English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Clarification about a meeting with Asselineau 0:00 First, I'll give a bit of the outline for today's session, I'm going to answer the requests I've received. Second, for once, and this will be almost the sole subject of today's session, we're going to talk about politics and the election. This somewhat contradicts what I said last time, when I said, look, if we could avoid talking about it, that would be just as well. I'm going to try to talk about it without talking about it. Or the reverse, whichever you prefer, it comes to about the same thing. You'll see.
0:30 So, I'll come back to the challenge I was faced with, which, as you might suspect, has a connection with the very upcoming deadlines. This coming weekend. Yes, well, I won't give the name, it's not interesting, but it's someone I only know through correspondence, because he's out in the provinces, and who usually puts me on a pedestal, as the French expression goes — I deserve neither this excess of honor, nor, I hope, this indignity. You know, as they also say among the Latins, and not among the French — well, I'm translating into French — the Tarpeian Rock is very close to the Capitol, isn't it?
1:05 The Capitol — you climb up, and afterward, you get thrown down from the Tarpeian Rock. All educators know that, all fathers of families too. Fathers are gods to their children, especially to their sons, at their own risk. Actually, it's already much healthier for a boy to fall out with his father from time to time. There you go. And vice versa. But in this case, I was...
1:36 That's why I want to address this. I was told... someone protested that I had shown myself arm in arm — I'm quoting here — with Asselineau. Worse, that I had called for people to vote for him. Well, my jaw dropped. I wanted to respond, not of course with an argument, because otherwise this kind of thing never ends, it's an emotionally charged period like this. But at least, this is what interested me, to say: just find me — because the video of the conversation — yes, I took part in a meeting where Asselineau came, at a bookshop I used to frequent for two years, when I lived around there, the Librairie Tropiques, which some of you know well, it's a bookshop that does a lot of agit-prop, as they say among revolutionaries.
2:21 And a fairly politically engaged bookshop, where there are a lot of debates, where Badiou and Lordon come regularly, in no particular order. And where I worked the till at one point. You have to be crazy to put a Corsican on the till. And so the program, the question, was: why so much hatred? That was the title of the meeting.
2:51 Why so much hatred? Understood, regarding Asselineau, there you go. Worse than for Marine, as one would hear, you see. We were supposed to answer that question. And the organizer, the bookseller who had invited him, had made clear that there was no question, at this meeting, of calling for anyone to vote for anyone. The only instruction he gave — it's not from me, I repeat, but I'm delighted to echo it — was: vote for whoever you want, except Macron. That was the only, really, you see, the only more or less perceptible commitment of that meeting.
3:25 Otherwise, the point was that Asselineau had expressed a desire to talk with Marxists. Well, since one of the two people who had been approached was absent, held up in the provinces, your humble servant was drafted in, there you go. Not only was I not arm in arm with Asselineau, but on top of that, I mean, I was the only one to raise an objection — well, the only one of those on the panel, there were three of us with him in the middle — to have raised an objection, I'll sum it up quickly, when he insisted a bit too much on his consensus-building side, that he's there to bring people together, well, the candidates, that's really badly put, he's not the only one.
4:03 So, there was someone in the audience, a woman, who clearly came from an anarcho-communist tradition, if I may allow myself that oxymoron, and she said: yes, that's all very nice, your stories, you're lulling us to sleep, but in the meantime, I mean, there are rich people and poor people, it's all very nice to bring everyone together, reconcile everyone, there you go. So I took the opportunity, since the hare had been started, so to speak, because the discussion had somewhat glossed over her question, to come back to this lady's question, which was providential for me, because I had been keeping a low profile, I wanted to stay a bit apart, precisely so as not to seem to be taking part in any way, neither support nor a takedown, and when he answered, 'not at all, we have lawyers among us, students, businessmen,' I said, the question is about social classes, and you're answering with professions — I was just recalling a basic ABC of Marx, there you go.
5:02 So I found it very unfair, like the record, you see, how it got transformed — I was arm in arm with him, then I was calling for people to vote for him, it's really extraordinary, there you go. That's what brought me to this — the story itself is of no interest — except that I'm going to explain to you why we're going to talk about political philosophy today, more precisely, let's be clear, about the relationship between philosophy and politics. So, rest assured I'm not going to call for a vote for one or the other, I'm calling to vote against Macron.
Chronological principle and logical principle 5:37 There, and even that only because he's in the lead, I don't care either way. And of course, I have no hope whatsoever of influencing anyone one way or the other, I'm simply recalling the aporias, the difficult problems that arise as soon as one approaches this chapter of philosophy — the relationship between philosophy and politics — which is not just any chapter, because it's starting to become somewhat familiar among us, especially for those who have been following our sessions a little from the beginning, for more than four years now.
6:10 I remind you that this seminar, From Repetition to Liberation, follows on from Between Crisis and War, Philosophy, question mark. We were already between crisis and war, when there wasn't yet an aircraft carrier heading toward Korea, or bombardments of sovereign countries that hadn't asked anyone to come bomb them specifically. Nor the invincible armada now being deployed from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, which extends pretty much all the way to the Black Sea too.
6:48 And already back then I was warning that we were between crisis and war. You see, it's more topical than ever, if you look closely. And I told you, when I changed the title and called it From Repetition to Liberation, I told you clearly: we're not changing the program. It's exactly the same theme. We're varying it a bit, because after three years, it starts to smell a bit stale. And there you go, it's roughly the same theme. Is it a repetition, the fact that so far capitalism has never gotten out of a crisis as serious as the one we're going through except through war?
7:21 That would be repetition. Or else, is there some liberation from this infernal cycle? Yes, for example. We need to show that there is nonetheless continuity between the two titles. So, those who have been following from the start clearly see, I repeat, that this is not a separate chapter, somehow trivial, slightly more important than the others. The relationship between philosophy and politics — it's the very essence of philosophy that is at stake. It's every aspect of philosophy that is at stake. I don't want to drown the fish in 'everything is political,' that doesn't mean anything.
7:51 When you say that, in the end, nothing is political anymore. Like 'everything.' I remind you that concepts, I like to repeat this, are like underpants, aren't they? The more elastic they are, the more useless they become. They fall down around your ankles and are no longer good for anything if they're too stretched out. A word shouldn't try to mean everything, otherwise it no longer means anything. But, I want to recall two things I've already tossed out here and there, but that I want to lay out properly today, in order. A day and a half before the deadline.
8:24 First, in its principle, in the double sense of origin and eternal renewal. Not origin in the sense that it happened once and for all, like the flick of the finger Pascal talks about — you know, Pascal mocks — I'm alluding to Descartes — but he mocks those who say they only need God to give the initial impulse of motion to the universe. Today we'd say the Big Bang. And then afterward, the physicist explains everything.
8:55 You see? Human thought can explain everything, but God still has to set its beginnings in motion in that sense, in short, in the chronological sense. But it's also the word 'principle,' arché in Greek, arché, plural archaï, but also in the sense of, at every instant, what makes things hold together. For example, theologians know what is called — and those familiar with classical philosophy and hence metaphysics, metaphysics having reached its peak, you know, in the seventeenth century with the Cartesians, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Descartes himself of course, etc.
9:35 What was called at that time, by these theologians, 'continued creation.' You see? Not continuous, continued creation. That is to say that for these theologians, God did not intervene only at the origin to create the world, but at every instant he sustains the world, and if his action ceases, at any instant, the world falls like a stone. You see? That's what continued creation is. So 'principle' in these two senses, the chronological sense, going back very far, and the logical sense. Logical is the more serious one.
10:06 If you remove — if you remove the fact of nursing one's young, you're no longer within the mammals. You see? You're no longer within the concept. If you remove the necessary attributes. There you go. So it's in this sense, both logical and chronological, that the political is part of the very principle of philosophy, of what caused it to arise, of what it arose for, and of what it continues to be done for, despite the fact that its imminent death is always being announced.
The "long detour" of the Republic 10:37 That's been going on for a long time. Here, let me open a small parenthesis. First, to remind those who jumped on the train mid-journey and sometimes have the impression we're going off in all directions — an impression I understand, but which I correct here — we are always within the framework of my inquiry into repetition and liberation, first because I'm on the verge of making a detour. When I told you, I'm opening a parenthesis. Well, what keeps repeating itself in our sessions is precisely the detour.
11:10 There must be a reason specific to philosophy. Right? I brought here... because I've had questions about my talk on Plato's Republic last time. Hugo in particular, I think. Wasn't it you, Hugo? You said I hadn't talked about Plato on that... No, I'm mixing things up. Anyway. And about the fact that the idea of the Good, I remind you what I said dogmatically, without explaining it, doesn't only give the object the property of being knowable and the mind the possibility of knowing it, but also gives, like the sun, which is its offspring in the visible order, growth and nourishment.
12:03 Which goes beyond the cognitive, beyond the merely theoretical order, which merely seeks to know. The newborn who sucks at the maternal breast or the bottle, isn't that so? has no cognitive concern. The question isn't 'what can I know.' Now, the sun, the Good, belongs to that order. It is the maternal breast in this passage of Plato. It's quite extraordinary. We'll come back to it. So, since I was asked about the Republic, I have the text here and there's a famous passage — I can't read it to you now because it's very short — where, right from the start, from the fourth book, there are ten books in the Republic.
12:41 That's ten chapters. I'm telling you this because of a scared reaction. If there are 'books,' I'll never read this, it's too long. No, there are ten chapters. And it's said that Plato revised each of the books seven times. That's probably a legend, because of the number seven. But still, the fact that this legend has survived down to us proves that he must have worked especially hard on this dialogue, whose purpose is to refound the city. There are two great periods in Plato's dialogues, according to specialists.
13:12 There's the one that ends with the Republic, the so-called aporetic or Socratic dialogues, those where the questions asked, the problems raised, matter more than the solutions provided, where one trains oneself somewhat in philosophical inquiry. Then, starting after the Republic, beginning with the Sophist, the Statesman and the Philebus, to take them in order, much more difficult, the so-called metaphysical dialogues. There, truly, the Platonic system begins to take shape and seems to take flight, majestic and angelic, as Julien Gracq says about the Hegelian system in a very beautiful novel called The Castle of Argol.
13:51 Now, the first series of dialogues, the Socratic or aporetic dialogues, ends with an eminently political dialogue, as its title indicates: The Republic. The second series of dialogues ends, as Plato's final text, written in his old age, with the Laws. You see that political concern is no minor detail in the first written philosophical system that has come down to us. First illustration. Now, right from the fourth book of the Republic, they immediately begin tackling problems, just as we're discussing right now for the elections, problems, I don't know, taxation, the distribution of wealth — the solution changes over time, but the underlying issues have been roughly the same forever, namely, they all keep running into difficulties every time, and Socrates says: you see, here we must make an immense detour.
14:49 If we want to solve the political problem, we have to stop talking politics. Which is what I meant earlier when I told you we were going to talk about the elections without talking about them, I'll talk about it philosophically, and that doesn't mean fleeing the debate but, on the contrary, perhaps introducing the very heart of what isn't said in the debates and yet is what's really at stake in them. A bit like, as we've seen, God being present in his absence, in negative theology.
15:24 This immense detour Plato speaks of is nothing other than philosophy itself. Philosophy would thus have a political crisis at its starting point and a political solution at its endpoint. Well, it aims at lifting the problems that led to the crisis, arriving with a whole other story. The proof is that we're still discussing it 25 centuries after Plato began saying we need to make a long detour. Apparently, it's a detour, and it's a long one.
The Seventh Letter and the death of Socrates 15:55 It seems that the detour, too, is principial, that is, it's not a detour that happened once, but one that keeps starting anew, you see, as things go along. So, that's a first example of this essential, logical link between philosophy and politics, which I've just given, with Plato's system. Second link, which I'll also take from Plato, because it's quite solemn after all, it's the founding system, even if it gets refuted a generation later by his student Aristotle, who nonetheless stayed with him for 30 years.
16:38 It's the famous passage I also pointed you to briefly last time, and which I'm repeating because these are things that deserve to be repeated and meditated upon, which is not found in a dialogue but in one of the very few letters of his that have come down to us. There is very, very little correspondence surviving from more than 2000 years ago, as you'd expect. Fortunately, Plato's works were already the object of a cult from the master's death onward, which meant we ended up with many copies, and about ten letters have come down to us, the most famous, philosophically the most important, being the celebrated Seventh Letter, written by Plato to his own people, to his family, to those close to him.
17:15 It's a real letter, it's not the Persian Letters, no, no. What is that — a pretext for doing philosophy, magnificent, the Persian Letters. No, no, this is a real letter where he gives news, where he says what he thinks has happened. In fact, it followed from something. Plato explains to his family his political misadventures. You know that it was dramatic. He had been invited by Dionysius the tyrant, that is, the king of Syracuse at the time. You know that the most brilliant Greek cities were not in mainland Greece itself, but either in Asia Minor, in the western part of present-day Turkey, what was then called Ionia.
17:51 The Parmenides, the Heraclituses, all of that, these are people who were in Ionia, they weren't in Greece as we know it today. Heraclitus of Ephesus. Georges Catherine. Sorry, yes. I know you like Ephesus. It's not very far from Smyrna, after all. That's right, it's over there. It's magnificent.
18:23 And then, at the other extreme of the Greek world, what's called Magna Graecia, that's not Asia Minor, that's Sicily. The most beautiful Greek temples, by far the most beautiful, are in Sicily, the most intact, the least destroyed. There's Segesta, and the other one I'm forgetting, in Sicily, what's it called, the most beautiful one? Sorry? Segesta.
18:53 Segesta, yes, I just said that, then there's another one, which is magnificent. Thank you, Agrigento. There you go. Empedocles of Agrigento, you see, the pre-Socratics, Empedocles, they were Sicilian, well, by residence, without a doubt, these are Greek colonies. Well, there you go. And so, in Syracuse, in the great city of Sicily, which you can still visit today, there are 500 historical layers between the Arabs, the Venetians, the Normans, the Vikings, it's fantastic, it's true, and he was invited as a consultant, so to speak.
19:26 You want to be my political advisor, then. You, you're the sage, the Greek, the good one, the philosopher, you have a reputation. And Plato took philosophy seriously, and when the king saw that it was changing his way of life, he sold him as a slave. Well, he sold him — actually he had him arrested and reduced him to slavery, no joke. You see, the relations between — before Plato, nothing was written in philosophy, but think, yes, think of Chinese thought, don't make me say what I haven't said, which has a vertiginous depth, but which is not philosophy, that's not the game we're playing today, I'll come back to it for those who want to see the difference, we can talk about it.
20:02 But philosophy strictly speaking, where the inquiry bears on words, before Plato, there is Socrates. And Socrates is already a philosopher put to death by the city. You see that the relationship between philosophy and politics, in principle, exists in a dramatic way. I haven't said necessarily tragic, I don't want to decide that, but in any case dramatic. It is the object of an action, each time of a stake, a tension.
20:32 So, there you go, as a slave — since he belonged to a patrician family, he had money, if you prefer — his friends bought him back, all that, you see, depending on whether you're powerful or destitute. And so, when he came back to Athens, he understood: no more politics. He bought a small suburb of Athens called Academos, where there was a beautiful garden, and there he strolled up and down with his disciples, and that became the Academy, the first school of philosophy. There you go.
21:03 In this letter, he tells his story. And he doesn't put it in the fun way I just summarized. He says, I told you already, I'll repeat it: while my eyes remained fixed on politics, I was as if forced to turn away toward philosophy. What a confession from a young Greek patrician, that is, one destined for a political career. He would have been one of the city's leaders, you see, continuing his social class's hold on power, and the trauma that kept him from becoming just one more apparatchik was the death of Socrates.
21:46 How is it that the most just man in the city was put to death by the city? It's this logical, metaphysical, moral and political scandal that made Plato turn away from politics — not because there's something better than politics, birds, trees, life, no, no, no, that's not it. That can exist too, I respect it. I respect the stylites. Do you know what stylites are? I'm sure some of you know.
Hölderlin in seclusion: understanding man in solitude 22:16 You know the thing, yes, they're the ones who spent their lives on a column, they're ascetics. A column, with a rope — food was brought up to them from below in a basket, they stayed up there all year round. I'm not joking, whether it stormed or hailed, they renounced everything. There are fakirs, there are yogis in the Himalayas, I respect that. But that's not philosophy — that's already a wisdom one has found, one no longer asks oneself questions, imagine that.
22:46 'O Asia, and you, mighty Homer, who were the first to know this, allein zu reden zu Gott' — to speak alone with God. The hymn by Hölderlin is called The Source of the Danube. I respect that. But, in the case of the relationship between philosophy and politics, it's not a matter of turning away from it in order to be — since I've come to Hölderlin, let me make the most of it — because to meditate on the relationship between philosophy and politics, there's no better moment than years after he had given up all worldly destiny, as they say, when he was nothing more than that poor madman that all intellectual Germany filed past to see in his tower, who no longer recognized anyone, who wrote all day long.
23:33 He still writes poems, visitors ask him, and the carpenter who had housed him for 37 years replies that he does so almost all day. He declaims in die blaue Luft. He declaims facing the window, facing the blue of the sky. We're far from philosophy, we're far from transmission. Here is someone who has walled himself off a little. Well, three-quarters of it was thrown away because the family — this good carpenter, it's already quite something that he had that understanding — it wasn't really his job to do what the Germany of that time should have done, which was to keep it all as relics.
24:08 But anyway, we have kept a few poems said to be from his madness. There's a very beautiful French translation by the poet Pierre Jean Jouve at NRF, a little hard to find but it exists on the Internet. And otherwise they're in quite a few collections, but it's probably the best translation. And in one of these, I come to my point, because I don't want to lose the thread here, from Plato to the Seventh Letter. They're small fragments, without continuity. And in this one, they're all numbered, it should be 19. "Only now do I understand man, now that I live far from him and in solitude."
24:44 You see? That means even when he's nothing but a poor wretch, alone and bored with himself, he understands everything about politics. He understands it. Well, it's too late for him. Isn't it? "Only now do I understand man, now that I live far from him and in solitude." I'm restoring the French syntax for you. You see? So when Plato says, well then — "then" is something I'm adding, given my sociological origin, my class origin, one might say, in Marxian terms — I have a political career all mapped out, and although I always kept my eyes fixed on politics, I was, as it were, compelled.
Man, a political animal 25:22 I had pointed out to you, from a linguistic point of view, that the term "ananke," which is what Plato uses in the Greek text to mean "compelled," is of religious origin and is almost equivalent to a damnation. It's a very strong word. There you go. So you see all the elements by which I'm supporting this fundamental relation between philosophy and politics. We mustn't forget that his disciple — I'm now talking about Aristotle — who stayed, as I told you, 30 years with him, so I'm not talking here about the disagreements between Plato and Aristotle, they've been contrasted for 2000 years and for good reason, there are serious disagreements which Aristotle is the first to point out, but still, he knows him well, having stayed 30 years at school with Plato.
25:58 and Aristotle says — I'm talking about the common points — they're both against the sophists, for example, namely that truth exists, it's not scepticism, and that it must pass through language to be found. That's already a lot in common, through logos, through rationality, there's all that in what's called Athenian philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Let me give a brief reminder, regarding Athenian philosophy, regarding before the pre-Socratics, after the so-called moral schools, the Epicureans, the Stoics, at the time of the decadence, which are more schools of wisdom, there you go, and in between, isn't it, the great Athenian philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
26:41 So we only have writings from the last two. Let me open a small chronological parenthesis. So when Aristotle says that man is zoon politikon, man is a political animal, how could such an animal possibly solve its problems independently of a politicity which is, so to speak, immanent to it, as far back as one goes in anthropology — I mean, those who work in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia or in East Africa in the Rift Valley, isn't it, where the oldest human remains have been found, some millions of years old.
27:20 The earliest traces of homo, well before homo sapiens, I'm talking here about Australopithecus — you know, "pithecus" means ape, we've sometimes said "anthropopithecus," when we don't know, we put both, anthropopithecus, ape-man, like that we're safe, that's verbal magic. When we're not quite sure whether your illness is really physical or psychic, we say it's psychosomatic. Yes, psyche is the soul, soma is the body. Very well. That's called the magical use of language.
27:52 Magical because "Open Sesame" and hop, it opens, yes, that's a use of language. We believe we have power over things with words. So the further back we go, and as far back as we go, we always find, we always identify human presence by the fact that it has a social life. We can't help it. Whether it's remains of burials, for example.
28:23 Or forms of rituals, perhaps on cave walls, whatever you like, which presuppose a social relation. So we shouldn't just say that as far back as we go, there was already sociability. It's this sociability that is characteristic of the human animal. There are other animals that live in society. Bees, ants, wolves, many of — certain families of monkeys, particularly the most organized ones, baboons, cynocephali, if you prefer.
28:55 It's impressive. I don't know if you've ever seen a pack of 200 baboons in front of you with the males guarding the rest, they're impressive. Panther-like teeth, a lion's mane. And everyone backs away from them in the bush, even the big cats. So there are sociable animals, and even ones with very sophisticated systems of communication, like dolphins or bees. We've already discussed this once, so I won't go back over it. But, on the one hand, these are a few very rare species in the animal world, whereas all human societies — that's a logical problem I'm pointing out here.
29:31 in man, it's essential in the sense that it is essential. So it's the case that a triangle has, that the sum of its angles in flat space is 180 degrees. It's not a curvilinear triangle, we agree on that. There you go. And it's essential for a mammal to nurse its young, etc. It's present in human existence, and that's where we see it joins up with its essence.
30:03 There is always a politicity. Now, even the man who lives alone, Robinson, has a sociability, we've already discussed this. We noted that the opening pages of the novel, if you look closely at the original, are about the exhausting efforts Robinson made to salvage from the wreck everything that would allow him to survive and to live humanly. Because that would only have been surviving. The animal does; the animal subsists, only man exists. He goes beyond himself, beyond his biological ontology to reach something other than what he was programmed for.
30:41 Yes, so we say that because we think Robinson lives like a man of nature. You must be joking — he starts by stockpiling the summit, the technology of the era, British maritime technology. The sextant, the calendar, spyglasses, it's all quite useful. When he climbs the hill right at the start and sees there are goats, they'll be able to eat. So even those who are deep in the Amazon, the simple fact that they think in their heads — thinking means having words.
Thinking is speaking: dream and languages 31:12 This isn't our topic today, I say this dogmatically, but most of you have already read that we believe we think without speaking, but we do speak. This has been measured with little electrodes placed on the throat and on the tongue muscles. They tell you: think whatever you like, and it's observed that the muscles begin to form the words we're thinking, while — well, let me open a parenthesis. Regarding Freud, for those interested in dreams, in the unconscious, who think Freud is someone who plays guessing games — no, it's both much simpler and much more complex than that.
31:48 The key to a dream is not a psychological notion, it's not to be sought in a meaning, an exteriority. The key to a dream is a statement. Freud found a solution when he found the statement that the dream spends its time illustrating. "I have a little sister named Daisy." It's an impersonal "I." I only have an older sister, I won't give her name because I love her very much. And, let's say, "I have a little sister named Daisy," which means "daisy," as far as I know.
32:18 I dream, at night, that I'm treading in spring through a flowering meadow full of daisies. I'm trampling her, you understand, because she was getting on my nerves during the day with her shrieking, etc., and I told her during the day fifteen times, "you, I'll grind you down, you're stopping me from working." The dream fulfills this wish, you see, in symbolic form. I walk crushing the daisies underfoot. There you go. There's a statement that is the key. It's not a thought, it's that. It's a precise statement.
32:49 With its wordplay, its metaphors. And to close the parenthesis, you know that Lacan went so far as to say that, to stay close to Freud's best findings — and there are best findings in all the great authors, there's also nonsense in all the great authors — but to look at what's best, it's better to look toward linguistics and figures of speech, and to understand that the dream, the slip of the tongue, the forgetting — to understand them and understand their meaning, it's better to refer to metaphor, ellipsis. I said oxymoron earlier, that's much more useful than doing psychology, taking psychology and wringing its neck, as the other fellow said.
33:28 There you go. Let me close this small parenthesis. I've just recalled, through multiple angles, that the simple fact that I have language, even when I don't notice it — now, it's not language that I have in my head only, because, as we've seen, bees, dolphins, have information systems. Why do I use this laborious periphrasis and not say "language"? Because, precisely, there is no single "tongue." All the dolphins in the world have the same communication system. The bees of Japan and the bees of California have the same communication system.
34:01 Whereas the Sioux and the Comanche don't have the same language, even within the United States. And I won't even go to Ivory Coast, isn't that right, Jean? I say that because I speak about Ivory Coast, because the further you go into the forest, the more the linguistic and ethnic diversity increases. That would have been a factor of isolation. So it's interesting to see that language does not exist as a universal system of communication for all members of the same species. That would be animal. No, it only exists through the mediation of languages.
34:34 Now, languages are nothing hereditary or biological. They're part of our heritage, not of our heredity. I mean that if I had been raised by Chinese parents as a foundling child, I would speak Chinese. And I would learn it. This has been proven. All children learn their mother tongue at the same speed. There are no languages that are more difficult or easier for babies. There you go. So this is important, what I'm saying here. I'm saying that the relation with the other — well, I realize now, I'm becoming more philosophical — the relation to the other is determining in our relation to the thing.
Feral children and political distress 35:11 All these reasons show to what extent — I would say — the relations between philosophy and politics have never ceased to be dramatized throughout the history of this discipline, and I don't want to muddy the waters. I've reminded you here of the politicity — sorry, near-barbarism — intrinsic to the human animal. That is, I never forget that man is an animal to begin with and remains one until the end, but that something else grafts itself onto this animal which makes it deserve the name of human, that we call him man.
35:50 This isn't to go back to the very origin of the designation. Have you heard about this little Indian girl who was just recovered? Did you hear about it in the press? It turned out — not a fake, but that she wasn't really a wild child who had been abandoned by her parents. But every year in India, roughly, elsewhere too, they've found bear-children in Poland and pig-children, and it's mostly in India because of the population density and remote regions.
36:20 There are about 500 to 600 newborns each year who get devoured by hyenas and wolves in villages in India. And sometimes, chance — it's rare — has it that a female, a she-wolf who has lost her cubs because a male devoured them or whatever, and who has great mammary pain from her milk coming in, finds it a relief that instead of devouring the little boy she picked up in a hut, isn't it, who spontaneously found a teat, it relieves her, and she keeps him, and there you go, that's how you get Mowglis.
36:52 There are some in Europe too, moreover the story of Romulus and Remus, who are after all the totem of Roman civilization, isn't due to chance. I told you we would talk about the upcoming elections, well I'm not talking about them. No but, you understand, there's a stake involved. So, if I tell you I don't feel represented by any of the candidates, don't tell me I'm not going to vote or that I'm going to cast a blank ballot — I won't tell you.
Hölderlin: the fatherland, Greece and the "national" 37:28 But what is certain is that we are living through an era of political distress. You don't need me to realize that. I'm saying that the political demand — I've been saying this for a while — the political demand is fundamental in man. The supply — and I'm going to quote the two lines again — "Mein ist die Rede vom Vaterland, das neide mir keiner" — "Mine is the discourse on the Vaterland"
38:01 on the fatherland, word for word: "Mine is the discourse on the fatherland, that no one begrudge me." No — because you might say to me, come on, Pagani, politics is disappointing, wisdom is going off to write poetry in the mountains, I want nothing to do with it, why not? I mean, that's respectable. And yet, you see, even the greatest poets themselves, those who have sung of nature like no one else, and of solitude, say "Mine is the patriotic discourse," if you want a literal translation, that no one envy me it.
38:35 And in another one — I'm giving you the quotes so you can try to find them on the Internet — but in another fragment, in the series, because in the Pléiade edition they're classified by plan and fragment, in the "plan and fragment" series, some are two lines, others a page, at most, of incomparable beauty. There's one that says "He wanted…" "Greece," the title is Greece, with a capital G. There are several, this one is called Greece.
39:05 I've seen, there are several with the title Greece, and it begins "He wanted to found" — "they," plural, the Greeks, "they wanted to found an empire of art." Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the moment corresponding to the Greek city, which he never names — Hegel calls it "the religion of art" [esthetic religion]. And Hölderlin, his fellow student, there was a homogeneity of thought — he wanted to found an empire of art. That sounds good, and then you recognize Greece, through Phidias, the statues, tragedy, the mysterious summit of Greek art, tragedy, where everything is present, the plastic arts, the setting, the word, the music, gathered together in what the Greeks called "mousikē"
39:45 to remain, so to speak, the totality of all the arts. That's tragedy. There you go. But immediately, Hegel said — "But the national among them was neglected, and Greece, supreme beauty, sank lamentably." So don't ask what "the national" means, that would take us too far. But I insist on the vowel — it doesn't say "national" [National]. It's not "Corsica Nazione." I've always been intrigued by "Corsica Nazione," especially since it's written N-A-Z-I-O-N-E
40:19 in Corsica. No, "nationel" is not "national." As if he had already anticipated the possible appropriations of his work. Starting with the most despicable one, Heidegger's, of course. Broadly speaking, the "national" is the way we look at the outside world, including a clearing, after thousands of years of history, without noticing it.
40:51 That's roughly what "the national" is. And "our national," as he says — "our" meaning "us" moderns, not "us" Germans, it's just as much French and so on — differs from that of the Greeks. There you go. Don't think this means that we live in a humid climate, we, in Paris and Berlin, while the Greeks were in a drier climate. There's a bit of that, but that's not the essential point. He shows above all that these are two historical moments that mutually exclude one another. We've already seen this, I won't insist — the pagan moment of measure, isn't it, of the non-mixing between the human and the divine, of the refusal of hubris and of the punishment of hubris when it occurs.
41:30 Hubris being precisely this contamination of the human and the divine, the transgression by which the human ventures into the divine domain, whereas in the religions of transcendence — I'll say this quickly because we've already dwelt on it enough, I'm ready to answer your questions — on the contrary, it is said in the Gospel, "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." It's said, the injunction is that one must be as close to God as possible, isn't it? Infinitize yourselves.
42:04 That's perhaps the Christian imperative par excellence, isn't it? Of the religions of transcendence, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, rightly understood, etc. So the great difference between the two "nationals" lies there. We have extremely different historical moments, extremely different in a historial sense. Now, to go back to the text: they wanted to found an empire of art, but the national — that is, what would have been proper to them, their historical moment — was neglected, and Greece, supreme beauty, sank lamentably.
42:38 Yes, that's interesting. Come on, a third poem from that period, I keep circling the same pot, so that it stays concrete, I like moving from the abstract to the concrete and back again. And then it brings us straight back to next Sunday — yes indeed, in Hölderlin, yes indeed, you think he's someone who only talks about the sky and the divine and the reflection in the river. "Who then now leads?" There's a poem that begins like that.
43:09 "Who then now leads?" — does he lead the people and the healthy community? No — a race of serpents. Never again the word on the lips — a false and cowardly race of serpents. So send us a hero, or wisdom. A Napoleon or a Hegel, I don't know. At the time. I say Napoleon — one can think what one likes of him politically, but for the German intelligentsia of the time, he was someone who brought a bit of blue-white-red, a bit of the storming of the Bastille, in contrast to their petty local princelings, etc.
43:46 For them, it was — Catherine, don't contradict me — the whole German avant-garde intelligentsia. Look toward Napoleon — that turned around fairly quickly afterward. German national sentiment had its main origin, isn't it, in the movement of revolt against French occupation, later. But still, at the start, isn't it, Bonaparte was this unforgettable young man in the mind of the German intellectual, who at the bridge of Arcole — that never happens twice. There are moments of bravery too. But still, the great strategists of history are those who concerned themselves with what boots their soldiers had.
44:18 That's what the great strategists are like. I tell you, logistics, not rushing headlong into machine-gun fire — recklessness is not courage. So — send a hero or wisdom. Who then now leads? Does he lead the people and the healthy community? No — a race of serpents. Still, so when I say that even the attitude that wants to give up philosophical inquiry, sorry, that wants to give up political activity on the grounds that it's only a source of disappointment — and God knows that's the case, I know of no field where there's so much disappointment or betrayal, etc.
45:00 even the one who flees this field ends up finding it again, isn't it, at the other end of wherever he ends up. I go back to poor Hölderlin at the end, who says "only now, that I am far from man and living in solitude, do I understand him" — a bit like those who say you have to have been deprived of freedom to suddenly see the importance of freedom.
City and decadence in Plato and Rousseau 45:30 Not very far from our story about negative theology. So, third concrete element — I'm now leaving ancient philosophy and Plato, who nonetheless has a privileged role in this relation between philosophy and politics. And I haven't even talked to you about the Gorgias and all that, I'm not going to talk only about Plato. I'm skipping 20 centuries. Why? Because I'm thinking of that agrégation topic I mentioned, I believe, twice in four years.
46:02 Which had been set about fifteen years ago, perhaps a bit more now, which struck me by how much it was — it was an interesting and well-formulated topic, and it was in history of philosophy, in the philosophy agrégation, there's a paper on authors, on authors' texts, and papers on general philosophy. It can be about anything. Well, there was the unknown, period. How long? Five hours? Eight hours?
46:33 Seven? Somewhere in between. The unknown, period, seven hours. As for me, I had "Critique and crisis, how to conceive their relation?" I saw ten people hand in a blank paper. Critique of what? Crisis of what? A nervous breakdown, the crisis in the Middle East, a toothache. And this topic was that one. That's general philosophy. And in history of philosophy, there are author-based syllabi that change every year or every two years, isn't it?
47:03 So that year, the syllabus included Plato, Rousseau and Kant. And the topic was this. A topic can combine two authors. City and decadence in Plato and Rousseau. I'm quoting. I'm jumping twenty centuries. And I find myself in the same problematic. A jump for nothing, I mean. It's to make a symmetry. The relation, already, between Plato and Rousseau, is that both express the end of a historical-political figure, the city.
47:35 With Plato, we're moving on to the Empire; with Rousseau, it's the Old Regime. It's Goethe, one of the greatest immediate post-Rousseauians, who says, along with Voltaire, a world finished. Voltaire is the termite gnawing at the building. He's entirely there, you blow on it and it all collapses. But it's there, there are the little tables, the 2015 nymphets, etc. With Rousseau, a world begins. Because on the collapsed world, something has to be produced, and that's the business, as you know, of the social contract.
48:07 Twenty centuries apart, look at the symmetry between titles like The Republic, which closes the first series of dialogues in Plato, and The Social Contract. These are not coincidences. Hölderlin, I come back to him, a great post-Rousseauian if there ever was one, who had boundless admiration for Rousseau, and even wrote a poem called Rousseau. 'You see these pilgrims coming to his tomb, moved with a lofty fear, as at the sepulchre of a sage, haloed by the faint rustling of the poplars.'
48:41 Hölderlin said that great poets appear at the beginning and at the end of great historical eras. You could say it's a bit the same for philosophers, you see. It's at the beginning and at the end of great eras that the deepest and most pertinent systems have held their ground. It's a moment of cracking, it's not so much. It's when tectonic plates work against each other that suddenly the inner magma bursts out rather brutally to the surface, either in the form of a volcanic explosion, or in the form of an earthquake, or both, isn't it? I'm not predicting a catastrophe for Sunday.
49:15 So, city and decadence in Plato, but also in both cases, you see, philosophy was posing problems to itself. We are in the eighteenth century with Rousseau. We are in the fifth century with Plato. And in both cases, I told you, there is a historical-political figure that lasted a long time, that marked generations upon generations, that is in the process of passing the torch. In Plato's case, I recall that while they're talking at the banquet, between Alcibiades and Socrates, while Alcibiades arrives completely drunk, held up by flute-girls, in the wonderful epilogue of the Symposium, and gets ready to praise Socrates, garlanded in the literal sense, with garlands on his head, all smeared.
50:07 While they're discussing at the banquet the beautiful, the idea of beauty—is it visible, is it not visible, should we discuss before drinking or drink before discussing? All these questions are posed in the Symposium. There's the point of view of the doctor, Eryximachus, who says it's better to discuss before drinking. Meanwhile, a bit further north, the soldiers of Philip—Alexander still a child, father of the great Alexander, Philip of Macedon—are sharpening javelins and the tips of swords.
50:49 And the Empire will soon subjugate the city. And the Roman Empire will only have to inherit from Alexander's Empire. 'And Greece, lamentable beauty, sank. But the noble spirit that had appeared was idled. He wanted to speak only of art and aesthetics.' That's what Hölderlin says, you see. So don't count on great poets like that to say that politics is disappointing while writing poetry. 'Mine is the patriotic discourse that no one envies me.'
51:19 I'm telling you this because contemporary commentators on Hölderlin, in the wake of Heidegger, never quote this. It's Hölderlin, it's still strange. It's written in black and white. So, two repetitions to really pick up the thread from the beginning. Two repetitions. Repetition of the philosophical detour: the philosopher is always in the process of detouring his subject.
The metaphysical 17th century, apparently apolitical 51:49 I was telling you that we were in the eighteenth century with Rousseau. I've illustrated enough with Plato. With Rousseau, it's the entire Old Regime that is wavering, of course, that is tipping over. And it's a long duration. It's not even just the monarchy, it's all of feudalism since the Middle Ages. It's a very long duration. Already the monarchy had dealt rather fatal blows to old medieval feudalism. We saw that when I talked a little about the transition from Louis XIII to Louis XIV, the establishment of the absolute monarchy. Even though the king remains, after all, primus inter pares.
52:23 He is not the first among his peers. He is still a feudal lord among others, but one who has subjugated all the others. That's it, roughly. The great nations did that. England and France essentially. Spain too. Germany and Italy much later. I explain the nationalist clenching of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany by the fact that the nation arrived far too late, far too belatedly at nation-statehood. And so, of course, it asserted itself with a nationalism that you only see among neophytes.
52:56 The most intolerant in religion are theology students, the apprentices. I come back to Rousseau. We are at the end of a period. But what period? I come back now to philosophy strictly speaking. I told you, just before the eighteenth century, just before the century that would put an end to the long monarcho-feudal edifice, there was the seventeenth, which is the height of metaphysics.
53:28 It's the complete opposite of the political. Find me anything political in Descartes. In Spinoza, there's the Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza lived very intensely through the wars of religion in Holland. You know that the division between Holland and Belgium itself comes from the difference between Protestants and Catholics. There you go, he did the affair of the placards, he posted the whole 'ultimi barbarorum' on the door when the de Witt brothers, a political clan of the time, were beheaded. So he's not an indifferent guy at all regarding his time, even if he wisely advises sticking to the customs of one's country.
54:07 But still, I mean, in Leibniz, Malebranche, in Descartes, you can search in vain for a thousandth of the intensity of political reflection found in a Plato, in an Aristotle—a magnificent volume called Politics, isn't it? It's the police of the city, of the politeia, and a fortiori in the century of the Enlightenment, of Voltaire, of Montesquieu, we think of The Spirit of the Laws and of course of The Social Contract.
54:37 So, you see, I'm deliberately highlighting this contrast. We might think, because there's a lot of talk about God, that the seventeenth century, on the contrary, is a century steeped in God. You cannot understand Leibniz, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Descartes if you don't realize how much these people thought within the framework of God. And they were anything but pious churchgoers, believe me. On the contrary, if they do metaphysics, it's because plain faith—the faith of the charcoal-burner, as they say, and my old aunt who takes holy water and prays to Saint Anthony of Padua to help her find the ring she lost—
55:16 That's not the relation these great metaphysicians have to religion. Here, I open another parenthesis. I'm trying to show that thought believes it has become independent of the political. It's within metaphysical, spiritualist preoccupation—we could also say, isn't it, bordering on the religious—that it seems to be at the opposite pole from political problematics.
Eternal truths: Descartes against Spinoza 55:47 So, this is where we can offer a beautiful proof by contradiction that political-ness is immanent to philosophy. That's why I'm making this important detour through the metaphysics of the classical century. When a purely philosophical dispute that apparently has no relation to politics—the dispute between Spinoza, it's famous, and Descartes—I'm not going to settle it, that's not the point. First because the era of metaphysics is past. Well, we've posed things differently since Kant, anyway, we no longer pose the problems in quite the same way.
56:18 But Descartes—Spinoza and Descartes did not agree on the problem of eternal truths. No, not whether there are any—both agreed on that. I told you that Plato and Aristotle agreed on essential things against the sophists. Spinoza and Descartes agree on plenty of things. Believe me, we saw last time that they agreed on the division of philosophy into three parts. They agree in saying that there are eternal ideas. That if A equals B and B equals A, that's called an eternal idea, that it doesn't belong to time, it's not true on Monday and false on Tuesday. It's not like fashion.
56:51 How many times have I seen short hair come back into fashion among girls, or the opposite. Miniskirts. It's not that. The idea of mathematical identity is not variable like that. It's the Parmenidean order: what is, is; what is not, is not. It's not the Heraclitean order where everything flows. There you have it. So there, they agree. That's not where the disagreement lies. The disagreement is that these ideas, for Spinoza, impose themselves on every understanding. Every sound understanding, unless one is stupid, an idiot, or gravely deficient, recognizes that if A equals B and B equals A—including, and this is very important, God's understanding.
57:30 Eternal truths hold for the divine intellect just as much as for the human intellect. Whereas for Descartes, God's sovereignty means that eternal ideas do not apply to him. If 3 plus 2 equals 5—if I say that 3 plus 2 equals 5, says Descartes, who you know was better at math than I am and than most of us here, well, for the time; I don't think he'd cross swords with Thomas today, but still, he's the one who invented Cartesian graphs.
58:04 You use them, Thomas. Even now. Descartes says that every time I add 3 plus 2 and get 5, it's not because it's true in itself—he goes that far, Descartes. It's because God created me in such a way that every time I add 3 and 2, I conclude that they make 5. The day he decides that 3 plus 2 equals 7, I would think it makes 7. There, what he's telling us, Descartes, he's a fanatic. There, there's a dispute.
58:34 I'm not settling it, I'm putting the problem to you, it's interesting. It's interesting, but why am I bringing it up? Because it would take me off topic. What was my topic? It was the relation of political philosophies, yes or no? Why does Descartes hold so firmly to preserving God's freedom even with respect to eternal truths? Because freedom for him is fundamental. Ah, of course, he's alienated in the Marxian sense, that is, it's not his own freedom, he puts it in God, this human freedom.
59:07 Agreed? But it's a magnificent tribute to freedom. That means that for a free being, there is no eternal truth. Freedom stands even above truth, as a value—true or false? Whether that's excessive, discuss it among yourselves, it's a magnificent problem. Do eternal ideas impose themselves on God? Ask yourselves the question. You'll see that whether one is a believer or an atheist makes no difference at all to answering the question, it's interesting. On the other hand, you can clearly see the political link.
59:39 Someone who you wouldn't exactly call left-wing, though then again, someone adored by right-wing people, a very great poet, I'm thinking of Péguy, a Catholic who wrote unforgettable poems about the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc—not exactly the CGT tradition, though then again, 'him who believed in heaven, him who did not believe.' Well anyway, you see what I mean. Well, Péguy himself said that Descartes is that French cavalier who set out one day at such a good pace.
1:00:11 Yes, yes, that the word freedom—at one time, when you went abroad, they'd say 'you, you're French.' Well yes. And so there's a certain French-bashing that gets on my nerves, personally. There you go. And I'm not flag-waving. Me, I don't care about France. There's the France of Pétain, there's that of de Gaulle. Both are as French as the other. That's not the question. But anyway, at the time of the thirties—I come back to current events—at the time of the crisis that most resembles the one we're living through economically, some countries chose the Nazi solution and others chose that of the Popular Front.
1:00:46 Well, maybe if Descartes hadn't claimed that 'for God, eternal freedoms'—I can't manage to say it. Isn't it? It's not imposed on him, necessarily. I don't know why God would be constrained every time he adds 3 plus 2, he's constrained by nothing. There you go. Even to the sum of 3 and 2. That's why I insist so much every time I talk about the foundations of mathematics. And here I come back again to my double sense of chronological beginning and logical beginning.
Euclid: postulates as requests and decrees 1:01:17 I mean, if I go back to the origins of our mathematics, to Euclid, you'll tell me 'I'm tired, you're tired, I'm repeating myself.' But you see the proof that it's important to repeat it. It's that at the start it's a bit abstract, now you see the stakes a bit better. When Euclid—the primary notions, the definitions, the axioms, the postulates by which one must begin in order to demonstrate all the others, in order to have them available, in order to be able to demonstrate all the others by successive identification—he calls these 'demands.'
1:01:48 There is already here a manifesto of human freedom with respect to what we're talking about. I don't know whether it's true in itself or not, I don't care about the object. But I, the subject, ask you, second subject, to grant me that through a point one can draw—but only one straight line—parallel to a given line in the same plane. Truth depends on our agreement and not on some object-in-itself, on an agreement between subjects and not on a subject's submission to an object, like the astrologer who looked at the sun to find out what it was like.
1:02:20 He deduced from it that it measured about 20 cm and was about the size of a plate. Descartes—and eternal truth does not impose itself on God because the value of freedom here bears on the purely cognitive value, the value in Kantian terms, the value that only has meaning within the field of practical philosophy—freedom, for freedom is only the freedom to do or not to do.
1:02:56 It's practical, freedom as a concept. It's not a concept that broadens my knowledge but one that broadens my action. It's not at all the same thing. So freedom, a concept belonging to the practical field, is a value superior to truth, which belongs only—important qualification—to the theoretical field. Even though philosophy always tries, of course, to unite the two. That's precisely why we're having this conversation. And second example, I recall, Euclid, you see—that's the second time I've jumped twenty centuries in one direction or the other—Euclid nonetheless reminds us that there is a sovereignty of the human mind from the moment, first, that one defines: from the moment that the circle I see around me, the ripples in water, the orbits of the stars as I imagine them, etc.—which we know, moreover, since Kepler, are not circular but elliptical—but spontaneously, the human mind comes to see circles everywhere.
1:03:58 That connects to a practical concern, in the unconscious, and not a theoretical one. Because the circle is simply the temporal figure of eternity. It's not something rational per se. And these ripples in water, these circles, these pseudo-circular or para-circular orbits of the stars disappear and I replace them with something that did not exist before I formulated it.
1:04:28 I, this little human debris lost in the universe, isn't it? I call the circle the locus of points equidistant from one and the same point called the center, within one same... decree. Decree. I hope the next president isn't going to start off with decrees during the summer. There you go. 8:15 pm, I wanted to point out these links between philosophy and politics.
1:04:58 I would still like to conclude—I've insisted, especially with poor Hölderlin, on quotations that show that your demand really doesn't get the supply it deserves when it comes to politics. That's the least one can say. And I'll finish with a quotation from him that I haven't given yet, but it will perhaps be the last one before the weekend, isn't it? 'And why in this wretched time of shadow, poets?'
1:05:28 This has been commented on, I'm not the only one. It's been noted in a magnificent hymn called Brot und Wein, Bread and Wine. Bread and wine, which ended in the same disaster we're living through now, isn't it? And he ends up saying why frankly there's more important things to do than poetry at this moment. Do you agree? 'And why in this wretched time of shadow, poets? But they are, you tell me, like the holy priest of the god of wine, Dionysus, wandering from land to land through the holy night.'
Wisdoms of crisis periods and the true use of mathematics 1:05:58 There, I'll conclude like that, forgive me, it seems a bit mysterious, but you'll read it in the text, you'll see that in context it's much clearer than it appears. As we move on to questions about what we've just raised—this relation of philosophy and politics—I haven't talked about commitment/engagement, I'll talk instead about the politics that was present in our actions, whether we think about it or not, which is a fortiori valid, of course, for militant action. But I'll hand it over to you, I'm not going to ask the questions in your place.
1:06:30 This is the kind of question that delights me, to the point that if one could read straight into my brain right now, one would think we were in cahoots through your question. Because—I won't say it, I don't feel like being ironic—but I'm appalled by what you're saying, by the development of what you're alluding to today, and where I completely agree with you, I made this connection a long time ago, we didn't coordinate, with what followed the great Athenian schools, the Epicureans, the Stoics.
1:07:05 So there, we no longer seek, we have wisdom. One must live in accordance with nature—the Stoics—or else the Epicureans, carpe diem. I don't know what people believe—the Epicureans, one must enjoy oneself as much as possible because death is coming soon—it's not that simple. On the contrary, it's extremely demanding. There, I want to do them justice, but that's not the question. Indeed, these are moral schools. So there, now, you're making me say the opposite of what I was saying a moment ago about the seventeenth century. I said that the seventeenth century was perhaps the one that seemed most theoretical, that had a completely absent political problematic in Descartes.
1:07:39 I come back a little to Descartes, it's a way of getting fully into your question. I talked about eternal truths, I won't go back over it, to bring out, you see, unconsciously in Descartes, the full importance of political problematics—even because it concerns God's freedom for him, of course, not yet man's. It's a century and a half too early. On the other hand, there is a permanent concern in Descartes to explore the theoretical disciplines, I'm thinking here essentially of mathematics, of course.
1:08:16 You know that when he reviews, in the Discourse on Method, all the subjects he learned at school, there were theoretical ones, there were practical ones, aesthetic ones, theological ones, poetic ones, whatever you like—he shows how much, not that he wasted time, but rather how terribly disappointed he was by everything he learned at school, because there was never anything certain, everything was a bit vague, confused, mutilated, evanescent, except—'I took pleasure above all in mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning.'
1:08:50 This passage is so important that I'll quote it verbatim. 'I took pleasure above all'—not only—'I took pleasure above all in mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning.' If I stop the sentence there, we remain perfectly within the theoretical order, I'd almost say in the literal sense and almost the etymological sense, because evidence—look closely, there's 'video' in it, it's written inside it, there's a visual aspect at the origin of the word 'evidence,' do you agree? It's in the word. So that reminds us of the famous Platonic theoria, you know, when the prisoner reaches the end of his ascending quest, he arrives before the sun, and there one no longer speaks, it's no longer either dianoia, discursive knowledge, nor dialectic, one falls silent, one contemplates, and according to Plato, one is nourished.
1:09:37 'What the Good brings to growing beings is nourishment.' So if I stop the sentence there, we're at the same point, we remain in the theoretical field. So, once again, opposite to the political: 'I took pleasure above all in mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning, but I did not yet notice their true use.' Ah, that suddenly smells of the practical. And it's confirmed by what follows: 'and thinking that they must serve above all to facilitate the mechanical arts'—no, sorry—'that they must serve to develop the mechanical arts and to make men's work easier.'
1:10:14 I was surprised that, their foundation being so solid, nothing more elevated had been built on top of it. In that sense, Descartes is perhaps the last, not only the first of the 17th century, but the last of the Renaissance, of that great humanist dream which is now being flouted by the doctrines you're talking about. When I say Le Noir or Rabhi, I never read it. I get enough of it drummed into me that I'm aware of it. When I say drummed into me, I don't mean by you, I mean by the media.
1:10:44 No matter how many channels I switch off, bang, it pops up on another one. It's appalling. She tells me, I made a pair of pants out of it. Anyway. So, indeed, well, an anecdote anyway to answer your question again. I had an excellent friend, by the way, kind as can be, she's far from Europe now, whom I put up because she'd been preparing for the exams at the time in the 14th arrondissement. And she saw I had a sore throat and she felt sorry for me.
1:11:16 She said, I don't have much left but I felt a sort of empathy because he seems to be suffering, and she gave me a small bottle of essential oil. Well, when you're not feeling well, you're ready to believe anything. Why not? I take it. She says, yes, but you have to hold it in your right hand, and if possible under the full moon. I start to feel a bit hopeful. I'm exaggerating. But still, you're right. Epicureanism and Stoicism, which come after the peak of the Greek city-state, that's no coincidence.
1:11:46 And that's where you're right and it's relevant. It's even been studied by others besides the two of us. I got lucky. It's no coincidence. There's an unhappy consciousness at work. Here we clearly see the fruitfulness of the Hegelian notion of unhappy consciousness. The city is in ruins when the Epicureans and Stoics appear. So problems get internalized, and we're lucky if we manage to have little individual wisdoms, since nobody believes in collective destinies anymore. Alexander settled everyone's hash. Or the Romans. It's the Alexandrian period that shines at the theoretical level.
The Tibetan lama and the anger of the Hegelian preface 1:12:20 We see it very clearly. Finished. All we have left are two extremes. A moral doctrine for everyday life, and theoretical order but in the hard sciences. And that's a good thing. Ptolemy, measuring the Earth's radius, that's good. There you go. So you're absolutely right, and you deserve even more credit for seeing it since I saw it back in my own generation. Yoga, Zen, that's been going on for 60 years. Right. And I myself was totally into it. I was 17, 18 years old. I read everything on the subject.
1:12:54 I'll make you laugh. I had one of my best friends. René Comer, since he now has a literary existence thanks to the admirable biography written by François de Negroni about Clouscard. So this restaurateur friend, who restored so many friends too, literally and figuratively, and who has passed away now — may the earth lie light on him, as they say in Africa. And once I was with him, I was still 17, still deep into all that, into the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.
1:13:24 It's magnificent on a poetic level. Read the Vedas. They're among the greatest texts in human history in terms of depth. There's a poem called Time which begins by saying, I was there before the father. You realize the audacity — Time, I was there before the father. Anyway. What was stirring in the unfathomable waters? It's magnificent. So I was deep into all that, but on a naive, first-degree level. And I had no notion at all of what the symbolic order was, and I was on a couch with my friend René and a girlfriend of his who was a sports fan.
1:13:54 He was waiting for the final of the Five Nations rugby tournament. I thought it was a bit of a waste of time when we could be discussing metaphysics. And then, a quarter of an hour before the match, all of a sudden — who knows why, it was rare at the time — the announcer says, and now we're going to interview him, and we see a Tibetan lama. You never saw that. It was black and white televisions back then. I said, hush, these are the greatest minds in the world about to speak to us. You're laughing, you see. I was serious.
1:14:25 Since he's a nice guy, René kept quiet — he's into rugby. The microphone gets held up to the lama, the Panchen Lama or whatever. So, what do you think about the relationship between being and becoming? Grunts, grunts, this and that. It was a burst of laughter. I had a terrible quarter of an hour. So much for your greatest minds of creation. There you go. It's a caricature. These are immense thoughts to which I now, nonetheless, pay tribute.
1:14:56 How to put it — Rimbaud at the end of A Season in Hell: that has passed. I know now how to salute beauty. There you go. These are thoughts that have the merit of clearing the way. Hegel is the first to pay them homage. Because he says the Orient was the first to posit the absolute as subject, even if it was formulated as substance. Still. It is said in the Bhagavad Gita that the sun is reflected entirely, not partially, in the smallest dewdrop in the morning.
1:15:26 The importance of each person, who is, in themselves alone, the absolute. Well, from there to it becoming... And that's what's new in modernity, in contemporaneity — a resentment in the Nietzschean sense, a resentment against progress, against modernity. Which was not at all present in the great original Eastern texts, which were on the contrary at the forefront of their time. It's this reduction that's painful.
1:15:57 So now you can't open a cosmetics magazine without hearing about the doctrines you're talking about, because you need the endorsement of Eastern sages to sell the slightest lipstick. I don't want to be sexist, to sell men's underwear too, whatever. There you go. Organic underwear, I don't know. Your question is very important, because — and this is where I'm not mocking at all... I said the right word, but here, it's the doctrine as symptom, because they are symptomatic, of an unhappy consciousness.
1:16:32 It's a consciousness in crisis, and it isn't getting better. Right? And so I'll conclude my answer to the question with this formula of Hegel's, which fits better here than anywhere else. By the ease with which spirit is satisfied, one can measure the extent of its loss. We must have lost a great deal lately to be satisfied with so little. By the ease with which spirit is satisfied, one can measure the extent of its loss. This sentence closes a very important period, a period in a stylistic sense, one that commits a sentence to an important development of his text.
1:17:10 It's in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that you find this formula. At the beginning, that's what a preface is for, it starts calmly, and then the great anger begins. You can feel him trying to hold it back. It's his protocol of rupture with the romanticism of his youth. It's a rupture with himself. Without these great ruptures with oneself, there's no development. So, and when he criticizes all these ways of thinking for confusing philosophy with edification, philosophy must guard against wanting to be edifying.
1:17:44 There's religion for that, there are moralities, wisdoms, consolations, whatever you like. If I see a friend who has just lost someone, who has just suffered a bereavement in his family, I'm not going to ask him whether he thinks eternal truths apply to God or not. No, I'm not going to bother him with theoretical matters. I'm going to try to say things that comfort him, that do him good. There you go. So there are things — because that's not what philosophy is. It only reaches practical matters through a theoretical detour, through a longer detour, my friend, as Socrates says to Glaucon in the Republic.
1:18:14 So, protocol of rupture with romanticism, and he says — because he's just made this declaration of war when he says that truth can only exist in the element of the concept, implying, and not, as the whole generation of his time had divinized, in the opposite of the concept. Yes? Bravo, intuition. Listen, philosophers, this comes from a physicist, you should be ashamed, he's faster than you. Yes, exactly that.
1:18:44 Not intuition in the original sense, visual intuition and all that, the intueri, no, intuition in the sense of intuiting. Foreknowledge, the thought that Hegel will later call lazy — it thinks like that, in one pistol shot it will have the ultimate revelations about the world around us. So he has just said this sentence: only in the concept does truth find its element, and for him, element is like fish in water, it's element in the sense of surrounding medium, finds the element of its existence.
1:19:14 And here begins the great anger. I know full well that this seems to contradict a representation that has as much pretension and self-display as the present period. So if the true exists in what is called sometimes ecstasy, sometimes intimate feeling of the divine, we come back to all these things — the beautiful, the sacred, the eternal, religion, love are the bait — bait in the fisherman's sense — required to awaken the desire to bite.
1:19:47 Granted, these are unhappy consciousnesses, they no longer feel like biting, so these things are needed to want to again. Not the concept, but ecstasy is supposed to spread the force that sustains and maintains the richness of substance. It's a magnificent passage. He says at the end that, like the traveler in the desert who longs for a single drop of water to refresh himself, it seems people simply long, in matters of religion, for the meager feelings of the divine in general.
1:20:17 You can have just a bit of spirituality in a glass of water, in some object, in some plant, in some doctrine, that's enough. To the meager feeling of the divine in general, colon: by the ease with which spirit is satisfied, one can measure the extent of its loss. Everything it had to endure to end up there — that's what it means. There you go. I don't want to monopolize the discussion. Are there other questions? They can be questions not directly related to what I've just covered.
Pascal: the desire of desire 1:20:49 I had the political philosophy question, it's from Jean, actually. That's right, Jean. Hegel is not putting ease itself on trial, he's putting on trial the ease found in satisfaction. You've all heard of the doctrine — since he alludes to it, and it fits perfectly — of divertissement in Pascal. Pascal — I'll sum up everything he says about divertissement with this formula, which remains extraordinarily relevant, confirmed by so-called modern thought, by existentialism and so on.
1:21:21 For a fervent Catholic like Pascal — it fits well, as Laurent says — even Nietzsche, who feasts on Catholicism, I mean Christianity, sorry, on every page, even Nietzsche, and he's neither Catholic nor Protestant, says of Pascal, he runs in my blood. We do not desire things, says Pascal, but the desire for things. The essence of desire is to desire desire, to remain in a state of desire. There you go, these are things so familiar in literature, in cinema, I won't belabor it. There you go, you know the illustrations — why spend a whole day hunting a hare one wouldn't want if it were given to one.
1:21:57 A real hunter, 6 in the morning, that's it, they've laced up their gaiters, checked that the guns are fine, they head out into the mist — no, don't bother, I've bought a hare, I have extra in the fridge, if you want, I'll... that's not going to satisfy them. Well, still, you see, Pascal is right. Let me dig a bit deeper into the example — I'll leave the hare aside, since I've repeated it often — and move on to another example, gambling. Pascal invented probability calculus in response to a friend who had asked him what his chances were of getting two sixes, I don't know, each time he threw the dice — it's serious, gambling.
1:22:31 Especially since, when there's a game — jeu — and I'm getting to this — there is 'en jeu,' at stake. In German, Spiel, the game, at stake, Beispiel, which is the same word as 'example.' That's where I want to go. Suppose people, instead of hunting as a passion, gambling exists. Watch out, no fortune withstands gambling any more than health withstands drugs. I mean hard drugs. Well, there you go. But still, there are people who have a passion for it. There's no shortage of literature on this. That's what happens, that's where it leads them.
1:23:03 Are you going to satisfy them by saying, well, let's just play, we won't play for money, we'll play with matchsticks. Real gamblers won't be satisfied by that. Precisely because there's nothing at stake. You see what I mean? Well, correct me, but I've never seen a great gambler say, oh, let's forget the money, we'll play for matchsticks. Right? So we say, so he plays for money. He'll say, no, I'm not playing — oh look, I won the jackpot, here, 100 grand, you don't even need to play.
1:23:36 He's not satisfied either. It's interesting, gambling as an example. It's not for the money that one plays, but there needs to be money nonetheless, to give the illusion that it's for the money. But what a circuit, I must say! It's the circuit of desire. The ferret runs — that's desire. And all the better that it runs. And Rimbaud will say, poetic application of what I've just said, that to understand my word, it must flee and fly. Yes, that's modernity. So Pascal — the most beautiful thing he says in his reflection is having understood, I don't know, that nothing here below satisfies human desire.
1:24:12 I've already told you about lions who sleep all the time, all the time, all the time. As soon as they've eaten a gazelle — for them, it's clear what the lion's need is. It's the gazelle, and occasionally the female too, but above all, every day, the gazelle. Or the warthog. Or the warthog, that makes noise when it's slaughtered, I mean. Pascal takes it a step further, because otherwise he'd remain just a moralist saying, well, what absurdity for man to run all day after a hare he wouldn't want if it were given to him.
1:24:49 And where Pascal is greatest is when he says, man is not stupid. I'm not doing what so many moralists do — he wasn't the first to see these things. Where he is first is when he says that man is right to act that way. Man is right to be in the misery of man without God. That's his greatness, Pascal even says, for — and I quote him — these are the miseries of a great lord, the miseries of a dispossessed king. It's the best proof that man comes from beyond, since if he were purely of this world, something of this world would eventually satisfy him.
1:25:23 If he had already understood that, we, all the more so, should agree even more, because now we have the means to satisfy whatever we want. You see, material means Pascal couldn't even imagine in his wildest dreams. Right? Well! Satisfaction is even worse now, isn't it? I'll point you to the film Citizen Kane — if we had to find an emblematic film showing that the infinity of means does absolutely not solve the problem we've just raised, that would be a good example. Do you remember the ending? Rosebud.
1:25:53 Yes, you remember the ending. We just have time — it lasts a fraction of a second. The whole film, the film's premise, is that the investigation is about figuring out what he meant when he died, falling down the stairs, saying it, while holding that little ball with snowflakes in it, like the glass ones you see. And we see, since he's dead, that they auction off everything he had, they throw into the fire this jumble he'd accumulated from all the arts, from every continent.
1:26:24 America, a country without history, that accumulates the history of all other countries. Magnificent as a metaphor. And suddenly, we, the film's viewers — but no one else sees it — because when it's thrown into the furnace, we see the little sled he had as a child, when he was raised in poverty by his mother before inheriting a fortune. Rosebud was the sled's name. You see? The circle closes. So, these are the miseries of a great lord, the miseries of a dispossessed king.
Against degrowth: judging the end, not the means 1:26:54 And it's precisely this indeterminacy of human desire. I'm glad that Jean's question, combined with Pierre's, lets me come back to next Sunday. What disappoints me most, in the disappointing sense — sorry for the pleonasm — is the vacuity of the political offer, lying in the fact that I have never seen an offer so lacking in progressiveness. Since even the most progressive candidate — I mean those who have a chance, a slim chance, who might figure in some pack maybe — even the most progressive candidate is not a fervent advocate of industrial development.
1:27:37 He's eco-socialist. No, no, but I'm not calling for a vote against him. I'm raising an issue. Even he shows traces of this unhappy consciousness, whether because he sincerely thinks so — I have no reason to doubt it — or as a tactic, which would also be a fair strategy. Asselineau was frank when he was told he was eco-social; he ended up saying why he didn't want to talk about eco-social matters — he said, if I talk about it, everyone runs away. So there you go, it's tactical.
1:28:07 I come back to my point about development. Once you've understood what Pascal means — Pascal formulates it better than others, but there's a whole tradition of thought that confirms this fundamental unsatisfiability. And all the better, that's what I'm saying. You see how we come back to infinity. To be modern is to understand that. It's not just knowing it. The Greeks had some inkling of it, they had wisdom, but they didn't go beyond it.
1:28:41 Measure was needed. Whereas for us, there's no measure in modern man's desire. Isn't that so? That means an economy, a political system and the underlying economy that sets itself a limit by saying we're overdoing it, we need to degrow a bit now. I'm not the only one talking about this, are you with me? I'm not saying something absurd here. There are ideologies of degrowth. As if we had crossed a golden age, a peak, a perfection, and now we're in excess.
1:29:12 I'm not one of those who, when they go into shops and do their shopping, say, come on, you're overdoing it, that's too much. No, no, I look at the prices and I'd love to consume more and buy more expensive things. There you go. I'd love to have a camera, a big screen here to project things that would illustrate my point. But yes, what is it? I'm telling you. There you go. I mean, and all the better. It's as if I were chasing a carrot that keeps slipping away, and that's what has made the tool never stop progressing from Neanderthal man to today, from the club to the cyclotron, because it serves an infinity.
1:29:50 There's no reason to assign it a limit. A political limit, yes. An economic and material limit, no. A political limit, yes. The wealth it produces must be distributed. The tool, of course, is quite another matter. But rather than conduct the real trial, the properly political and social trial — this is how I answer your two questions at once — we're an unhappy consciousness, we act as if it were the natural order of things, I don't know, and we put the means, the technology, on trial. As if, when I kill someone with a knife, it's the knife we're going to send to jail.
1:30:22 Yes. Once again, I ended my previous point by saying that if someone is killed by a knife stab, stabbed, as they say in the slums, it's not the knife that gets sent to jail. We mustn't forget such simple examples if we want to see clearly. We must stop putting things on trial as good or bad, for that matter. I don't divinize technology either. I don't demonize it, I don't define it. I mean that with this knife I could tear out my rival's heart or save him from a burst appendix.
1:30:58 It's not the means that must be judged, is it? It's the person animated by the end for which he used that means, which is quite different. That's precisely why, in an advanced country, when there's a criminal trial, experts are called in to determine whether the crime was intentional or not. And when psychiatrists are brought in, it's because if it turns out that physico-chemical and neurological reactions drove the crime, it's considered less serious than if it had been, as they say, deliberate, premeditated, etc.
Displacement: the forgetting of "aliquis" in Freud 1:31:40 Justice reflects, a little, certain aspects of our discussion. But, to come back to singularity, because there are many meanings of singularity — yes, this is the one I had in mind — it's because there's also the singularity of the Big Bang, I mean. I put that in parallel, and here again we find unhappy periods — I'm thinking of the adventures of Paris, of the terrors of the year 1000 in the Middle Ages.
1:32:13 Terrors of the year 1000 with epidemics, the plague — not the great plague, that came later — but there were periodically times like that when people despaired of everything and feared everything, when the slightest comet was the announcement of a cataclysm. There's a millenarian side to the Club of Rome's viewpoint, you see what I mean? A sense of the end of times, yes, exactly. That doesn't mean that I'm a happy fool who thinks, on the contrary, that there's no danger, no apocalypse.
1:32:43 I even think we've rarely been so close to the apocalypse as in recent times, right? But here it's been displaced. That's what's serious in the Freudian sense, the way a dream or a symbol displaces real problems in order to symbolize them in some pictorial form, etc., which lets me think about it without thinking about it. I'll take the example again here, because I've already recited it, I think it was to Lyosha — the example of Aliquis, at the restaurant, Freud's friend — a fine example of displacement, to illustrate my point, so it's rigorous enough all the same, because I'm taking the opposite view of those who think Freud is someone with fantasies that just pop into his head, a bit arbitrary, a bit random.
1:33:32 I'm not a Freudian, but I pay tribute to him. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he's talking with one of his university classmates. I'll cite the example — three years earlier, I believe. The classmate, who is Jewish like him, which matters for what follows, a medical student like him — we're in the 1930s — tells him, well, in the course of their discussion, which turns sour, 'I don't know if I'll stay in this country or if I won't emigrate, because things are getting difficult for us.'
1:34:05 And carried away by what he's saying, he quotes a line of Latin, because at the time, even medical students were accomplished Latinists. And he quotes Virgil: ex ossibus, aliquis, ultor. No one in this room needs to understand Latin to follow the example that comes next. It's profound. It's a quotation meaning something like 'this ungrateful homeland will not see my bones grow white,' from Virgil.
1:34:35 And as often happens with us when we quote something, it's not quite accurate. He has a slight memory lapse — a word is missing. That's what you need to remember. And that word is aliquis. It means 'someone, whoever.' But that doesn't matter. You'll see it's not the meaning that counts here, it's the signifier itself. So, as he sees a sly smile forming on Freud's lips — Freud who was starting to develop his theories about slips of the tongue, forgotten words, etc. — he says, 'I see you coming, you're going to say it's no accident that I forgot that word.'
1:35:06 But he says, 'If you're willing to play along.' And he does an exercise in association — free association, as it's called in Freud, almost mockingly. We'll see just how unfree the unconscious actually is. He gives him the rule: 'You're going to do me the favor of fixing your attention on that word, the one you didn't say, the one you didn't think of.' Because Freud had restored the missing word. Freud said, 'You mean ex ossibus, aliquis, ultor.' 'Yes, yes, that's it, that's the correct quotation.'
1:35:36 So he restores the word: 'Now you're going to focus on the word you didn't think of, the one you skipped, as we'd say today, and you're going to tell me everything that comes into your head, without censoring — very important, without censoring, without saying, I don't know why I'm thinking this, maybe it's not important. Tell me everything that comes to mind, in whatever order it comes, or in disorder.' The friend answers — the first thing, watch this sequence carefully from here on — 'The first thing that comes to mind is to separate a from liquis. And separating a from liquis, liquis makes me think of liquid, liquid makes me think of relic, relic makes me think of saint, of relics, of saints.'
1:36:11 'And I don't know if it matters' — don't worry about what matters and what doesn't, keep going. 'Well, thinking of saints, I think of Saint Augustine, I think of Saint Januarius, and thinking of Saint Januarius, I think of my vacation in Naples.' Saint Januarius, the patron saint of Naples — I mention it because that's how it really happened. 'And I think of the miracle of Saint Januarius, which was described to us when I visited the church in Naples' — and there he stops, his manner changes a bit, he looks somewhat troubled, and he says, 'And then I think of a bunch of things I don't want to talk about.'
1:36:43 And Freud says to him, 'That your mistress is expecting a child.' At that, the other man is dumbfounded. 'We weren't talking about that at all, how did you guess?' Freud said, 'But you told me everything.' Can anyone reconstruct it? You have the same material Freud had. His friend composed a poem, in effect. It works exactly the way poetry works on language. Look closely. He started by separating a from liquis.
1:37:17 Yes or no? Then he thought of liquid. Then of relic. Then of saints. But he didn't think of Saint Peter, Saint Paul, or Saint James. Which saint did he think of? He left us clues, he put us on the track. He named two — Saint Augustine and Saint Januarius. Saint Januarius. Don't you notice a connection between those two saints?
1:37:47 Yes? Yes, meaning? They're months. It's a calendar. Yes — expecting a child, periods, the calendar, the month. Oh yes, I didn't tell you, sorry, excuse me. What is the miracle of Saint Januarius? Well, that's what they tell you at the church, you can still go, it's still there today. There are relics, as in Spain — there are even more there. So they show you a little vial, a small container, where — since the Middle Ages, kept, it's good, traditions should be maintained — they preserve the blood of Saint Januarius, a martyr.
1:38:26 There you go. And that blood, over time, has more or less fossilized, hardened, and sometimes it liquefies. When it liquefies, that's a good sign — you can go to war against the Turks, marry Giulietta, etc. — and when it doesn't liquefy, well, it's best not to undertake too much at that point. You see, the good news is the blood — the one that liquefies — I won't spell it out for you — completely unconsciously, because the fellow was thinking about the Jews at the university, he wasn't thinking about his mistress. And at the time, in Vienna, having a mistress who's expecting a child was a scandal — it spoiled the whole picture for him. If he had thought of that word, it would have ruined his day, but what was really troubling him that day wasn't that — in the very short term, nothing was more urgent.
1:39:16 The problem is that in trying to hide it, he told everything. You see, when Hegel says that it's the nature of the Idea to externalize itself — people say, but we think the most internal thing is what matters most — that's actually what made me leave Hindu and Eastern thought behind when I was a teenager. I too used to think that what mattered most was, say, the seed, not the tree — the in-itself, not the for-itself — the potential, not the actual. I was being lazy. It could be the best seed in the world, but if you don't water it, if you don't weed around it, if you don't tend to it, it will never give you an oak, it will never give you a beautiful rose bush, all the same.
1:39:51 So there you go, you see, by separating a-liquis, you already get liquid, then liquid heads toward saints, the two saints — there's an infinity of saints, so why does he pick exactly the two that form a calendar? Because in German — yes — Augustin, August, that's August. I told you earlier, the key to the unconscious is statements, it's words that are at work in it. There you go. He circles around his problem, but without ever going to the center — he could have kept going, if Freud hadn't been there, he could have gone on telling his story like that indefinitely, he would have made a fine poetic chain.
1:40:29 A way of answering, very indirectly, the question — you can clearly see here how the symbolic order works, and how, when we forget that order entirely, when we're unhappy to the point of needing to think it in literal, real terms — when someone tells me that for it to work, warts, essentially, you need to hold it in the moonlight, at the full moon, sorry, and with your right hand as well — that's when we're no longer in the symbolic order, we're naively realist, if you like. There's still time for our two questions.
The artificial man, hubris and Prometheus 1:41:01 The problem — you're quite right to bring it back to this — the problem depends on politics. It's not about the means. Of course, the more the means increase, the more possibilities we have to do good, just as we have more possibilities to do evil. In the age of nuclear energy, you can do far more evil than in the age of edged weapons — that goes without saying. Agreed. And since I mentioned an agrégation topic earlier, and it fits well with your question, I'll mention another one that has nothing to do with Rousseau or Plato — that was literature, that was the agrégation in French letters, a topic on the syllabus at the time: the artificial man.
1:41:42 You know, there's a whole series of works like that — The Future Eve, by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, I don't know if you know it — one of the most famous, Frankenstein, etc. It seems very modern, except that it's in the 19th century that there are lots of novels developing this theme of a man made in a laboratory — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde too. There you go. And the topic was, in fact, it's always about showing that a transgression has been committed against nature and/or God. That's exactly your question. Who comes to take revenge here?
1:42:14 There's a typical fantasy structure — a transgression has been committed. Proof that this isn't linked to technical progress is that it has existed since the earliest antiquity. What is the Tower of Babel? What is the Flood? If not stories telling us: guys, we did too much, we consumed too much, we sinned too much, and God takes revenge. Yes or no? I'm not even talking about Sodom and Gomorrah. The Flood is by water, Sodom and Gomorrah is by fire, the Tower of Babel is by the confusion of tongues, but each time there's a hubris that must be punished. What does that mean?
1:42:44 That we should never have left the animal skin behind. From there, as soon as you leave the animal skin, you'd have to start thinking about degrowth. No, I say that because there are people today, there are some — because it all depends where you place the marker — who tell you all our problems come from the Industrial Revolution. Lots of people who call themselves anti-capitalist — listen carefully to what I'm saying, I think I'm the only one saying this — are actually anti-industrial. As if capitalist management were the only possible way of running industry, to which we were condemned.
1:43:15 It's a way of thinking, but one of extraordinary despair. It's a pessimism. It's remarkable. So all our resentment against capitalism gets displaced into resentment against industry. So there's that line of thought. Others say, no, it's not just the Industrial Revolution. In fact, as soon as there was the Renaissance — in fact the Middle Ages were fine when there was closeness — in fact, as soon as there was the monarchy, the nation-state, that was already the end of everything.
1:43:45 Do you hear that too? A Pétainist proximism. And then there are those who say, wait, the end of everything is the Neolithic. I've heard that, have you heard it? Am I making this up? There are those who say that as soon as we stopped hunting and gathering — I mean, as soon as we became sedentary — violence began. It really is extraordinary to hear that. Well, except — and I thank you for this, because I hadn't thought of it — but here, just as you've noticed that I don't favor transcendent religions over pagan religions, I'm a modern, I mean, so I don't set any limit on infinitization, any arbitrary limit.
1:44:29 I don't assign a limit. If there is one, I don't see it assigned. On the other hand, where I do give the Greeks credit is the myth of Prometheus. Because who is blamed in the text, in Aeschylus, is Zeus, not Prometheus. Prometheus Bound, that's the title. Prometheus Bound says: Zeus punished me because I brought mankind enlightenment, progress, fire — fire in the literal sense, fire in the figurative sense, meaning intelligence, the forging of metals, everything you like, it's magnificent. Agreed? And that's why he condemned me, just like that.
1:45:00 'But one day I will be freed, and at that point we will overthrow the gods, and the man I favored will avenge me against the gods.' It's all there in the text on Prometheus. So there's a Promethean side to it, isn't there? But no, people mock it — oh, Prometheus, technology, the Soviet world, almost. Let's not exaggerate all the same. All the same. There you go. Listen, thank you for your questions, which really do touch the heart of our problem.
1:45:34 I forgot to tell you who to vote for. I keep forgetting, don't I? Ah, not Macron. You can repeat that for me. Thank you all.
