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The noble savage, a working hypothesis and not a return to the animal 0:00 I must obey the law when it expresses right, but I must rebel against it when it expresses nothing but force. That's what he is saying. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated it.
0:30 Yes, this has hurt Rousseau a lot, it's the story of the good savage. You already know about Voltaire, it's in the letter to Rousseau, the letter thanking him for the copy he'd sent him. "I have duly received, sir, your new book against the human race." First act of perfidy, he acts as if Rousseau were writing against the human race. And that's where he says it makes one want to walk on all fours when reading your book, but since I've been out of the habit for sixty years... it's a superb style, but he's still being nasty. Anyway, so yes, I believe Rousseau himself, this has been explained many times, is very clear about the fact that the good savage he speaks of—he rarely uses that expression, he says "natural man"—is a myth he constructs, he says so himself.
1:12 It's a working hypothesis to try to understand something intermediate between the state of nature—the real animal, since we saw earlier that for him, as long as one stays at the state of nature, it's a stupid and limited animal we're talking about, and one only becomes an intelligent being and a man, dixit Rousseau, upon entering civil society—between the state of nature and civil society. That's where we see he's not being binary: he feels the need to construct this myth of a kind of golden age between the two, someone who doesn't yet have the servitudes of the future civil state, but who is nonetheless a man in the full sense.
1:54 So how do we untangle this knot? Well, one must always explain Rousseau through Rousseau. When there's a contradiction, it's because the problem is very complex, and there's a text by Rousseau that operates at a higher level, which lifts the contradiction that was necessary at one level, and which is lifted, as we say in dialectics, at another level. I'm alluding here to the correspondence he exchanged with Malesherbes. Malesherbes, let me quickly recall, was an aristocrat, a fine and highly enlightened mind—I say this not only without any irony, but with real affection, because he was very fond of Rousseau—he was closely tied to Rousseau's adversaries, of course, and he dreamed of mediating between Rousseau and the Holbachian clique, to use Rousseau's own term, and his enemies Grimm, etc., and Voltaire and company.
The letter to Malesherbes: fleeing servitude and domination 2:38 I'll take the opportunity to note that Rousseau is sometimes made out to be a paranoiac, and it's true he had a genuine persecution delusion, especially in his last works, but I'll point out that in strictly pathological terms, paranoia designates fear of an imaginary danger. Rousseau, from 1765 onward, changed residence some fifty times, hunted by the police of the three greatest powers in Europe; Voltaire called for his head on the chopping block; his house was half stoned, incited by the Protestants of Geneva, and so on.
3:12 So I mean, besides that, he supposedly had this bizarre persecution complex. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that in passing. So, to get straight to answering your question, Malesherbes had sent him a letter saying, explain yourself, you need to explain yourself, because you're worth more than what's said about you—your stories about the year, what's that about, your walks in nature, in the forest, what pleasure do you find in that, we're still better off in a nice salon, with carpets, I don't know, pretty women, good food—he said what everyone said at the time. Let's not forget that Madame de Sévigné, just a century before, when passing the Alps, drew the curtains, so horrific she found the mountains at the time.
3:46 Not afraid. So, Rousseau replies to him, answering your question—that's why I'm quoting this text—because he begins by conceding to the very imagery you rightly denounce, the one where Rousseau supposedly wants us to go back, as Voltaire tries to suggest, to walking on all fours. He describes one of his days at the Hermitage, in Montmorency, not far away, north of Paris, but at the time it was countryside, even forest.
4:19 And so, to go quickly, there's a beginning where he says: I arranged things so that neither letters nor visits would disturb my morning, no paperwork, but flowers and hay in my room—in short, he was botanizing, that was his passion. All the great philosophers of the era had a scientific hobby, typical of the time: Montesquieu had his chemistry experiments, Voltaire physics, Rousseau botany. Then afterward I would go for a walk with faithful Achates—that's the dog, it was the name of Aeneas's dog in Virgil's Aeneid.
4:49 And here there's vocabulary that a psychiatrist could indeed attribute to the semantic field of paranoia. "I hastened my step, fearing lest someone might seize hold of me before I could slip away. But once I had managed to round a certain corner," he adds, "with what a thrill of joy I would say to myself: here I am, master of myself for the rest of this day. I would then walk more calmly, seeking out wild, deserted places where nothing showed the hand of man"—and you see, that's where I'm stopping the sentence, "nothing showed the hand of man"—so if I stop the sentence there, one thinks it's a misanthrope speaking, fleeing all human presence to reach the heart of nature, somewhere with no one around, which is roughly what you hear all the time in interviews today.
5:34 And I'll continue the sentence: "where nothing showing the hand of man announced servitude and domination." Long before Marx suddenly understood that class struggle is the key to reading, to reading history—he's not for class struggles, but it's the key to understanding what lies behind the struggle between Protestants and Catholics, Armagnacs and Burgundians, Spartans and Athenians.
6:04 So, when he sees this, he takes up, he places himself on a path that Hegel had just illustrated with the famous dialectic of master and slave—well, well—and which is initiated by this Rousseau who flees, and now I get to answer your question, not humanity in general, nor even society as such, but that particular society, where, I repeat, servitude and domination reign. And since for Rousseau these are not laws imposed on us by nature as such, since it is we who have done everything men have done, men can destroy it; nothing is indelible except what nature imprints, and nature makes no one rich, prince, or great lord—so it's not nature that makes masters and servants, it's only the balance of force, you see, to return to my point—and that's why all the worst reactionaries, right up to the far right, always need validation from nature.
7:00 For instance, Arabs, Black people—I'm just saying random things—are inferior, it's been proven by genetics; in the Nazi era there was plenty of work like that to show it was grounded in the order of things, independent of man, of what man had done. It's telling. So what Rousseau says here is very liberating. It means not only does he not want to go back to walking on all fours, he simply wants to restore the freedom that lies at the origin of all these divisions. So that freedom doesn't benefit only a few, and isn't the freedom that's defended for us today, or rather that was defended throughout the West during the Cold War and continues to be—the freedom of the fox in the henhouse, or the wolf in the sheepfold, whichever metaphor you prefer—that's not quite the form of freedom Rousseau dreams of; on the contrary, that's ugly, that's slavery, when there is only force.
Paoli's Corsican Republic, the first Enlightenment applied 8:00 All the more willingly since an interesting edition was published just last year, precisely of this rather unusual work within Rousseau's oeuvre, where for the first time this text appears from a Corsican publishing house called Materia Scripta, and for the first time this text by Rousseau has been published bilingually, in French and Corsican. In association with Delga?
8:30 Exactly, which is distributed by Delga on the mainland. So, it's a question that interests me a great deal, insofar as the Social Contract is not a constitution—it lays out the fundamental basis of a problem that cannot be avoided once freedom has appeared as an irreversible demand of peoples. On the other hand, we've never seen Rousseau put this into practice or implement it.
9:02 Well, he received two requests: the draft constitution for Poland and the draft constitution for Corsica. Because in both cases, people turned to Rousseau, meaning they called on him for what we'd today call consulting work, simply, as an expert. There was such a resonance from the Social Contract, which had just appeared—even with the ban and censorship it faced, it was obviously a success. And this coincided with the fact that Corsica was experiencing, at that moment, the most important moment of its young history.
9:36 I'm talking about contemporary Corsica in the historical sense of the term. Namely, in the 1760s, roughly speaking—Corsica, we tend to forget this a bit too often—Corsica gave rise to the short-lived Corsican Republic initiated by Pascal Paoli, himself a fervent reader of the Enlightenment.
10:07 Corsica implements a program—well, produces the first republic to put Enlightenment ideas into practice, before France and before the United States of America. Before the United States and before France. So we tend to forget that Corsica was the first territory to apply Enlightenment ideas in politics. With separation of powers, etc. There was even Corsican currency minted at that time, in the village of Murato, in fact.
10:45 And speaking of currency, I won't dwell on it, that's not the point, but still, I mean, at a time when we talk so much about sovereignty—it's from the moment a state mints its own currency that it is sovereign. I note in passing that this is quite topical. So Rousseau finds himself receiving, simply—well, receives a letter, since it wasn't a physical arrival—from an emissary of Paoli, a close associate of Paoli's, Monsieur de Buttafuoco, that is, "Boutefeu" [firebrand], who was moreover well connected to Louis XV's Choiseul government at the time, telling him: listen, we've just founded...
11:29 So, sorry—all of Europe was abuzz with events in Corsica, just as today people talk about events in the Middle East or Ukraine, the news that enlightened opinion follows with passion. It's the Corsican events precisely because, at a moment when these Enlightenment ideas were advancing, with freedom as the central idea, this small people that had just shaken off the Genoese yoke, won a civil war, and put the principles of the new thinking into practice—it struck people's imagination. Voltaire says somewhere, "Europe is Corsica," at the time he's speaking.
12:00 And above all, in the Social Contract, an arid, abstract work, there are very few existential references, singular examples—it's almost entirely fundamental, general problems. And yet Rousseau speaks of Corsica, precisely because it was in the air, and says: "I have a presentiment that one day this small island will astonish Europe." He writes this at roughly the moment Napoleon is being born. It's an extraordinary story, really. So, of course, this hasn't escaped the attention of Paoli's circle, that little phrase.
The correspondence with Buttafuoco: "let me come and die among you" 12:36 Well, there it is, in one of the most famous books in Europe, no less. So he sends an emissary, to pick up my thread, who arrives in Switzerland, at Rousseau's, to say: we need you, we need you to draft a constitutional project. The man who specializes in political philosophy and the foundations of modern law is ideally placed to draft a constitutional project for us. Rousseau—it's fascinating to follow the correspondence that ensues from there. It's not long, there are four letters, with this Buttafuoco.
13:10 I'll say right away that the project will ultimately fail, because the French solution prevailed by force of arms—France will very quickly send an army, let me remind you what happened: Genoa was in debt, you see, nothing new under the sun with all these problems, but Genoa was deeply in debt, and to get out of the financial crisis, Genoa sells Corsica to France. That's how it was—there were peoples who passed from one master to another through a mere financial transfer. So this correspondence is worth reading; the publisher, Materia Scritta, had the excellent idea of making this correspondence available to the reader as an appendix, you can find it there.
13:48 It begins like this: the first letter from Buttafuoco, saying, look, you've written this, etc., we'd like to benefit from your wisdom. Rousseau's first reply, frankly: you Corsicans are wonderful, I'll summarize quickly, you've freed yourselves from the oppressor's yoke, everyone regards you as the proud fighters somewhat renewing the heroic deeds of the Greeks at Salamis, Marathon, etc. But frankly, I can't do it, I'm tired, I'm old, I'm ill, I have the stone disease, I can barely move, I'm hunted by every police force, etc.
14:23 I mean, because at the time it was an expedition—I'm not talking about going there now with Corsica Ferries and the airlines, with the strikes. But I mean, at the time, imagine—that fool Nietzsche, I say this affectionately, who spent his winters in Nice, dreamed of going to Corsica already, but already couldn't manage it. He said, between Nice and Corsica, I sense—and when he says "I sense," the beginning of the African sphere, the civet-cat scent—and he says, we'll go to Corte, he writes to a friend, because, according to my calculations, that's where Napoleon was conceived.
15:01 The Nietzschean fantasy—the Übermensch was conceived in Corte. So, Rousseau begins by saying no. Fine. And then, at the end, he says, give me some information anyway, like a consultant—I know generalities, but—and there he gathers information, you can see the seriousness of the consulting work, he wants to know everything. What's cultivated in such a place? What's done there? What are the mineral resources?
15:31 What are Paoli's customs? What are the relations between the population and the clergy, etc. He does his job, as an expert, if you will. And, little by little, over the course of the exchange, one senses he's tempted, despite his exhausted state. It's true, what he says—in 1765 it's the darkest year for him. That's when the famous stoning at Môtiers happens. He had taken refuge at Môtiers, in a well-appointed house, and that's when the villagers, incited by the Protestant consistory of Geneva, come to stone his house, thus threatening him with death, and so they must flee again.
16:07 And, fortunately, if I may say so selfishly, fortunately his house was stoned, because Rousseau decides to take refuge—it won't even last two months—he takes refuge on the Île Saint-Pierre, in Lake Biel, near Neuchâtel, and it is this that will inspire the Reveries, which mark the beginning of modern literature, as I mentioned earlier. And that's where Rousseau says he reached an unprecedented state of happiness, if I may say. And when he flees hastily, leaving his belongings elsewhere, because he's threatened with arrest, to take refuge on the Île Saint-Pierre—it's a small island in Lake Neuchâtel, Lake Biel—he brings only two works with him.
16:45 The Confessions, which he has just begun—he doesn't want to abandon the manuscript—and the draft constitution for Corsica. He still cares about this, after all. And gradually, he's tempted, and here's something pathetic and not at all well known, this aspect. That's why I'm very glad you asked this question. He says: listen, let's forget the constitutional project, I'm too tired, too old, etc. But, let me come to die at your place. It's an extraordinary gesture. And he says, I don't want to be—he doesn't put it this way, but—I don't want to be the official philosopher, on the payroll of the powers, quite the opposite.
17:18 I will go live forgotten in one of your small cantons, I've always earned my own living, I've made myself independent, my wife too, so we won't bother you, we won't cost you anything—but it's pathetic. And so this didn't happen because the French military solution prevailed, with the battle of Ponte Novu, where Paoli's last troops, Paoli's loyalists, are crushed, and where in 1816 they take back what they had bought from Genoa, after all. Rousseau isn't going to draft a constitution for a country that isn't independent. And so the project remains unfinished.
17:49 But it's an extraordinary text where, for the first time, we see a practical Rousseau. You said it: the piévi must be gathered—piévi means cantons—the piévi, I'm just making up examples, of Aléria and Ghisonaccia, because there's a lead deposit there, and there's this over there. I mean, we see a Rousseau at work who is no longer just reflecting on the fundamental concepts of political philosophy. That's why it's a text I recommend, especially since we see there—perhaps the only text where we see a concern for development, not exactly industrious but almost industrial, I mean, even though he insists a great deal that the Corsicans must above all preserve the freedom they've dearly won, by cutting off—so this wouldn't be at all pro-European today—all relations with outside powers, and if you start entering into commercial and financial relations, well, we'll lose our freedom within six months, he already sees this very clearly, and he even compares, at one point, Corsica and Switzerland, which are akin in origin, there are affinities in both cases: they're isolated mountain countries, cut off from the rest of the world, and which managed to preserve their freedom—it's true that in Switzerland there's William Tell, all that, it's tied together, so, yes, that's it,
A practical Rousseau and the theme of the island 19:00 and moreover, if I may add, digging deeper, there's a latent theme of the island in Rousseau—the island. If you visit his tomb today, you have to go to Ermenonville and see his grave, which is the least funereal tomb there could be—I mention it because it's on an island, that's why I bring it up, on the Île des Peupliers, as it's called, at Ermenonville, one of the most beautiful parks in the Île-de-France, indeed in France—because the Marquis de Girardin, who had invited Rousseau to come die at his place, so to speak, since Rousseau died practically three weeks, a month and a half after his arrival at Ermenonville. Rousseau had favored this invitation, since he had many, because he wanted to keep his independence, and because there was an exceptionally diverse variety of trees in the forest of Ermenonville, and his passion for botany decided him—and he already says, I'm happy to come to your place because in Paris the trees are all black.
20:00 There's no industrial revolution yet, but the trees are already all black. Why, in my opinion? Because they heated with coal. Reminder for the ecologists—even when you pass through a tunnel on a coal train, you come out in a filthy state covered in coal particles from every side, whereas an electric train is much less polluting. Anyway. So he's on an island, and yet his ashes are not there, because in a beautiful nighttime ceremony that took place during the Revolution after his death, the Convention sent a delegation to fetch Rousseau's ashes and bring them to the Panthéon.
20:37 So there's a complicity between Rousseau and the theme of the island. "Of all the places where I have lived—and I have known some charming ones—none has left me so sweet a memory as the Île Saint-Pierre in the middle of Lake Biel." That's how the Fifth Walk of this admirable text begins. So, again, he founds both the content and the prose of the best that would come afterward, from Chateaubriand to Proust. And here, what I call the fusion of prose and poetry within the same sentence.
21:07 Poetic prose. And so there is... It is on an island that he was happiest. Especially since he lived there thinking he would have to stay there forever, that he would not be allowed to leave. Like an exile. So it's interesting, when reading the Reveries, to know that he's speaking of a moment when he thought he would remain there for good. And finally, this draft constitution for Corsica. So, the island pursues Rousseau a bit.
21:37 And I think this is linked to his side as a hunted man. On an island, I am safe. It's a bit like fortified castles surrounded by water. That never stopped a castle from being taken by assault. But symbolically, having a stretch of water separating me, completely surrounding me from the rest, isolates one more. You can really feel this magical quality when you go to Corsica. That's why I recommend that first-time visitors go by boat. Even though it's much more convenient to fly when you're in a hurry. But somehow, crossing 150 km of salt water to reach an island is quite different from arriving by jet.
22:10 So, there you have it, I wanted to add this about Corsica. Somewhere in this famous correspondence, available in the book, we learn that he wished, had it been possible, to die and be buried in Corsica. So, in a way, the island pursues Rousseau throughout his career. There, I wanted to point that out. It may seem like an anecdote, but it's profound. Because the island resolves, in Rousseau, and now I'm getting serious, the problem becomes more serious, of three words often confused: revolt, reform, revolution.
Revolt, reform, revolution: the detour through theory 22:47 Merleau-Ponty, whom I rarely quote, though I like him a great deal, but I rarely quote him, wrongly so in fact, says this very fine line in In Praise of Philosophy: "If the philosopher were a rebel, he would shock less." And this was written before '68, nonetheless. He unmasked Cohn-Bendit in three strokes. "If the philosopher were a rebel, he would shock less. For after all," I continue, well, it's he who continues, "everyone knows deep down that the world isn't as it should be, even if one forgets it when returning to one's business. With Socrates, it's something else." Because he's talking about Socrates, he's praising philosophy, and he's implying: when someone is full of rebellion, when he's a radical revolutionary, that's terrifying in a way.
23:18 It's much more dangerous. So, there's revolt—it's necessary, I couldn't speak against it—but it's far from sufficient. There were revolts in France, the Jacqueries, the peasants, it was terrible. It was crushed in blood, period. A revolt, with its spontaneous character, doesn't worry those in power too much. To go from revolt to revolution, the revolt, with the legitimate anger it embodies, must pass through the detour of theory. I'm glad you quoted Lenin earlier, who says exactly that: without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice.
23:51 You're accused of being theoretical—people shouldn't snub theorists as if they're stuck in their bubble. Oh no, no, not at all, far from it. If man was able to emerge from nothingness and, over I don't know how many years, begin to assert a timid mastery over nature at first, it's because he took a theoretical detour, and this will accelerate with the appearance of science, etc. I mean, the more you know the laws governing nature, the more you can master it.
24:24 I recall Descartes: "I took pleasure above all in mathematics, because of the certainty and evidence of its reasoning; but I did not yet notice its true use, and, thinking it served only for the mechanical arts, I was astonished that..." etc. And there, it's very important to understand that there's no opposition between theory and practice. A practice is all the more effective the more powerful theoretical detours it has at its service. We were discussing medicine earlier—medicine is the best example of this.
24:57 Medicine is not a science, it's an art. It's not a matter of knowing, it's a matter of acting, of making sure that someone who is in pain gets better. That's what medicine is, let's not forget that from the start. Knowing is not its primary goal. On the other hand, medicine has only become effective, and has only left behind magic and everything you like—which often made things worse—since it started taking a detour through a science called biology. There you go. I mean, you can be an excellent biologist yourself and be a moral and political monster; there have been such cases.
25:31 Even in physics, I'm thinking of Heisenberg, who had sympathies for the Nazi regime—he was a huge... well, medicine is only effective since it knows the laws that govern our organism, quite simply. And so we can only transform something if we know the laws it's subject to. That's an important reminder. So, what makes a rebel become a revolutionary—I say this because "revolution" has become an obscene word too, apparently all our misfortunes come from revolutions.
26:01 That's what people kept repeating, it's Voltaire's fault, it's Rousseau's fault, we're back to that. That's what the old reactionaries kept saying for a long time, those concerning the émigrés, those who had fled France and then came back, and about whom—I forget who—said that admirable phrase: those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. That's terrible, that sort of thing. They've learned nothing, meaning they're still stuck in the old regime with their prejudices, but they haven't forgotten that they were afraid. They're wicked, but they've become even more wicked on top of it. So, this draft constitution for Corsica goes further than the Corsican issue, which is very important at that moment and important in itself, but here it goes much further.
The meanings of the word nature in the eighteenth century 26:41 With this, let's say, island, we finally understand the status of nature in Rousseau—the most complex term is "nature" in Rousseau, because it isn't precise. Because at the time, nature sometimes has a polemical sense. Natural rights, for example, are against authority, against arbitrariness. Right? That's what it means. The natural light Descartes speaks of, the fact that—no need—good sense is the most evenly distributed thing in the world, that's the first sentence of the Discourse, the fact that every man has enough intelligence to know that if Pierre is Paul's brother, Paul is Pierre's brother. There you go, that good sense with its reversibility, mathematical symmetry, all that.
27:14 I mean, nature. Thank you. It's the most complex notion in Rousseau. Apparently the most common, the most familiar to us. It's easier—if you're a natural kid, you think you know what that means. Whereas if I talk about the apagogic and the ostensive in Kant, it's Greek to you, but it's actually much easier—you just stick the definition on, that's what the apagogic is. But everyday words, the ones we use all the time, those are the most treacherous. You can well imagine. Which is why Hegel had that superb line: what is well known, precisely because it is well known, is not known.
27:45 And here, in particular, with this concept of nature—again, I'll only keep two meanings, there are several, it's polysemous. But there is this sense of nature as the object of physics, the only objective sense of nature. There you go. Physis means nature. In Greek, it's the science of nature. It's not the science of human history or whatever, nor of the supernatural—that's not theology, it's the science of nature. And nature has only been scientifically knowable since physics and its various offshoots appeared.
28:17 Very well. But that's the first sense. And then there's the polemical sense. When we say it's natural for me to go to the cinema on a Saturday evening, there's nothing natural about it. Everything about cinema is artificial. But it means that I have the right—wait, I'm losing my point. It means free with respect to arbitrariness. So, in the eighteenth century, there's this polemical sense. And by playing on all these senses, you end up with confusions and contradictions we alluded to a bit earlier. I've tried to clear some of that up with texts I refer you to, because they're very clear.
Between bad and good society: reverie by the lakeside 28:53 But let me come back to the island. The island manages to gather and clarify what Rousseau calls by concept. And that's where we see we need to go back to the number three again. I'm not a Pythagorean, nor am I into numerological mysticism, but still, it's for the sake of reminders. Namely: there is bad society for Rousseau, the one that tears up the contract, so to speak, or disregards it, or is without a contract at all—nothing, servitude, domination.
29:23 Let me pick up those terms again. And then there's good society, the one governed by the contract. That's two terms. One is missing. You don't just move from one to the other like that. You can hardly imagine big capital saying, "Listen guys, we're in crisis, we've lost our grip, here are the keys, good luck." That's not how it happens. Let me remind you, when we talk about revolution, we'd like it to happen that way. But it's not the case—sometimes power has to be wrenched away. And resistance, same thing—things went badly for the Germans. Anyway. So, since we don't move immediately from bad society to good society, there's an intermediate state through nature.
30:02 So there, in the ordinary sense this time, through landscape, through being alone. I'll defend that. The solitary one or the one in solidarity—reveries of the solitary walker. You have to be alone to rediscover the meaning of society. It's an extraordinary ethic. And that's why—I don't have the text of the Reveries in front of me, but I think I know this passage well—after this reverie by the lake, where he reaches a state you might call Zen, in the mystical tradition, which I respect, when he challenges anyone to guess what this enjoyment consisted of, what this happiness consisted of, he says he'll leave it to all the men of this century to guess about the life he led there.
30:36 And this at the height of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, machines, plates, tools—what does he say? He speaks of the precious idleness [farniente] he indulged in without restraint. It's extraordinary, this praise of idleness in Rousseau, who elsewhere praises manual labor in Emile. But here, what does he say? He says: I am condemned, I can do nothing more for my fellow men, I can do nothing more for myself. And so he discovers a relation to existence stripped of any other affection, as he puts it. What can one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to oneself.
31:07 The exact phrase: "Of nothing but one's own existence. As long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God." He even goes so far as to say something quite extraordinary—as long as this state lasts, it's an experience with God, its fleeting instant. So we might say, we've got it all wrong—Marxism, revolution, politics, we shouldn't bother with any of that, we should do as Rousseau did, withdraw far from all these horrors. And then there's an extraordinary passage where Rousseau says that few men have known this kind of state, because it requires many circumstances. He mentions in passing that it requires the right sonic circumstances.
31:38 He was a musician, after all. He closes his eyes, he's in this state. He says you need the cry of eagles, the sound of the torrent, and so on—I'll pass over that, it's another discussion, a fascinating one. But he adds: an unfortunate man, cut off from human society, can find in this reverie compensations that neither men nor nature could take from him. So there he says it's a refuge, as a last resort.
32:10 When it becomes unbearable—injustice, inequality, force, violence, in short lawlessness—right, the island, but as a metonymy in general, as we say, being in one's bubble, when I say an island, being isolated—isola, in Italian that's related to "unites," isola—but there, when he's on that island, he feels safe. And that's very important, because some people forget that and think his happiness—well, they've invoked mystical explanations for the supernatural state of happiness he finds himself in on the Île Saint-Pierre, daydreaming by the lake—whereas Rousseau says quite precisely that he knew full well that wicked men had no hold over him.
32:48 Let me take the opportunity to read this short passage that follows the description of what he did on the island—he has just written what you might call, forgive the triviality, the high point of his ecstasy by the lake—and he says: but most men, being continually agitated, know little of this state, and having tasted it only imperfectly for a few brief moments, retain only an obscure and confused idea of it that does not let them feel its charm.
33:21 It would not even be good, given the present constitution of things, for men, craving these sweet raptures, to grow disgusted with the active life which their ever-renewed needs prescribe as a duty. But an unfortunate man who has been cut off from human society and who can no longer do anything useful or good, either for others or for himself—one is no longer bound by duty—can find in this state compensations for all human felicities, compensations that fortune and men could never take from him.
33:54 I'd like to insist and underline twice that word "cut off"—an unfortunate man who has been cut off, and not one who cut himself off out of love of solitude, as the Romantic generation would soon do, and Lamartine. I'll take the opportunity to say I get a bit annoyed when people make Rousseau a forerunner of Romanticism. A forerunner is what? Someone who does a bit earlier what others will do later. Roughly, that's what a forerunner is. But Rousseau anticipates far more than Romanticism—even Symbolism and the Impressionism that would follow.
The maquis and the alleged Corsican laziness 34:25 So it is that if you read the fifth Walk, you're struck that there are fewer feelings than impressions—sensations of air passing, the sound of the torrent—that's not feelings, that's the senses being awakened. There, I wanted to point that out. So, the island of Corsica and the draft constitution for Corsica are only one moment, one stage, in this insular journey, I might say, in Rousseau—there's always an insular side to Rousseau, and in a way, by drafting the project for Corsica—so here I finish answering the question of why it's even more important for Corsica—because the famous tradition attached to the image of the rebellious Corsican, taking to the maquis, that's where the expression comes from. After all, I mean, I've walked the Corsican maquis myself to get through it—watch out, you're covered in blood when you're 15 meters into the maquis with no path, it's terrible, it's not grass, it's woody—and so it's ideal for hiding. Hence the bandit side, when they refuse to owe anything to anyone, lawless country as they say—typically speaking, Rousseau ends up justifying it, he who hates, without saying so, like Goethe.
35:36 that terrible phrase, that German phrase, "I prefer an injustice to disorder"—I'd say a phrase like that has a police-state consequence—I prefer an injustice to disorder. Rousseau—I admire Goethe, but that phrase is excessive—in a way praises something, and he says the Corsicans had no other choice, they were as industrious as anyone, etc., but you have to motivate someone for them to work. There's an extraordinary passage where he does, avant la lettre, a sociology of the so-called Corsican laziness—to get there, the image we have of the Corsican and of idleness, I mean, it's the opposite—and that's why it's very interesting to see this so-called laziness, which we also find in racist prejudices. I myself have heard, having lived quite a bit in sub-Saharan Africa, "anyway, black people don't work"—you'd have to never have seen a docker on the port of Abidjan or Lagos, or especially the African woman, whom nobody talks about, who walks 10 km every morning in the Sahel to fetch water because there isn't any at home in a non-industrialized country—secondly, who then walks another 10 km to fetch wood.
36:46 in a country where there are no trees, to heat water, and who then starts her day pounding grain with a child on her back and practically a chief too, pounding with a pestle that would give me blisters after five minutes, and she'll do that all day long—well, I'll just point out that the productive force that is the pillar of African society is, indeed, the woman—let's not forget that. So there you have these prejudices, which consist in speaking in terms of being, whereas one should speak in terms of becoming, in terms of connection, of relation, as Spinoza does so well—and that's where we see it, regarding the theme of the island and the interest Rousseau took in Corsica, and I wonder whether his wish to die there wasn't linked to that feeling of security offered by the prospect of being on an island, and moreover among a people who had just freed themselves. We shouldn't forget that there are authors who carry a life into a work—sorry, into an entire life's work—I'll leave Rousseau aside, I'm thinking of Lauro de Bastille and Coquallan, I'm thinking of Balzac's Human Comedy—these are works built over an entire lifetime, there's a succession of characters, as we find in Wagner's Ring cycle.
Faust: to live free on a free land 37:57 He spent forty years between the first sketches and the end of Twilight of the Gods. Remembrance of Things Past—these are the great sagas we might today call multi-episode works. Yes, an even more famous example of that is the work known to every German schoolchild, whose title everyone knows at least: Faust. Goethe spent his whole life writing it, between the first Faust and the end of his life, things evolved, his reflections changed, and so on, and there's a whole trajectory. So what is the final stage of Faust, which Goethe had forty years to ponder? Let me remind you, the deal is simple—what the devil wants is always the soul, that's simple. For his part, he wants the soul, and Faust says: I'll give it to you if you make me experience a state so happy that I would say to time, stop—sorry, it's the opposite, to the instant: stop, you are so beautiful, a dish so good that I would eat it every day, morning and night. It's difficult when you put it concretely like that, and that's where you see the devil has his work cut out for him. And of course, it's the greatness of man as Goethe sees it: the devil cannot find, in an animal as restless as man—which is what makes him distinct from other animals—something that would make him permanently happy, right.
39:07 And he just happened to seek out Helen of Troy, he had her brought back to life to give himself as a wife, well anyway, that's it—and at the end, old Faust is blind, it's a symbol somewhat of the ravages of age, etc., he's blind and he's walking with a cane in Holland, and he hears that a dam is being built, and he says—the devil is amazed—to live free on a free land, it's extraordinary, excuse me, it brings tears to my eyes, but I saw the same thing when Sankara was building small dikes in Burkina Faso, or when people mocked him for it—it's extraordinary, there, excuse me, that part should probably be cut anyway—and "to live free on a free land" is the conclusion of forty years of reflection by the greatest mind in Germany at that time. So, I mean, there was something of that in Rousseau—he wouldn't have felt safe, even on an island in the Pacific, even alone, unless it were at the same time inhabited by a people who had freed themselves. So it's not a marginal text among the major ones, if there weren't—
