English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Talks as restitution of what has been received 0:30 We've seen it all, here's where I live, in 18 square meters without a shower. There's a communal shower in the corridor, in a retirement home in Cachan. And no, no, I wouldn't want this to be taken as a complaint. In fact, I'm as snug as a bug in a rug. But I feel a bit awkward saying so because I wouldn't want to mock those who have always been hard up. It's because I had a lot of money at one point, I was a senior executive and all that, that I can appreciate what money gives and what it doesn't give.
1:08 I wouldn't be as happy if I had always been hard up. But I mean, I'm surrounded by other residents who've been abandoned by family, by friends, as is often the case in retirement homes, who are social welfare cases. And there I see real misfortune, in that nobody asks them to give a lecture or a talk here or there. Whereas my only misfortune is that I have to force myself a bit, given my age sometimes, to dash down the RER stairs to get there, or things like that. But I appreciate the luck I have to be alive, to have this luxury of being asked for something, quite simply.
1:43 I mean, I don't even pass judgment on the value of the answer I give to that, I'm not well placed to do so. But for me, the value these talks have for me is the fact that they are requested by people of such different kinds—I'm thinking of Tristan—agrégés in economics, brilliant young ones by the way, agrégés in math who teach in prep school despite their young age, in physics, people who left school as early as the BEPC, whom elsewhere we'd call "caïras" [tough street kids], and who also follow these talks, which forces me—and it's harder for me, but it's what I care about most—to find a mode of expression accessible both to the philosophy agrégé, and that hooks them just as much as someone who didn't have the chance to pursue studies, even simply secondary school.
2:35 So there, that's just to make this introduction that I'm not complaining at all, and if I don't complain, it's a luxury not to complain, because I've had other living conditions, and so, I fight so that—I have nothing against money—I fight so that people have some, that's not a religious statement, it's a philosophical statement, I'm not knocking money. I fight against the privatization of its accumulation, which isn't quite the same thing, and for its restitution.
3:10 So there, I give back what I can, I give back in the talks I do what I had the immense luck to receive, by the various chances of my life, chances in the plural of my life. I will never forget that I learned to read and write with African teachers from French-speaking Africa, so people whose native language isn't even French, who taught me the main tool of my livelihood, because I've spent my life either as a teacher or as a consultant selling hot air, chatting away, as they say in the south of France. For that, you need a command of the language that African schoolteachers gave me.
Same content, different form: the choice of Nerval's Angélique 3:43 So, I had that luck, so I'm only giving back a small part of the immensity of what I received. And so, you're asking me what we're going to do this year, well, I'd like to say, even if it seems contradictory, the same thing and quite the opposite—namely, the same thing, that is, we're going to keep talking along the lines of what has been called, since last year, a series of talks entitled "From Ulysses to Daedalus," referring to mythology, from repetition to liberation.
4:20 So there's continuity there. We're staying under the heading from repetition to liberation, from Ulysses to Daedalus, but instead of doing it in the form of philosophical problems—modernity, the self, the individual, etc.—which is also a way of reviewing the philosophy curriculum in general, and which had the advantage of allowing, for those not familiar with the discipline, a review of roughly the whole of its history, or at least its high points—we're not here to produce scholars—but which had the drawback, especially with my way of proceeding, of being subject to several, frequent digressions, detours.
5:13 So, I know some people like that and have told me so, that they prefer these detours, I've been told, don't tempt me. And I can see that others, I'd say, who concentrate their effort on trying to see the coherence of what I say, are often puzzled by the apparent non sequiturs I make. So to remedy that, while there's continuity of content—we're still in the problem going from repetition to liberation—as for the formal approach, still to return to a continuity of discourse, I intend, from this fall until the end of the cycle next June, to comment on one and the same text.
5:56 A relatively short novella by Nerval, since it's not even 100 pages, between 80 and 100 pages. Well, it's short—if it had been a novel, I mean, a short story, taken from Les Filles du Feu, entitled Angélique. Angélique is the first of the Filles du Feu, as the title indicates. Practically each of the novellas has a woman's first name. The most famous is the famous Sylvie. That miracle of transparency and balance and of shadowy zones wrested from the clinic, between two stays in the psychiatric hospital.
6:30 It's admirable what Nerval managed to do. And Angélique is not that at all. Not at all. It doesn't have the imponderable density of a novella like Sylvie, which Proust admired above and beyond many references he was familiar with. He says somewhere in a notebook, "Just try to go further than Gérard." He had admiration for the author of Sylvie as a writer. So, apparently it doesn't have that density. It has none of the qualities of Nerval's great texts.
7:00 That's why I'm choosing this text. It doesn't have the dreamlike flashes of Aurélia, which is somewhat the account of his madness. It doesn't have the imponderable density of Sylvie. It doesn't have the landscapes that are both unsettling and volcanic—quite literally—like in Octavie, which takes place on the slopes of Vesuvius or in Naples.
7:32 It's a novella that has always been somewhat neglected among the Filles du Feu, even though Nerval placed it at the beginning. It's the novella that opens the collection. Another reason it's often been passed over in silence is that it resists reading somewhat. That's why I intend to give it a running commentary with our followers. That's how one says it these days. Those who will be present directly at the workshops and those who follow us remotely thanks to the Internet.
The quest for an unfindable book and the anti-novel 8:06 In this running commentary, we'll try to see why this novella resists. One of the main reasons is that Nerval seems to keep changing the plot, the subject, the continuity—if we want to sound learned we'd say the diegesis, how to put it, the storyline, or the plot, or more simply, the pitch, as it became fashionable to say on TV shows. So, he seems to keep changing it all the time.
8:39 Even though the main thread seems to be the quest for a book he wanted to obtain in Frankfurt, the novella begins in Germany, at the Frankfurt fair. We don't really know what he's doing there, he doesn't tell us, but the first words are "In 1851 I'm going to pass through Frankfurt." In short, he comes across a book, he wants to buy it from a secondhand bookseller, he apparently doesn't have enough money on him, because he's already spent quite a bit on other books. He tells himself, in two days I'll be in Paris, I'll find that book in no time—but nothing at all in Paris. The story, the author, manages—I'll go quickly, I won't give away the plot—so that the book isn't found, which takes much longer than expected. Every pretext is good: the library is closed, it's on vacation, it's under repair; there, the book is found, but there are illegible manuscripts because there are rodents that arrived from Russia—the Russian rat, the Athenian mouse—that have just gnawed the manuscripts, which would have preserved the trace, the memory, and prevented the recollection, and so the book being unfindable, and the novella being part of a serial that really did appear in a newspaper of the time—the newspaper was called Le National at the time, a paper you'd call
9:49 today somewhat progressive, somewhat rebellious—and Nerval published his story and he was in quite a fix because, I mean, he had to find the book to continue the piece, and in fact, we'd say today, in terms of modern criticism—that's not my subject, I'll be doing a philosophical exploitation of this text, but still, in terms of literary life—it's already been noted that he builds what would be called in the 20th century, and it's very modern for the time, a kind of anti-novel: not finding the book, he's forced to invent another story in the meantime. So, I myself am not making any more digressions thanks to this running commentary of the text, but the author himself doesn't refrain from making them—well, I'll leave that to Nerval, who manages very well—we'll see that's not the case at all—and who has an enormous continuity of subject matter that I don't want to reveal now, so I already advise everyone who has access to the video, which is kind enough to be running, to grasp that, to get hold of the book. There's a good edition, there are plenty of very accessible, very cheap paperback editions, including one from Folio, which I'll point out because it's followed by
10:59 the collection of the Chimères, so we have the best of Nerval's prose with Les Filles du Feu, including Angélique of course, and then afterward the best of his poetry in the Chimères, the two texts often echoing each other—I myself go back and forth between the two—it's very handy to have this volume. So, that's roughly what the discussion will be about this year: a running commentary of Angélique by Gérard de Nerval, taken from Les Filles du Feu, to illustrate the path leading from Ulysses to Daedalus, from repetition to liberation. I didn't say it, from the repetition of the cross with Ulysses, of the carnage—let me remind those who've followed the earlier videos—Ulysses begins with the trick of the Trojan horse, which allows the Trojans to be massacred in a single night, and it ends, so it seems, with the opposite, a happy ending with Penelope, they have many children, it's the end of the tribulations—no, no, no, when you read the text, that's not it, that's the legend that has become established, even if it's conveyed by masterpieces like Du Bellay's beautiful poem that everyone knows, "Happy is he who like Ulysses has made a long journey" and then returned—the model of the happy ending—no, no, no, it ends in a dreadful massacre once again, repetition, the blood flows again, and always because of Ulysses—it's the massacre
The carnage of the Odyssey and the crisis of capitalism 12:09 of the suitors. So there, as if the whole detour I'm making, I'm making a big circle, as round as the first letter of Odysseos, Ulysses's name in Greek, a curve with a little hole at the bottom all the same—that's the letter omega, isn't it? Perhaps it's that little hole that will allow me, with Daedalus, to free myself from the cycle, we'll see, I'm serious. What makes all this topical, and its philosophical exploitation, that is, political—since Plato, philosophy is the shadow of politics, it's the shadow theater of politics—is that the crisis we are going through, which is the most serious since the 1930s, capitalism has never gotten out of its crises except through carnage. The most serious economic crisis that preceded the one we are living through, and which we no longer talk about because we only talk about terrorism, about this or that, men, women, homos, heteros, Christians, Muslims, Hutus and Tutsis, and so on—in short, they'd rather talk about fantasized identities, wouldn't they, than about reality
13:19 that is, about social classes, in which there are men, women—what does that matter to the Vietnamese whose eyes run down their cheeks after their head has been caught in a storm of napalm during the Vietnam War, what does it matter to them whether the one who bombed them is gay, straight, black, white—frankly, today's issues, what does that matter to the victim, let's come back down to earth. Up to now, capitalism has never gotten out of it except through carnage, repetition. So, we're going to try to see whether there isn't another solution than to make 50 million dead like the last time we got out of the great crisis of the 1930s, including 30 million in the Soviet Union, by the way, 17 million in China—the two countries most tracked by American bases and missiles in the world currently, interesting—and where war is closest, in the South China Sea, and from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea. So, I wouldn't want to be alarmist, but just to show that there's something serious in my little story about Nerval's novella.
14:29 we're going to look for a little book in the Parisian library, and we'll see that Nerval himself is well aware of the danger lurking around this quest for an unfindable book. There you go.
