English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Recap of the previous session and the problem of genres 0:00 I'm sorry about the last session, whose content was so sprawling, so dense, that it ended a bit lamely. Just when we were getting into the heart of the matter, I simply mismanaged the time, to the point that I sacrificed the question period, so much did the material of the talk make me run over the hour and a half I had set for myself.
0:31 I docked the questioner's last half hour, which is a real shame, and I'll try not to do the same thing this time. And we bought, out of the association's funds, a club for Thomas so he can hit me over the head with it if need be... There you go. I hope you remember — I won't do a roll call of who was there and who wasn't, because I'd get confused — but I'll still recall what, with a curious alpine metaphor I don't know where it came from, I called "we've reached the pass" during the last session, as if I had hoisted you up to the heights.
1:12 It's not me, it's Nerval. Well, it's true, it's true, I'd like to mark the occasion for once. It's true that I remind you that, since the first time I brought a literary text into our philosophy workshop, you know I'm a bit obsessive about the problem of genres, either because of their fusion, or on the contrary because of their distinction and separation.
1:43 There are sexes in life, there are social classes, and there are genres. I'm not talking about genders the way the Anglo-Saxons do, no. I'm serious. I'm talking about genres — tragedy, comedy, theater, poetry. I'm talking about it in the delirium of Caroline Fourest, mind you. Or Tariq Ramadan, same thing, all that. So, seriously, when I say mark the occasion, I mean: since the first time I brought in, made our reflection rest — in every sense of the word, and it really does rest, because it's a bit of a relief from abstraction — on an example of literary expression, it was, if I remember correctly, with Baudelaire's "The Cracked Bell," in past years — well, two years ago, then a year ago — and then, with a long collective reading, good evening, of almost the entirety of Racine's Phèdre,
2:55 when we wanted to illustrate the dichotomy, the split within the subject: "Enslaved now under the common law, by what turmoil do I see myself carried far from myself?" says Hippolytus, a bit late, a bit too late. I thought I was such and such. Well no, I'm not like that at all, I'm like everyone else, enslaved now under the common law. I believed in liberalism, in capitalism, I was an individual.
3:25 Ah well no, no, no, enslaved now under the law of the communists, sorry, under the common law. By what turmoil do I see myself carried far from myself? A moment defeated my rash boldness, etc. This crisis of the self splitting apart, which will become gaping open in modernity — we had illustrated that Racine's Phèdre, all that, was meant to illustrate, embody, give flesh and blood to concepts that, without it, might have seemed abstract, or in any case, given the frequency of our meetings and the fact that, alas for me, we don't see each other enough, it was a way of somewhat offsetting the abstraction inherent in the philosophical discipline, all too often.
4:11 So, I haven't stopped harping on this since Baudelaire — careful, you could write ten volumes just on that poem, on "The Cracked Bell," it's been done, tons of glosses, but we're not here to do literary exegesis, but philosophical exegesis. So, this is a reminder. And we'd somewhat forgotten it since we started reading Angélique, because I had to remind those who don't know the text well, and a fortiori the context, a little bit, precisely, the framework in which this work fits, in literary history and so on, but well, there you go, I did it hastily by necessity, I tried to stick to the essentials of what's going to...
Angélique and Aurélia, two texts that are complete opposites 4:51 ...point out to me what's going to have serious philosophical consequences. And so, I couldn't go back to the philosophical assessment of the text before last session's session, when suddenly we crossed a threshold. That threshold, if you remember well, what happened last time, is when we did the comparative reading of two passages, excerpts from two different works by the same author: the first excerpt from Angélique, from the sixth letter — sorry, excuse me, the fourth letter — the one where he changes setting between Paris and where he goes into the Valois, with a sub-chapter he himself titled "The Young Girls," and that's when he sees the young girls singing near Senlis cathedral, the little girls under the direction of a young woman, to be precise, and that it moved him, because we know he's very sensitive, we'll come back to it, to the folk song.
5:53 So, and we compared that text with, in a context that couldn't be more different, an excerpt from Aurélia, which is the clinical account that we owe, if you remember, to his doctor, who had told him that if he could put his obsessions, his visions and his dreams into writing, it might do him some good — which was, for the time, actually not such a bad idea. It wasn't yet the talking cure, but it was already the writing cure, wasn't it? And it's to that doctor that we perhaps owe Aurélia, which is a kind of document on the visions that overwhelmed our — I don't want to say "our poor Gérard," because he would have hated that.
6:31 But those, his most tragic moments — and we mustn't forget that his most balanced works, in the eyes of all the critics (I won't take it upon myself to make such a judgment), the most luminous, the most successful, the most masterfully controlled, were written during walks on foot around Paris, in the Île-de-France, between two bouts of total madness at the clinic. They are victories wrested from pathos, in the proper sense — from illness, no less.
7:04 And I say this to close the point — I had developed this last time — I had said that Nerval hated having his work reduced to madness, and I'm not saying suicide, since it wasn't really anticipated after all, but there you go. And he says, at the end of that admirable preface, the letter to Alexandre Dumas — you remember, since in the edition, and indeed it's the case, the one you have there, the Folio one, it's also the case in the paperback edition — and it was he who established the tradition of having Les Filles du feu, his collection of short stories, his prose, followed by his poems, the Chimères, that short but very dense collection, the Chimères, which would exert such a profound influence on avant-garde poetry, with the Symbolists and then the Surrealists.
7:47 So Nerval says, at the end of his preface to Alexandre Dumas — a bit to show that he knew full well Dumas wouldn't understand much of it — "And since you were imprudent enough to quote one of those sonnets composed in a state of supernaturalist reverie, as the Germans say, you will find them all at the end of the volume. You'll see, they are hardly more obscure than Hegel's metaphysics" — sometimes we'll manage clearer, all the same — "or Swedenborg's Memorabilia" — I remind you Swedenborg is a rather murky Swedish mystic too, who wrote the Memorabilia of visions, hallucinations, same thing — "they are hardly more obscure than Hegel's metaphysics or Swedenborg's Memorabilia, and they would lose their charm by being explained, if that were even possible."
8:34 "Grant me at least the merit of the expression." Nerval wanted to be judged on that poetic quality. I'll give you the last sentence, the last bit of madness, the closing line of the preface: "What will probably remain of me is the belief that I was a poet — it is up to criticism to cure me of that." I had said, one rarely sees a madman master his subject to this degree, with so much reasoning, isn't that so. So, Aurélia is the other extreme, it's truly the account of what he himself calls the overflowing of dream into real life.
9:09 It's not a big deal if you dream that someone who is, alas for you, a loved one who died, whom you've long since mourned, that you see her in a dream suddenly alive, as if she were there talking to you, and her head wanders among the branches of a tree. That's called a hallucination. It's not a big deal if you see that in a dream. When you see it at 4 in the afternoon, wide awake, that's called the overflowing of dream into real life. You mustn't be misled by the fluid manner in which Nerval speaks of it — these are serious matters. So, we had compared these two texts, and, surprise, we thought the first, Angélique, was written by someone perfectly sane, strolling through the Valois, who has a contract with the newspaper Le National, I remind you, and who sends off the text we've been reading regularly.
9:52 These aren't episodes of his serial, the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy. Ah, he can't find the book, so he'll pad out the piece by recounting everything that happens to him during his wanderings through the region around Bucquoy, in the Valois. Nerval doesn't yet tell us that this is where he spent his childhood, but he takes us there anyway. And so, we get the impression that just as we're in the oneiric world with Aurélia, in the world of dream, of hallucination, so in the field of what we'd call the imaginary — small parenthesis, the field of the imaginary, a tripartite division.
The imaginary and the Queen of the Night 10:27 I don't want these to be vague notions. I divide it into three species, if you will. You won't find any others. It's a classification like any other. There's imagination within the imaginary — that matters, within the imaginary, imagination. Second, dream, properly speaking, the nocturnal dream. Third, memory. Well yes! I see the camera — that's not imagination. I close my eyes, I remember it, it's the image I have within me.
11:01 That's the imaginary too, memory, don't forget that. Proust, Nerval, are champions of the vast edifice of memory, as they themselves say. Well, all that is internalized. It's the world of the Queen of the Night. What work is the Queen of the Night from? Yes! Well, you know things! The Magic Flute, yes. You never miss a chance to go see that marvel, do you. Especially since it's one of those things, like The Nutcracker, that can be enjoyed from age 7 to 77, as they say, right?
11:34 Children love it because it's a wonder, like a fairy tale. And adults who don't like it, that's fine, as... — oh no, no, that was Gustave Moreau, the painter, you know, he was director of the Beaux-Arts, and a student comes and says, "Sir, I don't like Michelangelo." He said, "That's fine. That's fine, my boy, it doesn't matter at all." No, but I would have killed myself saying, "But still, Michelangelo, you're right" — no, Gustave's answer is the right one, "That's fine, my boy." Because it doesn't keep you up at night, above all.
12:06 There you go. So, go see The Magic Flute. In The Magic Flute, there are two central characters who can't stand each other and wage a merciless struggle. We're in the Age of Enlightenment, Mozart, the sun king, Sarastro, the future Zarathustra. Sarastro — you know Sarastro is a name that comes from ancient Persia, it's the Persian religion that Hegel held in high esteem. And Nietzsche too, later — for once they have something in common, let's make the most of it. It's the religion of Zoroaster, alias Zarathustra, Zardusht, depending a bit on the spelling.
12:39 It's a Manichaeism between light, the good, etc. These are commonplaces. That doesn't mean it isn't profound. And then evil, darkness. That's in The Magic Flute. I mention it because there's a mystical side to The Magic Flute. It's a Masonic ritual. At the time, Freemasonry wasn't yet a mafia of co-opted members. It was a solidarity among people who were down and out, and poor Mozart — you know, whose grave marker couldn't even be left on his tomb, since he's buried in a common grave in Vienna, there was so little money.
13:09 I say this because it makes me angry when I hear people say the classics are for the rich. They make young people believe that. It's not right. I don't want to speak ill of those who just died. Let's move on. But, we let people believe that, I don't know, the first California rapper to come along is a billionaire, and Mozart died destitute, and Mussorgsky was picked up out of the gutter with 8 grams of alcohol in his blood. He's Russian, you'll tell me. And so on.
13:39 So, there you go. Yes, this Mozart went into Freemasonry because his neighbor, a Mason who was a clarinetist, gave him sheets to bury his nephews who kept dying, since infant mortality was quite common at the time. You see, these are acts of solidarity to begin with. And so there's this struggle between the Queen of the Night and the one who ensnares us with spells. Oh, I was talking about imagination when I lost my thread. I close my eyes, I'm no longer in the world of light, no longer in the world lit by Apollo, by the concept, by Greece, by clarity.
14:11 No! I'm in what Antigone says to Creon. "Your Zeus," you said that — Zeus of the city, the law, the world of daylight, democracy, what gets voted on in the public square. Yes, but my Zeus is the one of the world below, of unwritten laws and the dead. Magnificent! But the Queen of the Night is a bad Antigone. That's it! Someone who uses spells for her own ends. There! In her service, there's Papagani — Papageno, I don't know, Papagei, meaning "parrot" in German, it's a play on words — who catches birds to give to the Queen of the Night, in exchange for which he's given a slice of ham, a glass of beer, and now and then a little wife.
14:58 That's in the text, that's not me, I'm just delighted. And so, the birds are the symbol of that — the birds are the visions, the dreams, the imagination, which Papageno delivers to the Queen of the Night. She's wicked, she's deceitful, she lulls us with illusions, with the world of dream, with what Hegel will call, in criticizing the Romantics — of whom he had once been one — one must not pass off the Absolute as the night in which all cows are black.
15:28 In French we'd say the night in which all cats are grey, but it comes down to about the same thing — the world of confusion between the far left and the far right, between red and brown. Anyway, I'm going to get worked up. So when I said "oneiric," that's all of Aurélia. Whereas in the text "The Young Girls," it's a rather journalistic chronicle, with a lot of humor, you see, and he's there in Senlis, after having taken us through every library in Paris looking for the elusive book, which he still hasn't found by the way, and on All Saints' Day, it's the first time the humorous tone starts to crack a little: "it is the day of the dead that I am writing to you, forgive these melancholy thoughts."
The young girls of Senlis, a twilight world 16:14 Here's someone apologizing for being melancholy on the Day of the Dead. It's terrible to have to apologize for being melancholy on the Day of the Dead. I had told you it was no coincidence, since this was written and first published as a serial in 1850, then published as a book in 1853, reissued in 1854 under the title Angélique, whereas it had been called Faux Saulniers — at a moment when Romanticism was going out of fashion, when one had to apologize for being melancholy even on the Day of the Dead.
16:48 But there, in Senlis, his spirits lift — it's a town he adores, he's cheerful, the town was in a festive mood, we're still in November since it's the Day of the Dead, autumn, the young girls are cheerful, he says he didn't see a single ugly one in Senlis — maybe that one just doesn't show herself — but no, the blood is beautiful in that region because the waters are pure, he even gives ecological explanations, the purity of the water accounting for the beauty of the girls of Senlis. And then he heads back: "On my way out, I was able to admire, under a ray of the setting sun, the old towers of the Roman fortifications, half demolished and covered in ivy."
17:22 "Passing near the priory, I noticed a group of little girls who had sat down on the steps of the doorway. They were singing under the direction of the eldest, who, standing in front of them, clapped her hands to keep time. 'Come now, young ladies, let's start again, the little ones aren't keeping up, I want to hear that little one there on the left, the first one on the second step — come, sing alone.' And the little girl began to sing, in a weak but well-pitched voice." We had noted — I'll go quickly since we've already seen this, I can't keep going in circles indefinitely.
17:55 We had noted that, if we take stock, there's an adult surrounded by little girls, directed by a young woman, at twilight, under a setting sun, at the twilight of the day, sunset, but also at the twilight of the year, since we're in autumn. And in front of a building, the Roman towers half demolished — I quote, "half demolished," it's always nuances like that. "On returning to bed" — you know, in Sylvie — "I could not find rest, sunk in a half-drowsiness" — a drowsiness, a half-sleep, a half-drowsiness, a quarter-sleep.
18:27 This man is precise. The Roman towers half demolished and covered in ivy — ivy that comes to gnaw a little at the buildings made by man, to destroy them. Ivy is a plant dedicated to whom in mythology, ivy? Dionysus, bravo. Ivy, pine, myrtle — that's still what he's talking about. "I love to savor myrtle liqueur." It's good, isn't it? In passing. But it's in Corsica that you find that. So, three plants that don't wither in autumn, that stay evergreen year-round, hence the allusion to Dionysus.
19:04 I won't dwell on it. Libido. You know, in Paris, the tip of the Vert-Galant, at the end of the Île de la Cité, because they say it's the phallus of Henri IV, the Vert-Galant point, because he had many mistresses. The king must always be more vigorous than all his subjects. There you go. We'll talk about Henri IV again at the end of Angélique. Some of you know that already, don't you. So, here, we're in the real, we're not in the dream. It's a chronicle, fine, charming, well written.
19:34 But still, it's true that in Senlis, go ahead, there are towers, there are Roman ruins. It's true that in Senlis there's a cathedral worth the detour. But what's not possible in terms of reality, and this is where I'll get to the philosophical takeaway, is that at the very same moment, at sunset, in autumn, that is, at the twilight of the year, the girl sings with a weak voice, like the light that's fading. Everything is marked by the same parameter. I had told you that if we made a two-column table comparing the text of Angélique and the text of Aurélia, where instead there's a light — how does he put it, I quote — three times brighter than that of natural daylight.
20:12 "I found myself in an enlarged room" — so there, it's the opposite of the ruins. The buildings are in ruins in the first text and enlarged in the dream. The light that was fading is three times brighter than natural daylight. The vegetation that was deciduous — autumn, that's when the leaves fall. There, the trees bend under branches so laden with fruit that they're ready to snap. It's in the text, I'm not inventing anything. So, all this adds up to a lot. Did anyone keep the text of Aurélia?
The dream in Aurélia, the exact inverse of the Senlis passage 20:43 Thanks, that's kind. I'll just read a few excerpts for those who weren't there. Quickly, I won't waste too much time. "A dream I still have confirmed me in this thought." This is no longer journalism. "I suddenly found myself in a room that was part of my ancestor's dwelling and seemed only to have grown larger. The old furniture gleamed with a marvelous polish. The rugs and curtains looked as if newly restored. A light three times brighter than natural daylight streamed in through the window and the door, and there was in the air a freshness and a fragrance of the first mornings of spring."
21:17 So. It's not merely different from autumn, spring — it's the inverse. It's more than different. I even told you: take the first text and multiply it by minus one and you get the second. But I'm serious. Where am I going with this? This is where I get to the philosophical conclusion. The fact that, as you know, there's Jussieu and there's the Sorbonne. There are the so-called hard sciences and then there are the social sciences, the human sciences — I'm not quite sure how to put it — are they sciences? Are they sciences.
21:49 Some people laugh about it. The edifice of the human sciences isn't in a very enviable state. There's a lot of... Bachelard used to say that at a physics conference people exchange information, at a conference of philosophers people hurl arguments at each other's heads. Not entirely crazy. There are strange disputes even among the hard scientists sometimes, between Nobel contenders. Isn't that right, Erwan? There you go. So, what am I trying to say?
22:22 I've become megalomaniacal. What I'm trying to say here, in this workshop, is that we may have found the foundation for a rigor within the human sciences. Thanks to a madman. A madman is going to let us confirm Hegel's claim that the real is rational. A madman's discourse is no less rational — it's even far more so than that of a journalist from Libé or Le Figaro. I say this so no one feels left out.
22:52 Or from TF1 or Canal+, same thing. So, we're seeing this. There's an incredible predictability to the text, which you'd started to guess once you know it a bit: if he starts from autumn in the first text, an adult facing little girls, in the second, I say this for those who weren't there, another difference, but an inverse one, is that he's almost a baby, a small child, as he says, before tall, beautiful ladies in the dream. It's exactly the opposite.
23:22 I'll read it quickly all the same, because I wouldn't want you to think I'm reading things into it. Otherwise you'll say, "you're not being structuralist, you're injecting meaning." So, look closely. "The eldest of the three spoke to me in a vibrant and melodious voice." No longer the weak voice of the little girl earlier, you saw that. Precisely. "With a vibrant and melodious voice that I recognized from having heard it in childhood. And I don't know what she was saying to me that struck me by its deep rightness. But she drew my attention to myself, and I saw that I was dressed in a small brown coat of an old-fashioned cut, entirely woven by needle with thread as fine as that of a spider's web."
24:02 It's a magic garment, you saw that. "It was elegant, this coat, graceful, and steeped in sweet fragrances. I felt made young again and quite spruce in this garment that had come from their fairy fingers. And I thanked her, blushing, as if I had been nothing but a little child before tall, beautiful ladies." It's the inverse of the adult with the little girls. When writing reaches this degree of rigor, of course, you'll ask me: is it conscious on his part?
24:35 I don't even want to know it. It's so secondary when you see this rigor. It's extraordinary that this rigor is there. In my opinion, if he had been conscious of all that, he would have gotten his brushes mixed up and would have fallen flat on his face after two words or three lines. Let me think about it a little. I don't remember who said, if we had to think about all the rules of grammar and syntax every time we make a sentence in French, all the rules of French, we would soon strangle ourselves. So we do better than think about it, we express it. All that, right? Now, this fact of introducing rationality no longer into the movement of Jupiter's satellites, and I say this with respect, without irony, or into the spin of the electron.
Rationality in the human order: the law of nature and freedom 25:28 We have great researchers, and even greater female researchers here too. But not only in that order, but in the human, cultural, spiritual order — in Hegelian terms, praxical, if one is a Clouscardo-Marxist, not that I'm opposing all that, it says the same thing in different words. That's what comes to distinguish itself here, even to oppose itself, of course, especially when it's praxis, right?
26:00 Because for there to be a field, part of the forest or the marsh still has to disappear. And yes, there are those who want everything, who want the money and the butter and the money for the butter — for a field to appear, a forest has to disappear. Yeah! A bit anti-ecological. There you go. I've said it, I love spending my books in the forest. And France has more — Catherine, our historian, you'll grant me that there is more forest in France today than there was in 1820.
26:31 Frankly, historian — the lowest level of forests was just before the State decided to build, to plant the forest that is today the largest in Europe, the Landes forest. There you go. I won't dwell on it, but it's to tell you — 'One evening I believed the woods would be delightful to me.' That's Chateaubriand, a magnificent passage. Just like that, all of a sudden.
27:01 The guy, he's depressive, he says, I thought the forests would produce a kind of whim. He had already understood it was a fancy. Then the idea came to me that the woods would be delightful to me. He quickly grew disillusioned, until Baudelaire said, 'Great woods, you frighten me like cathedrals.' You know, there's a poem by Baudelaire that begins like that. Well, personally, I have nothing against woods. On the contrary, I love picking mushrooms, as you know. So let's leave that aside — introducing rationality into everything that is opposed to nature: nature-culture, nature-spirit, nature-praxis.
27:38 That had already been done. The door had been opened at the end of the 18th century, at the appearance of modernity, precisely by Kant. But immediately closed again. I remember a quip of Clouscard's: Kant saw everything, but he drew the curtain as soon as he saw it. Forgive me, I'm going to restore his accent — I can't help it because I still have his voice in my ear. He saw everything, but he drew the curtain. So what does that mean? We worked on Kant when we did the philosophy of knowledge. We had arrived at this result.
28:08 There is the order of nature, where someone like Newton triumphs, for example, in his time, which is subject to the law, as you know, of cause and effect, to law in general, that is, to the exercise of the cause-effect pairing. Heat expands bodies. Not in the north of France while in Corsica it's the opposite. No, it's everywhere and always. Even in the stars, we'll never find otherwise. Heat expands bodies. That's called the universal. The law.
28:38 Not the rule. Monogamy, polygamy — that's the rule. It's not universal. As Pascal said, truth beyond the Pyrenees, error on this side. That's men, among themselves, like that. Languages change from one region to another, from Japan to us. Whereas bees have the same system of communication everywhere. That's the world of nature. It's universal, it's the law. No fantasy. That's still Kant making the division.
29:08 And then there is the world of freedom, which produces another legislation than Newtonian legislation. And not just another one, but — I drive the point home — an inverse legislation. Newton is especially known for the law of universal gravitation. You know, I believe there's never any chance at that level, that is, for a law that speaks of... You see my gesture? The fall. The law of gravity, as it was called at the time. It was thought there was a low and a high, right?
29:40 Now we know that the bottom is New Zealand, which thinks that the bottom is us. Fine. It's not a big deal. In any case, it's the center of the Earth that drives all that. I'm not mistaken, there was a — there you go. Physicists, mathematicians, historians, it's wonderful here. Well, I speak under supervision anyway. Better be safe. And so, in the opposite direction, and for that he owes it to Rousseau, just before, who had said it's freedom that directs societies.
30:13 And if it doesn't direct them, it's because the contract has been broken. I'll insist a bit here, because we often make a huge misreading of Rousseau — I'm not talking about the misreading that he's a man of nature, I think we've insisted on that enough. But it's more serious than that. People think that for him, the contract is something we should make — that on the day we make the revolution, we sit around a table and draft the contract. That's not it. The contract has always been there. It is foundational to anthropology. And it is a violation of the contract that constitutes injustice.
30:44 Starting with illegitimate appropriation. This has to be well understood: force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them. If there are slaves by nature, there are servile mentalities, it's because there were slaves against nature. Yes, that's my excitement. So Hegel owes to Rousseau what he is. It's an image that Hegel takes up. Hegel says, starting from Rousseau, man walked on his head. It took daring. It's his deliberation, his will, that will direct what he does.
Man walking on his head: from liberation theology to Descartes 31:19 That's still extraordinary. Of course, not individual will, not caprice — Rousseau is not the Marquis de Sade, all the same. No, the general will. These are the reminders I'm making: on one side we have the law of gravity, submission to the law, to the fall — and I go downward on purpose — and on the other side, freedom trying to rise upward. Up to those Christians who deserve respect because they got themselves murdered, tortured. I'm thinking of those in Latin America who defended liberation theology in guerrilla movements.
31:53 Who suffered atrocious repression. And who for many, moreover, continue to think — in Honduras currently, which nobody talks about, where the people are waging a heroic struggle against a dictatorship that wants nothing to do with the elections that just took place. You inform yourselves — Honduras, Google. No, but it's a bloodbath of a violence in Latin America. And here come a few Christians — a few, I mean from the hierarchy, because Christians as individuals, there's nothing but that in Latin America, the Catholics.
32:26 But I mean, belonging to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, who, unlike most, who compromised themselves, right, with the dictatorships, developed what was called and is still called liberation theology. Liberation theology, for which — I'll go very quickly — God, oh scandal. Generally, in all religions, including Christianity, God is the origin, without which nothing would have existed, it's the creation, it's the beginning, it's the source, so to speak. It's the living fountain — not like for poor Nerval, for his mother, the dead fountain.
33:02 And here it is that for them, no, God is not at the origin, he is at the end, and even then, only insofar as we bring him about by liberating ourselves. Well, I say! That holds up, that, all the same. If Bernard Friot accepts the invitation we sent him — and from what I understood, Wilfried, no, it's not you, yes, it's Samuel, I think, who told us he had spoken to him, that he was enthusiastic about coming — so there remains a question of date that we'll try to pin down. Right, I invited him to come talk about Christianity and Marxism.
33:35 Right? So I'll close this parenthesis, but there you have it — starting from Rousseau, man walks on his head, you see, in that sense, just as it had started with Descartes, for whom thought is asked to say, it's because I think it that it's true, it's not because it's true in itself — there is no in-itself, there is no nature, there is no God, there is my thought first, and then we'll see afterward whether it validates a God or a nature. But here it passes into politics with Rousseau, all the same, and not only into the domain of mathematics or physics as with Descartes, or of theology.
The Kantian abyss and the bridge of the third Critique 34:10 So a revolution had occurred when Kant had clearly separated the two, but unfortunately separated them, and as Kant says, by what? By an unbridgeable abyss. It's a famous quotation, I'll go quickly. It means that we cannot pass from the theoretical order — Newton's physics, for example — to the practical order. What morality should be instituted in the good city? Nothing that we learn in the natural sciences will be of the slightest use in deciding what is good and what is evil.
34:41 The true and the false, that's a dichotomy. It has nothing to do with good and evil. That's the Kantian dualism, which only exasperates the Christian dualism. After 20 centuries — it takes time, history, the patience of the concept. The Greeks were unaware of these tearings-apart of slaves. The Greeks do philosophy, it's the citizens, often. But on the other hand, I mean, from the moment one says 'my kingdom is not of this world,' that means there is this world I live in that is opposed to the true world, but which is not here.
35:16 There is a Christian dualism, you see? Whoever wants to save his life will lose it. Thank you, you know your texts, that's good. Whoever wants to save his life will lose it. The first shall be last. But you see, we are always divided, torn — and yes, the symbol of Christianity is not Apollo, it's a crucifixion, it's suffering on a cross. All that is coherent, all the same.
35:48 So when Kant had made this separation — and here it is, toward the end of his career, after having written the two immense panels for the philosophy of knowledge, the Critique of Pure Reason, then the philosophy of action, that is morality, the favorite one, the Critique of Practical Reason — I'm skipping other works, I'm taking the essential panels — here he is, suddenly, bringing out a third critique at the end, where he tries to throw a bridge, however frail, over this unbridgeable abyss.
36:18 And what if we could have the rigor — I come back to my point — which would explain why even literature, even poetic prose, can suddenly reach a degree of determinability, I'm trying to be a philosopher here now, of predictability, like eclipses for an astronomer. At the end of his life he writes the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, sometimes translated as the Critique of Judgment in French, no matter, for now, we're not doing history of philosophy.
36:48 A critique of an Urteilskraft — Urteil in German is judgment in the sense of a trial. There's a short story by Kafka called The Verdict, in German it's Urteil — that is, the division of origins. And yes, Ur is everything having to do with origin. The Germans are mad about origins. The Indo-Europeans, the primitive language, which is moreover Indo-Germanic — these are fantasies, very interesting ones, and who doesn't have them? Starting with me. But still, the Germans are the specialists, especially in everything to do with Ur, Ursprache, the primitive language.
37:24 And, Ur Mensch, the man of origins. You know that's a German word, the man of origins. What's his name? If you're following well, I mentioned it once. Pardon? Bravo, bravo, yes, his name is Tarzan. The actor who played Tarzan, the first Tarzans, that is — I'm not talking about the remakes, the nudities, the Stokes, Greystoke, I don't know how it's spelled. No, no, I'm talking about the serious one. It was Johnny Weissmuller.
37:54 That means Johnny the white miller — you couldn't make it up. Already, the miller, the flour, is white. The white miller, Weissmuller — yes, an American, but still, like almost all white Americans, or WASPs of German origin, who was an Olympic champion in the 100-meter freestyle, and who, when he started to slow down a bit with age, went to Hollywood — and it served him well, because he embodied Tarzan. What am I in the middle of saying? That in the heart of Africa, at a time when there were blank spots, if you go there to find the Missing Link, the missing link between apes and man, there you go, there's no more unbridgeable abyss, we're going to pass from nature to man, you see, the Missing Link — well, we find it, it's an ape, it's a German.
38:42 And then when he dives into the pond, he swims a 100 meters, you have to see it, no it's great, I'm not — these are masterpieces. I think the height of eroticism in cinema is the scene in the first Tarzan. You watch the bathing scene — well, cinephiles surely know it, I don't know, do you know it, Mehdi? I'd expect you to, because you know cinema much better than I do. Well, with — I remember this actress had a certain taste, a kind of Gene Tierney — you know Gene Tierney, the one who's in Pandora, no not Pandora, Laura, not Preminger's — an extraordinary brunette who comes from London, because her father wants to find the elephants' graveyard, she arrives with her dresses, with eight petticoats, into the jungle, with the mosquitoes, it's extraordinary, she has to take all that off, into the pond, with Tarzan making her swallow water — it's extraordinary, you have to see it, because he's wounded at one point, because her father shot him, thinking he was an ape, etc.
39:33 So, I'll go quickly — she was frightened, because he took her up into a tree, she's terrified, then she sees he's not so mean after all, and besides he's handsome, so, he's strong, not like me, so she makes him bandages with her skirt, because she still has some of it left, her skirt — she says at one point, it's in the dialogue, it's interesting, you shouldn't get hurt so often, because I won't have many pieces of my skirt left to make you bandages with — you have to see this scene, it's extraordinary, how he carries her through the water, back and forth, and 100 meters, and then, then — no, I'm serious, anyway, there you go — Ur, so Urteil, that means — Teil is a part, Erster Teil, Zweiter Teil, those are the parts, the volumes if you prefer, in German — it's interesting to see that judgment — and yes, 'lion,' I haven't divided anything, I say 'lion,' I haven't said anything, I haven't shared anything, but if I say 'the lion is a mammal,' there, I'm going to pass from the concept to the judgment, yes, I've divided, I've divided the subject, I've made a predicate of it — if I say 'God,' 'God,' I haven't said anything — that's Hegel, it wasn't me, I wouldn't allow myself, but Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology, we begin with a word like 'God,'
40:43 as such, without a predicate, he says it's a sound devoid of meaning, it's not even a concept, it's a sound, as long as we haven't said — even a small determination — 'God is eternal,' there, we're starting to see a bit more clearly, we can see whether it's true or not true, but anyway, there, something has been said to us, until then nothing had been said to us, we might as well have said 'Popole' instead of 'God,' it would have been the same — so that's where we stood, and here comes Kant throwing a bridge over this unbridgeable abyss, in the Critique of Judgment, in which he sort of takes stock of his entire critical work, that's where — I'm not going to, I'm not here to do a reading, on the contrary, I have to make the readings easier for you, I'm trying — but still, there's a passage that can't be, that can't be bypassed, to speak like the journalists, where he takes stock a bit of all the faculties — you know that Kant has often been said to have a philosophy of faculties, there are three: sensibility, that's our senses, which start with, which are at the forefront, the real, we first make contact with it through the senses, but well, the senses, we've seen, I won't go back over that, it puts us well in contact
Reading Kant: two domains, a single territory 41:53 with reality, but without our being able to say any truth about it, as long as we haven't spoken — I hear a noise in the distance, is it a plane, is it a truck, is it thunder, I'm going to find out, I don't know yet — that, concepts, words afterward, that's no longer sensibility, that's understanding, right, the faculty of concepts, and my thing is so mangled that I've lost my — hold on, 27, there you go, so, that's it — sensibility, understanding, reason, I reassure you, there are three faculties, from the one closest to the outside world to the most interiorized, reason — and it's the collaboration of sensibility and experience for physicists and of understanding, concepts, for physicists, that produces science, right — reason sometimes comes along to force us a bit to rave, wanting to unify all that, to totalize a bit all knowledge, and that often makes us say foolish things in scientific matters — on the other hand, Kant rehabilitates reason in the moral domain, that's its whole function, I don't want to dwell on it, that's not what I'm here for — on the other hand, what remains?
43:02 Our faculty of knowing in totality, that is, taking both the natural sciences and the human sciences, as we'd say today, possesses two domains. Here he gives a summary as he never has before, a clarity — I extract this from the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, the introduction, I recommend it to you, it's one of the most difficult texts in history, agreed, but at least this passage, in the Vrin edition, which is a paperback edition, it's practical, quite economical, it's on page 34 that this summary begins.
43:37 The legislation — sorry, our faculty of knowing in totality possesses two domains, that of the concepts of nature and that of the concept of freedom. For now, there has been what I just told you, the great division between Newton and Rousseau, if you prefer. It indeed legislates, a priori — otherwise these wouldn't be sciences — by these two kinds of concepts. Philosophy is therefore also divided, in accordance with this faculty, into theoretical philosophy — there you have it for the order of nature, right?
44:08 Physics, chemistry, biology, physics in the broad sense, applied science. Philosophy is therefore also divided, in accordance with this faculty, into theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy. In the sense — this doesn't mean the art of putting away one's tools in the garage. It means, of course, here, morality, politics, law, the domain, that is, where it's a matter of acting and not just knowing. This is what answers the question 'What must I do?' and not 'What can I know?' What must I do? Not what can I do, because you can ask that of a dentist or a doctor too, when you have a toothache.
44:40 So philosophy is therefore also divided, in accordance with this faculty, into theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy. But, there you have the two domains — two domains, one territory — but the territory on which it establishes its domain, philosophy, and on which it exercises its legislation, is always only the set of objects of all possible experience.
The helicopter over the Amazon: rule versus law 45:10 Kant is very cautious — we haven't experienced everything. In 2000 years we'll experience still other things. But it still has to be objects of a possible experience. What is he saying here? That whether it's science... let me take the image, I was discussing it earlier. Take a helicopter, get in. There, let the pilot take us toward the Amazon and look carefully down below. What do we see? The canopy. You know what's called the canopy, you know that better than I do. Everything I see there on the canopy — the green, the monkeys, now and then, the parrots, the macaws — all of that can be explained by Newton's principles.
45:50 Everything I see there is explained by physical, chemical, biological principles, etc. No need to bring in anything other than the order of nature. And then suddenly — a clearing! Well, well — a village, the men's house, the women's house, the incest taboo, a whole bunch of things that not only differ from nature but oppose it. That's why it matters — it's not just that it's different. It opposes it. Ah, you mustn't marry your mother.
46:20 Ah, darn, that's — take a pair of rabbits, brother and sister, put them in Australia. There's a million of them within ten years. I say that because it was a catastrophe that made peace impossible in Australia, the rabbits the English brought over — they had to exterminate them. So there were too many, apparently. All incestuous. Well, yes, no big deal in the animal world. It's only in the human world that we say, look, that causes illnesses, it's disgusting. Yes, those are fantasies, that.
46:51 There are even intra-species incests among animals. Let's not get into bestiality. So, to be clear, suddenly I see a world where there are rules — rules that have this specific feature, that they oppose the law. You see, our vocabulary is becoming precise. The law tells me: eat, you're hungry, you fool. Chow down, that's all you're waiting for. And I say, no, please, madam, seriously, gritting my teeth.
47:21 Because I was raised that way. That's the world of culture, the rules. One can respect them out of respect, but that's not the law. The law of nature is to eat when you're hungry. Can you imagine a dog telling his buddy, 'after you, old chap'? Even when the master approaches the bowl, the dog growls. So, once again, from our very instructive helicopter — I see, I see, these are objects of experience, I'm not raving.
47:51 Experience shows me two domains that have nothing to do with each other and that oppose each other. Not only because trees had to be cut down to make the meager space of the village, and then you have to cut the — you have to greet everyone every day in those parts, I tell you, myself — you know, in green Africa, I'm not talking about the Sahel, but in coastal Africa, the somewhat Amazonian climate, humid tropical as they say, you don't leave the house of an African who has hosted you without having asked the way at least three times. It's not — Africans remember this — it's not, John.
48:22 You don't leave an African's home saying, well, now I have to ask the way three times. You ask once first, then you act as if you'd forgotten, then a few minutes later, in a rush, you say, well, I have to ask the way. What does that mean? That is, what wasn't good at our place? Was the food not good? It's not good to want to leave. You see, among these peoples, it matters, the traditions of hospitality. You, you don't care, the road is waiting for you, it's paved, it's cemented, but in the bush, a road is a luxury. Sometimes what's called a road there is just a footpath.
48:52 If you're not trained, you don't even notice a path for lack of grass. You see what I mean? You cut it, it grows back in two days. Plant a broomstick, there's a jungle at the end of it. Do you remember at Bovis, that vine on the terraces that we once measured at 40 cm in a day, would you believe it. Well yes, it's hot and humid. Right. And yet the soil is poor, it's a gift-soil. If you don't ask for the road, the bush will close in on you. And it would serve you right, because you left our place, you weren't well off. You see? When I tell you that you have to oppose nature, in the literal sense, cut it, cut the grass to set up the space of the village, but above all inside.
49:34 I'm hungry, I let the chief eat first, I let my parents eat first, I let the elder eat first. And I eat last, especially if I'm a woman. Last of all. There you go. And I've already told you, there are women, there are peoples where women aren't even allowed to think their husband's name in their head when they have their period. Otherwise she'll ruin the hunt, she'll make her husband's hunt fail. And yes, it's been verified.
50:06 Me, I was told not to think of something, and automatically I think of it. You see? No, but it's true. It's terrible. People talk about totalitarian society, it's nothing compared to those societies. You meet the poor kid. Oh no, I thought of it, that's forbidden, it's terrible. Right. So there you have it. There's the world, nature, the world of rules, we oppose it, and there's this impassable abyss. But these two domains, the domain of nature that tells me, eat, you fool, you're hungry, and the domain of freedom that says, wait, if you don't want to look like a boor to the lady you're courting, you say to her, please, you go first.
50:43 These two domains exercise legislation, says Kant, and that's very serious, over one and the same territory. Notice the spatial metaphors in Kant. Geographic, domain, territory, and I'm only quoting this passage, elsewhere he'll say metaphysics is like a navigator arriving in sight of unknown islands. You see, there are always geographical metaphors, he's a contemporary of Cook, of Bougainville, of those who are circling the globe, conquering colonial empires, and so there's a prestige of the spatial, whereas the next generation, with Hegel and Marx, soon it will be the temporal and history that becomes the field of metaphors.
51:22 It's interesting to see these metaphors. For now, I'll just draw your attention to the fact that there are two domains that oppose each other, but both can only have their legislation recognized on one and the same territory, which he calls the sum of the objects of a possible experience — which, if you know Kant's language a bit, means, in one word, the phenomenon. That's exactly what has been called, since Kant, the phenomenon. It's not the real. It's the phenomenon. It's what appears to us.
51:53 It's not merely an appearance either. Ah yes, it's a bit complicated. Listen, work a little, we're in philosophy class. Right, well yes. Come on, small difference. In German, appearance is Schein. Yes, I know, in English it's 'shine' and that's no coincidence. All that glitters is not gold, as we say in French. Only appearances glitter, they shine. Shine, S-H-I-N-E in English, that's shine, S-C-H-E-I-N in German, Schein. The phenomenon, Erscheinung. The difference is that it's an action, the phenomenon.
52:25 In other words, if you ask a German off the street — that's the best thing to do in philosophy, if you want to understand a word — what Erscheinung means, they won't give you Kant's answer, it's more active. You see, the phenomenon is the manifestation of something we don't see. There, so it's important. A small nuance: it's not merely an appearance. And Newton's physics has the phenomenon as its object. Everything that is in time and space, for Kant, belongs to the order of the phenomenon.
52:57 It's what is given to us as possible to experience. An infinite field, in its own kind, I mean. So it's this sum of the objects of a possible experience that constitutes the object of the field of knowledge. Within this field of possible experience, it's up to us to analyze what can be explained by laws of nature and what, on the contrary, deviates from, or even opposes, those laws.
53:29 As I gave you a rather crude example with my helicopter, well, that was just a way of taking a little trip to the countryside. There you go. But it's important. It's not obvious. Because both can be present at the same time. I also take the earlier example of the man at the table, who says 'serve yourself first' or who tells his boss 'after you, please' to enter a room, whatever it may be. But in every case, what matters is that there's always simultaneously the opposition between what Rousseau, the first, opposed as the state of nature — I'm quoting Rousseau here — and the civil state, the social state, civil in the Greek sense of civis, citizen, not man as animal, of the political animal, to speak like Aristotle, of man as the animal who lives in society.
Rousseau: the transition from the state of nature to the civil state 54:16 So I'll recall for the umpteenth time this important passage from The Social Contract, this passage — it's called 'On the Civil State' — this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked. Although — sorry, I'm skipping something — it is only then, when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulse, that man, who until then had considered only himself — in short, until then he was an individual — finds himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.
54:57 Although he deprives himself, in this new state, in society, of several advantages that belong to nature — and yes, nature: I can do this, do that, learn this, take that, without prohibition — he gains such great ones in return. His faculties are exercised and developed. His passions are ennobled. His whole soul is elevated to such a degree that — you know, I always stop the sentence there, it gets serious — if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he came from — I'm forced to stop there.
55:32 How can one be below the animal? Rousseau, for the first time, produces a theory of political evil, of historical evil. We've barely emerged from the century of evil, the century of horror, with the world wars and everything that followed and happened within them. If the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he came from — we're in the hypothetical. If — he should, man, he should, we're no longer in the indicative, as at the start of the text — he should ceaselessly bless the happy moment that tore him away from what?
56:10 From the state of nature. It's Rousseau speaking. The happy moment that tore him away forever — the irreversibility of the passage from nature to humanity — and that, from a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man. So it ends happily, but still, we had the threat: if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he came from. The animal does not know evil.
56:40 What's most horrible in nature documentaries — everyone has their own obsessions. For me, the real thriller in animal documentaries isn't that poor hyena I keep citing, devouring the fetus emerging from the poor female gnu while it runs across the savanna. No, there's worse than that. It's those insects that lay their offspring inside another insect, one that's four times bigger than the one they're laying in, and inside which the other progressively explodes. It's terrible, isn't it? I say this because there are people who say 'nature, a providence.'
57:11 There are those who'd want to take us back to it. Interesting. There are those who lay their eggs in our gardens. A cuckoo's nest. 'Will you build houses even inside my belly,' as the founding legend of the kingdom of Benin, of Dahomey, says. So this warning from Rousseau — I'll dwell on it a moment, even if it takes us a bit away from our subject — because, let me tell you clearly, philosophy — no philosophy is worth a minute's trouble if it doesn't talk about evil.
Evil: reintroducing the state of nature into the civil state 57:45 whether directly or indirectly. So, about the good. You've seen it — what must I do? That's the philosophical question. What must I do? That is, once I know it, I will do good and try to avoid evil. That's the fundamental question. Otherwise, you go to the CNRS to learn other things that don't need philosophy — to learn the chemistry of carbon, and to know what one must do, not merely what one can know. Philosophy isn't worth a minute's trouble if it doesn't sooner or later tackle the question of evil.
58:19 Now, here, for once this is the case, what does it mean to abuse the civil state? If the abuses of this new condition — how can one abuse the state of society? You know, in French, when we come to something important, we always have to let the language speak. It knows the language, since we, the individual speakers, will never know it ourselves. When we say 'he abused that person,' that means outright assault. When we say 'he abuses drink,' that means he takes too much of it.
58:49 Abuse there means going too far. But there's also, 'I wonder if that guy hasn't abused us' — that means he cheated us, tricked us. You see, it has several meanings, none of which is reassuring if you look closely. And Rousseau specifies none of them, which means he means them all. The abuses of this new condition. Now I'll take the last one, that's why I put it last. To abuse: to deceive. 'I was abused' also means 'I was deceived.'
59:20 Where am I going with this? I'm in society. But no, I'm being deceived. I'm made to believe I'm in the civil state, under the contract, and meanwhile I'm being handed a power struggle. That is, the state of nature is reconstituted within the civil state. That's the essence of evil, for now. In 2017, there's still 1% of the planet that hogs the wealth of all the rest. It's still quite something, all because of a quantitative banking difference.
59:55 But under what conditions? If you want to read just one thing by Marx, read the chapter on primitive accumulation. I don't know, for those who don't have time to read the rest. Do you know what primitive accumulation is? It's what nobody ever talks about. It's the horror. It's how capital was formed. Once it's there, you can deduce whatever you want from it, how it works, how it's maintained, how it grows. But it had to be formed to begin with. Read Marx's chapters on accumulation. It's terrifying. And there, it's not him deciding.
1:00:25 He quotes an English labor inspector. He quotes a report from someone who went to the West Indies, as they used to say for Indonesia. Sorry, excuse me, the East Indies. In Indonesia, which was a Dutch colony, he shows the conditions under which the Dutch practiced slavery in Indonesia in the eighteenth century. You can't believe your eyes. And yet we've read the unripe truths about the twentieth century too. It's terrifying, the conditions under which the riches we're so proud of were made. I've often said, you know, the greatest gulag of all time is the English factory of the nineteenth century.
1:01:02 You read the labor inspectors' reports, with 6-year-old children. There are some kids here just like that. Can you imagine, your 6-year-old kid slaving away at the steel foundry. Even adults didn't last long near the furnace back then. And they'd time you going to pee, down to the minute and quarter-second. And the Quakers who employed them said at the time that they were men of God. They said at the time, well, at least they're not hoodlums in the street. They're doing philanthropic work. There's always the rights of man behind them. The worst kind.
1:01:34 There are always fine moral ideas behind it. Right, the subjective side. So, primitive accumulation is terrible. And if you look closely, it's a merciless power struggle. Merciless. So you understand why Hegel, when he talks about the Code of Hammurabi, the very first written legal code we've found — you have a magnificent stele at the Louvre, written in the Semitic script of the time, the Code of Hammurabi — we owe it to the Orient to have produced the first code of justice. So Hegel says, it seems barbaric to us, cutting off the thief's hand.
1:02:06 It's a tremendous advance, the fact that there's at least one law applied throughout the whole empire for everyone, and not the prince's whim. The fact that law begins to prevail somewhat over sheer power struggle is always progress, for instance. So, I won't dwell too long, but to abuse the civil state, I say here for the first time with great precision, is to reintroduce the state of nature within the civil state. Personally, I have nothing against nature. The animal doesn't do evil, it does what it can.
1:02:36 Because the hyena that devours the gnu's fetus has its own cubs, hungry in its den. It's going to feed them first and eat afterward, poor thing. So everyone deserves pity there, the predator as much as the prey, doesn't it? Whereas here, no — we have rules of law and we violate them and replace them with rules of force while pretending there's still law. I'm being abused, we're all being abused in every sense, there's too much of it, isn't there?
1:03:07 And that I'm being deceived. The prince of this world is coming, and his essence is lies. I'm going from Marx to the Gospel of John. You see? It's nice when there are interesting agreements sometimes. And yes, the only time Jesus gets angry and uses violence is when he drives the merchants out of the Temple. There are those who use this to say it's an anti-Semitic text, which is quite extraordinary. As if there were merchants only among the Jews, when the greatest merchants in the world are the Chinese or the Germans, whichever you like, if you think about it.
1:03:38 For a long time it was the Americans, though their wings have been a bit clipped. The Germans, the Chinese, the great traders. The Jews are small-time dealers by comparison. It was under Pujadas, the ghetto back then. So there you go, they drive out the merchants from the Temple. 'Do not make my Father's house a house of trade,' as it's translated. In my opinion, he must have said something like 'a brothel.' There. That means, no — I say this because the Greeks said Hermes, god of merchants and thieves.
1:04:08 You see, it's not... Or maybe everyone understands it, I don't know. He was talking about the Greeks. It was the Greeks who traded in oil. Heraclitus made his fortune trading olive oil in Asia Minor. There you go. And yes, tell me, my friend, I'll give you a good price. There's always a bit of deception in trade, that's normal. Not a big deal. Just don't overdo it. There, I'll close this parenthesis on the abuses of the new condition.
The correspondence of Schelling and Hegel against the Kantians 1:04:39 And so, when suddenly, at the end of his life, he throws a bridge between pure reason, the knowledge of the world of laws, of nature, of the hard sciences, and practical reason, the answer, any answer, to the question 'what must I do,' he inaugurates an era that will be called — listen — after Kant, what comes? Post-Kantianism. The philosophers who, in Kant's wake, suddenly rush in, faced with this revelation, saying, it's incredible, but there's rationality even in human affairs.
1:05:09 It's not the absurd thing we've always been made to believe. And here I'll read you some excerpts from the correspondence of three post-Kantians. No, no, but it's quick. I'm not talking about neo-Kantianism, which still rages today, more than ever, in quantity. The Frankfurt School — no, no, I'm talking about the post-Kantians. That's quickly settled: Fichte, in chronological order, Schelling, Hegel — what's called German idealism. You'll say, oh, but we're moving away from Rousseau and Marx — no, no, no, read the Theses on Feuerbach and you'll see Marx paying great tribute — he who's as severe as anyone with idealism, hardly suspect of indulgence — he says nonetheless: fortunately there was idealism, it had the merit of revealing the activity of human reason, of human thought.
1:05:59 So, unlike the empiricists and the mechanists. And so I'll read you some excerpts from the correspondence of these three young men. Let's see — Tübingen, 21 July 1795. Can you imagine, we're six years after the storming of the Bastille. Can you imagine the atmosphere of the revolutionary wars, soon of the Empire, of Europe, the turmoil — it's an extraordinary era. It's the generation of Beethoven, Hölderlin, Hegel, born in 1770. A vintage as good as any, all the same. It's the generation of those who were 20 when the Bastille fell.
1:06:33 That's what matters, not what happens at birth, that we count like fools. It's what happens in between. It's true that things happen. Now here, take for example, you see, this letter from whom? That's Hölderlin, the three of them. There, there, there. It's currently — it's Schelling, Hegel. There, it's Schelling, Hegel. He talks about what's happening — they're all alone, it's German, each in a different city, it's not Paris, it's not centralized like France, they correspond, each one teaches, or is a tutor, not yet a teacher, they're tutors in the families that employ them to educate their kids.
1:07:22 So they write, they continue their philosophical reflection a bit through correspondence, and they say this — this is Schelling to Hegel, Tübingen, Epiphany evening, 1795 — there is now, it's true, a crowd of Kantians. Philosophy has prepared for itself praise from the mouths of babes and infants. But after much trouble, the philosophers finally found the point up to which one has the right to go. They stopped at Kant, didn't they, and at the separation between theoretical and practical philosophy.
1:07:54 There. There's the unknowable, the thing-in-itself, we can't go beyond it, we're all Kantians, that's fine, it's forbidden to know more. It's not that we're content with the phenomenon and the rest is, I'd say, totalitarian. They've settled on that point, taken up residence there, and built cabins in which it's pleasant to live and for which they thank the Lord God. And who in this century will come to chase them out? Once they're firmly established, let the devil make them leave.
1:08:25 To tell the truth, they've extracted a few ingredients from the Kantian system, from the surface of course, with which they concoct such fortifying brews that theology, which was already beginning to fall into a wasting sickness, will become healthier and stronger than ever. All possible dogmas, the old dogmas of the Church, already bear the stamp of postulates of practical reason, and where theoretical and historical proofs no longer suffice, the practical reason of Tübingen — he's alluding ironically to their professor, the theologians of Tübingen — cuts the Gordian knot.
1:08:58 Right, I'll skip a passage, I'll pick up a bit further on. It is currently in philosophy that I live, that I weave my web. Philosophy has not yet reached its end. As for giving results, the premises are still lacking. And who can understand results without premises? A Kant, certainly. But what will the great masses do with that? Fichte, the last time he passed through here, the first of the post-Kantians, who was somewhat their idol today, said that one needed the genius of Socrates to penetrate Kant. I find this truer every day. We must go further.
1:09:28 With philosophy, Kant swept everything away and cleared the ground. But how would they notice it? In their eyes, you have to break things into small pieces so they can grasp them with their hands. Ah! What great Kantians one finds everywhere now. You see, the post-Kantians — Kant is still alive, old but still alive — who are already denouncing neo-Kantianism, the recycling of Kant by the Church and religion, the ban placed on knowledge, on science, on philosophy. All of that is a matter of faith. It can remain chatter. Human, all too human. You see, it's interesting. That's Schelling.
1:09:58 You see, a bit further on, you have... It's not more technical. I'll skip the last one, which talks about teleology, we'll come back to that later. And there...
1:10:28 There. However, that too... Sorry. Regarding Reinhold's attempt, one of the neo-Kantians of the time, to reduce philosophy to its ultimate principles, your assumption — he's speaking to Hegel — surely didn't mislead you, that it wasn't extending the revolution produced by the Critique of Pure Reason. The neo-Kantians are inferior to Kant. However, this too was one of the stages through which science had to pass, and I don't know whether we shouldn't, Reinhold — the fact is that soon we'll find ourselves at the highest point.
1:10:59 Of this last step of philosophy, I also expect the last veil to fall, as if post-Kantianism hadn't gone on to complete the edifice founded by Socrates. Let the last veil fall, let the last spiderweb of philosophical superstition, woven by the privileged philosophers — the word is underlined — be torn apart. With Kant, dawn has broken. What wonder is it that here and there, in some marshy valley, a little fog should remain, while the highest peaks are already bathed in the rays of the sun.
Hegel: the dignity of man against religion and despotism 1:11:30 You'd think you were hearing the chorus of the 9th symphony. It's exactly contemporary. Freedom makes itself heard. You see, that still produces texts. And here I finish with Hegel, right? In studying again the postulates of practical reason, that is, Kantian morality, I had already conceived a vague idea of what you explain to me clearly in your last letter. He's speaking to Schelling. Of what I found in your work and what the Foundations of the Science of Knowledge by Fichte will make me fully understand.
1:12:00 The consequences that will flow from it will plunge many people into astonishment. One will feel dizzy before this supreme height of all philosophy by which man is raised so high. That dates back to Rousseau, that. But why has it taken so long to raise the dignity of man further? Say now, we're a bit the opposite of what we hear now. Man is the only sore that spoils, right, the natural harmony. Well. In studying again the consequences that will flow from it, plunging many people into astonishment, one will feel dizzy before this supreme height of all philosophy by which man is raised so high.
1:12:35 But why has it taken so long to raise the dignity of man further, to recognize his faculty of freedom which places him in the equal order of all spirits? I believe no sign of the times is better than this one. It is that humanity is represented as so worthy of esteem in itself — humanity, not this or that particular humanity. It is proof that the halo surrounding the heads of oppressors and the gods of the Earth is disappearing. Philosophers demonstrate this dignity. Peoples will learn to feel it and they will not be content to demand their rights, abased in the dust.
1:13:07 But they will take them back. They will appropriate them. Religion and politics — that was understood as thick as thieves. The first taught what despotism wanted: contempt for the human species, its incapacity to achieve any good whatsoever. I believe we had to wait for Nietzsche to criticize religion, the afterworlds, and yet we're told Hegel is the churchmen's man, and you listen, we get taken in. I'm not joking. Mystified. Thank you.
1:13:37 That's why I wanted to read excerpts from this extraordinary correspondence. I recommend it to you. It's published by Gallimard. Volume 1, there are three volumes. Buy volume 1 if you want. It's not that things don't sour later with age. Afterward, they take different paths. But still, it's magnificent, this correspondence between three young men. You have, after all, the two greatest philosophers of the time and the greatest poet, one of the greatest poets of all time, in the same room, discussing every evening. I would have loved to be a little mouse. There. I'll continue a bit with our story.
The hidden goal of the story: Rousseau's tomb 1:14:08 It's this whole stake that reappears thanks to the comparative reading of the texts we did last time. So I'd like to ask those of you — and I hope this is the case for the majority of you — who are getting acquainted with the text of Angélique, which isn't very long after all, to be attentive, after these texts, to the way this rationality that we saw emerge from this comparison, once you possess it, if you reread the text from the beginning — that would be ideal — and if that's not possible, reading it downstream, to see how the rest of the text obeys it.
1:14:48 But then, I tell you, just as eclipses are predicted in astronomy, since I tell you, myself, that the never-formulated goal of this novella, which apparently keeps changing its pitch, its goal, its purpose, its objective, which drags us around literally and figuratively — we cover kilometers, and often on foot. So the goal, in other words, the end that puts an end to all the other intermediate goals, is to go to Rousseau's tomb. That's indeed what I told you.
1:15:19 But no, not just to find some book, etc. — that's the pretext for going into the Valois. In the Valois, there's Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville, and 4 kilometers from Rousseau's tomb is Nerval's mother's village. And so the greatness of this text, for me, is that it could have been a text like so many others in modernity, deathly texts, an Odyssean text where you make a circular journey and end up, right, at the end, facing the tragedy of the beginning.
1:15:49 You'd think that by going to the source, you'd finally find what quenches, what nourishes, what slakes thirst, and at the source there's the dead fountain. Where there's no more water — that means, right, it's not the clear fountain where the girls still bathe naked, after Brassens, right. No, no, it's the dead fountain, it's terrible, you know, the mourning for his dead mother — it could stay within the personal novel, it could take us down that path. And yet it leads us to Rousseau's tomb, it leads us to a collective salvation. 4 km away, in other words — I'll use another metaphor, I've read Kant, it must be influencing me, a geographical metaphor — just as geographers carefully distinguish the magnetic pole from the geographic pole.
1:16:31 They're not very far apart, they're both in the ice. But still, they're not two coinciding points. Since the Earth is an irregular sphere — ask the physicists, it's easily explained — the mass of iron is not distributed quite evenly, so the magnetic pole is at a noticeable distance from the geographic pole. Well, I believe the magnetic pole is Mortefontaine, he's drawn to it, right? And so we understand better why the opening words of the novella, it's 1851, I was passing through Frankfurt. And yes, I was on the road to Germany, I won't hide it from you, but I was searching for the tomb of the mother who is buried over there in Poland, in that direction, but that's none of the reader's business, that's my business alone.
1:17:12 Right? So I'm going to take you to the mother's country, where her tomb isn't, right? And I remind you of this passage, I'll go very quickly, this passage where he says I regain my strength on this maternal land, tired of the vain quarrels and sterile agitations of Paris — it's he who took us into libraries, we didn't ask for that, and now he tells us he took us into vain and sterile agitations, we didn't find the book — I rest seeing these countrysides so green and so fertile, fertile opposed to sterile, green countryside to the dust of libraries, so there, that's the classic move, no need to belabor it, it's the imagery of the mother, the one who nourishes, who restores. Well, not at all — as soon as you arrive, first there's his melancholy, it's All Souls' Day approaching, and above all, the ground is strewn with corpses, read the novella, don't take my word for it, you'll see that he doesn't miss a single occasion to say, in such-and-such church, look, I saw the tomb of a monk, and then afterward I imagined it wasn't a monk but a Frankish warrior, with his face turned toward the East, in the tomb, and then he reaches the Ermenonville cemetery, he spares us none of the tombs that are there, not even a tomb with erased traces, and one with an inscription, it's he who says it,
1:18:22 after passing tombs of cardinals, of an abbot, here lies Almazor — say now, Almazor, that's all that's written on the tomb — and Nerval says, is it a madman, is it a lackey, is it a dog, question mark, it's a madman speaking, is it a madman, is it a lackey, is it a dog, Almazor, the tomb says nothing more. You see, it's the land of death, the land of decline, the twilight land, the Occident, the land where one is slain — yes, you see there's a logic in all this after all. So, let's go to Rousseau's tomb, and there he speaks of the sun, in contrast to the deathly — o sage, you had given us the milk of the strong, and we were too weak for it to do us any good, as one can already speak as if it were past, whereas it's the previous generation — that means, right, that already the political Restoration, that's what historians call it, at that time, 1830-1840, had already relegated the message of the Social Contract to oblivion. You had given us the milk of the strong, and we were too weak for it to do us any good, we have forgotten your lessons, which our fathers knew, the Robespierres, and we have lost the echo of your word,
1:19:33 last echo of ancient wisdoms — I told you, brilliant, a lineage established by Nerval between the Republic, 25 centuries ago, and the Social Contract, last echo of ancient wisdoms, of the political reassessment of all the problems we pose in philosophy. There, I'd like now to move on to questions. Next time I'll dwell a bit more on how the text bends, including in landscape passages, right, to the predictability I've told you about. We'll see that once we've passed Rousseau's tomb — this will be my last foray into the text, then I'll hand it over to you — once we've passed Rousseau's tomb, we must continue, since officially we're supposed to head toward the ruins of the castle of the beautiful Angélique de Longueval, the weather turns bad, walking becomes difficult, half-frozen thistles, still hardy, come up to our chests, we had to watch out for ruts, for peat bogs — up to that point, we'd set off from Senlis on foot, happily breathing the autumn mist. There, symbolically, the landscape seems to oppose our going any further than Rousseau's tomb. I won't say more, so read on to the end, and we'll talk again next time. I'm listening for your questions,
The symbolic itinerary: synchrony and diachrony 1:20:44 Everything okay, maître? Great, I have a question, just about the end — you said to be attentive in the reading, but I actually didn't quite understand what we should be attentive to when rereading. To the itinerary, yes, thank you, very good question, to the itinerary — I said in the outline that there were two ways to illustrate the symbolic relationship to the world such as we saw it manifest in the passage of the young girls at Senlis, the decline, the autumn, the ruins, etc. In short, you think it's the real world and you're actually dealing with an entirely symbolic world that symbolizes here a decline without any value judgment.
1:21:20 So, don't forget that this excerpt from Les Filles du feu, given the title of the collection — I'm answering your question — and that there's fire and fire, and the atomic explosion is brutal and instantaneous — well, it's instantaneous, it's fast, unfortunately, but with the same energy you can run a submarine for five years, well with the same nuclear energy, I mean — you can either produce an explosion instantaneously — yes, the relationship to time is interesting — but the same fire can also burn more slowly, that's the case at Senlis with the young girls, it's the twilight fire, and at that point, it's not a pain, it's not a sudden blaze. You'll notice that in the dream in Aurélia, the one where the light is three times brighter than natural daylight, it ends very badly, the dream, for those who've read it, because the light is so strong that it wears itself out, the light, and darkness arrives, and it ends with — some have read it, the dream — the lady I was following, her slender figure unfolding in a movement that made the folds of her shot-taffeta dress shimmer — that's some prose, isn't it, no but he's really listening to this again, frankly, the lady I was following,
1:22:31 it's the little boys from earlier, the tallest of the three ladies who was making him clothes, her slender figure unfolding — I'm not saying she stood up — her slender figure unfolding in a movement that made the folds of her shot-taffeta dress shimmer, gracefully wrapped, with her bare arm, still in the dream, around a long stalk of hollyhock, then it began to grow under a bright ray of light, so that little by little the garden took on its shape — you see, the light expands, and the garden takes on an immense — you saw in Pinocchio, there's also a beanstalk that grows under a moonbeam at top speed, don't you remember that?
1:23:05 We're watching Walt Disney here, are we? And his nose too, when he lies — so that little by little the garden took on its shape, and the flower beds and trees became the rosettes and festoons of her clothing, while her face — he's speaking of the lady — and her arms imprinted their contour on the crimson clouds of the sky, the woman becomes a cosmic giantess — I lost sight of her as she was transfigured, for she seemed to vanish into her own greatness — oh do not flee! I cried out — this is in the dream, the boy speaking — for nature dies with you — she becomes so vast that she absorbs the whole landscape — saying these words, I walked painfully through the brambles — say now, it was a marvelous garden with fruit, grapes, earlier, the brambles — as if to grasp the enlarged shadow that was escaping me, but I ran into a crumbling section of wall at the foot of which lay a woman's bust; picking it up, I became convinced it was hers, I recognized cherished features, and looking around me, I saw that the garden had taken on the appearance of a cemetery. Voices said — and this is the last word — the universe is in the night. It had begun with a day three times brighter, a bit of natural daylight, springtime scents, it ends with — the universe is in the night,
1:24:15 too much light, too abrupt — there, that's for the twilight side of things. So that's why, when I tell you to reread, there are two ways of seeing this symbolic relationship to the world that we've just seen here — in the dream, it's obvious the dream is made of symbols, but that it's also the same in the real setting, at Senlis, Oise, the department of Oise, a sub-prefecture, that's not nothing — so that's the field of the phenomenon we were talking about earlier with Kant, in which we must distinguish things that owe nothing to symbol — right, there is indeed the Oise river flowing through the department of Oise, and flowing toward the sea, that's due to Newton, right, it seeks the center of the earth, water flows too — and then there's everything else, right, not least the inscription Henri IV put on the town hall of Senlis, because that's where he sheltered his love affair with Gabrielle d'Estrées: 'my first happiness, my first hour,' H-E-U-R, following Senlis.
1:25:08 So, you watch how — that's what I recommend — how the text obeys the imperatives we're discovering, except there are two ways of doing it: either synchronically, if you take just one of these themes, buildings for example, which are in ruins or suddenly enlarged — and I had planned, I won't have time, I won't do it next time, but that's fine, we have time — the voice, the way Nerval is very sensitive to the female voice, the young girls, the little girls singing, the most famous passage in Sylvie, Adrienne's song, of course, and then there are other admirable passages in Les Nuits d'octobre, where he catches a girl timidely singing at a charity gathering at 3am in Pantin at night — so, the voice, the effect it has, the way Nerval is prey — as they'd say in psychoanalysis, he's prey to the signifier of the female voice, especially when it comes, for him, from a young voice, meaning a voice not yet spoiled by learning to sing and, as he says, by conservatory lessons and fashionable tunes — that's very interesting — and besides, diachronically, that is, how in the itinerary
1:26:18 up to the end of the novella — there I'll answer your question as precisely as possible — how, once we've passed Rousseau's tomb, to verify our hypothesis, let's be scientists, everything turns bad, the weather, Sylvain disappears — as soon as we've left the forests, Sylvain has gone back to his own land, a guy named Sylvain, you see, who has a symbolic causality, not a physical, Galilean causality. Sylvain, what does that mean? The man of the woods? Sylvain, that's the forest. He appears when we leave Senlis to go to Ermenonville, we cross the Ermenonville forest, for those who know the area a bit, and he disappears when we leave the forest and walk through the fields and the mud.
Personal evil and collective evil: the mother and the city 1:26:58 You see? So that's what I'm asking you to observe, how the landscape bends to the symbolic order. Very interesting, your question. Yes? If I understand correctly, the decoding we can do taking into account this symbolic order and what... It's that there's an evil that would lead him toward death and then it turns out he finds a way to turn away from it by turning toward Rousseau.
1:27:32 Is that right? Yes, except you strangely used the term 'turn away.' I'm a champion of detours, so I can speak about it. Actually, it's the opposite. He wants to go to Rousseau's tomb with us and he's constantly threatened with a detour by the personal complex, let's say, the personal novel, the maternal tomb. So indeed, the evil that could lead him toward death is an evil that is his own, personal, as you said, is that right? Yes. But aren't there...
1:28:02 And so, the solution, what saves and what liberates, is... to make it happen, the collective, is Rousseau. Yes. Is that right? Yes, provided you don't oppose them. Yes, sorry, finish your point. My question about not opposing them. My question is, aren't there elements in the novella that suggest that the evil he suffers from is also collective? It's not just a personal evil, the drama that isn't tied to his mother, it's also... If the solution is collective, then the evil is collective.
1:28:32 Right? There are already traditions. If you look at the Arthurian romances, the quest for the Grail, there is indeed the story of the Wasteland. It's a whole country that suffers. Gaste, waste, in English. You see? Devastating, violating the land that no longer produces anything, the ungrateful land. If you go to the Gâtine forest, south of Paris, if it's still a forest today, it's because there was nothing to grow there. Well, now there's honey, excellent honey, from the Gâtinais.
1:29:02 But there you go, if there's honey, it's because there's nothing else to do. So it's the same term as 'gaste,' 'guest,' the host. That's interesting. It's the ambivalence of language that Freud noticed, which means a thing and its opposite — the host, who can be either benevolent or dangerous. So the wasteland is the one that produces nothing anymore since the Grail no longer nourishes, since it has disappeared. For the Grail is above all a source of nourishment in the Arthurian tale.
1:29:33 I don't understand the mystery of the Grail any better than anyone else. So, to answer your question, we shouldn't oppose the two abstractly. That is, there's Nerval's mama, that's his own problem. It's not great luck to have a mother who abandons the newborn because she's so in love with her husband, so, I don't know, oedipal in an almost literal sense, that she'll follow him on Napoleon's campaigns — there weren't many women who did that, after all — into the snows of Poland and Russia, leaving the newborn to cousins, aunts, etc.
1:30:05 I mean, you have enough there to build a maternal complex, one would develop one for less. That's his own problem. But there's the mother — not my mama — the Mother, Isis, the Virgin Mary. You see, there we rise to the level of myth. We're no longer in the personal order. I mean, if there's a representation — I take all the Iranian and Catholic mythical countries, for example — of a woman carrying a baby, already freeing him from gravity, supporting him, nourishing him.
1:30:36 Often she shows her breast. There's an extraordinary painting by Fouquet, you know, the Pankha, who was the extraordinary portraitist, even of Charles V and François I. Look up on Google, the Virgin with Red Angels. I don't know if you know this painting. You see what I mean? It's extraordinary. Did you see it? She's offering a breast that's completely spherical, which is improbable, I mean, vertically. Well, anyway.
1:31:07 And the red angels behind, it's a splendor. This image that's everywhere, that comes to us from well before Christianity. That's why Protestants aren't too reassured by the Virgin. It's a bit of an old leftover of pagan stuff. Historically, they're not entirely wrong. Isis, among the Egyptians, who is the first figure — I'll start again with the Orient — Isis, the first figure of a maternal goddess, the first historical figure, I'm not going back to Neanderthal, there will be some not-boring things — who gathers, I'm quoting Egyptian mythology, who gathers from the waters of the Nile, for she is the water of the Nile, Isis, she gathers the phallus, fragmented into 14 pieces, of poor martyred Osiris.
1:31:48 Just as the three women are at Christ's tomb to anoint the martyr. And it's interesting to see this persistence. There, it's no longer my mama, it's no longer the personal novel, I'm answering your question. What's this about? I'm trying to say — I have to go fast. There's praxis. When you were speaking to me, you were deep in mysticism, I'm speaking mysticism. When you were born, you, all of you, men and women — that's inclusive.
1:32:23 When you were born, you weren't thrown into the forest like Oedipus, into the bushes. Oidipous means 'pierced feet,' his feet were tied. You weren't thrown into the water of the Nile like Moses. You weren't left in the forest near the dragon's lair like Siegfried. What did you get instead? A pram? Central heating? 'Mi-brolle-l'heure,' recommendations on television, on television. And so when I say praxis, I'm serious. There's a relay for the mother.
1:32:54 There's something that carried you. There are millennia of history that carry the newborn at birth. From birth onward. And all the more so when there's a certain standard of living, etc. That said, I mean, to have the equivalent of the maternal womb, the ideal temperature — there's someone and at the same time there's no one. It's the dream. But yes, there's someone and something at the same time — all the contradictions of philosophy are resolved. How could you not make an illness of that?
1:33:24 Well. This month, there's the angel with the flaming sword — it's in the Bible — who guards the entrance to the earthly paradise. The return is irreversible. And yes, we must produce a collective mother. Now you've got it. The city! Clouscard was writing The Paths of Praxis. He used to call me every day. This was in Africa. All right? 7 a.m., I rub my hands, I rush to the manuscript. He was in a period of euphoria. And he'd ask me to clarify things for him, because I'd had a bourgeois education, a better reading, well, a reading of the Bible that he hadn't had.
1:33:56 And he'd say to me, how does it go in Revelation? And he loved having me repeat to him the passage at the end of Revelation. There are a few among you who know the last lines of Revelation. After the catastrophes, the trumpets, the pools of sulfur, the horrific things, the plagues, the locusts, whatever you like, the punishments — well, there are the righteous who remain, those who have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. Do you know any poet as daring as that? How can you whiten something in blood? Do you hear what's written?
1:34:26 And here are the righteous who have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. I say this to those working on red and white right now, right? So, after all these catastrophes and cataclysms, each more severe as the trumpets sound up to the seventh trumpet, then that's it, the great Satan, the great serpent is defeated — I've already quoted this once — the voice of the evangelist says, there he is defeated, the ancient serpent, the essence of evil, the one who — don't you remember?
1:35:01 It's interesting, because we'll see what the essence of evil is in Christianity. The one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. This religion that we're led to believe, since a sort of sub-Nietzscheanism, right, which is not Nietzsche's own, is the Judeo-Christian religion of guilt-tripping and guilt, right, designates as absolute evil the fact of being accused before the Eternal. It's the religion of forgiveness. There he is, the one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. He's now in the lake of sulfur. There, I won't go where I can't — that's what delighted Clouscard.
1:35:34 The last act, because there has to be a happy ending after all — gospel, good news, that's the translation — is the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem. We see it come down at the end. It ceases to be heavenly. I told you earlier, my kingdom is not of this world. Yet in Christianity, there's always this separation between what I want, what I must do, etc. — a presence that is here but is not the truth, and a truth that is never present. And then behold, truth does us the grace of descending. Say now, say now, the heavenly Jerusalem becomes an earthly Jerusalem again.
1:36:06 That is, it's as earthly as paradise. It's no longer a beyond, but it's no longer the paradise of plants and animals either. It's a city. It's the heavenly Jerusalem. And it is said, and the bridegroom says to the bride, come, and let each one help himself freely. Say now, that's not quite 'to each according to his needs' yet, I don't know what, but it's not far off. No, no, but listen, I'm not inventing anything. I'm not inventing anything. You see, so Clouscard says, oh yes, he says that, the guy, damn it, I want to write that down. The guy — that's the evangelist.
1:36:36 There, I'm giving you a scoop there. But does that answer your question? Yes. So there, I spoke about the mother in the sense that Nerval connects us to. If I lead us to Rousseau's tomb, it's not to oppose things, all right? On the contrary, it's to preserve what's best in the maternal memory. What carried me, what nourished me, what saved me. And that's the famous Hegelian Aufhebung — suppressed, preserved. The fruit, when it appears, makes the flower fall.
1:37:07 The flower must wither and its petals fall for the fruit to appear. But the fruit preserves what the flower promised. There. Other questions, please? Unless the grain dies, it bears no fruit. Oh, I won't quote everyone today. Yes? Could I have your first name, sorry. Quentin, thank you. Thank you for the talk. Why does Nerval, in Angélique but also in Sylvie, constantly feel obliged to say that the love that, for example, La Corbinière — La Corbinière feels for Angélique — and even the love Nerval bears for Sylvie, for example, for Adrienne, is chaste, why does he keep specifying it?
Why chaste love in Nerval? 1:37:56 First of all, I'm glad to see that you've read both. I haven't yet been able to finish Sylvie, but... he doesn't quite say that. He starts out by saying this. She had to appear as a queen or a goddess, and above all one must never come close to her. I'll grant you that. All right? Love, alas, of bluish forms; seen up close, the real woman revolts our naivety, and so on. New paragraph. Some of us, however — he's a bit vaguer, he doesn't say "I." Some of us, he says, talking about his group of friends, cared little for those Platonic paradoxes, waving instead the torch of the underworld gods.
1:38:33 In renewed dreams of Alexandria — Alexandria, that was perpetual orgies, the Alexandrian period. So there are both, there's always this double temptation. And you have the... sorry, I'm using "tu" with you. There's this double relationship to eros sublimated, that's the classic archetype. Take the whole of Les Fleurs du mal, the poems are dedicated either to Jeanne Duval, the mulatto woman, the black woman, whom he can put in any position. There you go. Eros — I say this because there's a misogynistic side to Baudelaire.
1:39:03 And the opposite, the adoration for the "présidente" whom he never touched. Right? All right? Madame Sabatier, who doesn't want to be laughed at every day. Let's not be boorish. So this is classic for the period, I mean, it's the split found in one of the most famous films in the history of cinema, The Mother and the Whore. I mean, it's a dichotomy. The sacred woman, over whom the Oedipal prohibition hovers. Right? I'm already partly answering your question. It's not a chastity built on principles, it isn't.
1:39:36 But it's that, and above all, one must never come close to her. And then there's a text, Pandora, perhaps one of the most disturbing short stories by Nerval, where both are present at once, fighting each other, when he's in Vienna during New Year's Eve. I recommend it, Pandora — it's not in Les Filles du feu. But it's on Wiki, you can find it easily if you want to print it out. It's not very long. It's one of the most astonishing from a strictly literary point of view, one of the wildest, completely so. There's humor and despair at once, it's superb.
1:40:06 There you go, so let me just correct your question before answering it. It's the period, Nerval's own romantic generation — he himself cannot be reduced to being a Romantic. I've already insisted enough on that. He's more of a forerunner of what Baudelaire and the Symbolist generation would produce. The Symbolists pay homage to him on that level. The Surrealists even more so afterward, and Proust too. Fine, he belongs to modernity as well. But he was formed within the Romantic generation.
1:40:38 These affects — now, the Romantics come as a reaction against the ethereal, floating love we're talking about. That is, in the 18th century, the height of libertinism. The height of eros without feeling. Or where feeling is mocked ironically. I'm thinking of Laclos, I'm thinking of Laclos's characters. I mean, I'm thinking of Des Grieux, I'm thinking of the Marquis de Sade and of Don Giovanni — I say Don Giovanni because I'm thinking of the way Mozart portrays the character of Don Juan, of course also portrayed by our Molière.
1:41:16 So there's this succession. What made Rousseau's success? And in particular that of Julie, or the New Heloise? I'm answering your question by digging deeper now — why is the New Heloise the biggest print run, the biggest bookshop success of the 18th century, along with Voltaire's Candide? Because all of a sudden, up until then, all people talked about were bedroom affairs, that sort of thing — you've seen it, it's superb, I mean it's beautiful style. And in painting, that gives us Fragonard's The Bolt, you all know these paintings. I mean, these are French traditions, gallant, naughty, ribald — look at Boucher's paintings, you know, girls of 15 naked in the pictures, that is, commissioned by some marquis or other to hang in his bedroom.
1:42:02 That's what was available. And then suddenly Rousseau paints two young, somewhat naive Swiss people, loving each other madly, separated by obligations, one's marriage, etc. Why did that same aristocracy that had been wallowing — I don't say that pejoratively, I'm no moralizer, but still, I'm no puritanical Protestant either — why suddenly, I mean, this success happened because this awakening of sensibility was a breath of fresh air for an entire generation.
1:42:37 All right? So suddenly we found again the dichotomy between love and virtue. I'm answering your question. Oh, sorry, excuse me — love found itself caught between virtue and passion. When Julie is dying in the New Heloise, what are her last words? Does anyone know? "They made me drink..." go on, finish the sentence. She dies right after these words: "They made me drink to the dregs the bitter cup of sensibility."
1:43:12 So it's serious, it's not some floating, ethereal sentimentalism tinted in pastel — people die of it. And the novel that would inaugurate this — you know that light comes to us from the North, as Madame de Staël said — Romanticism begins in the North, in Germany, in England in particular, and Goethe, who precedes them all, his first novel, his success, which he himself later regretted, anti-Romantic as he was, saying "I should never have written that novel," it caused a wave of deaths — that's Werther, where the guy kills himself. Without ever having touched the woman of his dreams.
1:43:44 And Sylvie, since you've read it — how does it end? I can't get all the way to the end. Oh really? I won't tell you. But in any case, there's an allusion to Werther. There, that's what I wanted to say. Did I answer your question? Yes, yes, thank you. All right, enjoy your meal, everyone. Thank you.
