English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Resuming the outline and the comparative reading of Angélique-Aurélia 0:00 Well, first of all, you probably should have started with this, Thomas. First of all, happy new year. But Thomas is a good person who goes straight to the essential without frills. Yes, thank you for your loyalty, and well, I wish you what I wish everyone I'm fond of, that is, I owe you that much, that is, to have a year, a new year, at least better. It's an inequation, I'm not mistaken there, it's an order relation. A new year at least better than the best of those that preceded it.
0:33 Cool. You're not risking much with that. There you go. And thanks again for your loyalty. Very quickly, once again I ended in a rush last time, a bit pressed for time. And so I've decided to keep the same outline, since if you had access to it last time, the one that was handed out in December 2017. But not with the same treatment. The beginning of the outline, which I'm going to reread. The beginning of the outline, I'll take it up again and summarize it.
1:13 We can't repeat it, we'd lose too much time, because that, I had already developed it at quite some length last time, almost too long. On the other hand, precisely because I had perhaps devoted too much time to developing the first items, there were a few that were written on the outline that I didn't even address. I'll just read their titles here. The stakes of the teleological question, and then the two meanings of the concept of chance.
1:46 We'll translate all that into French afterward. And that was the end, the first part, which I couldn't address today. And finally, there was a second part where it would perhaps be time to resume the reading of Angélique, wouldn't it? After this great philosophical pause we've been taking for almost two sessions now. But we're not doing a literary serial, as you know. And I remind you all the same, the outline, specifying right away something, it's not a strictly chronological outline.
2:26 It roughly is. But well, it's possible that sometimes I treat the third item before the second. It's not a big deal. This time, we'll cover everything. So, last time's outline, which I'm taking up again today, went like this. First, expanding the philosophical level reached during the last session. At that time, the last session was the one where we proceeded to the comparative reading of when he sees little girls singing under the direction of a bigger one, in front of the cathedral of Senlis, on a late autumn afternoon.
3:03 And we compared that text, a prose text taken from Angélique in Les Filles du feu, and this novella which was published as a serial, I remind you, in a newspaper, with a rather journalistic tone overall, comparing it with quite the opposite, a text stemming from the greatest anguishes of Nerval, from that piece of writing wrenched from fits of madness, entitled Aurélia, which he still had in his coat when he was found, moreover, hanged, and it's an admirable text, which the Surrealists admired greatly, because in it you find the oneiric or automatic writing in its pure state, since it is the account, the putting into writing, I'll try to speak as plainly as possible, of the fantasies—I don't much like that word, and it's used indiscriminately—that overwhelmed him during his stays at Dr. Émile Blanche's clinic, who has a street named after him in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
4:05 That much is clear, since it was he who told Nerval, if it can relieve you to put your obsessions into writing, don't hesitate, and it's to him that we owe Aurélia, in the end. That wasn't obvious at the time. At the time, treatments were more like: if you weren't mad going in, you were sure to be coming out. I know some of you here are interested in Bruckner. Great post-Wagnerian symphonist, in case you don't know Bruckner. It's not a big deal, but it's a gap. They're endless symphonies, but with sublime moments.
4:35 And Bruckner—there's a film, a documentary made about him, where you see him, filmed, because it was the beginning of the first cameras, around 1903-1904, in Austria. The poor old man, they made him take boiling baths, then icy baths, then electroshocks. I tell you, if you weren't mad going in, you were sure to be coming out. There you go. Anyway. So, we had compared these two texts which have nothing to do with each other, in different contexts, and that's the great insight we gained from that comparative reading: we noticed that the two texts said the same thing in an inverted way, exactly like nothing resembles me more than my reflection in the mirror, in terms of appearance at least, except that everything in it is inverted.
Senlis: only a symbolic function remains 5:24 And we had seen that in the text of Angélique, which we believed to be a realistic text, so to speak, since written in the course of a journalistic report, in the good town of Senlis, in the Oise—all this exists, we're not in the imaginary—and which fits into the chronicle of the search for a book sent to a newspaper for a serial, we thought that when he sees young girls, it's because he sees young girls, when he sees a cathedral, he sees the cathedral.
5:54 And we noticed—and I'd like to insist on this today more than in previous sessions—that all this real has evaporated, and that only a symbolic function remains. I mean by that that the church of Senlis, which really exists, one of the most beautiful cathedrals of Christendom, the Roman ruins of Senlis, exist. But the way Nerval puts them into writing, that is, the fact that the young girls, that the little girl starts singing in a weak voice, under a fading light, the light of sunset, around the time of November 1st, All Souls' Day, thus at the decline of the year, that all this no longer has anything to do with the real.
6:38 So that would make for astounding coincidences, wouldn't it, a set of chance occurrences that never happen. In fact, what matters here isn't the subjects—I'm becoming rigorous in logic—it's not the young girls, the Roman fortifications, and the light, it's the attributes: that the light is fading, the young girls have weak voices, the year is turning toward autumn, or rather toward winter, since November 1st is already the end of autumn. So, I mean, if we only take the attributes, it's the same thing repeating itself each time.
The gold of the sea at sunset: the concept of surface 7:13 So the real has disappeared. That's what I'd like to take up again today, to make you grasp the stakes of the comparison we carried out. And for that, I'm going to take a small detour through an example that should speak to everyone. In this example, I'm going to deepen the philosophical concept of surface. I'm announcing it to you beforehand, because I didn't do it last time, and it's a way of synthesizing everything we've seen about this comparison of the two texts.
7:45 Here, in front of me, I'm not dealing with just a surface. There's depth, etc. There's a dimension that has been rendered by painters under the name of perspective, which is illusory in painting, but which is quite real, in empirical reality. Why do I bring this up? Because when I move to the aesthetic domain now—I wasn't there, I was talking about the room. You're beautiful, that's not the question.
8:15 But I'm speaking of aesthetics in the philosophical sense, that is, the sensible. You know, anesthesia, we suppress the senses. That's the etymology. When in the aesthetic field, and this time in the artistic sense of the term, where the question of beauty comes up, I say what a magnificent sunset over the sea. There's my example. What am I talking about? I'm talking about a kind of color, you know, as sometimes happens with very beautiful twilights, a sort of liquid gold.
8:49 The sea seems to carry molten gold. It's magnificent. So here, let's do an experiment, a thought experiment, as they say, we don't need to move to a lab to do it. You take a glass, imagine we took a glass, a drinking glass, and we went to scoop up some of that liquid gold, to have a little bit at home. Oh, surprise, as soon as you pull the glass back out, no more gold, transparent, you agree—sea water. It's not golden, sea water.
9:20 We were dealing with a surface. We're getting there—what did you say? Yes, yes, but precisely, illusions need a surface. You, who know cinema well, we're in illusion when we're in dark movie theaters, yes or no. We believe we're dealing with Gary Cooper, when no, it's his image. I say Gary Cooper, sorry, there must be more recent references. No, but he was my mother's idol, so. There you go, in cinema, everything is illusory, as in theater.
9:51 What is the generic term used for theatrical art? We say we're going to attend a...? Bravo, a performance—a representation. Which proves that there is no presence. Things don't have true presence, they are represented. Just as an ambassador—the country isn't there. It's because the country isn't there that it has a representative. A Botschaft, as they say in German. But of course. This is important, I'm digging into the concepts.
10:21 An illusion. Yes, we had the illusion that the sea was golden. No. So, what is golden? So, let's be serious, materially. It's not the water, it's not the sky, it's the contact between the two. Do you agree? We're in nothingness. Materially, that doesn't exist. This golden sea, you see? It's a meeting point between a reality, the atmosphere, the sky, the sky which is lit by the setting sun, and the sea which is, just like that, colorless.
10:55 I'm not saying tasteless, it's sea water. And it's the contact between the two that makes this liquid gold. You see, we've deepened the notion of surface. I haven't finished with this example, but I'm starting with it, to make you grasp—it's a bit unsettling—that most of the time, what we invest in is in fact surfaces. Because I myself am very sensitive to a beautiful sunset over the sea. Well, I'm not the least sensitive to it. Agreed? I don't want to be the first.
11:25 I'm not the last either. So, I'm like everyone else. I'm very sensitive to that. But you have to know that what interests me isn't there. What I have to deal with there is an evocation, a representation. You see how strong Plato is. What we see at the back of the cave is an image of something that is elsewhere. Agreed? Why are texts relating to a sunset, since I'm talking about a sunset over the sea, or to autumn, more melancholic than texts relating to spring?
11:55 In general, statistically, as the Jacques Brel song says, it's hard to die in spring. That happens too. You know Le Moribond. I think that's the name of the song. It's hard to die in spring, what can you do. It's great, that song. We don't set it aside. Why statistically? Because it's the moment of decline, of death, of gentle death—autumn, but still. So, what are we saying here? We're saying that we're in the symbol. So, we think we're in the real, we're in the symbol.
12:28 Agreed? It's more melancholic than a sunset over the sea than a sunrise over the Tyrrhenian Sea. That's the sea between Italy and Corsica. If you've never seen a sunrise there, you're missing something. You can say that about anywhere. The Japanese themselves name their own empire the empire of the rising sun. They're quite right. It's on their flag, moreover. And the Chinese, the middle kingdom. There has to be a middle between the extremes. These notions are interesting. Nerval called China, the Germanic countries, the China of Europe.
13:02 Because it's the middle kingdom, the Germanic countries, between the Slavic world and us, the developed countries, the ancient ones, the old nation-states without any complexes. But who spend their time giving complexes to others. Between the two, there are 'German quarrels,' as we used to say in history class. Quarrels over nothing, German quarrels. At the time, Germany was divided into 600 states, Austria, all that. It was rather similar at the time. And the middle kingdom is interesting. Because we're going to talk about the middle again.
13:33 We're dealing with an illusion. We say, we feel like going there, going for a swim in that golden sea. It's alluring. Has this ever happened to you, gentlemen, out on a walk with a girlfriend? Let's go, she says, let's go. She doesn't understand that it's an illusion. Let's move on. Interesting. It can be the opposite. It can be the guy who says, let's go, and who then has the luck of getting to enjoy a sunset every single time. Anyway, let's move on. That's couples for you.
One loves a surface: the flayed figure and Perceval 14:03 Well, first example, second example. I had students in Africa, I talk about it often, because I really loved teaching in countries where there's no shared cultural background, so you're forced to start from zero, from scratch, you can't rely on a common corpus, which is extremely formative for the teacher. I say this because I owe them a great deal. So, I remember I had young girls, poor things, they were in a secretarial vocational track.
14:34 That doesn't mean anything to you, secretarial vocational tracks, secretarial vocational diploma. They were the poor kids who hadn't succeeded in general education, who had still gone through the equivalent of a Pigier-type course sanctioned by a vocational diploma, basically shorthand, typing, you see what I mean. I wasn't going to talk to them about the difference between the apagogic and the ostensive in Kant. I answered their questions. Sir, why do French women take the pill? So, there you go, societal issues, how shall I put it. And one day, I ask them, since we were talking about surface, I'm getting to it, what do you like about your boyfriend?
15:11 So, of course, again, she would answer, sir, everything. Yes, I expected that. Well, since you like everything, I'm not going to remove much. I'm just going to remove the skin. What do you mean, she got suspicious there? No, no, just a millimeter of skin, so that your boyfriend resembles the flayed man from biology class next door. Ah, the class recoiled in horror, of course. Ah, sir, but philosophy is nasty, isn't it! You tell me you like everything, I've removed almost nothing, and you already like him less.
15:41 We loved a surface. See my second example? And I dig deeper. Contradictorily, a surface, precisely, has no depth to it. But I'm digging intellectually. This surface, we don't leave it as it is. We put surfaces on top of it. Tanning, cosmetics, foundation. I'm not joking. Ah, you're as white as an aspirin tablet. These things matter, you see, when there's no surface on the surface. When there are no roses on the lily, as they say in medieval poetry, when the girl blushes.
16:15 That's beautiful. Remember when Perceval the Welshman, in the admirable Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, comes upon three drops of blood on the snow and is so fascinated that he remains there for hours, to the point of not noticing that at King Arthur's court, which is there, encamped nearby in the snow, they find it ill-mannered that a knight doesn't come to greet the king—he's being watched from a distance and they don't see that he's contemplating the three drops of blood on the snow, because he had just wounded—as he says somewhere, 'I shoot on the wing whatever flies'—he had wounded a white bird, a blackbird, a white bird, you see, Baudelaire's Albatross has quite a legacy behind it, doesn't it, for those who know English poetry there's the extraordinary Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge, where the narrator, the old sailor who arrives, this whole story that runs several pages, is perhaps the most beautiful poem there is, is condemned and made to feel guilty because 'with my crossbow I killed the bird that made the breeze blow,' and that bird is a white albatross—there really are quite a few of these white birds without number, all that, well, and so.
17:25 They send delegations to tell him to come greet the king—that's not done in the Middle Ages, we're quick-tempered, as de Gaulle liked to say of the French, anger comes fast—and each time he's watched, he sees a rider galloping toward him, he takes his lance—typical Arthurian romance—the other one gets completely smashed, a broken collarbone, the next one, he unhorses two or three, until Gawain, who is the model of the good knight, the model knight, tells King Arthur: Sire, if you allow me, I'll speak to him, perhaps it's someone who's taken a vow of silence, mustn't rush him—he goes to speak to him, and Perceval tears himself from his reverie and says: it reminded me of the roses on the cheeks of my beloved—those are surfaces too, but well, his beloved, if I removed a millimeter, as with my secretarial-track classes, he'd be horrified. It's terrible. So where is the interiority? It's surely not the guts, you see all the problems that arise, that seem simple and are not at all, as soon as we approach the problem of surface. Now why did I make this long development on surface? Because we discovered.
The screen of the imaginary and the dream screen 18:35 in our comparison that Nerval wasn't concerned with what surrounds him in depth but only with what appears, in other words he projects onto this screen—I come back to the cinema metaphor, cinema is a projection of illusion, the projector behind me, I don't know if it still works that way and there we go, there we go—but there has to be a screen, something like that, to receive it, there has to be a surface, otherwise it would be lost in infinity, we agree—well this surface that I need, it can be the surface of your dreams, our dreams, it happens to me too to dream, and I'm thinking especially of the dreams of those who say 'I never dream'—those are the ones who dream the most but they don't want to know it, they lock it away every morning in amnesia, they must have terrible dreams, it's true, all they can say is 'I don't remember dreaming,' they don't say that they—I'm coming back, let me reopen this little parenthesis on the oneiric—but Freud says that there are early-morning dreams that are made on purpose.
19:45 to screen off the dreams of the night, isn't that right—the early-morning dreams which are often fairly pleasant, well, when we've had a good sleep just before going to work, we take advantage of the last seconds of sleep, it's clever, the dream, after all, I might dream that the bells are ringing, the village etc. is celebrating and all that, in fact it's the alarm clock ringing, but since I want to play for extra time and gain a few minutes, my dream makes me believe it's not the alarm but the bells, has that ever happened to you? It's clever, that's always something the enemy won't get, as we say in French, we've gained a few minutes of sleep. There you go, the same trick means that if I've had painful dreams that confront me too much with what I don't want to know about my unconscious, I manage to lock away the memory with early-morning dreams that will be the only things I remember afterward during the day, you see, these are called screen dreams. There, I said screen dream. We come back to my screen, to my questions of surface, just to show that my screen story isn't purely material, it can be a screen made of synthetic material.
20:55 I presume that when you project... when you have a home movie projector or slides, as used to be done, it can be a sheet, it can be a white wall, it can be a movie screen, but it can also be... how does Nougaro put it? I don't know what I have with singers tonight—'on the screen of my nights' or... no? 'On the black screen of my sleepless nights I make myself a movie'—which means that the world of the imaginary always needs a surface to receive it, the world of illusion, that's interesting, and that this surface is always the occasion, I'll sum up, of a representation, and the fact that it's a representation should put us on guard and warn us that we're not dealing here with the thing in its immediacy, in its presence, alas perhaps, isn't that so?
The phenomenon in Kant and the yellow glasses 21:52 and because it is not present, it needs to be represented—so once again it's not geology or geography that interests the traveler Nerval, is it, it's everything that appears to him, and there, last time, so I'll go quickly because we had developed it a bit, we see how much we owe, in this order of ideas, to a fundamentally Kantian concept, that of the phenomenon. Kant is the first chronologically, and it's going to have great fortune, since the most famous book in Kantian posterity in philosophy is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit—so I mean the concept is going to flourish, and why?
22:37 first because there's PH which you find in—Phantasm, well, the world of images, bravo—come on, physicists—in photons, well, we're getting there, photons, what's all that—come on, you put an N in place of the T, you're a specialist—I don't understand any better than you, honestly—well, PH-O-S, phôs, light, phôs, phôtos, to be multiplied like that, it's the world of what is necessary for things to appear, you see why this radical, this prefix—it's not a radical, well it is a radical, PH, phôs, light, but which serves as a prefix to many terms in the language, and not just in French—Phantasie—which are meant to show: watch out, we're not dealing quite with the real but with a representation, with a fantasmatics, taken in the proper sense this time, now.
23:48 the precision I couldn't give last time because I went a bit fast regarding Kant's phenomenon—I had nonetheless recalled that Kant's phenomenon is the set of objects of a possible experience, it's the set of what we perceive through time and space—that's a lot of things, but it doesn't include God or eternity, agreed, nor my past either—not my past as I represent it to myself in memory, but as it truly was—you know how quickly history tends to turn into legend, doesn't it, when you get an experiment done—it has been done—when you get the peasants of a region to recount stories, myths, legends of their land, and when you ask them to try to date them, they say 'pfft, that goes back to the mists of time,' and when an investigation is carried out, it turns out it goes back two or three generations at most—I mentioned this to you once regarding—it was about a survey done, in particular the last one I saw, agreed—and that's normal, if there's no written trace—that's why I took peasants here, a traditional culture, an oral culture if you prefer—if there's no written trace, memory doesn't go back far, we know almost.
24:58 hour by hour what was happening in Rome in Cicero's time, thanks to the writings, agreed, whereas poor Charlemagne, whom a monk had sign with his hand guided like that, even though it's well established, we don't have much—he's a barbarian after all, we call them 'the dark ages' before the Renaissance, coming from the Italian sun, then the Enlightenment, isn't that right, took over—there, I'm playing a bit with all these concepts, but I come back to my phenomenon business—it's the set of objects of a possible experience, watch out, it's precise vocabulary—it's not just what we see here around us, that's the phenomenon in act if you like, that's the phenomenon real, real in the Kantian sense—reality, it's real by virtue of time and space, it's not reality in itself—watch out, listen, if you want to understand the phenomenon in Kant, I'll tell you something personal, a pedagogical trick, but in fact what you should do, imagine that we are a prisoner of Plato's cave, since after all Plato says they resemble us, we are all supposed to be prisoners of the cave, in other words since our birth we are condemned to see only what's in front of us, etc.—now in front of us.
26:08 what do we see—yes, the phenomenon in Kant is meant to explain what that means, imagine this—I'm the one adding this now—that we were born with yellow glasses, a hypothesis not even hard to imagine, agreed—I'm going to tend to think that being, the world, is yellow—you are you, you see what I mean, the world is yellow—I'm going to take something that comes from me, something subjective—I'm summing up all of Kantianism—what is subjective, I'm going to take it for an objective quality inherent in things, I'm going to be naively substantialist, to speak like Hegel, because substantialism in Hegel is that: a subject who doesn't know he's a subject and who takes himself for a thing, it's alienation, alius, that's 'other' in Latin, what is proper to me I attribute to the thing, to something other than me, the yellow—so when we deduce something perfectly logical, it's that we are condemned to know only the phenomenon—if you ask me, yes but what is the world like when I don't have my yellow glasses, that's contradictory because I'm acting.
27:19 as if I could take them off, which in my hypothesis is not possible, we agree—so remember my example, imagine that we had yellow glasses since birth and that this was as constitutive as our pupil, so that we couldn't take them off—well, I mean, and moreover it's a bit the case: the vision we have is not the same as that of the fly, you know that well, you know the fly has an eye with I don't know how many facets, and that it doesn't see at all the same colors as we do, there are polarization phenomena, insects see colors that suit them on flowers, that's important, what I'm saying—there are animals that barely see in black and white—so I mean, what we see, it's not just because we see it that we see reality, it would be simple if it sufficed to bend down to pick up the real in the gutter, no—what we see is a compromise between what comes from the real and the structure of our knowledge, the a priori structuring as Kant says, that is, even before experience, our knowledge is already structured, and I recall, to be more rigorous and demonstrative now, that Kant begins.
Space and time, a priori forms of sensibility 28:30 in that passage of the Critique of Pure Reason—not the Critique of Judgment, that was the critique last time—which is called the Transcendental Aesthetic, which has nothing to do with aesthetics in the artistic sense, that is, the science of the perception of appearances, aisthêsis—he begins by identifying the two, the two great, what he calls the a priori forms of sensibility, in other words sensibility—seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, the olfactory, the five senses if you like, we think that's where our being-in-the-world begins—no, for example, I cannot see this if it doesn't occupy a certain space, that's what Kant says—so we'd say, yes, and so, space too, is it because we have sight that we have a notion of space? No, it's the opposite: we couldn't see anything if space weren't given beforehand—think about it, that's the great Kantian reversal, that's where he leaves behind the Anglo-Saxon empiricism of Hume, which had its importance at the time, it's very important what we're looking at, it's in the aesthetic.
29:40 the transcendental turn Kant makes tips metaphysics entirely over into logic, as Hegel would say later, in fact it's for a logical reason that we cannot say that my knowledge of space, my feeling of space, comes from experience — no, experience itself is only possible because space is given first, otherwise I couldn't see anything at all. I'm only talking about space; if we talk about time it's even more obvious — how could you hear a single note of music if it didn't have a minimum duration? But yes, you see, for example — then afterward he generalizes, I'll stop, it's a bit abstract but I have to go a bit fast — space is the a priori form of all external intuitions, says Kant; external space is, roughly, vision, and time is the a priori form of all internal intuitions. If I close my eyes and think of this carafe now, I represent it to myself — you agree, I represent it to myself, I do have an image in my head, but it's already an image on the screen of my memory. I told you last time about the imaginary, an important genus, three species of imagination.
30:50 dreaming — everywhere there is production of images — and memory, we just saw: I close my eyes, now I only have an image, I don't have the real carafe, otherwise it would be enough to drink the carafe in my memory to get me out of trouble in the desert. The concept of dog doesn't bark, said Spinoza — yes, that's funny, Spinoza is good — and I say about Hegel's acorn, let's be just as funny — when he talks about the oak and the acorn, when he says that when we want to see an oak in its magnificence and in the full expansion of its trunk and foliage, we would not be satisfied by being shown an acorn and being told, yes, but it's all entirely contained in there — yes, but I don't take my nap — that's my own example — in the shade of an acorn; I take my nap in the shade of a fully spread oak. So if I close my eyes, I drink the carafe, so I no longer have space, I'm no longer in real space — you're still in it when I close my eyes — but I am in time, the carafe has become a duration, and so when we conclude, it's very profound
32:00 time is the a priori form of all intuitions, external as well as internal, and starting from Kant, Western philosophical thought, which had struggled to reconcile thought and extension, the outer world, from Plato through Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, will become obsessed with reconciling thought with time, starting from Kant — and that will give us Hegel and Marx, you see, it's not the same era as Leibniz and Spinoza. It's interesting what we're saying with respect to time — time as constitutive of anthropology, since I'm on that topic — it's going to seem a bit disjointed but I can't help citing it, because it places it in its context of importance — Hegel gives a definition of man like this: man is the concept itself existing — let's not think too hard about 'the concept itself,' but existing, daseiende in German, that is, the very concept but not in my head or in the abstract, but really existing. Now he gives exactly the same definition of time: time is der daseiende Begriff selbst, time is the concept
33:10 itself existing — the same definition for man and for time. Yes, I know, I'm being a bit abstract, but we need to train our brains to understand things that may be simpler afterward. But it's important to understand that the natural world, in the sense of the object of physics, can never be in time — you have to be outside time to be in time, in the same way that you need a fixed point to decide that there is motion. You know this well: when you're on a train and you have the impression that you're moving when actually it's the other train moving — it's with respect to a fixed point that there is motion; if there is no fixed point in the universe, there is no motion either, there will only be relative motion, of which we can never know whether it exists in itself. You see what I mean, this is important, what we're seeing. The same holds for time: you have to be outside time to be conscious of time. When we give final-year students this topic — 'in what way does the sentence "I have changed" express a contradiction' — it's a cute topic, I like it because it's profound, because in 'changed' the change is explicit, and then there's the pronoun 'I' which says 'I was sick'
34:20 now I am in good health, so at the same time there is something that changes and there is an invariant, which is the 'I' that is always there — yes or no? You see, as soon as we start from time, we're in dialectic, we're in the opposites — but not logical opposites between which one must choose, like Buridan's ass, you know, who let himself starve to death because he had two equal bales of hay at equal distance — no, concepts that are constitutive, opposites that are constitutive of reality. What is becoming, changing, being in time, if not, at every instant, both being and not being — 'I am no longer what I once was and shall never be it again, my sweet springtime and my summer have leapt out the window.' There, I wanted to dwell a little on this notion of phenomenon. The phenomenon is everything that appears to us through time and space — but 'through,' don't make me say that it's reality in itself, it's like my yellow glasses, because space and time impose themselves on reality in itself, of which I cannot speak directly and immediately — but I can speak of it negatively, that's where Kant goes furthest
35:30 I cannot tell you how the thing in itself is, but I can tell you how it is not. For example, since we've just learned thanks to Kant that space and time don't come from things but from ourselves, since they are a priori and experience wouldn't be possible without them — well, what we can know about the thing in itself is that it is neither in space nor in time. Ah, well now, those are quite revelations — Kant is strong. In a way that means the outside-of-time becomes possible again, that is, freedom becomes possible again in Kant, because determinism presupposes the temporality of cause then effect, that is, in the world of nature that supposes the order of time — we've just seen that this holds for the phenomenon, but not in the world of reality in itself. Only, Kant says, we mustn't dream, and there we can only think negatively — if you like, I take up my yellow glasses again: I don't know what the world is like when I don't have my glasses, except that it's unlikely to be yellow, because now I know that comes from me. Likewise I can only have negative knowledge. So, one last determination of the phenomenon that will now make it tip over definitively and clearly — we've trained a bit
36:41 so it will be simpler — the subjectivization of what we believe to be the real, when we say we take back onto ourselves what we had a bit too hastily attributed to objectivity, to the outer world — that's the difference, I told you in German last time, and I'm going to develop it, and I'm developing it, I'll specify it today, between phenomenon and appearance. Because from what I'm saying, one might tend to think that the phenomenon is only an appearance, and I told you: careful, the phenomenon is not reality, but it's not a mere appearance either, it's more real than an appearance and less real than reality in itself. So how are we going to get out of this — a small etymological hint: Schein is the term that designates appearance in German philosophy, S-C-H-E-I-N — you'll notice, of course, since almost all of you are English speakers, that it's the verb meaning 'to shine' in English. There's a link between shining and appearance — only appearances shine, the bling bling, how do we say it in French, all that glitters is not gold, isn't it?
Phenomenon and appearance: totality comes from the subject 37:49 so Schein, appearance — we can decline it: Schön in German means beautiful, Schauen is to see, Anschauen is intuition — there's a shared root, SCH, everywhere, there is immediacy of the visual. I recall that in Greek, Eidos, which gives 'idea' and gives 'form' — anthropoid ape, ape shaped like man, it's the two senses of that famous word Eidos which has been translated for 2000 years as 'idea' when Plato writes and as 'form' when Aristotle writes — and then people say it's very different, Plato and Aristotle; it's true that they're different, but not there. So we know, from specialists, not my field, but distinguished Hellenists, that originally the term always has visual connotations, which we also find in an anthropoid ape which has the look, the appearance, of a man. So it's not only in German, in European languages there's a link between the abstraction of the idea and seeing. So, Schein, appearance — but that's not the word for phenomenon. Phenomenon — does anyone remember, or did we see it?
38:56 Erscheinung, thank you, Erscheinung. Now, when you're a bit familiar with German, the 'Er-' always heralds an action, doesn't it, and '-ung,' especially like '-tion' in French, deliberation, liberation, refers to an actual act and not to a being. There's a big difference between debating about freedom — does it exist, does it not — and affirming liberation. Freedom is a quality, you see, I'm deliberately playing on the suffixes — having it or not, that poses the problem rather badly. The real reality is that we are never free at the start, but that we can free ourselves from the situation we're placed in, you see what I mean — and so the only thing that exists is a progression from determination toward freedom, that's what liberation is, but it's an act, not a being, it's a process if you prefer, and so it requires time. So Erscheinung, if you ask — I said this last time, it's the last time I repeat it because I'm going to bring my new determination — ask a German off the street, that's the best advice I can give you as philosophical advice in general, or to know what a word means
40:06 in a foreign language, ask the man in the street and not intellectuals, because you immediately get the richest sense to start with, the one that leaves out the least. You ask a German on the street, what's Erscheinung, the term Kant uses for phenomenon — he'll tell you first, you think of a ghost, an apparition — not appearance, an apparition, you see the difference right away, something is happening. So Kant specifies now — I stop the suspense — the difference between phenomenon and appearance, says Kant, is that the phenomenon, Kant's definition, is the totality of the appearance. It's not the appearance, it's the appearance taken as a totality. You'll tell me, why announce that so solemnely, I don't see, where's the difference — but look, watch, here's a totality, I see the classroom here, I turn around, I see another totality — what makes the appearance have a totality, if not the subject contemplating it? In passing from appearance to the totality of appearance, from appearance to phenomenon, we pass from the object to the subject — it's each of us as subject that makes the appearance
41:18 able to have a totality, because in reality there is no totality, it's scattered — a totality, there's like a grain of sand in the Sahara, you know where? I often think, when there was dust in Niger, sand particles — it's been calculated that a Tuareg on average swallows about ten kilos of sand a year despite all those scarves, headwraps, etc. Well, so the real is inexhaustible, the real always overflows anything that would try to enclose it, empirical reality, physical reality, so it is never a totality, because a totality is something completed, you feel that well — this is a totality, a carafe, a plant is a totality, the roots, the stem, the flower, the organic world in Kant's Critique of Judgment expresses a totality. A pile of stones is not a totality, it's a plurality of stones, agreed, but it's no more total whether you put 5 or 6 or 7, it's still a pile of stones — you see the difference between a mechanical assemblage and an organic totality, the privilege of the living, and a fortiori of works of the spirit
42:28 a work of art, a house, a painting — you cannot, in a Monet painting, take 10 brushstrokes here and put them on the left — well, actually it's absolutely possible, we see such things today. The difference between phenomenon and appearance is that the phenomenon is the totality of the appearance. Now what makes an appearance become a whole, if not the fact that a subject contemplates it? When I faint, I annihilate the appearance the world had for me; when I fall asleep — so it's insofar as it is for a subject that the appearance can have a totality. I recall here, because I know some of you follow very meticulously, but others forget, and I understand, because it's hard to retain the abstraction — I had pointed out once that in Kant's table of categories, under the category of quantity, the way Kant proceeds for each category is thesis, antithesis, synthesis — no, we're not with Hegel, I'm talking about Kant's categories, Kant is not a dialectician — in the category of quantity
43:38 thesis: unity, one pebble; antithesis: plurality, eight pebbles; synthesis: bravo, totality. Totality is a plurality brought back to unity — that's what we just saw between us, but now we've seen that it's brought back to unity by a subject, by a perceiving subject, because, once again, the totality of a landscape I see — I turn around and see a house behind me, both are a totality — it's me who makes a scene into a whole each time. And now you understand that a whole is always uni-total, there's unity in the notion of a whole. So there, I wanted to insist on this evaporation of empirical reality in the passage from Angélique to Les Filles du feu, and to recover it, but as symbolic reality
Illusion is not error: Spinoza and Copernicus 44:48 that doesn't mean it doesn't exist — I'm not saying that the imaginary world is opposed to the real in the sense that it corresponds to no reality at all. Remember two Jews, Spinoza and Freud, there's something in common — I'm not enough of a specialist on Jewishness to know if it's due to the fact that they're Jewish, but well, Spinoza has, among the best things in him, a magnificent theory of error and especially of illusion, when he says that if the false consisted in making something exist that doesn't exist — for example, I say there's an angel there, and there isn't one, so I'm in the false — if that were it, says Spinoza, then the fact of expressing something false would be proof of a strength in man and not of a weakness, says Spinoza. That means we're like God, we manage to make things exist that don't exist — that wouldn't be proof of weakness, error. And since Spinoza isn't stupid, he says: so, when we're mistaken, it's that we're expressing reality well, we're incapable of expressing anything other than the real
45:58 but a real that is displaced — and that's a term that will come back under Freud's pen a few centuries later — a real, but one that is not in its place, agreed. When Nerval sees, coming out of the cathedral, 'I was able to admire, under a setting sun, the towers of the half-demolished Roman fortifications, covered with ivy' — when Nerval is sensitive to everything that expresses a decline in the setting around him, in the sunset, in autumn, in buildings threatened with ruin — it's not that this corresponds to no reality, it's the work, the problem of age, of aging — don't forget that in that scene he is an adult surrounded by little girls, whereas in the dream to which it's been compared, he is a child surrounded by three great ladies. There, I wanted to recall this: we do have to do with a reality, but one that is not in its place, exactly like
47:08 the pre-Copernican illusion — we're not saying the center doesn't exist, but it's not where we thought it was, it's not us who are the center; as far as the solar system is concerned, it's the sun, you see, and so we have to invert what we thought — that's the Copernican revolution, that's why I like the image of the turnaround, because it's harder — it's easier, sorry, to correct an error: 5 plus 7 equals 11, I do my accounts at the end of the day, I'm tired, I have a cup of coffee, I get 11 — nonsense, that's wrong, you need coffee — whereas, I'm at the center of the world, that's not a simple error, it's false like error, but moreover it's not due to chance, you see the difference, it's not a contingent cause like fatigue, it's that this falsehood is the inverse of the truth. It's not different — 5 plus 7 equals 14, that's wrong, it's 14, not 12 — here true differs from false, in the case of addition; whereas in the case
48:19 of the pre-Copernican illusion, true is the inverse of false. That means that to go from false to true, you need — a proper turnaround — a revolution, well. That's why it's harder — I repeat — it's easier to correct an error than to get rid of an illusion. And here I can bring in my last determination, I repeat: what makes it so that illusion is not simply an error is that, in illusion, first, the false is not merely different from the true, I repeat, it is exactly its inverse — but second determination, even more fascinating, where we find the subject again — in the case of illusion, the subject has an interest in the error, and that's why it's more difficult, much more difficult, because you have to struggle with yourself, the cause of the illusion is within ourselves. It is harder to root an illusion out of oneself than to correct a simple error — it's more advantageous to think of oneself as the center — and yes, I live in the center of Paris in my head, it's expensive, but yes, like thinking like a suburbanite
49:29 of the universe all the same — it's not very reassuring to think of oneself at the periphery. All physicists know that at the periphery of an atom's electrons, things start to become unstable, don't they — I may be putting it crudely but roughly that's it, it becomes ionized, right? Ionized, yes, on purpose, say it your way — for an atom to become an ion, it's the peripheral electrons that are the first to take off, roughly. Yes, that's — dividing? Yes — no, but it's true, the periphery is never very reassuring, maybe on the edges. And since we're there, I come back — I promised we'd come back to the text to rest a bit from the heavy abstractions I've asked of you — you'll see it's very useful to arrive at the concrete. If you look at the fourth letter, to which I often return but never for the same problem — that is, the letter where Nerval suddenly tells us we're going to stop looking for the book
The fourth letter: Angélique de Longueval and the mother 50:40 in Paris, the libraries and something of a jumble or a labyrinth with this fantastic, somewhat pre-Borgesian aspect, isn't it, of the labyrinth — to go take a tour outside Paris, and if possible to the northeast. There, 'I had the idea of going to the Archives of France' — there, we're still in Paris — 'where I was given the authentic genealogy of the Bucquoys; their family name is Longueval.' I had pointed out to you that as soon as you say Longueval, the last syllable 'Val' makes you think of Valois, of Gérard de Nerval, and in short of Chapelle-en-Serval — that doesn't exist there in Valois — and so we're already almost in his maternal region, aren't we, just from a surname — except that we learn here that it just so happens to be the surname of the abbé whose biography he's looking for while combing through the numerous files related to this family — you see how precise it is — 'I made one of the happiest finds.' Well, then he talks about Angélique's manuscript, I'll skip that, he stumbles onto something quite different from what was being sought — remember that, we stumble onto something other than what we were looking for, because we'll talk about finality later, I insist on it — we were looking for the biography
51:51 of his ancestor Angélique de Longueval, like that, and since he finds it interesting, for a young girl of that era, quite a daring thing etc., I'll read you — we still don't have the book we're looking for, meanwhile we're going to get treated to the story of the ancestor, aren't we, and we learn moreover that she is going to follow — some of you have read it, I hope more and more have read the novella, that's enough now — and you notice that Angélique is going to follow her husband on his military campaigns — doesn't that remind you of someone?
52:27 Nerval's mother, exactly — there are good readers here, ladies, make an effort — and yes, I told you that poor Nerval, his madness isn't entirely unrelated to this — his mother abandoned him as a nursing infant to go — she was so in love with her husband, I'm speaking African-style, so in love with her husband that she went to follow him on campaigns in Poland, in Russia, and it's there that she died and there that she is buried, in cold Silesia. It's terrible to be born under a constellation like that, put yourself in his place. So his character Angélique bears a curious resemblance — he didn't invent it, the 17th-century manuscript, you can consult it, for those interested, at the library of the Institut, one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, in one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the one on the Pont des Arts, you see, facing the Louvre — I wouldn't like to live in the Louvre, it's a bit crushing, I'd have nightmares at night, but exhausted, with the Mazarine across the way, if I could see it — that's nice, there's a little pavilion up top to listen to music, it's a dream — let's not stray. Anyway, you can consult it, it's a historical document, we're not in the imaginary here, except that if he's interested in it
The boundary where three regions meet 53:37 it's because there is a part of the imaginary — it's that he's projecting the figure of his mother onto it, this woman who abandons everything to follow this fellow — not very interesting, agreed, but there — so let's not stray, he speaks of her like that, and that's where a little paragraph begins, that's where I was getting to — I was saying earlier that we'd arrived at the periphery — I wouldn't want us to lose the thread, and why the periphery is an interesting notion, structurally interesting — the periphery, the edge, the limit, the border, border, grenze, granitsa, that's in Russian, good. A small text to hook us, the reader, because we've changed our target ten times now, you know this text — and now he wants to take us elsewhere again. 'Old provincial France is barely known on these sides, which, however, are part of the outskirts of Paris' — so you see, it's not a great expedition, I'm telling you, it's just a little trip, we can go there and come back in the evening — 'part of the outskirts of Paris, to the point' — listen carefully, we were talking about limits and peripheries — 'where the Île-de-France, the Valois, and Picardy meet' — it's not in the Valois
54:49 it's not in Picardy, it's not in Île-de-France, it's — this is the text, I repeat — 'to the point where the Île-de-France, the Valois, and Picardy meet, at their respective limits' — yes, there, where they meet, that's our surface from earlier, the sea that was like liquid gold — that doesn't exist, it's a limit. France exists, Germany too, the border between the two — from what point do you leave France for Germany? It's a point, a millimeter. You know there are inns like that in the Alps, you have a drink there at the bar, you're in France, you have it three meters further along the bar, you're in Italy — it's true, it exists — or in Switzerland, have you heard of that? No, I'm serious. In other words, well, the border is a space, that's why we create what's called no man's lands — at the time there were still two Germanys, I remember one of the regions where wildlife was most abundant was there, where the Wall was — obviously nobody ventured there, there were mines, whatever you like, so there were rabbits everywhere, there were deer, I swear, you're safe there
56:00 the animals — I'm talking about the notion of limit, of border, of edge. You know, when we did Racine's Phèdre, I pointed out to you that every time Racine evokes shores, it's always the sign of a peril: 'What charm drew her to these dreaded shores, since rumor has it that Theseus has gone to the god of the dead to dishonor his bed' — as we say, to go 'play the Corsican,' to go fetch a wife for the god of the dead — 'what charm drew her to these dreaded shores' — there are no dreaded shores just because it's a shore, it's dreadful — what I'm saying is, what is a shore, first of all it's slippery, I'm serious, a shore is slippery — look at the extraordinary beginning of the great prose narrative that's practically contemporary with Angélique, since it's in the last five years of his life that Nerval ventures into the long prose narrative — never mind, because there I can't manage
An edge is slippery: the Lorelei 57:10 to see it, I'll stop here — anyway it's a whole description, remember, the Lorelei, it's easy to remember, it's easy to see when you're in front of your computer, the very first paragraph of the novella where he describes this fairy who is on the slippery rocks of the Lorelei — that's why I know the Lorelei is this fairy, whose legend says that by her songs — the eternal myth of the siren — she lured the boatmen of the Rhine, whose barges would smash on the rock still called today the Lorelei rock, near Koblenz in Rhineland. 'My glass is full of a trembling wine like a flame, listen to the slow song of the boatman who claims to have seen, toward the Rhine, seven women twisting their hair, long and green, down to their feet — the Rhine, the Rhine is drunk — the vines mirror themselves — all the gold of the nights falls trembling to be reflected there — my glass has shattered like a burst of laughter' — who's that?
58:03 Sorry? Apollinaire, bravo, bravo, thank you, that's nice, Apollinaire, 'Nuit rhénane' — you see how fertile the Lorelei myth is, and all German schoolchildren have learned this poem by Heine, the marvelous Heine, the only one of the German Romantics who has an unbridled sense of humor, along with Jean Paul — Heine's most famous poem is precisely the Lorelei. Now here we have an author, Nerval, who says 'I dreamed in the grotto where the siren swims' — so all this is shore myths, you know, the nixies, the sirens, the ondines, they frolic on shores, Wagner's three Rhinemaidens are always on a shore. So why is a shore structurally dangerous?
58:55 because it's a switching, as they say in computing, you see — if it's a cliff, the edge of the cliff is the passage from the horizontal to the vertical; if it's the bank of a river, it's the passage from the still to the fluid — if you don't tell the difference, you risk drowning. So we're always, aren't we, dealing with the notion of edge, of limit, of passage from one extreme to another — there I'm no longer in the frontiers, in frontiers it's not as obvious, that thermal question — there, with the notion of edge and the peril that is immanent to it, and which, as it happens, every poetic exploitation, in the deep sense of the term, of the notion of edge takes up again — there, there's always a peril. It's always on the shores of the sea that opera heroines die, this has been noted — there's Catherine Backès-Clément, I believe, a philosophy specialist, who wrote a rather interesting book called L'Opéra, ou la femme assassinée — all opera composers make their heroines die — Carmen
The heroines die at the edge: from opera to Ariadne 1:00:05 speaking of Carmen, I'm scandalized by a certain kind of feminism — otherwise all the others, I embrace all the feminisms, but that one — you know some want to censor the ending of Carmen because Carmen is killed by Don José. Yes, at first they wanted to change it, and it's actually gone as far as an inversion — which is monstrous — it's not a problem to kill a guy, that's fantastic, yes, but it's not normal for a woman to be killed at the end of the opera — it's common in the Mediterranean to have the unfaithful woman murdered etc., in the imaginary, in narratives, that's all there is — 'and besides she asked for it,' I'm talking like a macho, well anyway, it's the heritage, and now there are some who want to change the heritage, they don't want you to inherit your legitimate legacy — well really, monstrous — soon we'll be correcting Plato, honestly, what is this business — I'll stop getting worked up. So yes, L'Opéra, ou la femme assassinée — with Carmen, but let's start with Tristan, that's still the most frenetically exacerbated love story
1:01:15 ever written, to the point that Wagner said, luckily we play my Tristan badly, it's performed badly, executed badly musically, and stage directors don't know how to stage it — luckily, he said, because if it were performed as I would want, people would go mad. That's nice. So Isolde, she dies, you know, before the sea, with Tristan's corpse on her lap, dreaming that he's awake and that she's the only one who can hear his song — it's magnificent, she dies. Take three centuries earlier, the admirable death of Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas — well, Dido is the Carthaginian princess who dies before the Gulf of Syrtes' sea since Aeneas has fled — it's not Aeneas who's unfaithful, like all men, he left for Rome, he had a bit of fun for a moment, then he left for Rome, he's no fool, a great destiny awaits him, you'd think, with a Punic princess. Madame Butterfly, who dies of grief because the little Japanese girl — because her American, likewise, had fun for a while and then leaves, goes back to Texas, the bastard — and it's magnificent, that makes for a final aria — L'Opéra, ou la femme assassinée — but it's on a shore every time, you see, to add to the tragedy
1:02:27 of it — and of course the most emblematic example in mythology, she doesn't die at one moment, she's going to die, she's at the last moment, she is — I'll guide you — the one who had a grief that was going to make her die of sorrow on a famous shore, Ariadne: 'my sister, wounded by what love did you die on the shore where you were left, abandoned by faithless Theseus?' And yet, well, really, if Theseus is still alive when he lands at Naxos with Ariadne, it's because she saved his skin — without her he'd have been devoured by the Minotaur — well it's really she who gave him the thread trick etc. — where would we be without women, good lord, we wouldn't get far in the labyrinth — and Phèdre, the labyrinth, with you gone down, would be with you found again or lost, it's magnificent, it's easy — she saved his skin, and you can tell how grateful he was at the very first island he lands at, because in those days you couldn't sail very long without navigating, finding your bearings etc., at Naxos — Ariadne, at Naxos, oh dear, we forgot Ariadne, that
1:03:37 and then he becomes a maniac about forgetting, because afterward he forgets to put up the white sail, you know, and so his father commits suicide from a distance, seeing the black sail, believing his son has been lost, devoured by the Minotaur — he becomes, repetition, he repeats the amnesia, I don't know what happened at the bottom of the labyrinth between the Minotaur and Theseus, but ever since, something has been gained, something has happened in Theseus's mentality that multiplies fatal bouts of amnesia — but well, it turned out fine for Ariadne in mythology, since at the moment she's about to die of grief on the shores of Naxos, who shows up?
Nerval recovers his voice on the banks of the Rhine 1:04:12 Dionysus, I'm hanging in there with you — yes, Dionysus, not bad, the god, the god of intoxication himself, who comes to tell her, don't worry about that, my girl, I'll give you others — well yes, after all, having Dionysus as a partner, and in the sky you have the constellation of Bacchus and Ariadne, it's a constellation now, she's saved — it's all about shores, I insist a lot today. Now, I repeat, 'to the point where the Île-de-France, Picardy, and the Valois meet' — I had read you the letter he writes at the same time as he writes this novella, when he arrives at Strasbourg — it had been a long time since he had traveled, you know it's the period of his most severe fits of madness, and there's a kind of rhythm that sets in — when he's doing better he travels, travel revives his literary fecundity, there's a very beautiful dialectic — and he writes this magnificent letter to Jules Janin, 'Dear friend, from Strasbourg'
1:05:11 as it happens, a border zone — 'Dear friend' — 'last night, finding again the banks of the Rhine, I found my voice and my faculties again' — and it's underlined, voice and faculties — 'I no longer lodge at the Corbeau' — that was sinister, a pun, there's a Corbeau [Raven] quarter in Strasbourg, he was at the Hôtel du Corbeau — 'I no longer lodge at the Hôtel du Corbeau but at the Hôtel de la Fleur' — long extinguished — and long, yes, extinguished — 'I felt myself flaming up again with the sun of my finest days' — all that thanks to the magic of travel, but on arriving at a shore — 'last night, touching the banks of the Rhine, I found my voice and my faculties again'
1:05:48 you see, I'm saying that Nerval seeks out danger, in other words that — we said earlier, when are you in France, when are you in Germany, down to a millimeter, abstractly — this has been studied by geopoliticians, the modern notion of the abstract border dates from Descartes's time, I mean, before, there were rivers, mountains, one knew roughly that behind the mountains was another world, but the abstract, modern notion of border is recent. Now for Nerval, precisely, borders, shores, are spaces — it's not a limit that you quickly cross with a step or a visa on a passport, it's spaces, it's a whole space. So there, I wanted to dwell a little on this notion of border, and I insist on another division — the rivers, since we're talking about borders, you see, he always seduces us by saying old provincial France is barely known — there, at the point where
1:07:01 the Île-de-France, the Valois, and Picardy meet — I know, yes, I've already told you, but I continue — divided by — now we'll see the borders — the Oise and the Aisne with their slow and peaceful course. So I repeat the whole sentence to understand the fall, look how beautiful it is: 'old provincial France is barely known on these sides, which, however, are part of the outskirts of Paris, to the point where the Île-de-France, the Valois, and Picardy meet, divided by the Oise and the Aisne with their slow and peaceful course; one may dream of the most beautiful pastoral idylls in the world on its borders and its shores' — all of a sudden something appears — 'the language of the peasants themselves is of the purest French, barely altered by a pronunciation in which the endings of words rise to the sky in the manner of children's speech, this forms a kind of warbling; there is also in the turns of phrase something Italian' — it's a strange space, we're at the heart of France but there's something Italian in the turns of phrase, 'which no doubt is due to the long stay made by the Medicis and their Florentine retinue in these regions, once divided into royal and princely appanages.' I arrived
1:08:12 last night at Compiègne, pursuing the Bucquoys in every form with that slow obstinacy which is natural to me — he sums up his way of proceeding a little, 'that slow obstinacy which is natural to me' — one has the impression, for those who know it, of hearing a rhythm of muffled wandering, of walking, which is exactly the music of Schubert — Schubert wrote the Wanderer Fantasy — often in Schubert, even those who don't know Schubert but who know Kubrick, and thanks to Kubrick know Barry Lyndon, it's a walking rhythm, it's the Schubert rhythm, the rhythm of the Wanderer, the traveler, it's magical — you find it, for those interested, in the second movement of his last symphony, a symphony we wouldn't even know if — it's the greatest symphony of musical Romanticism, that's not me saying it, that's the musicologist — if brave Schumann hadn't gone to look around after Schubert's death, who died at 31, at his brother's place — there were manuscripts up in the attic and all sorts of things, that's how we came across the most gigantic symphony of musical Romanticism, we are but small things — and in that second movement
1:09:22 there's the same thing with the strings, you need a bit of walking. So I'm saying that this walk, this wandering, this journey on which Nerval spends his time taking us along — I'm playing on words deliberately with the slangy, almost slangy sense — the guy who takes you for a ride is the shady guy, isn't he — well, so where is it to go? It's not to arrive at a center, it's not to go from Paris to Brussels, it's to arrive as at a clearing, a place where suddenly one is de-situated, where one is at the boundary of several hearths, so where one is everywhere and nowhere at once. And since I'm speaking of the slangy use of the word 'embarked,' I'll point out that when he says 'it's All Souls' Day that I write to you,' you know, I had read you this passage before, pardon, these melancholy thoughts, I had quoted it to note
The Embarkation for Cythera: from Watteau to Baudelaire 1:10:32 that it was a bit strange that he should have to apologize — because he apologizes for being melancholy on All Souls' Day, I won't go back over it, we saw that it's because Romanticism had gone out of fashion, let's go with that — but he adds: 'The Embarkation for Cythera by Watteau was conceived in the transparent, colored mists of this country' — it's a Cythera modeled on one of its little islands, modeled on the ponds of the Oise and the Aisne, their slow, slow-flowing rivers — you see, so the painting that comes to mind as a reference when he speaks of this misty Valois landscape is the Embarkation for Cythera — Cythera is a Greek island, it's anything but misty, it's the clear Mediterranean light where the contrasts are strongly marked, that light which the Impressionists went looking for, to flee Impressionism the Post-Impressionists, since Van Gogh went to Arles, you agree, the light is not blurred, with a mistral gust, Cézanne, Aix-en-Provence, thank you — Gauguin, he first joined Van Gogh in Arles, isn't it, where he painted
1:11:42 a few paintings of his early manner, and then went straight to Tahiti — there it's not the mists of the Valois — except that his last painting, what is it, Gauguin's, I'm not straying from the subject, you'll see — you know, in Tahiti, before dying, what does he paint? A Breton village under snow. When I tell you that we live in representation — what do you lack in Tahiti, we all have on hand a Breton village under snow. It's the era when Rimbaud writes 'Le Bateau ivre,' where he roams the seas of the whole world, up to saying 'Or moi' — from that 'or' there's a turning point in the poem, since there it becomes triumphant — 'Now I, lost boat under the hair of the coves, thrown by the hurricane into the birdless ether, I whom the Monitors and the sailing ships of the Hanse would not have fished back, the drunken carcass, water-drunk, smoking, risen from violet mist, I who pierced the reddening sky like a wall bearing exquisite jam for good poets' — it took Rimbaud to write phrases like that, 'lichens of sun and snot of azure'
1:12:52 snot and azure had never been paired before Rimbaud in a poet — 'I who... I who,' I'm skipping a few passages, 'I who trembled, feeling groan fifty leagues off the rut of Behemoths and thick maelstroms, eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I regret Europe with its ancient parapets' — ah, there he is, my reader — yes, 'I regret Europe with its ancient parapets,' oh my, what a turn — there was the sea, the wind, the ebb tides, the swells, and then the parapet, nothing more immobile, more mineral — suddenly, 'I regret Europe with its ancient parapets,' it's the same back-and-forth movement — if you read Hölderlin you'll see this up close, one could say that parapets are slippery, bravo, especially in this season — I think of the ruins of Carcassonne, well, of the well-restored ruins anyway — there, that's true. So the fact that he thinks of the voyage to Cythera
1:14:02 Of Watteau then, the painting by Watteau — it's true that he's more pre-impressionist than Mediterranean. If you know the painting, there are several variants, there's one at the Louvre, there's also one at the Guggenheim in New York, there's one at the Städel Gallery — there are three that Watteau made. Each of the three, of course, but each time there's the common feature: you have dreamlike figures, those of the fêtes galantes, their short coat-tails, their soft blue shadows — I don't quite remember the Verlaine poem — whirling in the ecstasy of a pink and grey moon, and the mandolin chatters amid the shivers of the breeze. It's fluid, Verlaine setting off like that; there's a boat waiting for them below, toward the times, a landing stage toward an island, an island that could perfectly well be in the Oise in Watteau, and a golden sky, a golden background — it's death, it's so beautiful it can only be the beyond. Now Baudelaire wrote a poem called 'Embarkation for Cythera' — if you look closely, in Les Fleurs du Mal, I don't know who it begins with — happiness, the ship was gliding under a cloudless sky like an angel intoxicated by radiant happiness, etc. — a beautiful day of sailing.
1:15:12 'What is this sad, black island? It is Cythera, we are told.' Oh dear, the tone changes — 'a banal eldorado for all old bachelors.' It's in the poem, isn't it — yes, Cythera, the island of Cythera, of Venus, of love, of glitter everywhere, whatever you like. Yes, it seems there are islands for 'homo' in Greek, there are islands for... yes there are islands for that sort of thing, that's what's wanted, for all the LGBT crowd there are a thousand, and Mykonos I believe — look. After all, it's a poor land, adds Baudelaire, and what does he see on the island, when we were supposed to think of things connoted with Venus, gallant things? And Baudelaire says — he begins by saying what it was not: 'It was not the temple with shady bowers, where the young priestess in love with flowers went about, her body burning with secret heat, half-opening her robe to the passing breezes' — no. What does he see, you know it, it's a well-known poem from Les Fleurs du Mal all the same, Tristan, I know you have great Baudelaire — you've forgotten this poem, which was one of the condemned pieces — being a passerby, in the... bravo, a hanged man, a gallows, a gallows on the island.
1:16:22 There's a gallows because it was occupied by the Turks at the time — some fellow who had done something, it didn't take much to annoy the Sublime Porte — and he sees a gallows. There's a passage where Baudelaire — the heavy intestines were flowing down his thighs — he spares us no detail at all. We set off for love, we arrived at death. You see, I'm not straying off the subject. Now Nerval — this greeting was inspired by a passage from the Voyage to the Orient by Gérard de Nerval, where Nerval sails past Cythera. He says, 'At last, Cythera, we dreamed of it,' and he sees the gallows. So there you have it — think about this business of limits, of boundaries, conceived this time not as a line, not as a limit in mathematics, but as a space. Again, I don't know much about it, but I don't know, Thomas, there may be moments in Cantor's axiom where it wanders like that, the limit — still, closed intervals, open intervals, things like that, I find that very interesting but I don't know much about it — you have to construct the reals for that, it's far too complicated.
1:17:32 And so there you have it, and again, try to grasp the dialectical side of this notion of limit, of edge, which has this passage of a thing into its opposite. We saw it for the cliff, from the horizontal to the vertical, from the immobile to the fluid, etc. Now that I've insisted enough with all my examples to show that the real — the empirical real, the real in which we move about, in which we live, the realistic real which we've seen is not really real in itself, but is the phenomenon — that we're well agreed between ourselves — has evaporated, has become phenomenalized in the angelic passage of the young girls, where Nerval retains only the surface, onto which he can project his fantasy of decline, for example in the passage we saw earlier. In other words, there's no fundamental difference between the ontological status of the dream and the ontological status of Senlis as seen by Nerval on an autumn afternoon. That's what I'm in the process of saying. From there, one can — I told you it's a great ambition — take up again the great hope of refounding...
Refounding the human sciences on the predictability of the text 1:18:42 ...the human sciences, the social sciences — I'm not a socialist, call it whatever you like, I'm not a fetishist of the signifier — on solid grounds, I mean I'm going to slide a bit into this, I say it very seriously now. Serious scientificity, everyone agrees, is achieved with the so-called natural sciences, the hard sciences, the exact sciences — it depends a bit on the period, but in any case their field of application — I'm not talking about mathematics, which apply to nothing but which we apply to everything, sorry, I mean they don't need to be applied in order to be mathematics, but we can apply them to everything — their field of application is nature in the physical sense, in the general sense, insofar as chemistry, biology, biomechanics are part of it. On the other hand, everything that is opposed to it — again, I'm not a fetishist, call it culture if you're following Lévi-Strauss's nature/culture, spirit in Hegel — spirit, praxis, history, it's all the same to me, it turns around man, what is opposed to nature — there, on the other hand, scientificity, there wasn't any.
1:19:52 Well, for a long time we didn't even ask the question. There was one — there was a scientificity that explained human behavior, but it was entrusted to religion. Under the Ancien Régime, until the end of the Ancien Régime, it's religion that explains what's wrong with man — for example, it's because of original sin that this or that happens, in the Christian religion. There are others, there are founding myths in all religions that explain why human life became shorter. You know, if you have Le Cru et le Cuit by Lévi-Strauss, you'll have a treat seeing how the Amazon Indians explain why human life became shorter. You know why it became shorter? I'll go quickly because time is short — when the hero, the young hero in the sense of myth narratives, managed to steal the art of making fire from the jaguar, who had previously been the master of fire — that's why he eats raw food now, and he no longer has fire, since he gave it to us, so he took it — there's a logic in savage thought — when the young man took fire from the jaguar and rushed off quickly to his village to bring it...
1:21:02 ...to his village and thus to humanity. The benevolent jaguar had told him at the outset: watch out, in the forest you'll hear three calls, four calls from four trees — the trees speak in the animate, animist world — so you answer, because you have to be polite, to the tree, to the jatoba — these are plant names — but there's one tree you must not answer: the call of the rotten wood. There's a very well-known tree — it's not — you know, it's like that, and water flows from it; when you can't find water anymore in the Amazon, it's fresh water, it's a wood so moist that it's called rotten wood, that's a translation. You don't answer the call of the rotten wood, all right? And the child goes off, he hears the three calls, he answers them, and he cracks when he hears the call of the rotten wood — it must be an incomparable music, the call of the rotten wood, because the kid cracked. It's since that time that human life has been measured, because he gave in to the call of the wood. It's beautiful — you mustn't listen — what were we saying earlier about the Lorelei, who with her songs wrecks us on the — you see, there are sounds one must not hear, there's music too beautiful, like Wagner's.
1:22:12 Fortunately it's played badly, that music, otherwise it would drive you mad. So our great ambition — there's a logic in the things of nature, and there's madness in human affairs. All the moralists for centuries — what madness, truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other; someone who's a criminal here is no longer one there — it's human affairs, it's varied, it's capricious, there's no rationality in human things. The real is rational in nature, but it isn't in human affairs — that's what was thought until the end of the Ancien Régime. You see, I'm making you gauge the stakes of this comparison of texts we've made, because by showing that Nerval's text has a predictability equal to that of eclipses in astronomy — I'll give another demonstration, it's not modesty, I don't say demonstration but well, you'll see, it's hard to be more convincing than his text — there is thus, in what is apparently the work of fantasy par excellence, the writing of imagination, of creation, of the arbitrary, something rational, as Frazer says — you know Frazer, an anthropologist specializing in Oceania, well, one of the best known...
Natural determinism and historical determinism 1:23:23 ...before Lévi-Strauss, in the field of Oceania — he had said that phrase which Lévi-Strauss places as an epigraph to his works, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship: if there are laws somewhere, it's because there are laws everywhere. That's interesting for determinism, we're getting there — I'm saying that there's also a determinism in human affairs. Someone would say: wait a minute, you have bad news there — I thought you were telling us that the postulate of all philosophy is freedom, because if there's no freedom, there's no point in asking the question 'what must I do.' Good, you know your lesson, I'm delighted, and I maintain that, as Kant says, freedom is a postulate of practical reason — if we're not free, there's no point looking for what we ought to do, since we won't be able to do it, since we're not free to do it. So what — now you're telling us we're determined even when we dream, even when we write, even when I write my little novel — after all I have the right to invent, to produce images — no, all that is determined? Wait — two determinisms, good news. The determinism of nature: the earth makes the moon revolve around it...
1:24:33 ...by its mass — I say 'makes,' it's a metaphor, but I'm not doing equations, so I'm forced to speak natural language which is metaphorical, there you are — a relation of force, it's the case to say it, it's not — the earth's force of gravity excludes the possibility that the moon escapes its gravity. So that's a determinism which is opposed notably to freedom — the moon doesn't have the freedom to go take a little turn around Saturn. On the other hand, when I — when I respect the red light, I obey a law, I'm not saying I do as I please, it's not caprice, but it's not a law like the earth-moon revolving around the earth. You see the difference clearly — the difference is that I can criticize the red light at two in the morning when there's no cop — no, you shouldn't do it, but I mean, that's the big difference — there's no opposite in natural determination, the opposite is impossible. I cannot live without eating, I must eat in order to live — that owes nothing to culture, nothing to the symbolic order — there we're not on the surface, we're in the very depths, at the back of it all.
1:25:43 'The man who is hungry is not a free man,' said the founder of Ivory Coast's independence, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who was a great reactionary besides, but anyway, I mean, it's a beautiful phrase — it could only have come from an African, reactionary though he was, whatever his origins. I say that because when you're a teacher you always get the president's phrase of the day when you enter the classroom over there, so I've seen it 327 times — after this phrase it's always the class monitor — 'the man who is hungry is not a free man,' that's quite true. And so, I cannot live without eating — one must not say 'I must eat in order to live,' as if it depended on me, as if I set that for myself as a moral imperative — no, I cannot live without eating, it's not a duty, it's a capacity. On the other hand — I cannot live, not I must not, but I can. So, good news, you have a determinism that can be circumvented — you guess I'm alluding to Rousseau's extraordinary sentence in Émile: what men have made, men can destroy; there is no ineradicable character except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither rich...
1:26:54 ...nor prince, nor great lord. I'm saying that if there are historical, class determinations, things opposed to nature, we can undo them — I don't know, I didn't say it's enough just to do it — look at the status of women, I won't deal with it today, there's no time, I'll never deal with it, I don't know if I'm well placed — Samuel, you're late, you wanted to arrive discreetly but there was no question — hello and happy new year again, François. Look, I'm all for emancipated woman, liberated woman, I'm the first to be for it — but that doesn't happen overnight, the weight of millennia is terrible. I see it at home in Corsica still, the weight of habits — in Bastia it's fine, but in a village, if I talk with a girl from the village, people will say 'who's that, where's he from' — you see, that's why women flee — Brittany, Corsica — to go to Marseille, to Paris, to be left alone a bit, I understand them. There, it's very slow, customs change but it's possible, it's not physico-chemical determinism. There's the good news — so there are two determinisms, enough of opposing determinism...
1:28:04 ...to freedom by treating determinism as something homogeneous — natural determinism, Y equals F of X, you can't do anything against that. And then there's 'I must pay the taille, the gabelle to the Lord' — well, that can change, especially if several of us set about it together. There you have some good news anyway. There are 20 minutes left for questions — I've eaten into the question time by 10 minutes, I don't want to abuse it, so I'll hand the floor back to you; if I have anything more to say, I'll say it while answering your questions. All right, let's end on good news — the determinism we've highlighted thanks to Nerval, I mean, and which we'll illustrate again next time because we haven't finished with the short story — it's not an implacable determinism — ah, in the sense of the pays de marche, yes, where does...
The marches: Ukraine, the Balkans, the Eurasian plain 1:29:14 ...the title of marquis in the nobility come from? The marquis originally is the one who guarded the frontier, is that right? Yes, I know it, because of 'negro in equitable marquis' — yes, marquis is the one who holds the march, indeed, and there are still provinces in Italy — that's the case — but also in Germany, the notion of march comes from holding what serves as a border. And the question is what? No, it's not a question — but does that mean these are regions that have always been absolutely — well, you're righter than you think, since let's take a hot country currently in geopolitics, Ukraine — does anyone know a bit about the etymology of the name Ukraine? I'm talking politics, I'm talking about the etymology of Ukraine, what does it mean?
1:30:03 What does it connote? Ukraine — the border. I don't want to take sides between the two parties, but anyway, it's not like old France or Great Britain, it's a region that has never been clearly defined, it's the border. That means, from there — are we in Russia? Are we in Poland? Are we in Moldova? Are we... it's a passageway, and so it's a place of conflict. Indeed, I'm thinking again of the Balkans, still to follow up on your remark about the march, which is excellent — about the Balkans, why?
1:30:43 Because the Balkans are a region of fracture — it's through the Balkans that one passes from Asia to Europe, from the Middle East to Europe. It's through the Balkans that one passes from Islam — you know there's a Muslim country at the heart of Europe, it's Bosnia — I'm not inventing anything — pardon? — And Albania — you're taking the words out of my mouth — and Albania even more so, of course — yes, 100%, almost, which are remnants of the powerful Ottoman Empire that reached as far as Vienna — hence the Turkish March by Mozart, you know, and hence the croissants, you know all that, the croissants are the crescent of Islam, called 'viennoiseries' because there were banners at the gates of Vienna, the banners of the Muslim armies, before the Polish routed them. So they had a scare, the Austrians, so they make fun of it afterward — Turkish march, turquerie, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart — well, they had a close call. Frontier, these are border countries, all that, Central Europe moreover — the center in general, you know, from — there's a film...
1:31:55 ...called 'Un soir, un train' — do you know that? No — with Yves Montand, who is a very bad actor except when directed by great filmmakers. I like him as a singer, but as an actor he's really bad — but here he's good. It's Delvaux — Delvaux, he made very few films, you don't know Delvaux — I'm not a film buff, but he should interest me — a few of you know the Belgian filmmaker, oh, extraordinary — listen, there aren't many filmmakers who have put three Gracq texts to screen — the Rendezvous of Cophetua, no, the Rendezvous at Bray, King Cophetua — Belle, which takes place in the Ardennes, it's a Belgian one — and no, it's not him, the third one, it's not him — it's A Balcony in the Forest, that's not him either. Well, so why — why am I talking about it — because in this film, Un soir, un train, it's a film where everything is a flashback from a train accident — someone passes out, there's a fainting spell, and the whole film is a flashback. Now while he's a bit between waking and fainting, we hear voices in the compartment, in the train...
1:33:05 ...people who are like that, the train is stopped in open country, there's been an accident, he hears a voice that says — and there begins a voice, entirely realistic, speaking to another interlocutor — 'there begins a plain' — we're in Belgium — Belgium and Holland, it's the flat country — 'there begins a plain that doesn't stop until Siberia' — it becomes fantastical, and it's true geographically, if you look closely, the Ch'ti country and us, Artois, the plains of the north, there between Beauvais and the sea, are the last shrunken, the last centimeters on the map of the kilometers of the immense, hyper-fertile Eurasian plain, it's loess lands, they come all the way from China, like that, the wheat fields of Artois — people fought all through the Middle Ages over who would take the wheat fields of Artois, the accursed kings, etc. There, so the marches — yes, the Balkans, indeed — what did I say — between Islam and the West, between Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Islam — the Croats are Catholic, the Serbs are Orthodox, the Bosnians and almost all the Albanians are Muslim — it's rare, countries like that — and it's from there...
France, a country where one stops 1:34:15 ...that the war of 1914 started, no less, from that region. Still now it's a place of drug and arms trafficking, since it's on the route of the Golden Triangle — the opium comes from there, from Thailand, from Burma, and it passes through there to reach you, bunch of junkies — the bulk of the market is in the rich countries, that's what I mean — so that's where the arms trafficking is, as it happens it's always the same places, the marches. You see it's not clear-cut as soon as you dwell a bit on these regions. Yes, so think hard about the notion of a border, even if there are borders more border-like than others — one is always someone's border. But then, a country like France, why did almost all those who crossed it say 'and what if we stopped here'? Well look, Burgundy, it's a rich province, we're at the heart of France, Burgundy couldn't be more French — Burgundy comes from the Burgundians, the Burgundians are a Germanic tribe; when they arrived there, they saw the Saône, a dream, a calm, navigable river, superb girls...
1:35:25 ...a cuisine, wines, meat — it's incredible, the Charolais cattle are right there, we're stopping here, we're digging in, we stop pillaging. Yes, I'll speed up, but that's roughly it — the Vikings, when they saw Normandy, same thing — yes, it's true, the Calvados, the Isigny butter — no but it's what, superb girls everywhere, super girls everywhere, almost as much as in Paris. The greatest political stroke of genius by French sovereigns is the kings of France of the early Middle Ages who said to the Vikings: 'Listen, you want Normandy, you keep it, we're handing it to you — I'm the sovereign over this, but I'm leaving it to you, you're still my vassal, but you protect us against your cousins for the next invasion' — and it's held to this day, that's quite a good deal all the same. There, yes, a question, barely, but I'll ask it anyway because I think it would have a small connection — it's the following question, I think that...
Repetition and liberation: Ithaca and the Abbé de Bucquoy 1:36:35 ...in the account you give of Nerval's journey as told in Angélique, there's the idea that it's about not going all the way to the detour toward Mortefontaine and toward the sea — R.E. this time — to find a kind of path toward the political, symbolized by Rousseau — is that a fair summary — what we're conceptualizing is, on one side, a kind of seduction which would be the seduction, a bit, of the deadly sirens — quite so — and hence a relation to Ulysses, in a way, with repetition, and facing which — well, an alternative path in relation to which the alternative is thus Rousseau — but wait, you see it doesn't seem straightforward like that. Well, you've certainly made up for your lateness with a question like that — wait, I have a story — it's a bit like the revolution, a bit republican, and it's always — that doesn't seem, it's not really associated with seduction at first glance. The question is the following: is it ultimately the case that the path implicitly proposed in Nerval, and as you restore it, isn't about revisiting the aesthetic that would correspond to the republican project, and for that...
1:37:45 ...I'm connecting it to what you just said, which is in fact an aesthetic — not quite, well, a popular aesthetic — which is rooted in Aubrac beef and up through the folk dances but which would lead to Bach — I'm connecting it with a little video, we're in agreement, and I know, I know you don't turn your nose up at Aubrac beef — no, quite so — you're telling me there's a small relation between the popular bourrée and certain compositions by Bach, so isn't your point an invitation — yes, yes — to popular aesthetics, a bit like Aragon in La Diane française, on gallant poetry and all that — yes, and even other poems apart from La Diane française — quite so, and Aragon makes much of Nerval, by the way, as it happens. Well, thank you for your question, it's not a figure of speech, it's really a question that comes right on cue, because if you're to forget everything, and if you want to come back to Angélique, to my remarks on Angélique, it's just been summarized by Samuel — I told you from the very start of this series that it continues my series on repetition toward liberation from the previous year, that is, the going round in circles of Ulysses in the great O, the Omega of the Odyssey, which goes from Ithaca to Ithaca...
1:38:55 ...and from carnage to carnage, if you remember well — an attempt to get out of it thanks to the wings of the engineer Daedalus, thanks to the wings of the engineer R. Daedalus, one escapes the cycle of the engineer Ulysses, of repetition — I'm summing up — the short story is structured exactly as you say, and moreover I have time, yes — moreover, the very last lines of the short story, because Nerval — Nerval is too discreet to say, like Joyce with a title, Ulysses, isn't it — in Dublin — the end!
1:39:38 It's the steel of Ulysses — it's Joyce's most famous novel, which I recommend — but at the end, after that, it's over, it's Sylvie, it's the end. It's a curious dialogue between the author and an imaginary voice, which is visibly the reader, who's had enough, who's exasperated, who's exhausted — we're reaching the end of the short story, and we still don't have the book. The author. And then, 'thus it is that Diderot' — how, is it a tale, I'll be told? — go on, still — the reader who's had enough.
1:40:08 'You have imitated Diderot himself, who had imitated Sterne, who had imitated Swift, who had imitated Rabelais' — it's a comic device, going back in time, you see, the authors, each one imitated another. 'Who had imitated Merlin Coccaie, who had imitated Petronius,' the great Latin author of the decadence. 'Who had imitated Lucian,' the Greek poet. 'And Lucian had imitated many others' — Nerval waits for the last page to tell us this — 'unless it were the author of the Odyssey.' And the term is underlined, the Odyssey. It's true that Odisseo is Ulysses' name in Greek.
1:40:38 '...unless it were the author of the Odyssey, who has his hero wander for ten years around the Mediterranean.' That means, you're getting impatient, after 80 pages of my story — Ulysses, it took twenty years, ten years of war plus ten years of sailing around the Mediterranean. So be a little patient. That's for your story, which almost deliberately avoids reaching its goal. 'Unless it were the author of the Odyssey, who has his hero wander for ten years around the Mediterranean, in order to finally lead him to that fabulous Ithaca.'
1:41:08 'Ithaca becomes the object of a fable.' It's, yes, as I was saying earlier, it's the imaginary, it's not the real — that doesn't mean it's nothing, but it belongs to the order of fable. '...that fabulous Ithaca whose queen, surrounded by some fifty suitors, undid each night what she had woven during the day. But Ulysses did finally find Ithaca again,' continues the impatient reader. 'And I found the Abbé de Bucquoy,' answers Nerval. Mathematical proof, in any case hyper-logical, that Nerval equates the Abbé de Bucquoy, the book we're searching for, with the equivalent of Ithaca for Ulysses.
1:41:41 That's the end of the quest. And just as Ulysses isn't exactly in a hurry to go back to watching television in the evening next to Penelope — no, no, I'm not being crude, I mean, it's the eternal husband, it's the title of a Dostoevsky novel — and besides, women have every right to be bored at least as much next to their man as the man is. That's not the point. In any case, he's not in a hurry, Ulysses, apparently. And on the other hand, he's very pleased each time he makes a stop-over, on an island, a new stage, to find there a woman, a beach, until some danger drives him away.
1:42:17 Until carnage catches up with him. So — but Ulysses did finally find, he found the Abbé de Bucquoy. 'Speak of it.' 'I've done nothing else for a month.' He tells us everything, isn't that the last page — 'I do nothing other than what Homer tells you in the Odyssey.' The readers must already be exhausted. It's a curious way to end, this ending that doesn't end like that, you see. So that answers your question well, yes. I'll sum it up now very clearly in case you're getting lost, but it's going to be abstract, this summary.
Two determinations, Mortefontaine and Rousseau's tomb 1:42:48 And I spend my time detailing it, giving it flesh and blood. We all have two ends in life. A determination — I was there — the two determined things. A determination against which it's hard to fight, which is tied to our birth constellation, so to speak. I include in it both heredity — there, I can do nothing about it, I said it earlier, it's nature, I wasn't born with green eyes — heredity, and inheritance, another determination. Now that's different — I can do something, I can assimilate it, I can on the contrary rebel against it, I can squander it, I can cultivate it and expand it.
1:43:22 That's inheritance, it's not heredity, never confuse the two. Today I spoke of it about Carmen earlier, where there's a question of tampering with our inheritance, all the same. So we all have our personal constellation made up of two things, of nature and non-nature. And besides that, we have a collective trajectory — I mean of relation to the other, to begin at the most elementary level.
1:43:52 If only, first, to the mother, to the nurse — it doesn't matter whether it's the real mother or the nurse — to the other first. Our first moments in life, we are entirely dependent, literally absorbed by the other. For as Proust says admirably, one doesn't think of oneself, one thinks of getting out of oneself — especially when one comes from nothingness like a newborn, from pain, from ill-being, from receiving all at once the heaviness one must struggle against.
1:44:23 That wasn't the case in the mother's womb. The heaviness, the cold, the cries, the noise, the light. So we are absorbed, aren't we, by what can draw us toward civil status, to take up what you were saying. So first relation to the other, embryonic, which then expands. As soon as we go to school, we discover what a bit of civil society is like — right, it's no longer just mom and dad, I'm an anonymous person in this. We've all had these little anxieties at school, but these joys too — we can also do a bit what we want, the parents aren't there, there's a bit of both.
1:44:53 Like the hunters in the forest, in Amazonia, they leave the village, so they can do a bit of things that in the village they cannot. In the village everything is regulated, everything is coded. But at the same time, it's dangerous — it's not like the village, the forest. That's what school is like. And then afterward, of course, one can still get involved in a football team, in a political party — I'm being serious, playful, whatever, there are a thousand ways of having a collective bond. Now indeed, Nerval, to go very fast, is permanently determined.
1:45:26 How could it be otherwise? It's our case for all of us, by maternal determination. His more than another's — I told you why earlier — because of his birth constellation, with this mother who abandons the infant to cousins and aunts, just like that, to go follow her husband in the Napoleonic wars. So he's drawn — and that's why, from Paris, he's brought us into the Valois, because we're 3 km away, there, when we're at Ermenonville, from Mortefontaine, which he never mentions in Angélique. That's interesting. He speaks of it in Sylvie, he never speaks of it in Angélique.
1:45:56 That's why this story matters to me — because it's there that he most succeeds in not being absorbed by the deadly side of the first peregrination, the Odyssean one. On the other hand, we're heading toward Rousseau's tomb, that is, toward the one who wrote the social contract. 'O sage, you had given us the milk of the strong, and we were too weak for it to nourish us.' It's interesting that Rousseau gives milk. No, I'm taking the text literally, we always benefit from looking at the text literally.
1:46:27 The milk that the mother can no longer give, for the mother is the dead fountain — a dried-up fountain, a fountain that no longer nourishes, no longer quenches thirst, it's dreadful. So there's Rousseau, like a maternal uncle in anthropology, a benevolent figure, as its substitute — precisely because he isn't someone who takes the mother's place to play the same function, because he gives us the nourishment we truly need, as men.
1:46:57 Spiritual nourishment, if one is Hegelian — it's not democratic, it's praxical, there. So I'm answering your question. What's extraordinary is that in this short story, the two tendencies rub shoulders permanently. When he says, at the beginning when he leaves Paris, 'the lyricism of my observations, for he is lyrical as soon as he arrives in the Valois, must not surprise you' — he tells the reader 'must not surprise you' as an imperative. Up to that point he was apologizing. 'Weary of the vain quarrels and sterile agitations of Paris' — I weigh every word — 'I rest myself seeing this fertile maternal earth.'
1:47:34 'Fertile, maternal' is opposed to 'sterile,' the agitations of Paris. It's he who led us well into the libraries and all that — it's not we who decided. So there are two spaces, the space of Paris with its sterile agitations, the abstract intellectual quest, then 'these countrysides so green and so fertile.' It's just our luck, as soon as there is — I told you — this surface on which I walk, the ground on which I walk, is strewn with corpses, isn't it, since he's fascinated at every moment by the tombs he discovers, by the remains of history.
1:48:05 Whether singular remains — I'm thinking of the Ermenonville cemetery where he spares us no tomb — up to, when he speaks of the struggles that took place at the time between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, he says that it's like at Montépilloy, a village of the area, where mass graves and heaps of gathered corpses were discovered. All at once it multiplies. So this earth which was supposed to be invigorating — I regain my strength on this maternal earth, like Antaeus in the myth, isn't that so, the one who, as soon as he touched the ground, regained his strength, which meant Hercules had to strangle him in the air to be able to overcome him, I don't know, in the fight, because he was son of Gaia — there, this maternal earth turns out in fact to be a land of death.
1:48:44 I'm right. So, in that land, one must quickly go to Rousseau's tomb, which is no longer tied to an identity, to a determined geography, and to a personal history. A tomb in which his ashes are no longer present, since they are at the Panthéon, the whole text suddenly counts, right there. Because as soon as he speaks of it, he says, here is Rousseau's tomb, empty of its ashes, we are not here to indulge in fetishism, we are here to look at this tomb with the poplars rising out of it and shaking their branches in the sun. If you look at a poplar tree, you also find the people within it.
1:49:15 No, I'm not joking. The leaves of a poplar are never still. Poplars in the sun are a people rejoicing. There, I'll end on that. Thank you for your question. Thank you.
