English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Why Nerval to think the historical present 0:12 Well, Dominique, aren't you kind of pulling our leg? I'm going to talk to you about Gérard de Nerval, when what we'd like to hear is what capitalism is, as the foundation of all hubris? I recognize the legitimacy of the question. Apparently — and I'm already starting to answer — the appearance is nonsense, well, at first glance like that, it's true that, going to look for something to talk about the critique of the present, because I often invoke Hegel to say that the important thing is to know the historical present, and the historical present is the undivided domination of capital since the fall of the Berlin Wall, without rival, globalized, globalizing.
0:56 And here I am going to fetch, for that purpose, a dreamer, a madman, a romantic from 1840 — there's something not quite right there, one might say. What's more, someone who ended up not only mad but also a suicide, both. So there you go. But if I chose him, it's because for me he is exemplary, in both the mathematical sense — like a model, so to speak — and exemplary of what has become our modernity since the end of history.
1:30 I'd say — but that's even less Marxist — 'the end of history' doesn't work. You're making your case worse: Marx inaugurates the science of history, and you're already saying it's over. Yes, well, let me recall a distinction between Hegel and Marx anyway. It's perhaps the only important difference between them. Whatever Althusser may say, for me they have almost everything in common, except for that detail — which is not a minor one. It's that the period for which Hegel says it is the end of history — that is, his own period — is for Marx the end of human prehistory.
2:00 I'm quoting Marx. So it's not contradictory — something does come to an end with the appearance of you, of me, that is — and this is indeed my subject with Nerval — with modernity. So there, I'm answering your question. For me, Nerval is exemplary of modernity, and especially of its dead ends. He's not my hero, he's a favorite writer, but not my hero. I don't wish, now, to end up mad and a suicide. Agreed?
2:32 But on the one hand, our dreamer isn't entirely apolitical. Not because he said that phrase libertarians like so much — when they do read Nerval, which doesn't happen often — namely, I quote him, 'let it not be said that I engage in politics, I have only ever practiced opposition.' Still, that's already not just any political stance, Nerval's. That's the first point. And second, there's this relationship to Rousseau, which is fundamental in him, an invariant.
3:02 And so, there you have it, these are reasons why we're not so far off, and especially the work I chose, Angélique, with the novella in question — he had set out to make something autobiographical of it, and he gives us back the foundations of our political youth as moderns. That is to say, it culminates at Rousseau's tomb, and thus at the Social Contract, unlike Sylvie, which is autobiographical and ends very badly.
The suspicion of aestheticism: Marx, myth and the political 3:32 Because there, he can't manage to free himself from the personal novel, that is to say. There you go. I won't monopolize the floor, because there must be other questions, but that's why Nerval isn't as incongruous as that. Second, I'd say to those who think I'm an esthete — instead of talking about productive forces and relations of production, I talk about Nerval, Wagner, Drach, Schiller, Racine, all the things I mention. I'll remind you that Marx, every three pages, quotes Shakespeare and/or the Bible.
4:02 Recently, I was challenged on Facebook by someone who is certainly, sincerely a Marxist — well, who was saying, look, such-and-such historian, whom I won't name, from such-and-such publisher, whom I won't name, very Marxist, shows that Wagner, who is one of your references, had started out writing operas on historical subjects — that, at least, is progressive — and then he turned toward myth, and so we lost him: myth is reactionary, it's Wagnerian, you only have to see Lukács's critique of Wagner.
4:41 I felt like answering, in other words, that would mean saying Marx is a reactionary writer — the guy is Marxist, he's... he turns up his nose, he's Marxist. Whereas Marx analyzes the myth of the Titans versus the gods as the Greek slaves against the citizen-gods; he understood very well, Marx, that there's a lot to be gleaned from myth when one is a Marxist. Agreed? So there you go, I mean, it's not... It's curious that I'm suspected of aestheticism when the only wretched book I've published — I say wretched because it's a bit slight — is a book about... I was going to say about Corsicans, but I shouldn't speak too ill of Corsicans because he loves them very much. It's a book about laziness, it's a legend, Corsican laziness — you should see the terraced farming we have, it's Titan's work. No, no, it's true it's a short, dense book, but still, one can't...
Periodizing modernity: the mixing of genres 5:33 Many have told me, many readers of this book have told me, 'you've ruined all the investments I'd put into aestheticism.' It's funny to be called an esthete after that. I show in this book that Hegel did indeed subsume aesthetics under politics. That the truth of aesthetics is politics. There, I'll stop my answer there for now. You say that 'the wave' is a vague word, that it was also lived quite differently, for instance, in the Middle Ages, before France.
6:06 What do you mean by that? Ah, that's a good question. Well, all the... points of irreversibility that add up and form a figure — the figure of modernity, a figure, I think, to use a Hegelian term, a Gestalt, which is a historical figure, in which we still are, and which I make coincide chronologically, roughly, with the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution — it's quite coherent, all of that fits in a handkerchief, it's the eighteenth century. It's our genesis. And the signs by which we recognize modernity are, I'd say above all, the mixing of genres.
6:45 I take that in every sense. I've talked a lot tonight about limits, about boundaries. Well, that's precisely the moment when boundaries and limits blur. When you don't know — look today, am I red or am I brown? Because I might be a bit of both. I'm not making a personal joke, mind you. I know where I stand. There are some who are between Soral and so on, I mean, you see... The boundaries blur.
7:16 Whereas there was a time when there was the right, well the far right, the right, the center, the left, the far left. You couldn't get any further from the far right than the far left. And now, if you position yourself on the far left, you get called a fascist. Because if you're on the far left, you're for the nation-state, now against globalizing liberalism. You see? I'm generalizing my story about the mixing of genres. It's not only literary history, it's not only the fact that you can have a tragedy with comic moments in it.
7:48 That's not what I'm saying. Even if that too is part of it. It's no accident that Shakespeare gets rehabilitated at the time of the Romantics. Because in Shakespeare, you can have the tragic and the comic in the same play. That's unthinkable in Racine. That's typical of modernity. I note, to answer your question precisely now, that there's a mixing of genres in art and literature at the moment when the classes collide at the French Revolution. Whereas up until then, they had been kept well separated, like castes.
8:18 To the point that Racine, in the preface to Phèdre, goes so far as to say — and this is typical of the Ancien Régime — 'Yes, I departed from tradition. Seneca has Phèdre herself denounce the slander — well, slander her stepson by saying he pushed himself on her — to put it in plain terms. And I did not want to follow that tradition, because I thought that a princess, given her station' — her station, at the time, meant her social class, embodied — 'given her station, slander was too vile a thing to be put in a princess's mouth, and was better placed in the mouth of a servant.'
8:51 Full stop. So there we have it: one is 'born' — B-O-R-N, from the verb 'to be born.' You had to be born noble to be noble for life. Born base, you're base for life, at the time. And then, starting with the French Revolution, all of Balzac, all of Stendhal — that's it, that's the middle classes, the intermediaries. It begins a bit with The Marriage of Figaro, where Suzanne, the maid, becomes for the first time a full-fledged role, a leading role, for instance. Whereas in Molière, even though they're magnificent roles, the maid roles are comic roles — she still stays in the kitchen.
9:27 Whereas Suzanne is a central role. You who are an opera lover, you can see the importance of Suzanne in The Marriage of Figaro. Her vocal role is even almost more interesting than the Countess's. There you go. So, to answer your question: one can date, first, periodize modernity in the double fracture — economic, the Industrial Revolution, and political, the French Revolution — the two being inseparable. If there's only one or the other, it's not modernity. That's the first point. And on the phenomenological level, that is, how to recognize it semantically, in the mixing of genres, in a very extensive sense, in that there is at once the mixing of social classes — because I often draw the analogy that humanity is divided into social classes, into genders, and into sexes.
10:10 You find Freud, Marx there — that's how it is. There, I don't know if I've more or less answered... Well, I've oriented an answer to your question, because it's a bit vast to answer just like that, but I mean... Modernity is well defined for me. And if we had to pick one author as a reference point to inaugurate it, it's Rousseau.
The individual, particular reflected and raised to the universal 10:49 Yes, no, I'll tell you why. Because of the opposite. It's that today there's a return to enclosure, a temptation to go back to enclosure within identities, within communities. Whether religious, whether ethnic — Islamic identity, Corsican identity, I say at random and in no particular order — femininity, or rather feminism, which is not at all the same thing. Because, like Hegel, I respect this femininity — I quote — 'the eternal irony of the community.'
11:24 Hutus, Tutsis, men, women, gays, straights. People shut themselves up in identities. Which seem very different but all have in common — and this is what I denounce — being ontological, as we say in philosophy. That they owe nothing to history, nor to class struggle, but that it's just like that from birth. Being a man, a woman, Hutu, Tutsi, Corsican, French. There you go. This isn't a moment to disturb me — you're welcome, of course. So, I mean, that's the first answer to your question.
11:54 Because we're shutting ourselves back into identities, it's more necessary than ever to keep recalling that modernity is the emergence of the individual. It's strange for a Marxist to stress the importance of the individual. But first, I'll make a confession. So, do with it what you will. If I'm a communist, it's because I'm for the individual. Because only a society in which social classes are reconciled can finally see individuals emerge, instead of reserving individuality for a few elite classes who have the leisure to be individuals.
12:25 Because it's certain that on the assembly line, on the three-shift system, or during the harvest in the Sahel, I mean, there isn't much room for the individual. We're crushed by the same constraints and thus leveled down. When you see the faces of the poor boys who ask to park your car in Abidjan, there isn't much room for the individual. They all have the same face, poor guys. Whether tall, short, fat, or thin. So there you go, individuality requires flourishing. And so, myself, I am like...
12:55 When the differences in social handicaps are set aside, we'll be able to see who has worth musically, who has worth cinematically, whatever it may be — we'll be able to see individual values manifest themselves. For now, they're crushed by social constraints. So, once again, to answer your question: why is it necessary to talk about modernity now, to insist on its main attribute, which is the emergence of particularity as such, of the individual as such?
13:26 But the individual, in the very dialectical sense in which Hegel defines it — that is, not something opposed to the universal, as a liberal would have us believe. The particular opposed to the universal — no, on the contrary, there's the magnificent definition he gives in the Philosophy of Right, which is after all his political testament, namely: one must not oppose the particular to the universal, I quote, but one must see the particular reflected upon itself and thereby raised to universality — that is, individuality.
13:59 That sounds abstract, but let me sum it up. What is the individual, for Hegel? It's not the opposite of the universal; it is, on the contrary, the particular that has made the effort, through reflection on itself, through a return upon itself, to rise to the individual. Agreed? Take Hippolytus, my character in Racine's Phèdre. He thought he was an individual. 'All men chase after women. As for me, I don't care about women, I don't like the court. I like to hunt wild boar deep in the forests.' There you go. 'All this business about women bores me, I'm shy at court, it doesn't interest me.'
14:29 The result: when he falls in love with Aricie, he confesses — 'now enslaved beneath the common law, by what turmoil do I feel myself carried away from myself.' I now confess, I reflect on my particularity, that in the end I am like everyone else. Well yes, I am raised to the universal, but somewhat against myself, at the cost of losing myself. There you go. So, the true individual is the particular reflected upon itself, and thereby it is the beautiful universal. In more Marxian terms, it's the one who reflects on his own determinations.
15:01 In this case, class determinations. The more I reflect on the determinations from which I come — I'm not talking about natural determinations, we can't do much about those. I'm not going to — well, now apparently there are things that can change the color of your eyes — but I can't change much about my heredity. On the other hand, I mean, I can reflect on my own socio-historical determinations. What everyone can do, what everyone should do, what everyone ought to have the possibility of doing. But that's not what school teaches you. At school, on the contrary, they make you believe that you are ineffable individuals.
15:34 Do you want me to tell you? There you go. That's how I bring this to your question. It's more urgent than ever to reflect on the concept of modernity today, and in particular on what it implies in terms of the progressive emergence of the individual. Societies took millennia to free themselves from clan structures, from community. That mattered. It was necessary in times of scarcity. In times of scarcity, everyone is in collective solidarity. A Corsican who left Corsica back when there was no tourism in Corsica, when there was poverty and vendettas one had to flee...
16:06 He was quite glad to find a Corsican in Marseille who gave him a leg up. Otherwise, he was nothing. There you go. I mean, I'm not making moral accusations here. But we now have the material means. Industrial revolution — this ties in with what I've been saying. Political revolution. We have the economic means to progressively free ourselves from the constraints that forced us into sheep-like behavior. I didn't say collectivist — I'm in favor of that. I said sheep-like. That is, being in the collective under constraint, and not freely. I am for chosen community, not community endured.
16:37 Thank you.
