English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Outline of the session and the question of the particular and the universal 0:00 Before presenting the plan to you, I should tell you all my gratitude for the fact that you're willing to steal two hours of this splendid weather to come shut yourselves in with me. Frankly, in your place, I would have hesitated. Well, seriously, this is our second-to-last session. For now, I'll take stock — that's why I wanted the plan handed out this time, because I'm picking up the plan from last time.
0:31 Some of you may still have it in mind. And especially the points I didn't have time to develop last time, or in any case that I only developed very partially compared to what there is to say about them, namely the recurrence of various philosophical problems. What are the problems? We're arriving somewhat at the summary, aren't we, of our continued reading of this novella, since it will be finished in a month. So, I'll remind those who weren't there — no, I'll remind those who were there, and let those who weren't know — that we've accompanied Nerval to his final steps, the last step of the walk to which he invited us in this novella, but that we haven't finished commenting on it, precisely because we've left behind quite a few things we need to come back to.
1:22 So, recurrence of various philosophical problems that I'm going to come back to. And among these, I'll tell you out loud, for those who want to take notes: illusion and truth of the aesthetic. That was already in the plan last time, but I barely developed it. Illusion and truth of the aesthetic. In parentheses, symbol and surface. And something I'm going to call "the political destinality of modern poetry."
1:54 The political destinality of modern poetry. It's something that should become clear when we talk about it. There. And that won't stop us from probably coming back to a few points like the mists of history. That's somewhat connected to what I just said. The mists of history. There. The rest is fine. It's the detail of the text. There. I'd like to begin, from a chronological point of view, right now, with the resumption.
2:27 We had stopped there somewhat abruptly, that's why I'd like to pick it back up. Yes, on the question Erwan asked me at the end of the session last time, which seems fundamental to me in relation to everything I just announced and everything there is to say. Can you remind me of the question? Remind us of the question. The question was to know why we're reading Nerval. And doesn't reading Nerval just speak about Nerval? And why? What could it say about universality? Universally speaking, roughly.
2:59 How does it speak to us? Is it perhaps simply Nerval's states of mind? What interest does it hold for us readers, apart from the literary interest for those who appreciate the style, etc.? There are many of them. What philosophical interest? We agree, that's what you mean. In what way are we concerned? Is it the quest for his mother? Or is it... In what way are we concerned? The problem of the particular and the universal, which is fundamental after all in this story, isn't it? Well.
Bearing: the mother is the one who bears 3:29 I'll point out, not to weigh you down, that I've often answered this question, haven't I? Indirectly. And in other contexts. I recall, throughout everything I said about "portance." That's not the word I had chosen, it's a technical term. A term from which field, portance? Aviation. So I say, bravo, we see the engineers here. Hats off, right? It's good, I thought I only had a literary audience, lucky me. No, no, I have mathematicians.
4:01 Yes, yes, clearly. Yes, can you tell us in two words what "portance" [lift/glide ratio] is? It's the distance an aeroplane travels. Actually, it's the quotient of the horizontal distance over its height. I'm sure it would be incomprehensible. Scientists — that's the problem too. No, it's how far the plane can glide when the engine is no longer pulling it. Roughly speaking, that's it. And I learned that word when I was in Niger. Right. Because there was an amateur pilot like you who took us on little trips over the bends of the Niger River.
4:31 Right. And who was, moreover, an excellent tenor sax player in jazz. He had passed the agrégation in English. Anyway, I'm not going to tell his whole life story. But a very sensible pilot, excellent in fact. In fact, on his Facebook page, he just told the story of an emergency landing on a beach. It was remarkable. He came through it on a rocky beach. And he had said, we have to leave early in Niger where there's dreadful heat. Because the lift is better when it's a few degrees cooler. For example.
5:01 Yes. So why am I talking about lift? Because Nerval's quest for his mother has nothing to do with what interests us. It's the quest for the mother, not for his mother or yours or mine. The Virgin who carries the infant Jesus, Isis, gathering from the waters of the Nile, in which she herself is embodied, the bloody and battered fragments — fourteen pieces, if I remember my Egyptian mythology — of Osiris's phallus.
5:36 To be carried. I'll even recall the line from Racine: "Sovereign of the seas which owe you passage." Our love of navigation, of ships, going back to the Egyptians of antiquity. The Egyptians of antiquity, we still see it in what it left in Egyptian painting, the famous solar barques that carried the deceased toward the land of Punt, toward paradise, toward the beyond. You see, that's still a voyage, it's a vessel. Vessel, navigation, aircraft [aéronef]. Everywhere castration has been overcome.
6:12 But yes, no, I'm serious. Erection upward, castration downward. These are the fundamental things. We're far from the particular here, because this doesn't only concern Nerval. The mother isn't only the one who reassures or is tender, she's also the one who carries. Now, the trauma of birth, to take up a famous theme from a famous disciple of Freud, Otto Rank, isn't that so?
6:42 I believe... Christian, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe he was with Freud on the boat when they arrived in New York, Otto Rank. Facing the Statue of Liberty, when Freud said "we are bringing them the plague." Yes, by the way, he abandoned psychoanalysis afterward, he made his fortune playing the stock market. I learned that, yes, since then. I put back his trauma. So, yes, the trauma of birth is not only...
7:12 It's several elements that will all matter in the symbolism afterward. It's passing from the ideal temperature. 37 degrees. Who can do better? Well, 37 or 27, doesn't matter. What matters is that it's the temperature — that of the surrounding medium equal to the one I have. First. Second, so we pass from that to the cold, we pass from darkness to light, like the prisoner of the cave in Plato. You know he staggers, Plato insists a great deal on that.
7:43 And the others laugh, saying he's mad. It's not worth going to spoil yourself. And then when he comes back, he also staggers, because now he's so used to the light that he can no longer see in the darkness. So he's always staggering, Plato's prisoner. It's interesting. A great artist of thought, Plato. And so, from hot to cold, from shadow to light, to blindness, to dazzlement.
The absent mother and the feminine voice 8:14 And from being carried to falling, to the problem of having to hold oneself up against gravity. That's a lot. Am I answering based on the question or not? This doesn't only concern Gérard Labrunie, known as Nerval. Agreed? Now, the reasons why he specifically develops this theme in an exhaustive way, all the way into a fully accomplished aesthetic, a poetics, that you have to look at in his biography.
8:52 You have enough elements in what I said — I'll repeat it for those who weren't there — the fact that, practically from birth, his mother left him there to go follow his father, who was on Napoleon's campaigns. And so she died in a city that's now in Poland, isn't it, of fevers caught during the campaigns while crossing bridges laden with corpses, Nerval says — it's somewhat of a family legend, well, no matter — in any case, she died there, she never came back.
9:23 And this makes me think, moreover, that very quickly, the fact that Nerval is so sensitive and receptive to the feminine voice — you know, we've seen many passages, some among the most famous, like Adrienne's song in Sylvie, isn't that so? You know: "As she sang, the shadow descended from the great trees and the rising moonlight fell on her alone; she fell silent, no one dared break the silence." These are long developments each time the narrator himself is explicitly present, when it's autobiographical, or in narratives, each time he's in contact with a certain kind of feminine voice — not just any voice, he specifies in great detail — voices that have not yet lost the freshness of their first intonation and, as he says, that have not yet been spoiled by the lessons of the conservatory.
10:19 I think the passage where this is most detailed is in Les Nuits d'Octobre — I recommend it, it's all on Wikisource — Les Nuits d'Octobre, otherwise you'll come across Alfred de Musset's "Belle nuit d'octobre," which is something else. In Les Nuits d'Octobre, there's a chapter called "Pantin." I can't help telling you the first sentence, because it's one of Nerval's rare nocturnal wanderings — it's night, everyone is asleep, and he goes to Les Halles, the only place in Paris where, at the time, people weren't sleeping, because there was the market.
10:54 And there was onion soup, some of you have a few white hairs, some have known that, they called it, right, the "gratinée" at Les Halles. That's nice, isn't it? When you had insomnia, you'd go to Les Halles. Isn't that right, Jean? There. And so afterward, with a friend, always a double, a bit like Sylvain in the novella we're working on, a double who is in fact himself, who says to him, let's go to Pantin — there are places, imagine a dive bar at 2 a.m. in Pantin in 1840.
11:28 There. At a certain point, in a back room of this dive, the two of them stumble by chance into what is clearly a Masonic ceremony. Well, it's a republican banquet like they held at the time, they're in the process of initiating new "cubs." And he says, at the entrance, someone said to us, "Are you of the trade?" My friend made the signs, and he let us in. Afterward I asked myself, is it true that we're of the trade? Forgive me for laughing, but he says Amphion, the Greek poet of antiquity, Amphion who played the lyre while they were building the Parthenon, to encourage the workers on the Parthenon — the poet was of the trade.
12:09 And we are of the trade. In short, we are masons by the mere fact that we are poets. There. More seriously, at that moment, it was unexpected. The president asked for indulgence for a young girl who was going to perform in public for the first time. And up to that point, it had been the tone of a joke, a nocturnal banter between two Parisians out on the town. And then, suddenly, there are these true prose poems that Nerval develops as soon as he falls prey to this voice. And that's where he gives the most detail when he says "Then, gradually stripping her voice bare, as a knowledgeable neighbor pointed out to me..."
12:42 You see, in terms of stripping bare, she arrived at bold flourishes, etc. There. So, what am I saying, since I was speaking about this in relation to the mother? That Nerval alludes, very fleetingly, in "Promenades et souvenirs" — a text I recommend to you — it's his final texts. It took him a long time to speak about himself. I'm repeating myself. Because with no offense meant, there are always newcomers. So, I'll repeat: Nerval took a long time to speak of himself in the first person. As prolific as he was in writing reviews of the mediocre boulevard plays of the era.
13:14 It's as if someone today wrote reviews of television series. He took a long time to speak of himself, even more so to write long narratives. Sorry. He gets as far as "Promenades et souvenirs," which was barely finished when he committed suicide. It's the last completed text before Aurélia, which is unfinished — the account of his illness. In "Promenades et souvenirs," he even alludes to his mother: "I never saw my mother."
13:44 They say she resembled a portrait after Prud'hon called "Modesty." It's rather vague like that. And so I tell you this because we'll need it for the text I handed out. Yes, there's a question of a painting. Well. So, and I mention it because of that. He says: "They often read me those letters she sent from the banks of the Danube, or the Rhine, or the Spree." In short, she followed her husband on Napoleon's campaigns. You see, the Spree is what flows through Berlin. That's far.
14:15 Germany is quite close. In Strasbourg, it's right at hand. But Berlin is far. In Berlin, you're 60 km from the Polish border. Beyond that, it's the steppe all the way to China. No, I'm serious. There's a film called "Un soir, un train." Maybe you've seen it, by Delvaux, a strange Belgian filmmaker who adapted two of Julien Gracq's stories for the screen. That doesn't happen often, things like that. And in "Le Roi Cophetua" or "Le Rendez-vous de Bray" — that's not the one I'm referring to — and the other one called "Un soir, un train."
14:46 With Yves Montand, who's a very bad actor but here he's directed rather well. And at a certain point, the whole film is a flashback stemming from a train accident. The main hero has a fainting spell and the whole film is somewhat in flashback with Steve A. — do you know it? Not at all. And you hear voices on the train, a bit dazed like that, in an altered state, and you hear travelers stopped like that in the landscape, and through the window one of them says, "You see, that plain there, it doesn't stop until Siberia."
15:22 Yes, I'm not making this up. Look at the map. It even comes all the way to France. It's the famous plains of Artois, over which people fought throughout the Middle Ages because they're rich. The wheat fields of Picardy and Artois. There was textiles in Flanders and, isn't that so, Catherine? And the wheat. Isn't there a magnificent poem that speaks of that? "Carrier of Flemish wheat and English cotton."
15:52 Come on, that's well known. Yes, Rimbaud. Well, you're good, aren't you? I can die peacefully now. Yes, in "Le Bateau ivre." Yes, right from the start, the boat — it's the one speaking. "Carrier of Flemish wheat and English cotton." The Flemish wheat, that's Artois. Wheat of the "ch'tis." The letters she reads to him from her, from his mother, are bound up with the mother — feminine voices of cousins, of governesses, of servants who come and say "Your mommy is writing to you." You see? I'm trying to imagine it.
16:24 Right? Interesting. So that explains why he in particular is so sensitive to this, along with the distance. But the drama, we share it with him. If some people cope better with it than he did, all the better. All the better for us, all the better for them. Agreed? But well, as Seneca said to a traveling friend, didn't he? He said: "You can go wherever you want, but wherever you go, the distance to the underworld is always the same." Isn't that so?
Reading of a dream from Aurélia 16:54 There. We are never safe, are we, from a reactivation of the primal scene, as they say elsewhere, right? So, I handed this out to you precisely to address this problem a bit more precisely than what I just said. So far I've just been the aperitif. Now we need to sit down at the table. It's a dream excerpted from Aurélia. That's why I gave you the text, because we have Les Filles du feu and Les Chimères in the book we've been working from since the beginning, but we don't have Aurélia.
17:24 So, I remind you that Aurélia, the narrative, we owe it to his doctor. His doctor had told him: "If you can put your dreams in writing, it might do you some good." It's an excellent idea. We owe all of this to him. A good doctor. He has a street named after him in Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, rue du docteur Émile Blanche. And it's... So, one of Nerval's most famous phrases, which is in Aurélia, right from the beginning in fact, is: "Here begins what I would call, for myself, the outpouring of the dream into real life." Beautiful prose, isn't it, Nerval, all the same.
17:54 Every time, the exact word, the outpouring [épanchement]. Like a synovial effusion, as they say, you know, when you've hurt your knee. An effusion, an épanchement, is often of a liquid. "The outpouring of the dream into real life." And yes, the dream is a neurosis — not serious, it's not a pathological neurosis. The dream, the slip of the tongue, that's a neurosis. Correct me, Christian. There's a psychosis. There isn't — right, absolutely. There are hallucinations. I even see my grandmother, who died I don't know how many years ago, I dare not say.
18:26 I go see her as if she were there. I'm happy to see her again. Hallucination is serious, from a clinical point of view. So I'm saying this because — first word — it's "one evening, I believed." He doesn't say "I was dreaming of..." Adrienne's song in Sylvie is "I pictured to myself a castle of that time." I pictured to myself. Representation, as we've seen, is what is common to memory, to dream, to imagination. It's the field of the imaginary in general, which is the field of the Vorstellung, as they say in German philosophy.
18:59 Representation is at the same time common to the theater. What an important term. But also to diplomacy. "And here is the representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran." Indeed, when one represents, it's because there is no presence. The country is not there, we are not there. Representation is not presence. For those of you working on Hegel's Logic, I remind you that representation belongs to the order of essence, not of being.
19:33 It's being that has disappeared. You know that in German, essence is Wesen, that is, what has been. It's the past participle of the verb "to be." One couldn't be clearer or simpler. What is? That's the world of the Greeks, where the divine is present. You mustn't even get too close, because otherwise there's the punishment of hubris, tragedy. You never know when you're entering the sacred grove, and then you mustn't say — I've already told you this — you mustn't say "I didn't mean to, I didn't know." That doesn't fly.
20:03 You enter the sacred grove, you're guilty. Intention doesn't matter. That's modern, that's Christian. There. As Hegel says, that seems a bit barbaric to me. It's less profound than our conception, but more courageous. Well, there. I repeat: "one evening, I believed." I believed what? So, let's go. I'll read it with you. "I believed with certainty." We've seen that certainty is not truth in philosophy.
20:35 A great Hegelian dichotomy. We are certain that solid ground doesn't move. We are being carried around the sun. "One evening, I believed with certainty that I had been transported to the banks of the Rhine." First, let me read it straight through. "Before me stood sinister rocks, their outline sketched in the shadow. I entered a cheerful house, through which a ray of the setting sun gaily crossed the green shutters festooned with vine. It seemed to me that I was re-entering a familiar dwelling, that of a maternal uncle, a Flemish painter, dead for more than a century."
21:07 "The paintings, sketched out, hung here and there. One of them depicted the famous fairy of that shore. An old servant, whom I called Marguerite and who seemed to have known me since childhood, said to me: 'Aren't you going to go to bed, for you have come from far away, and your uncle will come home late. We'll wake you up for supper.' I stretched out on a four-poster bed draped in Persian cloth with large red flowers. Before me hung a rustic clock on the wall, and on that clock, a bird that began to speak like a person."
21:41 "And I had the notion that the soul of my ancestor was in that bird. But I was no more astonished by its speech and its shape than by finding myself transported, as it were, a century back in time. The bird spoke to me of members of my family, living or dead at various times, as if they all existed simultaneously, and it said to me: 'You see, your uncle took care to have her portrait made in advance. Now she is with us.' My eyes fell upon a canvas that depicted a woman in ancient German costume, leaning over the edge of the river, her eyes drawn toward a cluster of forget-me-nots."
22:21 However, the night was gradually thickening, and the sights, sounds, and feeling of the places were blurring together in my darkened mind. So, why did I select this text? You'll tell me it's because it's very beautiful. Well, that's you saying it. But really, that's practically all of Nerval's prose. I don't know. No, that's not what would set it apart. Let me remind you that Goethe, to show that it's not merely subjective when I speak of the beauty of Nerval's prose — when Goethe came across the translation Nerval had made at nineteen, barely out of school and knowing hardly any German, of Faust, which Nerval had just translated, Goethe said, in a tribute rather rare from an author to his translator, "Since I read this French translation, I can no longer read it in German, it's so beautiful."
23:14 You see, all the same. So it's not just that. And it's not just that we find recurring themes in it. So, we'll see them now. "One evening I believed..." Ah, listen, it's you who are going to spot them, a little exercise in applying what we've been doing. "One evening I believed with certainty that I had been transported to the banks of the Rhine." Nothing to say? Don't just smile foolishly, there's something to say, say it.
The theme of the shore, from the Rhine to Phèdre 23:47 Hi. Hello, Benjamin. No? Yes? "To believe with certainty" seems contradictory. Yes, no, I've already done that work — noting "I believed" is good, worth pointing out: it's neither "I dreamed" nor "I remember that," that's good. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about themes we've seen, illustrating the themes we've seen. Yes, the Rhine — what about the Rhine? "On a bank." Good, so with the Rhine, there's the theme of the bank/edge.
24:18 Let's remember that Nerval is an author of borderlands. Someone said this beautiful phrase about him: he was someone for whom frontiers are not lines but spaces. Let me remind you that when he takes us into Angélique, which we've been working on this year, when he wanders through the maze of Parisian libraries in his never-satisfied search for the book he had stumbled upon by chance at the Frankfurt book fair and had neglected to buy for lack of money, thinking he'd find it in Paris, Paris, capital of the book, and he goes about it.
24:53 He doesn't find it. And suddenly the narrative shifts, in the Aristotelian sense of local displacement, from Paris to the Valois, where we were last Sunday, right? It's just to make the others jealous, the weather is splendid. Did you see the park where you jump? No, I can only encourage you to go there in these lovely days ahead. So what does he say to urge us on? He says, to seduce us if you will, because this is already the tenth time he's changed the subject, the aim of the narrative — "old provincial France is barely known."
25:30 "Especially in these parts, which nevertheless belong to the outskirts of Paris, thirty-eight kilometers from Notre-Dame to Vaudoisin, at the point where" — I was speaking of borderlands, right, of edges — "at the point where the Île-de-France, Picardy, and the Valois meet, one may dream of the loveliest sheepfolds in the world." "At the point." That's a point. Earlier we were saying surface, line — here it's a point. Do you realize?
26:01 In the imaginary, that's a limit. The limit of the field is the forest, the limit of the forest is the field. The limit, if you know your Hegel's Logic, is where the thing is no longer what it is. It's where the thing is no longer what it is. There is always a positive side and a negative side to the notion of limit. Now the Rhine — and God knows it's an overdetermined limit, isn't it — at the time, people revived that, there was Musset's poem, very fashionable, following the early wars with Prussia, Germany didn't exist yet as a nation.
26:38 In that poem, Musset says, "We have drunk it, your German Rhine, it stayed in our glass." You see, it's a bit of French-German squabbling. It doesn't go very far. Well, anyway. So, a border overdetermined if ever there was one. But what were we talking about before? We were talking about his mother. One must cross the Rhine to reach the mother's tomb, over there, to the east, in Poland. At the time it was still German territory, it was Glogau.
27:09 Wrocław, it's called now, right? I think it's the third city of Poland, something like that. In the old Silesia, which was a German province until the last war, Schlesien, right? So you see all there is to say just about being on the banks of the Rhine. So, continuing to answer your question, all right? Nerval isn't the only one sensitive to the notion of the bank/edge. Here we shift into the in-itself and the universal — how many times, throughout the whole year we worked on Racine's Phèdre, do you remember, how many times does the word "bord" [bank/shore] occur in the text of Phèdre.
27:54 At random, what comes to mind — when we learn that Theseus is prowling around the kingdom of the dead, where he goes to dishonor the bed of the god of the dead: "what charm drew him to those dreaded shores." We had even analyzed how every shore is dreadful as a shore, because a shore is where everything changes, it's a switching point, a shore is where the cliff turns vertical. Isn't that a shore? It's where solid ground becomes liquid, the riverbank.
28:26 So you can drown there, right? Narcissus leans too far over the edge of the rock. So we could multiply examples like this, but the notion of the shore always expresses both peril and attraction at once. It's Rimbaud who says in a beautiful poem, "To admire the strength or the peril of Psyche." Psyche, who wanted to see the face of her lover who had told her, "You must not seek to see me." Let me remind you that he was the god Eros, her lover nonetheless, and she lost everything by wanting to see him.
29:01 "To admire the strength or the peril of Psyche." Let me also remind those who studied Greek that Psyche means the soul. Psychology. In the broadest sense. All this for the notion of the shore/edge. When... when Hippolytus's confidant in Phèdre says, "Come now, don't tell me stories, you're leaving because you're a good boy, you have no news of your father, you're worried, you're going to look for him. I've already looked, we haven't found him."
29:33 "And who's to say Theseus wants to be found — he's a womanizer, your father," he doesn't put it quite like that, but it's very clear. "Who knows, who really knows, if the king your father wants his absence to remain a mystery, and while with you we tremble for his life, he is calmly hiding new love affairs." And when Hippolytus says, "I too am leaving because I no longer wish to stay here," and — "since when, my lord, do you fear the presence of these peaceful places so dear to your childhood?"
30:08 Let me remind you this takes place somewhere that, relative to Paris, would be like Versailles at the time — that is, a hunting residence of Theseus's, not Athens itself. "And whose stay I saw you prefer to the pompous tumult of Athens and the court — what peril, or rather what grief, drives you away?" Answer: "That happy time is no more, everything has changed since on these shores the gods sent the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë." Yes, the shore comes back every time bringing a problem, a difficulty, a danger.
30:41 I'm not inventing anything. I fall short of the truth, if anything. What more could I add? Read it, you'll see it's even more fascinating. So the more you read, the more proof you have. Thomas — this isn't the last time I'll say it, nor the first — is often an immense mathematician. The only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is an exact science. He knows it's a mathematical tribute when I say that.
The maternal house and the benevolent uncle 31:13 Otherwise I won't repeat it. I'm not an obscurantist and I don't march alongside the return of anti-scientific barbarism, which is spreading just as neo-positivism spreads. I send both back to back. That's not our subject. We'll come back to it before long. So you see all there is to say about shores. "One evening I believed with certainty that I had been transported to the banks of the Rhine. Before me stood sinister rocks." Well yes, the banks of the Rhine, romantic Germany, hence the Erlking, dark things — it's not the world of Greece and all that.
31:50 So, sinister rocks, that's how one pictures the Rhine, "whose outline was sketched in shadow." And then, immediately, contrast: "I entered a cheerful house" — sinister rocks, cheerful house — "whose green shutters, festooned with vine, a ray of the setting sun lit up." Now, any reader familiar with Nerval recognizes this as the maternal house at Mortefontaine. So there's an overlay of the maternal house of the Valois — it's 40 km from here, right — onto the banks of the Rhine. But do you understand why?
32:20 Maybe not as clearly as I'm about to put it, but you now have the material to guess. It's that the path toward the mother passes through the banks of the Rhine. So it's natural for the maternal house to appear there. I mean, the dream had a staggering logic of its own. "Somewhere it seemed to me that I was entering a familiar dwelling, that of a maternal uncle, a Flemish painter, dead for more than a century." I won't, it would take too long to comment on everything there is to say.
32:50 But anyway, the maternal uncle — I won't go back over it, it confirms what we just said, doesn't it, that the dream here stages, let's say, the maternal domain in Nerval's imaginary; he's not the only one. We've seen that this uncle holds a central place in the autobiographically-postured narratives of Nerval, the few there are — this uncle holds a central place, right, he was somewhat his guardian, the one who initiated him.
33:21 And I told you that in anthropology — again, I'm moving from the particular, Nerval, to the universal — in anthropology it's well known among anthropologists that the maternal uncle is always a positive figure in mythology. Read Lévi-Strauss, read Frazer on Oceania, Lévi-Strauss on Amazonia, and you'll always see the benevolent figure of the maternal uncle. Think of the jaguar figure in the origin-of-fire myths, in The Raw and the Cooked, for instance. Right? The jaguar goes so far as to offer the boy who is the hero of the myth, whom he saved from certain death — he's dying and decomposing under the filth and bird droppings, I'll skip that —
33:55 And the jaguar licks him, washes him. In reality, nothing is more terrifying to the Indians than the jaguar. This is a myth made by the Indians. But it's because it's the jaguar from before humans mastered fire. If we have fire, it's because the jaguar gave it to us. And that's why now he eats raw meat. I said there was a logic to Nerval's dream; there is a logic to collective imagination in myth. It's extraordinary to say that the one who gave fire to men is the animal that eats raw meat par excellence in the Amazon jungle.
34:32 Isn't that so? But there's a logic to what Lévi-Strauss calls savage thought. To react against the "prelogical mentality," as Lévy-Bruhl said just before him, of traditional and ethnocentric ethnology, for which "savages" had no logic. We see clearly that if the jaguar eats raw meat, it's because of fire — but he no longer has it, since he gave it to us. And it's about the gift. So the maternal uncle is a benevolent figure.
35:04 And in Sylvie, in Promenades et souvenirs, in the introduction to that compilation called Les Illuminés, Nerval says he did all his childhood education in his uncle's attic, where there were piles of books that perhaps wouldn't have been put on display for children. I'm not talking about lewd things. I'm talking about, as they said at the time, accounts by the 18th-century philosophers, which were somewhat impious relative to the good Catholic upbringing that was the norm then. And there's an allusion to the uncle's beliefs when, in Sylvie — sorry, in Aurélia — when he suddenly has a very anguished crisis, he tries to cling to his childhood, to religious ideas, and says, "My beliefs are a bit old, I'll say, but one day I asked my uncle, what is God? He answered me, it's the sun."
35:50 You see, these things seem quite innocent to me, but at the time — and even a bit before Nerval's time — you'd have been burned for less than that. Well, there it is. So, the maternal uncle, a positive figure. Let me remind those who might want to pursue the anthropological aspect of the matter that when we speak of brother-in-law, uncle, one must always distinguish the wife-receiving in-law from the wife-giving in-law. A relation of hostility or a positive relation.
36:22 Think about it, it's not very complicated. "Dead for more than a century. Sketched paintings hung here and there." I told you earlier that in Promenades et souvenirs, finished just before Aurélia, the first time he alludes in a published writing to his mother, he says, "I never saw my mother" — so you see, he doesn't even have a face for her in his mind — "they say she resembled," you see, "a painting, a portrait after Prud'hon entitled Modesty."
36:53 The engraving — it's actually an engraving — is reproduced in the Garnier edition, the yellow Garnier, the Classiques Garnier, I believe, it's called "de Nerval," the Works of Nerval. There, that interests you. So the fact that suddenly there are paintings around, in this maternal field, isn't quite a coincidence. "An old servant" — so we stay in the archaic domain of childhood family life — "an old servant, whom I called Marguerite and whom I seemed to have known since childhood, said to me, 'Aren't you going to go to bed?'" You see, being put to bed, all that, these are archaisms, it's Garnier, Nerval who will end up, right, that extraordinary night when it was freezing bitterly cold, it was minus 15 in Paris, he knocks at a night shelter, they don't open the door.
37:36 The suicide was somewhat abrupt — if they'd opened the door for him, maybe he'd still be with us, not to speak for him, but yes. I mean, we also have to allow for contingency, but just before going out, he had stopped by his aunt's, who wasn't there either but who had put him up for a few days — he was homeless at that point, you see, in contrast with that welcoming dwelling where they immediately put him to bed. He was homeless, he stops at his aunt's, and when she's not there, he leaves this note, which is his last written text.
38:09 "My dear aunt" — wait, tell your son, for she had grown children, "that you are the best of mothers and aunts. When I am done with all my enemies, you will have your place in my Olympus, just as I have my place in your house. Do not wait up for me tonight, for the night will be black and white." Let me remind you that Nerval means "the black valley," and that it's a pen name, so this isn't quite a coincidence. There. And here it's the opposite. Ah, how reassuring, good heavens, at the time he writes this, a bit like Rousseau suffering terribly in the last moments of his life from kidney stones, from catheters and all that in the urethra, etc.
38:53 I mean, they enchant themselves, in the proper sense — incantare, incantation — they enchant themselves by writing about the most beautiful moments of their lives, the Reveries, the Île Saint-Pierre, I think, where he himself says something that's perhaps the most modern thing he ever wrote. He says, in writing, imagining that I'm there, it's as if I were going there, and even more so — it's even more so than when I actually was there: I had thoughts, I had worries, I didn't see things as clearly as now, in writing. It's an extraordinary passage, that.
39:23 So it's a bit the same thing the dream does here, isn't it? "Aren't you going to go to bed, for you've come from far away, great traveler" — you've come from far away, journey to the Orient, well, that's far in that era, especially without a penny. And yes, far isn't only kilometers. "And your uncle will come home late, we'll wake you for supper." All is well, I fall asleep, they won't have dinner without me, they'll wake me. It's not the same thing. "I lay down" — look at the hallucinatory precision of the whole dream.
The clock and the prophet bird 39:54 That's where — Christian, you're right to speak of Picasso — this precision found in hallucination. "I lay down on a four-poster bed draped in chintz with large red flowers. Facing me there was a clock." There's the figure of time appearing. I say this, allow me, because it might seem like I'm forcing meaning onto it, injecting meaning, as they say. Good evening, Tristan. No, it's because the figure of the clock — if you're a familiar reader of Nerval, if you read Sylvie, I don't know — when he has this half-dreamed memory, only Nerval could find things like that.
40:28 It's real, it's imaginary, it's a dream — how does he sort it out? "Everything was explained to me by this half-dreamed memory." Suddenly he decides to go to the Valois in the middle of the night. "What time is it? I had no watch. Before me stood a clock whose mechanism had been stopped for more than a century." You see, there's always the figure of the stopped clock. "There was before me a rustic clock," no doubt of walnut, "hanging on the wall, and on this clock a bird that began to speak like a person."
41:02 I hold that against you, you did it on purpose, because your question runs deep. Here again, this isn't specific to Nerval alone. You who know music well — there's a piano piece by Schumann called "The Prophet Bird." The bird is always prophetic. Look in antiquity at the augurs, the Romans, who searched the liver and entrails of birds to predict the future, yes or no. And who leads Siegfried to his death in the Rhine — well, in Germanic mythology, in passing from the sea?
41:34 Who leads him? The bird. When he has killed the dragon, Siegfried — there, he's now the lord of oil, so to speak. The dragon was the guardian of the treasure; Siegfried can now seize what everyone dreams of possessing, he becomes the Lord of the Rings, of the ring. Except he's the only one with no awareness whatsoever of the ring's value. He's just a kid, he goes in there, oh it's pretty. So the bird is there — the blacksmith who raised him, that's Mime the smith in the mythology, the blacksmith who raised him waits with a poisoned liquid to finish him off: "ah, you're tired, you're worn out like the dragon, here, refresh yourself" — actually he wants to finish him off to seize the treasure, he needed Siegfried's strength to overcome the dragon. I tell you this — I remind you that my son, as a child, used to say, "Dad, they stole everything from Wagner in The Lord of the Rings" — it's Germanic mythology, hence American, well yes, it's my German wife who revealed to me, who knows jazz well, hence America, and who knows Germany well, who told me to what extent it's so obvious that we don't see it, that the entire white settlement,
42:45 WASP, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, of the United States — I'm not talking about the Chicanos — is overwhelmingly Germanic in origin. With us, the term "Anglo-Saxon" is misleading, as if it just meant the English a bit rougher, a bit more vulgar — that's the French right talking, there's a right-wing anti-Americanism. No — the great mass of settlement, look at your statistics, comes from the great migrations from Germany, Austria, the Scandinavian countries, all of that is Germanic. And as for the English, they're just older Krauts, honestly — from Hastings on, isn't that right, Catherine, when the Normans seized England — before that it was the Celts, I don't know exactly what the Celts were, especially, but suddenly it's the Vikings — the Vikings, what are they?
43:40 They're Siegfrieds, huh — well, no, not Siegfrieds, we say Sigurd, it's the same thing; we don't say Wotan, we say Odin, same thing; Wut, that's rage in German, it's more like thunder, but yes, all right, so, the bird — all this leads back to the bird, I haven't finished with the bird — I'm crossing the Sahara now, watch out, because that's far — no, the Mediterranean is nothing, everyone thinks the Mediterranean separates us from Africa, nonsense — I'm Corsican, aren't I, Alain, aren't I, Christian, they're cousins, all that, there's vineyards, pretty curly-haired brunette girls, there's grapes, there's goats, there's sheep, it's all layers — the Mediterranean, that's family. But when you cross, at 900 km/h in a Boeing, an Airbus, the Sahara, it's still desert, it lasts for hours — that's what a real border is. For centuries, black Africa was isolated, you see, before the first Arab travelers, Ibn Battuta, in the 14th century, crossed it boldly with the vessels of the desert, that is, camels — you see, why am I talking about this — because in African sculpture, the masks, look closely, there's the bird on the headdress, and that's exactly the case up there,
44:52 most often, and I've often asked Africans, why do you always have birds on the headdress, and they say, because it's the one who's going to tell the other what you're thinking — exactly like the Queen of Sheba, when she goes to meet Solomon, is preceded by her messenger hoopoe, that's the bird — and, there, that's my comment. No, if I speak of Nerval, it's because he's someone who displays, in an exceptional way, I'll sum up the essential, exhaustively, the path we all have to travel, that's it, all right, for reasons of his own, that I agree, he had the faculty, or the curse, or the blessing — that's a value judgment — to be able to display, I think it's a phrase of Hegel's that ought to be the manifesto of any serious aesthetics, isn't it, when he criticizes the Romantics who say form doesn't matter, what counts is the essence, what is hidden — that's a rather stupid aesthetics — what aesthetics shows, after all, is what you make heard, what you make seen,
46:02 and Hegel says — I quote him word for word, it's in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit — "it is precisely because the form is just as essential to the essence as the essence is to itself" — one cannot go further than that — "that the essence must be grasped and expressed not merely as essence, but just as much as form, and in the whole wealth of the developed form." With Nerval, we have this exceptional richness of a form exceptionally "entwickelt," as they say in German — developed. — Excuse me, does that let us distinguish between something essential and something more contingent, for instance, I don't know, a bird figure on the globe, or something more specific — does it help make the connection?
46:43 I'm not sure I understood the question. — Because you can bring the figure of the bird closer, speaking of other peoples, other lands, to something more essential, something that symbolizes something more universal. — Yes, the invariant isn't the bird, it's the bird as messenger, in the collective imagination, the prophet bird. — Does it allow us here to appeal to something more universal? — Well, let's go on. The answer is in the text, that's why I prefer that it be Nerval speaking. But a very good question, really, a very good question.
The forget-me-not and the final blurring 47:13 Let's return to the signifier, shall we? "There was before me a rustic clock hanging on the wall, and on this clock," — like among the Africans, perched on the headdress, so on the head, you see, that's above — "a bird that began to speak like a person." You're right, I hadn't gotten there yet, you're right. "And I had the idea that the soul of my ancestor was in that bird. But I was no more astonished by its speech and its shape than by finding myself, as it were, transported a century back in time. It spoke to me of members of my family, living or dead at various times."
47:43 He sees the past, he sees the future. And he says to me, you see, your uncle took care to have her portrait made. The bird knows what we do not know. You see, your uncle took care to have her portrait made in advance, so now, now in the future you can be at peace, you can sleep, you wake up, she is with us. She is no longer in her cold tomb, frozen in distant Silesia. Now, I haven't yet said the main reason why I'm going to give you this text. You'd say, all that rambling just to tell us that.
48:13 But yes, but yes. Still, what we've said is interesting. It's Nerval. "My eyes fell on a canvas which represented a woman in ancient German costume," which clearly shows that the portrait has a connection with the mother, doesn't it? "Leaning over the bank of the river," and there's the bank coming back again. "Leaning over the bank of the river," and the eyes, of the woman in the portrait, drawn toward a tuft of forget-me-nots. How do you say myosotis in English? Bravo, forget-me-not.
48:48 Nerval, translator from German, into German, vergiss mein nicht. Same thing. And as Freud said—and this is perhaps one of the most brilliant things about Freud, I tell you, for those who believe—to understand the dream, you need, I don't know what, either to look into the organs, or... Dreams are statements. We cannot represent to ourselves sentences, with words, with lines between them, no. We take images—let me give an example that never actually happens in a dream because it's too simple, isn't it?
49:19 But—I think you've already said this—but if I walk, no, if in a dream I tread on a field of daisies, and I have a little sister named Daisy, which means pâquerette in English, doesn't it? And if during the day I said about her, "That one, I'll trample her underfoot with her whining while I slog through my exam," I tread on a field of daisies, that means I'm trampling her underfoot, isn't it? I carry it out, but in the form of an image, because in my head I have the statement, "That one, I'll trample her." There you are. You see, that's a plastic translation.
49:49 In this case, the dream is often visual, most often, but there are also sounds, words, statements. And here, what is it, isn't it, that is represented? The statement is "Forget me not." So, with Nerval, she can rest easy there. He'd have done better to forget her a little from time to time, I don't know, that's a value judgment, I know. But, there you go.
50:21 Is that a bit clearer? I come back to your question. Yes, I saw that there were several clues that allow us to make this connection. There, it's Badeau who knows, there. I note that the allusion I made to the hoopoe, messenger of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon, is contained within the story, within Nerval's Voyage en Orient—I won't allow myself to impose it from outside—when he wove into the heart of the Voyage en Orient the umpteenth variation on the theme of the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and the Queen Emilie.
50:58 There. We are preceded by the bird. I still haven't said the essential thing. Truly, the whole field. I come back to your essential word. I comment on it, because it's a good question to raise. Perhaps it's essential for him, because for me, it's fine. Yes, it's not necessarily because in his life he experienced things with birds that even talk, that it necessarily symbolizes something inward for him. There, there, there. There can also be a difference. There, exactly.
51:28 Here we arrive at what is essential regarding his personal novel. That is to say, the dream is exceptionally—there's where I want to get to—explicit. Never, in any text, did Nerval come so close to the maternal figure. To my knowledge—I think I know nearly all of them. Now, what happens here, I'm getting to what's essential for me now. For us, for us, or in itself, as Hegel says to the reader of the Phenomenology, not a subjective for-me.
51:58 Look at the last three lines. Why am I telling you this is essential for us? Look at them closely. "However, the night was gradually thickening and the sights, the sounds and the feelings of the place were merging in my mind." Everyone has the right to answer except Christian. Because he must have already understood. That's familiar on the couch, that. What did I just tell you? That never was he so close to his truth.
52:28 But it is not stated. It's we who put it into words, who speak of his mother. It's not him. On one hand, the word "mother" is there. But even less of his own. No idea? Bravo. Who said that? Are you good? But yes, that's it.
52:58 We have a good analyst's ear here. Yes. You have to have the ear for it. When it's too close, it becomes unbearable, the truth. We're on the verge of waking up. It's Novalis who says in a fragment, "we are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming." That, you all know. Once we start dreaming that we're dreaming, it won't last long. Don't ask for too much. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
53:31 And there, as if by chance, just when everything becomes clear, everything blurs. That's what I feel. These three lines—every single time—everything blurs. Look, I'm not making it up. "The night was thickening." Night is not light. "Gradually." "And the sights, the sounds, the feelings of the place were merging in my drowsy mind." And I won't tell you what follows. He's carried toward the center of the globe among the chemical channels. The dream is over. Completely. Curtain. That's why I wanted to begin this evening with this text. Because I still haven't finished answering your question.
Between crisis and war, philosophy? 54:01 Because we're at the time for taking stock. I haven't stopped repeating the same thing for four years. But it's not obvious, given the few detours I sometimes take. Sometimes. It's only this year that we've been working on a text by Nerval. But I take responsibility for saying that all the previous years, it was the same subject. The first year, what was the title of our first lecture cycle? It was—yes.
54:33 Between Crisis and War, comma, Philosophy, question mark. The crisis isn't getting any better according to the economists, roughly speaking. Quite the opposite. Every time they say, "that's it, we're out of it," it means it's gotten worse. If you look closely. And as for war, it has never been so close. I'm past 70, I've never seen war so close. I lived through the Cold War. I'm not saying it will happen. I'm no prophet. I know nothing about it. But in any case, it remains relevant as a title.
55:04 Philosophy isn't worth a minute's trouble if it doesn't speak of evil. Not one minute's trouble. War isn't exactly the most innocent or the most benign form of evil, is it. Evil. "Mommy, it hurts, I have a boo-boo." In every sense, physical pain, illness, malaise, evil.
55:37 So philosophy is a brief interval where we can speak, between the crisis and—two things that can cut off our speech—crisis and war. Remember? Remember Plato's Gorgias, when suddenly the figure of the little Nazi thug appears, Callicles, the pre-Nietzschean—no, I mean the one who gathers together, in three brilliant pages of Plato, all the themes that the pseudo-Nietzscheans—because poor Nietzsche, we must have respect and even pity for him, for what he detested, but still, the pity he felt for the mistreated horse when he collapsed in Turin.
56:16 But yes, all the themes, yes, all the collectivist, socialist, progressive, Christian doctrines, all that nonsense, those are slave moralities used to frighten us, they're mere spells—it's exactly, word for word, what Callicles says to Socrates. "Now you're boring us with this. That's for inferior men, your stories about how it's better to suffer injustice than to commit it. What else? I'm a Greek citizen, a master, I'm not a slave." The young man of good family, watch out.
56:46 Now, what does he say to Socrates? "If you weren't old, you'd deserve a whipping." There's a limit to dialogue, and that's violence. When someone cuts off speech, I'm serious. So, we're no longer in Nerval here. I'm taking stock philosophically. Between Crisis and War, philosophically, that's what I wanted to say. It's the best thing we can do. Not to get out of the crisis and not to fall into war. Philosophy. I say this because we need to justify it. Justify why we're doing philosophy. I don't do it lightheartedly.
Marx and the 1859 preface 57:17 I don't follow any single author, but I'm as close to none as I am to Marx. I'm telling you clearly, for once. Not on a personal level—quite the opposite. It's not exactly my cup of tea. Me, I'd rather we talk about Schubert's music—I know nothing about it—or 1950s Westerns. That has nothing to do with it. There. None of that is Marxian. I acknowledge that Marx is right. Let's set the personal aside. That's each person's anecdote. I'm still answering your question. Now, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy.
57:50 That's why I'm speaking of Marx again. And here we are, still philosophizing, how long after his death—we just celebrated his birth. Ah yes, the first half of May, that's really something. And so, May 1st, that's also a bit of a bloodbath, the origin of May 1st, or not, in the United States, in '86. May 8th, the armistice after 50 million dead. May 9th, in Moscow, 30 million Russian dead. Never mind, they're Russians.
58:22 Slavs, Slavs. I once met someone who told me, "yes, but there was also the alcohol." I swear. Well then, as the Bible says, what a vale of tears. May 9th, I forgot, I've had an odd year, there's something very important.
58:54 In any case, May 8th, the Sétif massacres in Algeria. That one, I haven't forgotten, you can mention it afterward if you like. All the same, the month of May, that's really something. And still, Marx's birth is a bit more positive. The Poverty of Philosophy. Philosophy—let's review this—for Marx, is part of, it's a species of the genus, a species, it's a subsection of ideology. This is the third time I'll say I'll die in peace.
59:25 Yes, of ideology. "The forms in which men become conscious of this conflict"—conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production, I'm quoting word for word—the famous 1859 preface to the Contribution, to the Critique of Political Economy. I remind you that if you drop the word "Contribution," "Critique of Political Economy" is the subtitle of Capital. So this isn't the early Marx of something-or-other, we're not going to do Althusser's "break," no, this is a definitive Marx.
59:56 That's why today's Marxists don't like this text, because it's clear. Because with this text, you can't say, "well, there are as many Marxisms as you like"—besides, Marx himself said "I am not a Marxist," there are no more Marxists. There's yours, there's his, there's mine. Hitler's conception of Marx is good too, it's his own. While we're at it, why not? There, it's all there. Because for once, Marx says: "the conclusion I arrived at can be briefly summarized as follows." That's how this extraordinary text opens.
1:00:26 Because Marx is like Hegel, he doesn't much like stating the essential outright. Because the essential, when you reduce it to the essential, is no longer the essential. If you cut it off from the detail, I mean. There. I come back to that beautiful phrase of Hegel's, that precisely because form is also the way in which the essential manifests itself. Form is as essential to essence as essence is to itself, so that essence is not conceivable simply as essence, but equally as form, and in the whole richness of developed form. So, back to Marx.
1:00:59 This text so famous—I won't read it to you in full, but even though it's short, it begins by, let's say, refuting vulgar Marxism. Well yes, Marx starts by dismissing an abstract Marxism, the one that sticks to the imagery of infrastructure and also superstructure. Infra, super, what does that mean? Below, above. I'm not interpreting. I'm analyzing the words. What are we dealing with here? Below, above? Are we in time or in space?
1:01:31 In space. That's not the real Marx. Marx is history. Since Kant, the problem of thought, of theoretical detour, is the problem of time. Whereas up until Kant, since Plato, it was the problem of extension and space. These are interesting problems—the plastic arts and the arts of time, music, poetry, cinema today. Cinema does both. There are plastic arts, we watch and we hear. Cinema—this was already there in opera.
1:02:01 Come on, whatever—there are sets, classical, dance, gesture. So he speaks of the productive forces above which, isn't it, the superstructures unfold, and suddenly he goes to the next line and says: at a certain degree of development, at a certain degree of their development, the productive forces come into contradiction with the relations of production.
1:02:32 Ah, there, well. Suddenly he says the opposite of the previous paragraph. Fantastic. Up until then, the superstructures, what's in our heads, to put it very simply, isn't it, were the reflection—as they say in somewhat mechanistic Marxism, isn't it—were the reflection, granting that the term "reflection" is reductive enough anyway, of what lies below, the material. And now, suddenly, no. I don't know. It contradicts itself. The above and the below.
1:03:04 Ah, listen, either it expresses it or it contradicts it. "Come into contradiction with the productive forces." And here he drives the point home. Watch out, because the sentence is reversed. "From forms of development of the productive forces that they were, they become fetters on them." That's the sentence. Up until then, they were the forms of, so the expression of—we're still in space. And now, suddenly, they become fetters. So, says Marx, an era of social revolution opens. A capital text.
1:03:34 I repeat, I remind those who want to refer to it, and who might dare admit here that they haven't read it yet—there are plenty of reasons not to have read it, we don't encourage that much—that it's the preface, or foreword, depending on the translation, to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859. There, now you know everything. It's short, take advantage of it, never has so much Marxism been packed into so few lines. For those who don't want to slog through the rest, this works out well.
1:04:05 There. We're not going to do everything at once. Now, when he speaks precisely of superstructure, he tells us that—at the time of such upheaval, so when there's contradiction between the top and the bottom, between the material base of society, as he says, and what's in our heads, I say this to simplify—when he says, we must clearly distinguish the upheaval in the material base, which can be established with scientific precision.
1:04:39 That, we can measure, it's rigorous, change in material things. Distinguish it from what? From the legal forms. Look at the list. Philosophical. There. Political. Aesthetic. Religious. In short, that's Marx speaking. In short, there's a word, a generic term to say all that. In short. Ideological. Never has Marx been so clear.
1:05:10 Never did Marx confuse—I'm speaking biblically, aren't I? God confounded the powerful. He confounded his enemies. There are people who speak of "Marxist ideology." There can be no such thing as Marxist ideology. Marx is precisely saying that ideology is always what is determined. It's opposed to the sciences. So, we shouldn't be doing philosophy anymore. If I do it anyway with you, it's a misfortune.
Philosophizing while waiting, like Hölderlin 1:05:40 That's what I've been saying all along. It's a stopgap. And so I do philosophy the way Hölderlin did poetry, but more simply—when Hölderlin says that among the Greeks, no one had to bear life alone. He's speaking of the Greek world, but the ancient Greeks. That's what Hölderlin regrets. He's not a Schwärmer, as they say in Germany, a dreamy enthusiast who says, "ah yes, it was wonderful, beauty, Apollo"—no, that's not it, that's not the Greece he means, it's not Heidegger, it's not Nietzsche.
1:06:14 Broadly speaking, all the same, Greece is a pretext for making a break with the world of the metics, the Semites of the Orient, and for having blond, blue-eyed people and Hollywood heroes. That's not it. I'm simplifying. But it's worth balancing out, given all the drivel spouted through the 19th century and into the 20th—people pass on and it still goes on at the Sorbonne. No, historians know very well that Greece is a product of the Orient, fine. That doesn't take away what is remarkable and magnificent and specific in the Greek world, but still, Astarte and Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess.
1:06:47 Think about it. There, and the flood, that's Gilgamesh. Well anyway, we've already seen that. So, when Hölderlin evokes Greece, it's because "no one had to bear life alone," the collective. But he knows very well that this was reserved for a minority. So Hölderlin is caught between a promise that we got thanks to the Greek world, and which must this time be fulfilled for everyone. There's a fragment where he says all this remarkably.
1:07:19 A fragment from the period of his madness. I mention it because it's very short. Word for word in translation. "He wanted"—"er wollte," that's Greek. "He wanted to found an empire of art." You see how close he is to Hegel. Hegel, when he speaks of Greece in the Phenomenology, calls that "the religion of art." "He wanted to found an empire of art. But the national among them was neglected." It's rather elliptical. "The national" doesn't mean the nation-state. It's not the national-state, otherwise he'd have said so. The word "national" exists in German. It's roughly the way a landscape moves us, and we believe it's nature when in fact it's history reflected there.
1:07:53 There, roughly, roughly. I won't say more. "But the national among them was neglected"—the national is Greek. "And Greece, sublime beauty, sank. The Greeks neglected their own foundation." So why am I speaking of this? Because he says: in the meantime, in the meantime, until it comes back, and for everyone, in the meantime, "grant me to be able to turn my thought toward the hours of festival, and that a peace be restored to me toward the dead."
1:08:23 Can you repeat that? I didn't hear the sentence. In the meantime, grant me to be able to turn my thought toward the hours of festival, and that a peace be... and by the reader, I don't know who... and that a peace be restored to me toward the dead. For long ago there died many captains, beautiful women, and poets. I say it as an enumeration. Captains, beautiful women, and poets. Nowadays there is so great a crowd of men, but I am all alone. The last line tells us that to the Greek day, the world of Apollo, has succeeded the Christian night.
1:08:53 This is not a criticism at all, this isn't Nietzsche, quite the contrary. He knows that it's a deepening of the Christian world. In the meantime, freedom which was for a few... You know Hegel's formula. The Orientals knew that only one is free, the pharaoh, the emperor of China, the king of kings in Ethiopia. The one who breaks all records in titles. Negus, emperor of Ethiopia, king of kings, lion of the tribe of Judah, descendant of Prester John.
1:09:23 Try to match that. The Orientals knew that only one is free. These aren't Orientals in the geographical sense, it's historical. There are Chinese people in Shanghai today who are more modern than I am. Much more modern than me. The Greeks knew—we shift from the imperfect to the simple past, because it's an event, the Greek miracle, fairly brief in time. At noon, it doesn't last long, it's not like the morning or the evening. The Greeks knew that a few are free.
1:09:53 The moderns know that all are free, potentially. But the time it takes—what Hegel calls patience, the calvary of the concept—for the freedom of a few to be extended to all. In the meantime, let me get on with it, that's how you have to do philosophy, almost, unfortunately—I'd love for us not to need it anymore, for us to live in a classless society, but that's not up to me alone. You've made us review quite a lot with your business about the particular and the universal.
Illusion, inverted truth 1:10:28 There you go, but I care a great deal about the last three lines. It's getting blurry—all right, now I'm going to move on to what I announced in the outline, the relationship of aesthetics, which I've titled illusion and truth of aesthetics. How can it be both illusion and truth at once? I'm not saying art is false, I'm not saying art tells the truth, I'm saying art is an illusion. No doubt, it's more beautiful.
1:10:59 Now illusion is a truth, it's not like the false. 4 plus 5 equals 11 has no relation whatsoever to the truth. I pick up a cup of coffee and correct myself, I was distracted, that's all. But illusion is truth, only inverted. It's not just any error. Among all possible errors, there's an infinity of them. I make precisely the one that is the truth multiplied by minus 1.
1:11:30 It's curious all the same, I had the choice, through 360 degrees, and I picked the point diametrically opposite to me. I'm at the center of the universe, before Copernicus, for instance. It's not only that it's false, it's that it's the inverse. I'm on the periphery. You know, people don't like to admit they're from the suburbs. They'd rather say they live on the Île Saint-Louis. Well yes, it's better for flirting anyway. I say that because apparently it was fully built up from a real-estate point of view. On the Île Saint-Louis, everything was already taken from the time it was built under Henri IV. So I understand it. So the price was already high.
1:12:04 That's what illusion is. It's the inverse of the true. And now I'm digging into the concept of illusion. Work on it in Spinoza. Spinoza is a master at this. Few philosophers have understood what illusion is as well as Spinoza. Indeed, if you look closely at his most famous statements, it's always an illusion turned right-side up. We do not desire things because we judge them to be good.
1:12:36 No, no, no. We judge them to be good because we desire them. Desire comes first. And I think afterward. The idea that Peter has of Paul—I love this one—expresses more the state of Peter's body than the state of Paul's body. Yes indeed, it's the same person who tells me, sir, I don't like Mozart. He's saying nothing about Mozart. He's talking about his own body. I can assure you, his body. Yes, you're right to laugh, because I think it was with you—I told you the story about Gustave Moreau, you know, when he was director of fine arts, the painter.
1:13:11 A student had said that to him: sir, I don't like Raphael. Do you know what he answered? Roughly—does anyone remember? Yes, bravo, thank you. I would have gotten angry, I would have shut myself away. You're exaggerating, but still, he found the right answer. He said, it doesn't matter, my dear boy, it doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything at all. There, Spinoza, that's good, because it's so simple, these statements—the idea that Peter has of Paul involves more the state of Peter's body than the state of Paul's body. That's illusion.
1:13:43 So we must take it seriously. Because, you know, there's a lot of truth in illusion. If it's enough to... You understand, it's the mirror. Stand in front of a mirror, you understand everything. What's on the left is on the right, what's on the right is on the left. As for top and bottom... let's not complicate things. But still, you see? Why necessarily the inverse? Why not the same way up? It's the side of another. I didn't hear. Why necessarily illusion? You invert. He tells me you're speaking minus one.
1:14:13 I'm not going too fast. Illusion? Yes. I say to myself you're speaking minus one, so I invert. Why couldn't I go around instead? Because illusion always inverts. In the mirror, what's on the left is on the right. I'm dealing with simple things. There's no vocabulary here, what's on the right. It's not a matter of vocabulary, that's what illusion is. It's not at all something that doesn't exist. No, it does exist. It's a Freudian term, but it's something that exists, just displaced. It's a displacement.
1:14:44 The center goes to the periphery, the periphery goes to the center. Yes. Louder. In fact, error or illusion—are we making a mistake? Let's put some order into this. Good, that's a good vocation. It lets me bring order. In both cases, error and illusion, are we in—? Error, wandering. In the false. We shouldn't get lost in words. In both cases, it's false. Still, we mustn't forget that there is truth and reality waiting for us. But whereas in the case of a simple error, the false is merely different from the true...
1:15:15 In the case of illusion, it is exactly its inverse. There's a bit more order now. There we go. A few emblematic matrix-illusions, like geocentrism, for example, which plays such a great role in the history of science, to the point that Kant himself titled his own initiative a veritable Copernican revolution. Let's not forget. None of that is by chance. So, I say that aesthetics is that kind of world. So here I'm obliged to put Hegel back in his place.
The place of art in the Hegelian system 1:15:51 Because he is, after all, the first philosopher to leave us a detailed aesthetics. He's not the first to talk about art and beauty—Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium are summits of aesthetics. But that's not a system, a system of the fine arts. How shall I put it? I mean that it's Hegel's most developed work in terms of number of pages, this one. And that's for someone who says that art is finished, that there are things superior to art called religion and philosophy.
1:16:24 Let me remind those who aren't well acquainted with it—it's simple, the system. It always works in threes. Logos, Nature, Spirit. Let's set aside Spirit for now. For the moment I leave logic and nature aside. But each of them is threefold too. In the Logos you have the logic of being, the logic of essence, and the logic of the concept—I won't develop all that. In Nature you have mechanical nature, organic nature—inert nature, mechanical nature, organic nature, the living.
1:16:56 And then Spirit. Roughly, history, everything we now call culture, the human world, everything that breaks with nature. From there Spirit splits up: subjective Spirit, objective Spirit, absolute Spirit. I'm reminding you of the great Hegelian divisions. I'm not saying it's true, it's false. There. Where does art fit in? Does anyone know among you? In the Hegelian system? In subjective Spirit, in objective Spirit, or in absolute Spirit? Definitely not subjective.
1:17:28 Subjective spirit is psychology, consciousness. Ah, I think... Objective. So objective spirit is spirit embodied in its acts. It's tools, it's a constitution. You see? The Code of Hammurabi in the Louvre, that venerable stele, which is the first written legal system to have come down to us. That's objectified spirit right there. It's not me deciding by whim what to do to a thief—there's a code. And Hegel says that's a great progress, even if it seems barbaric to us to cut off a thief's hand, it's still better than the whim of the prince.
1:18:03 No, art is in absolute Spirit. Art occupies an eminent place in Hegel. Because there are those who say Hegel understood nothing about art. As soon as someone says art is not the absolute, therefore he understood nothing. That's the bourgeois's aestheticism talking. I once met... I was in business for a while, dare I admit it to you. Yes, and thanks to you. Because it was the European Union funding it, that is, your taxes. I've never earned a good living except with your money. So let's be serious.
1:18:33 How many times have I seen such beasts. No, actually I worked for Hachette before. My life is terrible. Businessmen who tell me, 'Ah, if I had to do it all over again, now I'd do art, I'd do music.' Well, how nice for him. He extracts surplus value for 40 years and then, with one foot in the grave, he tells me, 'Ah, if I had to do it over, I'd do art.' Anyway. No, Hegel is not reductive about art. Absolute spirit. But within absolute spirit there are still three things. Ah, there we go. And there, art comes first, it's not last. Art, religion, philosophy.
1:19:06 Hegel teaches that at university. Who employs him? The Ministry of National Education. That didn't exist yet at the time. Right, well—by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. He's watched over by the Prussian state and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. So for those interested, that's the other side of Hegel. Hegel in His Time is the title of one of the books to read. Domenico Losurdo is good too. But Jacques D'Hondt is the specialist on these questions. The late Jacques D'Hondt, who died a few years ago, and who founded the Institute of Hegelian-Marxist Studies in Poitiers.
1:19:41 A remarkable man if ever there was one. And you'll learn everything: the political ideas of the minister who recruited Hegel to Berlin during the brief period when Prussia was at the political vanguard. Very well informed. And that extraordinary night, I won't stop for the anecdotes—that night when Hegel, there he is, in his glory, in Berlin, it took him time. Students mocked his Swabian accent. That's the kind of intra-German thing that's brutal. It's nothing. For us, a Marseille accent gets a laugh, but it's nothing. A Bavarian professor of biology can't get taken seriously in a Berlin lecture hall.
1:20:15 Everyone burst out laughing. And so, they mocked him, they called him Absolutus von Hegelingen. 'Ingen' is a Swabian ending, it's from the south. Like Tübingen, etc., Säckingen. Absolutus, Absolutus von Hegelingen. That's what they called him. So, on that extraordinary night when one of his pupils, one of his students, had been jailed for subversive activities—rather remarkable—and other students told him, to support him, to come see him at night in the prison.
1:20:48 And the prison stood on a bridge over the Spree, and there at night, wrapped in a mask and a cloak, he went to visit this student and said to him, in Latin, 'me vides,' you see me. It's extraordinary. That's from Jacques D'Hondt. Are you interested? Go read it, it's worth it. But precisely, art, religion, philosophy—Jacques D'Hondt says that part—not all, we mustn't be too reductive—of the difficulty we all have reading Hegel is largely due to the fact that he was trying to elude the censors.
1:21:23 Put yourself in the censor's place. What is the censor interested in? One question and one only: does this gentleman believe in God? After all, our children are in his hands. Well, I feel sorry for the poor censor in this case, because given Hegel's logic, to determine whether or not he believed in God—good luck. It's not simply a matter of subject, predicate, being, measure, concept. Good luck. Part of the difficulty comes from there.
From representation to the absolute idea: Lenin as reader of Hegel 1:21:55 There you go. So art—that's why religion comes second, all the same. But, and this is Hegel's audacity, even under censorship's watch, the system doesn't end with the religious sphere. Philosophy is above religion. Spirit is unworthy of itself as long as it is not in self-consciousness and as long as it has not definitively left the sphere—I mentioned the word earlier—of Vorstellung, or representation. Now, art, aesthetics, like religion, still belongs to the sphere of representation.
1:22:28 The earthly paradise, all that, we have images of it, it's a representation. Some people look for whether the earthly paradise wasn't the Cape Verde archipelago, because there are bananas there and that would be Eve's fruit rather than your ordinary apple. That's representation. And science, for him, was... knowledge, Wissen in German—even though Wissenschaft means science—the knowledge that allows philosophy and science, for Hegelian philosophy, to be what lets us leave representation behind. Or rather, not to reduce ourselves to representation—that doesn't mean we no longer have representations.
1:23:03 That's a good question. Because Hegel himself says the proper feature—opposite to representation. The Idea, with a capital I, is the summit of Hegelian knowledge. So for those who ask me, 'Where are you taking us? You say you're a Marxist and you're deep in idealism.' The absolute Idea, what next? Pious nonsense, is that it? Well, Lenin, when he finally had time—a militant like him didn't have much time, but there, he's in exile, in Switzerland, stuck, having escaped the Tsar's police—and he finally has time to dig into this famous Hegel he'd heard about.
1:23:36 He'd long been a Marxist, but among philosophers, he'd heard mainly from Marx that Hegel is nonetheless not like the others. Yes, there's mystification in him, but still he's worth all the other bourgeois philosophers put together. So, all right, this time I'll go see for myself. And what does he tackle? The Logic, the most difficult part. He, an autodidact, makes fewer misreadings than all the readers from, say, the Sorbonne—I'm not specifically targeting the Sorbonne—or Cambridge, or wherever, to give them a hard time. He reaches the final chapter of the Logic, precisely titled the Absolute Idea.
1:24:12 That's going to make a Marxist burst out laughing, especially a militant like Lenin, can you imagine? And at the start of his reading, he's like that—he says, oh dear, you can smell the mystic, the bigot, the mystified man, the priest, not far off. That's how it starts. And then, as he progresses—I recommend the text, Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks—it's a prodigious reading to witness, because these are annotations within Hegel's text. So at first, it's criticism. Then he says, that's not bad. That's very good. And then, bam bam, like that, bam bam, he's really into it.
1:24:44 It's not when there's the argument—excellent. And there he reaches the Absolute Idea, and Lenin says too—and here, I'm quoting word for word, I'm not exaggerating—'This chapter on the Absolute Idea is exceedingly remarkable, colon: it is the most idealist and yet the most materialist passage in Hegel. It's contradictory, but it's a fact.' It's not over. New line. Boxed—he boxes it himself—Aphorism, he writes, aphorism, colon: 'It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.'
1:25:17 So, said by a Marxist half a century after him. Don't take my word for it, read it. I say this because the whole Parisian Marxist scene wallowed in Althusserianism. The glorious era of structuralism, and Althusser spent his time trying to decouple Marx from Hegel. Maybe he's right, I'm not settling the substance of the matter, I'm just doing logic here. Because I haven't finished with Althusser. He says everyone got it wrong. Like Lenin, he says everyone got Marx wrong—but he says the opposite: for lack of a Hegelian reading of Marx.
1:25:47 That's what Althusser says. Roughly, and I'm not betraying his thought at all—far from it—he spent his whole life decoupling Hegel from Marx as much as possible. Except for one, he says: Lenin. It's mind-boggling, really. Three of them, and either some are lying or some are mistaken, I don't know. So I take Lenin, who says the same thing—you can't understand Marx, including the first chapter of Capital, unless you've read—especially, he says—the whole of Hegel's Logic. So, seriously, to answer your question.
1:26:19 Knowledge is that. But the Idea, you see, how important it is in Hegel—the absolute Idea. For Lenin too, the idea is worthy of itself only when it externalizes itself. Hegel keeps coming back to that. His own way, so as not to anger the censor, was to translate it into Christian terms—perhaps he was sincere. In any case, the censor could say nothing. Namely, that God becomes incarnate. If God does not become incarnate, then, for Hegel, he is not God.
1:26:52 If the Father remains up there—I mean, if there's no Son and no incarnation—then the Father doesn't exist. You find that in Hölderlin. Yes, there are hymns. I'm thinking for instance of the hymn of the Three Brothers... [names], and the third, I forget which, where he says that if the community weren't there to sing it in chorus, the Father wouldn't exist and would be manifest nowhere among the living. You see, there must have been great discussions between Hegel and Hölderlin in their room, when they were theology students at Tübingen.
Crisis, Baudelaire and modernity that hates itself 1:27:28 Yes indeed, I've already said I would have loved to be a little mouse listening to them. But there you have it, the greatest poet of his time—some say of all time—and the greatest philosopher of his time, no less, with Schelling who joined them afterward. Not bad, that room must have been quite something. Another figure. So, all that, I need to tell you—this whole account, why does this repression happen? I'm coming back to my last three lines. I'm interrupting because I'm running short on time.
1:28:02 I'm going to cut the questions short because I need to finish analyzing what this text is telling us today. And to show you it's definitely not because I begrudge your speaking time, I propose that the last session—that is, the next one, the final session of this cycle, because after that you'll all be off to Corsica with me—the next session, we devote entirely to questions on this year's seminar, starting wherever you like. So, back to the last three lines, or rather two and a quarter lines.
1:28:35 Here: 'However, the night gradually grew thicker, and the sights, sounds, and feelings of the place blended together in my drowsy mind.' And we've seen, I repeat, that it's no accident that confusion arises precisely at the moment when clarity was exceptional. So now I come back to your question, Erwan. You said very rightly, it's repression. But what is being repressed? Is it Nerval repressing something, some singular truth? I've just seen—I don't think there's much singularity in all this, there's a great deal that is shared.
1:29:09 Let me remind you now of everything I've been saying for four years. When did I first use a literary text in this philosophy seminar? I began by recalling the origins of philosophy and its principle, recalling that philosophy always arises within the framework of a crisis. These are reminders I keep giving. Crisis of the Greek city, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Crisis of the whole Ancien Régime, of several centuries of Ancien Régime, feudalism, and monarchy. The Enlightenment.
1:29:44 Crisis of the Middle Ages, Montaigne. 'What do I know?' Not much is left standing. The Middle Ages was the age of certainties. 'What do I know?' The Middle Ages isn't one century, it's almost ten centuries. Ten centuries during which the essential relation is vertical, that of man to God. That's called religion. From the Renaissance, in the 16th century, the fundamental relation—the one that makes Rabelais, Montaigne, and later Enlightenment France reflect—is the horizontal relation of man to man, that's the political.
1:30:19 That's interesting. I'm not excluding the other one. I'm simply showing you how the axis has tilted. So, apart from that opening on the essence of philosophy, the first time I turned to a text was Baudelaire's 'La cloche fêlée' ['The Cracked Bell'], if you remember. I recall that this very short poem, made of quatrains and tercets—tercets, like in the trifecta. But not at the racetrack betting counter.
1:30:51 I chose a short text on purpose because it's all the more incredible that in 14 lines, it's nothing at all, it's not a great epic, it's not a tragedy, in 14 lines Baudelaire takes us through voluptuousness, romantic melancholy, you want to be there. It is bitter and sweet, during the winter nights, to listen near the fire that flickers and smokes, to distant memories slowly rising to the sound of chimes singing in the mist. Ah! A good fire there, a good servant, Marguerite there, preparing us pea purée.
1:31:23 Well yes, those were the good old days, sexism, who cares. The bells ringing the hours, paradise. No, I say that because now there are people who complain, who hear the bells in their second home and they write to the town hall, it's scandalous, I paid a lot. I like it, we're in the village, they tell me, we're not in the city anymore. People are strange, they're greener than me, those who protest against the bells. So it starts well, it ends in nightmare, in 14 lines: blessed — I'm not talking behind her back — the bell with the vigorous throat, it's bronze, which despite its old age, alert and in good health, faithfully casts its religious cry, like an old soldier keeping watch under the tent, the bell, the church, the soldier, the army, Freud, the church and the army, two examples of a crowd without women, blessed, the bell with the vigorous throat, which despite its old age, alert and in good health, faithfully casts its markers, its bearings, its religious cry, like an old soldier keeping watch under the tent, and yes, it's the popular that guides, ah, never step outside the numbers
1:32:33 and beings, full stop, that's it for the quatrains. As for me, my soul is cracked, a bell that is cracked, it's done for, a bell whose sound doesn't carry far, and when in its troubles it wants, with its songs, to people the cold night air, watch out, a new nativity scene, it seems, it seems that its weakened voice is like the thick death-rattle of a wounded man forgotten by the edge of a lake of blood, under a great heap of the dead, and who dies without moving despite immense efforts — total thriller, can you imagine, letting him move barely at all, a corpse on top, in 14 lines. I told you this is the poem of modernity, of what begins here, and we'll see when. Let me recap, let me take stock, because of that I wanted to put the questions off a little later, since I owe you clarity, after all, these were detours we took, and we could make up for the effort you've made trying to follow along — you see it's easier now.
1:33:44 This modernity which appears chronologically, let's be clear, starting from great upheavals such as happen once every 20 centuries, namely the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, that is, within a handkerchief's space, at the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th — none of that is so old. Modernity, I mean, the contemporary — go to the Ministry of Culture regarding music, you'll see, the department of 'actual music,' actual, modern music, contemporary music, actual music, good luck sorting that out.
1:34:14 I'm talking about modernity, let's be serious. The beginning of what we are, you and I, that's what we repress. Because the defining feature of modernity, I've already told you, but I'll repeat it, because now you see it in order, is to detest itself. The defining feature of modernity is to love Baroque music, and not the music of today. Well yes! But Bach wasn't playing the music of three centuries before him, that's not what he listened to.
1:34:47 I already told you, coming back from UNESCO once on a mission, I see a young guy, coming out of the metro, playing to perfection the most complicated themes of Charlie Parker, Donna Lee — who knows Donna Lee? Well, well, it's terrifying to play that flawlessly. Apparently those were complicated themes like that because there were tons of young musicians who wanted to play with them to sort out who was good. And I say to him, I'm full of admiration, but still, it's good, he's 18, the kid, the little amp, you know, out there, it's good, they know that, they master the repertoire, they don't let themselves get taken in by TV shows, and the 'soup' — that's what we call what is neither jazz, nor classical, nor world music.
1:35:26 There are a few French songs here and there that aren't bad. And then, there's all the richness in this domain of popular song, but that falls under world music. We'll get there — popular song, that's the best for him. And suddenly I say to myself, you idiot, you're being dazzled by a guy playing jazz from 40 years ago. But Parker didn't play the jazz of 40 years before him. Modernity doesn't love that. But me, me first — I once invited a girl, I don't know, we're going way back, I took her to a little mill by the river, from the 15th century.
1:36:00 I tell myself, you see, I don't know, I'm saying whatever, there's a restaurant I recommend, the Coupe-Chou in Paris. Not far from the Collège de France, there are Gothic cellars, if you want to impress someone. Modernity doesn't love modernity. Racine has his Greeks speak like contemporaries. He is modern, with feathers, lots of feathers. Right? And above all, they speak like courtiers of Versailles.
1:36:31 Allow me to admire it without imitating it. You can't imagine Homeric heroes talking like that. Him, a bit, if you dare, that was it, all the same, in the Mediterranean. Well, fine, I'm being a grump. Well yes, that's it. Whereas, when I'm all on fire, I see this coldness clearly — I'm taking one of the rare lines of Racine that verge on preciosity. But still, he's rather pleased with himself for it. Father Kircher, you know, the one who traveled to China and wanted to make reproductions, engravings in the 17th century to show us what China is like.
1:37:04 He shows the Egyptian sphinx, he's done the Orient, etc. He can't help putting Versailles-style decorations on the Egyptian temples. You see? Because it would have been incongruous at the time to do like today's photos, showing things raw and unfinished. It's only recently that we've had a historical outlook. It's very recent. That's what we repress with a history that we replace with legend. When Freud says, date your memories, date them.
Absolute knowledge and romantic anguish 1:37:34 Give the date. Isn't that a bit to pin us down, precisely so that history doesn't drift off into legend? It happens so fast. So what is repressed in this last outlook? Once again, something that appears at the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th — I'll finish on this. It's what man has repressed since the origin of humanity, but which can no longer be repressed starting with modernity.
1:38:04 It's absolute knowledge. That's the moment it appears. It's the last chapter of the Phenomenology, isn't it? Some people think, oh these guys, they think they're megalomaniacs. Absolute knowledge — no, everyone can attain it. He wrote it precisely so that everyone could attain it. To bring philosophy down to common consciousness and to raise common consciousness up to philosophical consciousness. That's his program, spelled out in full. Because now the historical conditions for absolute knowledge are finally fulfilled. Because there was a century of enlightenment, and religion is no longer there to make the answers precede the questions.
1:38:35 Death can no longer be sidestepped. Pascal had prodigious intuitions. We are inconsolable. If we are not diverted, the human condition is unbearable. That's exactly what Pascal says. When I examined men, I noticed that all their unhappiness comes from their inability to stay quietly in a room. With that elliptical style of his, the secret he alone possesses, saying the essential in so few words — the great art.
1:39:07 Well yes. And as for the king, he would be unhappy, any king that he is. He would be unhappy, any king that he is — he wrote that at the time of Louis XIV — if he weren't diverted, which is why so much effort is put into diverting kings. For he too is mortal. 'Madame is dying, Madame is dead.' Yes, even Madame dies. What can you do. It's badly made. That's how it is. But it's not serious. Even in Pascal, who is a great tragic figure.
1:39:37 Even in Pascal, there's still... that's down here below. But beyond, there's God, etc. Ah, you see? That's over now. And here I can't help reading you an excerpt from a German romantic. I'll add — you say these are modern things. Yet even in Hegel's time, none of that existed yet. Look. There was no Kafka, there was no... how is it called... Waiting for Godot by Beckett, there was no such anguish. You're going to see what you're going to see. Listen, I'm sorry, I can't find it, I won't waste your time, we don't have much left.
1:40:10 So let me give you the reference. It's an author whose name we will probably never know, we only know his pseudonym, Bonaventura. He's a German romantic, an exact contemporary of Schelling, of Hölderlin, who wrote one single work called The Night Watches. The Night Watches of Bonaventura, watches in the plural. Because the narrator in it is a night watchman. The night watchman is an emblematic figure of German romanticism.
1:40:41 Because for a long time, in German towns, under the Ancien Régime, there really was a night watchman with a horn who would sound the hours. It wasn't the bell that sounded the hours. You'll find him again in the second act of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, the figure of the night watchman, who arrives after the big brawl, but arrives too late. Everything's calm by then. After the brawl in the street it's been sorted out. And it's a night watchman who writes as everyone sleeps. It's a hallucinatory, hallucinated and hallucinating text, in which he says that everything is nothing.
1:41:14 he almost states negativity itself. Some say it was Schelling, the author. I'm the only one, I think, to hypothesize that it might even be Hegel, because there's a statement of negativity in it. He says, in fact, being spends its time devouring itself, and even this self-devouring is itself an illusion — I'm quoting here — as if there were something. But there is nothing. But these things, I won't develop them, because it would send us straight to the psychiatric asylum. It's him speaking. You see to what degree of anguish modern man had arrived within a few years.
1:41:47 These are unthinkable things. You won't find them from the pen of a Voltaire. Voltaire knows a lot of things. But that's the Ancien Régime. He writes marvelously well, Voltaire, but he's not Rousseau. Rousseau is the beginning of the new regime. I'm speaking on the stylistic level. It's romanticism. Modernity is romanticism. Not Musset, not French literary romanticism, which is, how shall I put it, strangled by the old form. Madame de Staël is right, romanticism — the light comes to us from the North. Romanticism was English and German first. And then it took until Baudelaire, the Symbolists, then the Surrealists, to see all of a sudden — the Surrealists were the first to speak of the German romantics.
1:42:23 Who were totally unknown in France. So this is important. It's the first traumatized expression. Traumatized because they all end up mad or dead by suicide. I can't help it, it's statistical. So here we leave the psychological register. Let me go back to answering your question. There's nothing more different at the individual level. On an analyst's couch, there's no connection at all between the life of Wackenroder, dead at 24, the life of Novalis, dead at 29. Hölderlin, mad, psychically dead at 30.
1:42:55 Büchner, 27 years old, the author of Danton's Death, you know, and of Woyzeck, which would give rise to what I think is the most beautiful opera of the 20th century, probably — Berg's Wozzeck. There you go. It's a massacre. Something collective. We're no longer in the field of psychology, we're in the sociological, socio-historical field, call it what you like, when it reaches that point. So that's what is repressed there. And what we must now take on. We need art, but not in order to make art.
The girl offering fruit: our museal relation to art 1:43:25 but so as not to fall back into the same illusion. And so I'll finish, five more minutes, with... Ah, I love ending with her. She's so pretty. You said, who wants to talk about her? Hmm? I'll say Antigone, but... Ah no, better than that. Really, better than that. Prettier. Antigone is sublime. That's not the word.
1:43:56 Yes? The girl with the fruits. Thank you. The girl with the fruits. Ah, gentlemen, that interests you, does it? The girl with the fruits. 'Apples, pears, and doo-wops,' as Sacha Distel sang. After being dumped by Brigitte Bardot. Well yes, apples, pears. Come on, be serious. So, the girl with the fruits, it's... it's... the second-to-last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. So we're three pages from absolute knowledge. This is serious business. We're still in the chapter on religion.
1:44:27 Religion itself is divided into three. Natural religion, that's animism. Aesthetic religion, that's the Greek world. And revealed religion, offenbare Religion, manifest, revealed religion, etc. — Christianity. That's the great division. And this text, the girl with the fruits, comes in at the end of the Roman Empire. He never gives these precise details. He says 'the empire of abstract right.' We know very well that means Rome, once we're familiar with it. And... decadent Rome, waning Rome, Rome that never stops ending.
1:44:57 It's not... Christianity hasn't yet learned... that will take over starting with Constantine. Nerval: 'Yet the Sibyl with the Latin face still sleeps beneath the arch of Constantine, and nothing has disturbed the stern portico.' We're no longer in the great Roman Empire. It's falling apart, and we're not yet in Christianity. At that point, there's a whole long page that resembles Hölderlin, in an almost elegiac tone — if it weren't Hegel.
1:45:27 There are no longer the hymns that faith has abandoned. The Games are no longer the Olympic Games in the Greek sense, they are gladiators, a poor bear that's being kept, a panther put out to graze. In short, it's decay and decadence. And he says, and the fruits of ancient art, of aesthetic religion, the Greek fruits — meaning the Romans always surrounded themselves with Greek objects — no longer have the light that bore them, the sky, and so on, he creates a whole sort of meteorology that would have surrounded Greek art.
1:45:58 And he says, they have become what they are for us — sudden shift into the modern, contemporary world. The fruits, yes, the fruits of aesthetics, the fruits of art. And Hegel understood that it's the museum that begins in his own time. Our relationship to art is a relationship to the museum, we moderns. You have at home, I have at home, I'm the first to admit it, an African mask here, a Giotto painting, and so on, and piles of photos, things from various eras, various places. Racine would never have done that, it wouldn't fit, we're not in the 1700s anymore, by the way.
1:46:32 We didn't have the Grand Siècle spirit anymore, so, I insist. They are henceforth what they are for us. They are like fruits — we're getting there — that the girl offers. In the street, there are girls, saleswomen who go to market, in Africa, she still has plenty. And he says, the fruits no longer have the aspect, etc., the light that had engendered them, the air, the breath. And suddenly, there's a reversal.
1:47:02 But they are more than that. For the girl who offers her fruits is more than the immediate naturalness of her fruits. Our modern relationship to art, our somewhat frustrating relationship in appearance, museum-like — 'muséique' isn't a word, but let's say museological if you like — is deeper in a way, even if it's less gratifying, less striking, I don't think, than the relationship the ancients had to art. Fra Angelico painted the Virgin and the Saints on his knees.
1:47:33 For him, it was first-degree, it wasn't representation. It was the sacred. You see? They painted with their knees almost bleeding. All the same. You see? It's a radiance. And he has a very beautiful image, he says, for the girl has, in the radiance of her self-conscious eye — if that means anything, self-consciousness — a light superior to the light of the sun that had engendered her fruits.
1:48:03 Extraordinary text. I recommend it to you, it's in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the chapter on religion, right at the beginning of revealed religion. There you go. I'll end on that. 9 o'clock sharp. Enjoy your meal. Thank you all.
