English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Progressive romanticism and reactionary romanticism 0:00 Hello dear friends, dear confined ones, that's already two words I can use without worrying about inclusive language. "Confinés" or "amis," French spelling is such that, to the ear like that, it can be taken as either masculine or feminine. Dear comrades, likewise, the most faithful among you, I keep expressing my gratitude to you for being faithful to our sessions of confinitude, so as not to waste too much time.
0:57 I'm always a bit off on timing, as you know. I'll go straight, as a preamble if you like, to the three texts I'd like to build on today, which will be displayed when I talk about them, I presume. I believe some of you, thanks to our Facebook site, our Facebook page, have already had a look at them.
1:29 It's better to absorb them a bit beforehand, a few days ahead. So much so that if I make a comment focusing on one part and somewhat neglecting another, at least the whole context of the text has been covered. It's always better to absorb the text before working on it. Especially since this kind of text is dense.
2:00 But before that, as I told you as a preamble, I'll keep answering the questions, not to go backward but to move forward. First, there are questions I somewhat neglected. I'm thinking of Mehdi Brochet, and Jess Fincher too. And as for our Norwegian friends, I mention all three, because all three ask a question related to the classicism-romanticism relationship.
2:33 And if I may, I'll start by quoting Mehdi's question. I'm not doing him any wrong by making his question public, since he asked it himself publicly last time, right? Now, I find that he expresses very well not only the problem I'm trying to bring out, the problem immanent to modernity — I'll come back to it — to our modernity, he restates it very well.
3:13 And on top of that, he anticipates the misunderstandings we might have about the terms I used — romanticism, classicism, revolution, counter-revolution. I'm not here to hand out prizes, but I'm very favorably impressed by Mehdi's dialectical ability, because he shows clearly — and this is a point I'd like to stress especially today — that we're not dealing in Manichaeism.
3:44 I'm not saying romanticism is counter-revolutionary, or the reverse for that matter. I'm not saying classicism is fascist and romanticism is Marxist. So, enough chatter, let me quote Mehdi, who sums this up very well in the question he asked last time, and which I'm going to try to answer, since you'll see that the substance of his question is taken up by our Norwegian friends from Algarbra, and at the same time this allows me to answer Jess's question.
4:20 Mehdi: "So, isn't there a progressive romantic heritage and a reactionary romantic heritage?" Well, here's someone who is not in Manichaeism. He has clearly understood the ambivalence of romanticism. That's a very important term, you see, in Freud — ambivalence. It's not ambiguity. Ambiguity involves some trickery, some deceit behind it. Being ambiguous means: he tells us this, but it's not quite what he thinks. It's not clear.
4:51 It could be taken in several ways. No, ambivalence means the subject himself doesn't notice it. He is contradictory. He believes he wants this, he believes he hates while he is in fact loving, and vice versa, to take one of the simplest, most spectacular examples. "I hate and love her," as a famous poet says. So romanticism, precisely, is this ambivalence. We'll see later, it's not opportunism either.
5:23 It is not both at once and at the same time. We'll try to determine when it is romantic and when it is progressive, when it is reactionary. Let me go back to Mehdi's text: isn't there a progressive romantic heritage and a reactionary romantic heritage, corresponding, as far as the reactionary is concerned, to the irrationalist turn of the bourgeoisie, which the Lukács of The Destruction of Reason sees very well. I recall that the great Lukács's most famous book, and at the same time a masterpiece, The Destruction of Reason — whose reflection on the ontology of social being has been reissued by Éditions Delga, which I warmly recommend — Lukács, with this very beautiful title, The Destruction of Reason, mapped out an entire historical process that begins exactly at the period I'm talking about, which I say corresponds to the emergence of our modernity, if not of modernity in general, which is a more extensive concept.
6:35 Our modernity, the one that follows the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution — in short, the one that the German Romantics, the German Idealists, whether revolutionaries, progressives, or reactionaries, are the first to get hit in the face with — this modernity bursts in their faces, that's important, as we'll see. He takes it up, then, at its birth, since it's Schelling, roughly, the first great stage of the destruction of reason, all the way to Heidegger, up to our own time, passing through what Mehdi rightly calls irrationalist doctrines.
7:17 Look how fashionable Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are. What adolescent hasn't been Nietzschean, Schopenhauerian? Right? When you're a teenager, with pimply acne, the figure of the Übermensch speaks to you, you easily identify with Zarathustra, with dancing Dionysus, don't you? We'll see, with the texts I've prepared for you, Denis, that reality is a bit more ambivalent, to use Mehdi's term.
7:49 So, I'll start again from the beginning and go through to the end of Mehdi's question. "Isn't there a progressive romantic heritage, and a reactionary romantic heritage, corresponding to the irrationalist turn of the bourgeoisie, which the Lukács of The Destruction of Reason sees very well, while knowing that the very young Lukács had already seen, in Soul and Form, the reactionary and bourgeois character of German romanticism."
8:19 So there you have it — it's not romanticism in general, no. "Corresponding to a class impasse, to an objective social and historical situation." Simply put, these are excellent reminders Mehdi gives us, but now he refines the questioning part of his question, so to speak, in a somewhat redundant way: "simply, what about the appropriation of romanticism by the bourgeoisie in its ascending phase, which repudiates reason, which it then understands as a threat."
8:50 And there, in parentheses, he shows the emergence of the philosophy of history and of Marxism. There you go. So, thank you very much, Mehdi. Our Norwegian friends wrote to me very kindly that they were closely following our workshops of the... no, no, no, the fact that we hold our sessions of confinitude — insofar as the questions we raise apparently entirely coincide with the concerns they are currently developing in their own activity in Norway, and God knows how fruitful and courageous it is.
Classical music, social struggles, and the figure of the reactionary 9:29 I recall that... among our two Norwegian friends, I'm thinking of Agnès Nédregård, who is president of the Association of Visual Artists of Norway, so aesthetic questions are not foreign to her, which doesn't stop her from being a Marxist-Leninist, and even, if I may say, a convinced Clouscardian — she'll correct me if I'm wrong. I have a fond memory, which I'll quickly mention, of the wonderful hours I spent in Bergen, Norway, thanks to their invitation, over two splendid days, in one of the rainiest cities in the world — and in the month of May, you have to go in May, if you want, in those parts, not July-August, you're very far north, you have to go in May to have the best chance of nice days.
10:25 And so, arriving at their apartment, which overlooks the street, from the window you could see Clouscard's works, so to speak, speaking to whoever was walking on the sidewalk, displayed right in the apartment window. There you go. Now, I also learned, through a kind message, that our friend Rémi Cardinal, whom I greet in passing, and who, for those unfamiliar with this repertoire, is a classical pianist — but above all is the founder, on Facebook, since there are plenty of classical pianists but he is the founder, of a page I recommend to you, a site called "L'armée des romantiques" [The Army of the Romantics], which has recently grown thanks to the events we've been living through for a few months now — because I'm not just talking about the lockdown, I'm talking since even the Yellow Vests.
11:25 He founded the "convergence des luttes," but of "luths" [lutes], L-U-T-H-S. We're among musicians here. You've all seen, as I have, these extraordinary and unprecedented images of musicians, instrumentalists, choir members, from the Opéra Bastille, the Opéra Garnier, on the steps of their building, protesting against the social policy being imposed on them, particularly in their fight against the pension reform project. And so this "convergence des luthes" is a way of acknowledging this collective emergence — because individually there had already been some, but this collective emergence of social struggles in this world of classical repertoire musicians, little known to the general public.
12:22 We very often tell young people, we make them believe, that classical music is only for the rich. Stupidity. Mussorgsky picked up out of a gutter, dead drunk; Mozart buried in a common grave, his family not even having enough money to pay for a funeral, however minimal. I won't even mention Schubert, dying at 31 in anonymity, in poverty.
12:54 Whereas you've all seen, like me, rap stars pretending to brawl in airports, and those people's turnover runs into the billions, right? There you go. But I'm not like those who dismiss classical music with a wave of the hand. I don't judge rap through them; I'm judging the paradox of those who believe rap is a popular music and classical music an elitist one. There you go. So Rémy Cardinal, he too, is very attentive to this classicism-or-romanticism dichotomy, not only because he founded the Army of the Romantics, but because he perceives very well — I think he's attentive to our problem at that level — the reactionary side of what I've called, not classicism, which has nothing reactionary about it.
13:49 Classicism, at its height in the 17th century, at the time — that means nothing, revolutionary, progressive. In the 17th century, generally speaking, one is conservative. That's all, simply. Which is very different from reactionary. I've already told you that the reactionary is far more dangerous than the conservative, because the reactionary is the conservative who got scared. Like the émigrés at the time of the Revolution, when they came back, those who had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing," as the famous saying goes — they got scared, and so they become vicious.
14:20 As Spinoza says, in the magnificent opening of one of his most beautiful texts, most men are wicked. They are unhappy. They became wicked because they are unhappy. They were afraid. So there you have it — it's neoclassicism, that is, the return to classicism after the emergence of modernity and romanticism, which can have a reactionary, counter-revolutionary tendency. And now I'll try to put a bit of order into all this, since it keeps revolving around the same questions.
Philosophy, daughter of crisis 14:52 And for that, I've prepared three texts for you, before reading them. Second small preamble, but very short this time — it's a reminder. The reminder is the problems I'm summarizing, the problems I'm raising. I brought a hypothesis about which I told you to be careful, because it's personal, so in expressing it, transmitting it to you, I'm not doing as usual — I'm not transmitting someone else's body of work for you to check and counter-propose.
15:33 This hypothesis is that access to modernity, in relation to the Hegelian concept of absolute knowledge, which, once again, has nothing to do with knowing everything, which would be stupid. There are tons of things that don't need to be known. I've already told you there are drops of water in the Indian Ocean, after all. There you go. I recall in passing that pure cognition is a complete chimera. Right? Aristotle is an immense thinker, one of the greatest of all time.
16:03 His effort of intelligibility is colossal, one of the greatest in the history of humanity. Yet he begins his admirable Metaphysics with this piece of nonsense. It's not nonsense, actually — I mean, this ideological blunder: "all men naturally desire to know." It's a famously well-known opening. All men desire — no, it's not spontaneous. One doesn't desire to know. There's no such thing as pure cognition. If one seeks to know, it's because one has taken a blow to the head. Otherwise, one wouldn't be foolish enough.
16:33 I'm anticipating the Nietzsche text I'm going to read you. One wouldn't be foolish enough to go looking to know, and thus perhaps learn bad news, if one hadn't been forced to by a crisis situation. There you go. I don't need to remind those familiar with my talks from the start — I like to recall it — that philosophy is always the daughter of crisis; the great advances in the history of philosophy, the great turning points in the history of philosophy, have always occurred in periods of crisis.
17:05 Crisis of the Greek city-state — Socrates; crisis of feudal monarchy or monarchic feudalism, as you like, in the 18th century — the Enlightenment. Which proves that if things are going well, one can keep going like that without asking questions, without suddenly saying, like Socrates, "what do you mean by that?"
17:36 I told you the anecdote about that kid who hadn't started talking. He was already five years old and still not speaking. His parents thought he was slow, that he had some neurological deficiency, poor thing. And suddenly, the child at the table, everyone somewhat downcast and silent, says, "Pass me the salt, please." Astonishment at the table, tears of joy, the family circle euphoric. But why didn't you speak before? I mean, we were worried, and the kid answers: because until now, everything was perfect.
18:10 When everything is perfect, we don't ask questions. So Aristotle is wrong to say "all men naturally desire to know." It's not natural, it comes from taking hits. There you go. So, once again, the hypothesis I'm bringing is that this absolute knowledge, this knowledge which, to the detriment of consciousness — consciousness, our consciousness, mine, yours — is steeped in certainties from the outset.
18:40 We don't start with truth, we don't start with certainties. What's the most beautiful car in the world, and the best, for that matter? Well, I'm saying whatever — it's the Peugeot 308. Why? Because it's my dad's, says the kid in the schoolyard. To his friend who says, "no way, it's the Volkswagen Golf." Why? Because it's my dad's. We start with certainties. They are not truths. But here, the two certainties cancel each other out. You see?
19:10 There you go. Unfortunately, there are certainties less serious — more serious than that, sorry — which have lasted for ages. Right? And you already know enough now, through the talks I'm trying to develop, to know that at the root of all certainties there is this prejudice, lying at the bottom of all our consciousnesses, of wanting there to be an already-there — something substantial, in the Hegelian sense of the term, where there is in fact something constructed.
Naturalism, supernaturalism, the anthropological standpoint 19:44 I recall this here, so as not to have to repeat it — I'll repeat it at other times, but not for a while, since it's been a long time since I brought it up, and there are some who haven't heard it, since I'm happy to see many newcomers to our session of confinitude. I recall that if you get completely tangled up in philosophy, there's one thing you should always keep in mind. All philosophical viewpoints — no, no, I'm not trying to fit my own thing in here, on the contrary, you'll see that all viewpoints are acceptable in what I'm about to say.
20:15 All philosophical viewpoints reduce to one of the following three theses: the naturalist thesis, that is, what determines everything is nature. Today, cognitive science illustrates this viewpoint, neurobiology... but also whoever says "it's all his grandmother," that one, with her constant fidgeting and chatter.
20:52 Nature relates to being born — from birth, in one's heredity, you see. It's nature that determines. It's the genes. Why not? I don't know. Genes do determine quite a few things. For some, that determines everything. There you go, that's the naturalist viewpoint. Thesis, the antithesis, exactly the opposite. That's the supernaturalist thesis. Broadly speaking, that's the sum of religions. That is, whatever explains everything through the intervention of something supernatural. I'll go quickly.
21:24 Whether or not one is properly Christian changes nothing about it, right? When Moses receives the Ten Commandments, he receives them from a supernature. That's why he cannot see. He cannot see who is speaking to him; he can hear, but he cannot see. Because one can only see what is here below, right? He sees a burning bush, you know. He sees a representation. Fine.
21:54 So, to recap: the thesis is that nature makes man, makes what we are. Antithesis, it's supernature, it's God — the god or the gods, doesn't matter — that makes, that makes what we are. Synthesis — not for me, it's not about me — it's man who makes man. That's the anthropological viewpoint: naturalist viewpoint, theological viewpoint, anthropological viewpoint. There you go. Place yourself in one of these three.
22:25 I see no problem with it — we can discuss it — but there you have the breakdown of all philosophical viewpoints. There you go. Now, I'm saying — why do I have a preference for the anthropological viewpoint? Because the common point between the thesis and the antithesis, which seem to be completely opposed — right, to the neo-positivists who only think what they see in their test tubes, I'm caricaturing, or in their equations, or who think — I have nothing against equations, on the contrary — but who think that with these equations they're going to understand why Nerval killed himself, if they wanted to.
23:00 what these two have in common — the one and the one who says, "no, not at all, everything comes to us from a supernatural intervention" — the common point is that the essential is an already-there, prior to you, to me, to man, to the subject. I'm giving a seminar this year on the subject, and I would like to show that if Nazism was able to appear in history, and if it is now reconstituting itself, it's because we've cheapened the notion of the subject far too much.
23:35 I say this to tease my friend and comrade Léo, who was worried in his question last time, who was growing impatient with what seemed like wasted time — our sessions of confinitude — and who wanted us to quickly get back to the constitution of Nazism, which is a very good intention, because we're never vigilant enough about what's currently happening. And as Hegel says, the limit of all philosophy is to think our historical present — which is, unfortunately, one of the characteristics of our historical present: the reconstitution of Nazism in many countries, among them some of the richest in the world.
24:19 To the point that in certain countries, mainly Nordic ones for now in Europe, right, the only political forces gaining ground are the far right and/or the environmentalists. Strange, isn't it, how strange. There you go. Don't just take my word for it. This can be measured — it's not an opinion, it can be measured. In Germany, in Scandinavian countries, in Austria, look closely, look closely at what governing coalitions are made of.
24:58 So, you see, if I have a leaning, myself, for—I tell you this in all honesty—I don't lump all three of them together as equivalent; on the other hand, the third one, for me, treats the first and second as equivalent. The anthropological point of view satisfies the naturalist point of view just as much, because it is materialist, the anthropological point of view; it relies on what man has done throughout his history, a man plunged into nature at the start and constantly measuring himself against it and forming himself insofar as he shapes nature.
25:32 whether we chip a flint or build a skyscraper 200 meters high or send a weather rocket beyond Earth's gravitational pull. I mean, in all these cases, one must, to do this, know the laws of nature well and make use of them, often by turning them against nature itself. That's what Hegel calls the ruse of reason.
A being become: the result taken for the origin 26:07 So, I insist on this. If I favor the anthropological point of view, it's because it's the only one that doesn't rely on an already-there that replaces being—ontology. That's the common point between the first and the second. The first has an ontology, a naturalist ontology, and the second has a supernaturalist ontology. But in both cases, there is 'on' in Greek, which means being. There is what is, first. And then the subject comes after. No—not for us, not for the human being.
26:38 The human being, that is to say, only arises once natural being has been overcome—a field, simply a field, a field in the agrarian sense of the term, the agricultural sense, and already a transformed nature, a 'geworden Sein.' 'Werden' means to become in German philosophy, 'geworden' is the past participle, 'Sein' is being—a being that has become, a result, not an origin, a result.
27:09 You see the illusion? We revise quite a few things, thanks to our harnesses of finitude. The difference between error and illusion, as I keep repeating, before expressing a difference, we must recall what they have in common. Error, like illusion, expresses falsehood. We must not forget the essential thing. Both are false. So, between 3 plus 5 equals 11—that's an error. And, I am—the Earth is at the center of the universe and I am at the center of the Earth.
27:44 Isn't that so? That's an illusion. Both are false. But whereas in the first case, a cup of coffee would have sufficed to avoid stumbling—right?—whereas in the case of error, to be rigorous now, the true and the false are simply different. The sum of 3 plus 5 is different from 11. In the case of illusion, it is exactly its inverse—how strange. For nothing resembles a thing more than its inverse.
28:14 Stand in front of a mirror and you'll understand. Nothing resembles you as much as your reflection. Yet everything is reversed. You see? Well, almost everything—left and right, let's say, not top and bottom. That's why, on one of the rare points where I agree with Althusser—I've never said he was stupid—when he says that the theme of the reversal of Hegel by Marx changes nothing about the structure, because whether you set a thing right side up or upside down, you don't change its structure.
28:49 I fully agree with him there—except that for him, this is proof that there's more than just a reversal of Hegel in Marx. He would like there to be a total destruction of Hegel within Marx, right? So he stretches the text a bit, whereas the late Marx spends his time talking about inversion, including in his famous preface to the second edition of Capital. So I make these reminders—error, illusion—to show here an example of illusion, right?
29:26 I think I'm talking about origins—matter at the origin, spirit at the origin—and in fact, I'm at the result. I believe I'm at the origin and I'm at the arrival point, I'm not at the start. I pay homage here to all those who were tortured, massacred, executed for having supported, in Latin America, against the formidable armada of dictatorships armed by the CIA, those who embraced—they were Christians—liberation theology.
30:01 Oh, it wasn't the whole Catholic Church, far from it—most collaborated with those in power—but there were those who said: does God exist or not exist, that's not how the problem should be posed. God can exist if we make him exist, each time we extend the domain of freedom, God enters a little more into existence—God as a result of history, not as an origin. That's a bit less lazy than putting the resolution of all problems there.
30:33 Spinoza said that there are those who speak of God as a refuge of ignorance, right? Those who place God at the origin—of course, once you give them God as origin, he explains everything for you. Well, there it is. The anthropological point of view. I brought in this hypothesis that our certainties collapse in modernity for the benefit of truth.
31:07 Truth comes little by little—I alluded earlier to geocentrism, to anthropocentrism—but after Galileo, the idea nonetheless ends up spreading that we are not at the center, spatially speaking at least, and after Darwin, right? But progressively—I say progressively, there are American states where it isn't forbidden to teach the theory of evolution, you know, one can always have medievalist regressions—needless to say these states are mostly in the South. Well, there are marvelous things in the American South, starting with the work of William Faulkner, among others.
32:00 I take this opportunity to pay tribute here to Gregory Protche, who was kind enough to take part in our workshops last year, because of his admirable talent as a reader—a reader of texts. I had already said that a reader, a good reader, is even rarer than a good actor, and Gregory is the best reader I know. He has just proposed, on the site, on his Facebook page, to read an excerpt from a short story by Faulkner, 'The Priest'—a marvel. I recommend Gregory Protche's readings, you can find them on YouTube, P-R-O-T-C-H-E. I salute him here because he had very kind words for our workshops.
Absolute non-knowledge and critical mass 32:51 Well, it's not only for that—I admire what he does—but I take the opportunity to... I didn't dare 'like' it, even in red, because since he was saying nice things about my talks, I wasn't going to crown myself. I close the parenthesis. So there, I brought in this story of absolute knowledge—it's not me, it's Hegel who did it. But my hypothesis is that, parallel to the emergence of absolute knowledge, since it involves a great many unpleasant consequences, to put it euphemistically—because it's much more serious than that—since it involves losses of what I believed until then, of my certainties.
33:37 It's no accident that I said earlier that the Romantics are the first to run headlong into this, especially early Romanticism—I'll get to it—into the question Mehdi raises, into the richness of the problems it introduces. The very first Romanticism, what is called in Germany the Frühromantik—'früh' is a bit like 'first,' if you will, in English—the very first one, before it degenerated and became reactionary, before we saw in every German living room a painting of a deer by a pond against a sunset.
34:15 So, since knowledge—all knowledge—involves unpleasant consequences, losses, an absolute non-knowledge lies hidden in the unconscious, crouching there, resisting within us the progress of knowledge. Our enemy is within ourselves; it's not to be sought elsewhere, in capitalism. I remember children's resistance when they discover in the schoolyard that older kids tell them how babies are made—precisely, the resistance that arises, because they can't imagine their parents engaging in such abominations, those who think of it as abominations—and this inner resistance is nothing to feel guilty about.
35:08 And that doesn't make these children abominable hospitalists—that has nothing to do with it. So it becomes reactionary in the political sense of the term, right, when a whole part of society has no interest in the other part gaining access to absolute knowledge. Here I'm making this explicit, to go along with Mehdi's question, and at the same time echoing what he says by trying to feed his question, bringing in a new notion, one I propose to you: it's a metaphor of critical mass that I borrow from nuclear explosion, right, from nuclear fission—the atomic explosion occurs, right, when the charge of uranium, of plutonium, has reached what physics calls critical mass.
36:05 I'm using this, though it's not my field, so I move quickly. On the other hand, what is critical mass in politics, in history? It's when two factors converge. That's why I thought of a nuclear bomb. A physicist had explained to me very quickly—I'm putting it crudely, because what I understood is crude compared to physical theory—that in an atomic bomb, such as the ones in our arsenals, there's a safety mechanism. And the safety consists of separating parts of that radioactive matter which, when they come together, produce the explosion.
36:41 So there are separations that melt away at the last moment, when the nuclear attack is triggered. They collapse so that the matter comes together. Well, that's what inspired me—the joining of two things that the ruling class strives to keep separate for fear it will explode in its face. What is it? It's absolute knowledge combined with a very large number of people.
All are free: Hegel, Rousseau, and the right of the strongest 37:18 You see how important the role of school is now. You see why it's urgent to destroy schools the way we destroy hospitals. All this is very topical. But yes, it all holds together—I'm not jumping from one subject to another. Well, still, a school where children are brought face to face with the whole history of humanity, up to progress, up to freedom. A history that opened, as its blueprint, with Hegel's magnificent formula: the historical Orientals. I'm thinking of the Emperor of China at that time, or the Pharaoh—I'm not talking about today's Egyptians and Chinese, who are often more modern than I am.
37:50 The Orientals knew that only one man is free. The Greeks knew that some are free—those lucky enough not to be slaves; that was a minority. The moderns know that all are free. If that is taught in schools, power is finished. Well, still. That's exactly what Rousseau says in The Social Contract, that we are the strongest ones. It's no accident that The Social Contract opens with pages upon pages criticizing the so-called right of the strongest.
38:20 Not to say that it's not good, that it's wicked, that it's a sin—no, no, that's not Rousseau. That's not moralizing, Rousseau. He says it doesn't happen that way. Human history could not, human societies could not have been based on the law of the strongest at the start, but on a contract. I had slightly modified this by saying that the term 'pact,' somewhat darker than 'contract,' might be more justified here—but in any case, certainly not on the naturalism of the notion of force.
38:51 I remind you that physics, the science of nature, begins by examining the notion of force, which it calls energy and so on—that's another story. But it's the concept that governs all of physics. Let's leave nature and force aside. In human societies, as Rousseau says, the strongest is never strong enough to always be master—the strongest is never strong enough to always be the master. He can be for a while, I'd say. The strongest is never strong enough to always be the master unless he converts—
39:23 Careful, here things shift—that's what revolutions are. His force into right—it's right that must reign, the law, and no longer force—unless he converts his force into right and thus obedience into duty. That's my addition. And yes, from the moment right governs, and not the arbitrariness of force, it becomes a duty to obey at that point, since I'm obeying myself. There it is—so obedience to a law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom.
39:54 I'm paraphrasing The Social Contract to say that this is exactly what modernity brings. But do you think power is going to let things happen like that? The ideal for power is to have modern technology at its disposal. That's what neopositivism is—having a minimum of scientificity at its service. It's selected because power needs it for productivity, to build machines, because there's always a competitor to crush among capitalists. For my commodity to be cheaper than my competitor's, more competitive, I need machines that produce more in less time.
40:30 I'm not going to summarize all of Marx for you. And that's what leads to the tendential fall in the rate of profit. Tendential, right? And that's what causes the crisis, which we think we've contained, but which always comes back to haunt us. There it is. So, the strongest is never strong enough to always be the master unless he converts his force into right and obedience into duty. So absolute knowledge encounters resistance. Power has an interest in absolute non-knowledge. So now I come to the distinction Mehdi draws between reactionary and progressive Romanticism.
Reading of Beyond Good and Evil: the value of the true 41:09 How do we find our bearings? What's the use of saying, as I said earlier, that it's ambivalent? We can't leave it at that, because then we'd never know when it's progressive, when it's reactionary. How do we tell? And here I'll bring in the three texts. We can start with Nietzsche—I'm speaking to the control room and to our friend Philippe. So I don't know if you have the text in front of you.
41:58 Well, I thought I had it, but I don't anymore. How did that happen, by the way? Ah yes, if I take... No, because here I have a question from Geoffrey Stig—I don't have the Nietzsche text. But anyway, I have the book, so it's not a problem. Well, listen, I'll read it to you, but I presume you can see it—that's what matters.
42:29 Perfect. So, first I'll read it straight through without stopping. I'm showing you here, right, that it's an excerpt from Beyond Good and Evil, and that it's the very beginning, right, the very beginning. There are a few lines before it that I'll come back to afterward, with superb humor by the way, but here we get to the heart of the matter. 'The will to truth, which will yet tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise; that celebrated veracity of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect—what questions has this will to truth not laid before us!'
43:11 I remind you here—no, let me read it all the way through first. 'What questions, strange, wicked, questionable questions! It is a long story—yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced.' Duly noted. Nietzsche is well aware that modernity clearly sets itself apart from what came before. The mere fact that we pose this problem of the value of truth was not obvious in past times. 'It is a long story—yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced.'
43:44 'Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? Who is it really that puts questions to us here?' What is it in us that wants truth—no longer 'what is truth,' as all philosophers have asked, no, but what in us wants truth? That's the question Nietzsche raises. 'In fact, we made a long halt at the question of the origin of this will'—
44:17 'and came finally to a standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the value of this will.' For those getting confused, I remind you we're already at the third question. First question: what is truth?—the question Nietzsche criticizes, the one asked by all philosophers since the origin of philosophical thought. Second question: what in us seeks to know the truth? Third question: we made a long halt at the problem of the origin of this will.
44:48 'And came finally to a standstill before a yet more fundamental question'—there's the third one. 'We inquired about'—and it's underlined—'the value of this will.' Is it worth the trouble to seek truth? That's what Nietzsche is asking. That's modern. In other words, isn't absolute non-knowledge better than absolute knowledge? Better in value, not truer. Who cares about truth, says Nietzsche. If truth is unbearable, why would we seek it?
45:18 And yes, when I comment on an author, I identify with him. So I've been the advocate for plenty of devils. And then there are devils far more dangerous than this poor devil Nietzsche, believe me. In particular, there are more dangerous devils—the Cold War Nietzscheans: Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida. People come to mind who are even more publicized but not worth talking about. So we'll see afterward why I clearly distinguish Nietzsche from the Cold War Nietzscheans.
45:56 'We inquired about the value of this will'—assuming that we want the truth, assuming that we want the truth, assuming the philosopher is acting in good faith—why not rather untruth? Why not uncertainty even? You see this isn't some Pagani fantasy, having formulated the hypothesis that absolute non-knowledge arises at the very moment absolute knowledge arises. To the point that there are even some, and Nietzsche at least has the merit of dropping the mask and raising the question—yes, yes, there is an absolute non-knowledge and maybe that's what's worth having.
46:30 'Assuming that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? Or uncertainty? Or even ignorance?'—which neo-Kantianism is currently hatching its claws over. I salute here our comrade Simon Verdun, who wrote an admirable work, his doctoral thesis, right, on the figures of neo-Kantianism in the work of Michel Clouscard. Michel Clouscard having shown that neo-Kantianism—not Kantianism, right, which remains progressive in its overall movement, in its original aim—but neo-Kantianism, right, which uses Kant only negatively to lock off all access to knowledge.
47:17 That one, yes—we see here that its birth certificate is: 'assuming that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? Or uncertainty? Or even ignorance?—Is the problem of the value of truth presented to us, or are we presented to it?' Nietzsche is aware, and rightly so, that Sterne knew how to make the German language resonate within philosophical thought in his time. Who is Oedipus here, and who is the Sphinx?
47:48 'It seems as if this were a meeting-place of questions and question-marks; and—would one believe it?—it must finally seem to us as if the problem had never before been raised.' That's why I don't leave modernity. That we are the first to see it, to envisage it, to dare it. The word is underlined, for it carries a risk—I told you access to absolute knowledge is not without risk. For it carries a risk, and perhaps the supreme risk.
48:21 Well, there it is! So, let's be Nietzschean, right? And instead of pursuing the chimera of truth—not a chimera in the sense that truth would be impossible to attain, but rather that it would be better not to attain it, right? This is no longer a cognitive criterion. Nietzsche has not demonstrated that some particular philosopher says something false. He says they are quite wrong, right, to fight the false and want the true. I'm thinking here of the admirable preface—not exactly a preface, more a sequence of reflections, seemingly almost disordered—by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, that most celebrated novel, where he says at one point: 'All art is at once surface and symbol.'
49:16 'Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.' You see, the same idea, at exactly the same time, in this second half of the 19th century, in this agony of the West which never stops agonizing before hurtling into the estuaries of death, of the war of '14. You see. So let's put a little order into this. I'll go back over the text very quickly—I'm not doing a literary commentary as such, but still, there are things I need to return to. So I'll pick it up again from the beginning.
Oedipus, the Sphinx, and what is proper to romanticism 49:48 First, the figure of the Sphinx appears. If this Sphinx, truth, ultimately teaches us to ask questions in our turn. So, last time, I quoted you this phrase from Hölderlin, who will be our third author shortly. Hölderlin, who says king Oedipus has one eye too many, no doubt. Modern man is the one who has one eye too many, who sees too much, who knows too much. It would have been better for Oedipus not to know the truth, wouldn't it, for it is unbearable.
50:21 The proof is that he tears out his eyes, hence Hölderlin's allusion, who knows this better than anyone. It's Greek, isn't it? That's the common point he shares with Nietzsche. I say this in passing, some people get furious when I say it, but Nietzsche knows Kant less well than an honest philosophy examinee today, when Kant is on the syllabus, I tell you. He doesn't have a very detailed philosophical culture, which doesn't contradict what he's saying there, it's not truth that interests him. On the other hand, he has an admirable philological competence, especially in Greek philology, and that led him to have philosophical insights that I don't dispute at that level.
50:59 It's not that they're undeniable. He brushed against the problem of the unconscious. So, the figure of Oedipus and thus of the sphinx. Oedipus is the one who killed the sphinx, by answering that the answer to the sphinx's question is man, an anthropological point of view. All the same. Good. Granting that, yes, I insist on the evolution of the questioning.
51:31 Philosophers say, what is the true? Then Nietzsche says, what is it in us that wants to find truth? There must be a masochistic part in us. If the true is fearsome, it must be a masochistic drive that relentlessly makes us seek truth. Well, I already resolved the problem earlier. I sketched a solution for you by saying that we must have taken a hit in order to ask the question. Why do we ask? We don't ask questions when everything is going well.
52:03 Granting that we want the true, why not rather the untrue? So here we'll be able to distinguish when romanticism is reactionary, when it is progressive. Last time I had distinguished a romanticism in the strict sense, the one that, historically, especially in France, is usually made to begin with Lamartine's Méditations poétiques and to end, all very academic in the pejorative sense this time, in 1853, with the failure of Hugo's play entitled Les Burgraves, and romanticism in the broad sense in which we, as moderns, are still immersed.
52:42 Isn't that so? And I would like you here to have more confidence in yourselves. I was going to say awareness, but it comes down to about the same thing. That is, in your ability to answer the questions you ask me by reasoning from what I've already said about it, by pushing the coherence of what I say to its limit. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but there is a coherence. Let me give you an example.
53:13 I've said several times in the workshops, "What is peculiar to modernity is to hate modernity." All my regular listeners are familiar with this formula. "What is peculiar to modernity is to hate modernity." If I now say that romanticism is the first expression of modernity, let's reason it through, let's apply what I just said, let's do like mathematicians, let's replace the subject with the predicate, like logicians.
53:43 In that case, what is peculiar to romanticism is to hate romanticism. Well, there you go! What is peculiar to romanticism is to escape from the mal du siècle. And here I'll keep my Nietzsche. And I'll even keep, you see the book, Beyond Good and Evil. But I'll take another passage where we're going to talk about music, which lets me answer someone who wanted me to say something one day about the relations between Nietzsche and Wagner. Well, I'll partly satisfy him with the little sequence that follows, right?
The South as a school of healing against German music 54:17 Where it's not a matter of Wagner by name. But with Nietzsche, there's practically not a single page where Wagner isn't at issue, isn't that so? But here he's not named, though you'll immediately see what it's about, who it's about. I have here paragraph 255 of Beyond Good and Evil. You don't have it? Let me read it to you. I hold that one must exercise great caution with regard to German music. There you go, one mustn't consume too much German music.
54:48 German music at its height, especially in the 19th century, during the romantic period. It was the Italians first, historically, I'm speaking in broad strokes, the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, from Monteverdi to Mozart. It was the Italians who reigned supreme up to Haydn and Mozart, the first Viennese school, Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven. Then there's the break with Beethoven, there's the break with the French Revolution, it's the same thing. Beethoven was born in 1770. Bonaparte, 1769, you couldn't invent it, it's the generation that was 20 years old at the fall of the Bastille, Hegel and Hölderlin, in 1770, like Beethoven.
55:27 Well, that's the break. It's not the Ancien Régime, it's not the new one, it's the great movement that occurred between the two, when the die was not yet cast. There you go. Now, German music begins at that moment with Beethoven, and it begins to reign over all the rest of music. There would be a fabulous rebirth of French music thanks to Impressionism, which we saw last year, in the first Attelage of the Confinitude, with Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, etc. I hold that one must exercise caution with regard to German music, therefore romantic music, therefore Wagner, who is the culmination, isn't he, of this immense romantic surge, but who is not romantic, who is already post-romantic — we'll come back to that, but we're not doing a history of music.
56:06 A man who loves the south the way I love it. So, change of scene, we were among the Germans, in the mist, the fog and romanticism, in vagueness. Nietzsche says admirably in The Will to Power that the romantics have always confused the pleasure of falling asleep with that of waking up, in the twilight zone between dog and wolf. And now we move on to Greece, a model never attained but never replaced by any classicism or neo-classicism, isn't that so?
56:38 I told you last time, you walk through Versailles, practically, almost 20 centuries, well 20 centuries after the Greek city-state, and at every step you run into something evoking Greece in plastic form, in the form of a quotation, in the form of mythology. I hold that one must exercise great caution with regard to German music. And now, here is the antidote to German music according to Nietzsche. A man who loves the south the way I love it.
57:08 The south, the south. Do you know the land where the lemon tree blooms? Every German schoolchild knows the admirable romance of Mignon, taken from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Among Germans there's always someone who wants to go to the Mediterranean. He's telling you about it again. You see them arriving in season, don't you? Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn? Do you know the land where the lemon tree blooms? Where oranges glow in the dark green of the leaves. A man who loves the south the way I love it.
57:41 Like a great school of healing. Ah, there you go, romanticism is the mal du siècle, the sickness. Look how the words echo each other here. We're in rigor. We're not in mathematics, we're more rigorous, we're in poetics. A man who loves the south the way I love it, like a great school of healing for the soul and for the senses. Not the healing of bodily diseases, go see a doctor for that. Thank goodness there's biology and the positive sciences. No, no, no, no. No, no. This is someone who died mad speaking here.
58:14 The illnesses of the soul, he knows those well. A man who loves the south the way I love it, like a great school of healing. We're beginning to better understand Nietzsche's attraction to the Greek world. It's not a problem of truth, of true and false. And one being right and the other wrong — it's that it does the soul good, whereas romanticism hurts, like absolute knowledge. We're starting to see clearly. A man who loves the south the way I love it — go on, I'll continue — like a great school of healing for the soul and the senses, like a profusion of light — we're far away.
58:48 Nietzsche said Wotan, the king of the gods in Norse, Wagnerian-Germanic mythology, Wotan is the god of bad weather. So, like a great school of profusion, of light and sun that transfigures everything by pouring itself over sovereign beings, full of faith in themselves — he's thinking of course of classical-era statuary. Such a man is a bit wary — it's an understatement — of German music, which, by making him fall back into its bad taste, risks also compromising his healing.
59:25 A man from the south of that kind, he's thinking of himself of course, a southerner by belief, that's underlined, and not by origin, should he happen to dream of the future of music and of the means of freeing it from the grip of the North — in short, from German romantic music — and here I'll stop, because it's extraordinary, if one day we write a history of music together, as I hope. Nietzsche is anticipating here. So, the few lines I'm going to read to you concern the great events he didn't see — he died before them — which are going to constitute modern and contemporary music, including jazz.
A music more than European: The Rite of Spring 59:58 But judge for yourselves. A southerner of that kind, southern by belief and not by origin, should he happen to dream of the future of music and of the means of freeing it from the grip of the North, will hear within himself the first strains of a music that is deeper, more powerful, more cruel. Careful! Careful with those who think Nietzsche is a man of the left. I salute here Aymeric Monville, co-founder of the Delga publishing house, who wrote a superb essay called "The Misery of Left-Wing Nietzscheanism."
1:00:34 Not exaggerated either. I know very well that to push De Gaulle out of power, some had to claim to be to the left of the Communist Party, in order to be to the right of De Gaulle, to the right of a right-wing man — that is, the extreme right made itself believed to be to the left of the Communist Party. The Misery of Left-Wing Nietzscheanism. I repeat, a southerner of that kind, southern by belief and not by origin, will hear within himself, then, a music that is deeper, more powerful, more cruel, perhaps more secret, a music more than German — that's underlined, more than German — which, in the presence of the blue and voluptuous sea and the clarity of the southern sky, would cease to appear dying, faded, pale.
1:01:21 That's how he speaks of the romantic musicians. Dying — see the mal du siècle, the West, the setting sun, decline, Harmonie du soir, Baudelaire, La cloche fêlée, remember — which would cease to appear dying, faded, pale, as all German music does. Wagner is not named, but he reigns over the whole passage. Wagner wrote Twilight of the Gods. A music more than European, you see, he anticipates the fact that the renewal of classical music will happen through Europe's geographic edges.
1:01:57 The equivalent of what Les Demoiselles d'Avignon were in the history of contemporary painting, the total break with everything that came before, was made by a Spaniard, at Europe's African edge. The equivalent in music is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Russia, at Europe's Asian edge. Europe renews itself through its edges, through the places where it looks elsewhere than at Europe.
1:02:29 And that is already a call to non-absolute-knowledge, but one that produces masterpieces. I'm not putting on an aesthetic trial here. The Rite of Spring is an absolute masterpiece. And here I'm answering Jess Fincher. And yes, I'm piling up answers today, because I feel bad about having been a bit hasty last time and not answering all the questions. People ask me where to start with contemporary classical music. Well, there are things you can't get around. What I'm going to say isn't very original, but why not start with this atomic bomb that is The Rite of Spring.
1:03:07 It's not me saying this, it's a music historian speaking about the period when The Rite of Spring emerged. Late 19th, early 20th century, 1913, premiere in Paris. Premiere in Paris of what? Of this ballet written by this young Russian nobody knew yet. Now, what were people listening to in music at that moment? What I began this Attelage of the Confinitude with — people were listening to French Impressionist music. People were thrilled by iridescence, moonlight, cotton wool, isn't that so?
1:03:42 Fogs, not romantic, but still post-romantic, impressionist, where the body is more present than in the romantic, where sensation is more present than sentiment. That's very fine. We were in the tiniest delicacies and clouds, and suddenly a Russian, a bumpkin, a barbarian, a muzhik, a Cossack arrives and — I'm quoting my music historian here — hurls, right into the fray of those who were saying now we need to get out of this musical decadence a bit, now we need barbarians.
1:04:15 And he says — I'm alluding here to the history of music you can find in a paperback by this collaborator, that's putting it mildly, let's say he behaved well under Pétain, but he wrote an excellent history of music, one of the best in that format, Émile Vuillermoz, isn't that right? And he says, while the tacticians were preparing a renewal of music that would go beyond cotton wool, moonlight, iridescence, impressionism, we need barbarians. Igor Stravinsky answered the call, and threw the bomb of The Rite of Spring right into the fray.
1:04:48 The explosion was atomic. At the last chord, nothing remained of harmony, of control. There you go. So one has to start there. I'll say right off, yes, it's music that grates on the ears, if I understand correctly. First, it caused a scandal. A scandal in the literal sense — there was fighting in the hall. There was fighting at Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. And there's even Florent Schmitt, a composer of the time, who shouted the famous phrase, "Silence, you whores of the 16th arrondissement." I'm quoting. There were people, the subscribers to the concerts, who go along like that, just because we paid our subscription, nothing more.
1:05:25 And who, all of a sudden, felt as if they'd been raped, violated, isn't that so, by this savage music. And who said, "But what is this, a barbaric, savage music?" And there Florent Schmitt said, "Silence, you whores of the 16th arrondissement." You see, it was a real fight. Well, if I'm telling you about this, it's not to dwell on it. Even though it's unforgettable, it's an unforgettable rupture. It's to say that it's become a classic. Now, with hindsight, we've heard it so much, but it has a beauty, a formal perfection. Ah, these aren't the forms of before. There you go. So, Jess, The Rite of Spring.
Ignoring good and evil: cruelty against pity 1:05:56 There you go. There are, as I told you, three roots to musical modernity. I'm not leaving my problematic. I'm illustrating it through the musical facet. But my polyhedron is the same one, it's modernity. So let's come back to music here for now. Let's stay there. So there are those that renew themselves by fleeing Europe, by trying to flee it, by being fascinated by what is extra-European. And here I continue Nietzsche's text because it's incredible how relevant he is, even though he died just before that music began to win over the public.
1:06:34 Just before. So, a music that would cease to appear dying, faded, pale, as all German music does, a music more than European — I had stopped there — which would affirm its own value even in the face of the bronze-gold sunsets of the desert. You see, we've left Europe — even in the face of the bronze-gold sunsets of the desert. Let's go further. What is there after the desert? There's the jungle, isn't there? A music sister of the desert's palm tree — everything is said — a music sister of the palm tree, which would feel at home among the great, beautiful, solitary beasts of prey.
1:07:14 It would go roaming with them, where one finds cruelty again, let it be said in passing. It would go roaming with the great, beautiful, solitary beasts of prey. Oh, this dreamer would imagine a music whose rarest charm would be — that's underlined — to know nothing at all of good and evil. We're tired of suffering, of telling ourselves we're wretched. Because watch out, there was the mal du siècle, we saw it with Senancour, we dissected it surgically, it got worse with Baudelaire, with spleen which is even more neurotic, and outright with Kafka.
1:07:51 Listen, let me sum it up for you: in Kafka's Diary, there's this extraordinary passage where he says — he's speaking to himself — in the fight between you and the world, take the world's side. In Kafka, it's always the guilty one who speaks, and to say that the liberal-libertarian mindset, which is always on the lookout, wanted to make Kafka, in the middle of the Cold War, into the anti-totalitarian — that is, the anti-Soviet, let it be said in passing.
1:08:21 Whereas Kafka never accuses a power, a system, etc., he accuses himself throughout his entire work — he's an accomplished artist. So here it's the opposite, it's this guilt, isn't it — to be done with guilt, to finish it, cruelty wants to be done with pity, and voluptuousness with guilt. You see? Remember that well because we'll continue with other texts shortly — remember that well.
1:08:51 The antonym of cruelty is pity, isn't it? You know there were a few pitiless powers not long after Nietzsche's death. A music, then, I repeat, a music sister of the palm tree, which would feel at home among the great, beautiful, solitary beasts of prey and would go roaming with them. Oh, this dreamer would imagine a music whose rarest charm would be to know nothing at all of good and evil, except perhaps... Nietzsche can't shake all that off, because he himself is steeped to the marrow in the music he's criticizing.
1:09:24 He was an excellent pianist and played all the works of the romantics, Schumann and Chopin, he knew them very well, he had them under his fingers. Except that... So, a music... except that perhaps a vague nostalgia for vague golden shadows, for tender weaknesses — which nonetheless remains in memory, you see — would sometimes brush against it, a music that would absorb into itself, come from very far away...
1:09:56 Which would absorb into itself, come from very far away, the tints of a declining moral world. There's the West. I've slain it, I've put an end to it. The West is what declines. The word itself — it's not my opinion, it's what the word says. It's the sunset of the world, of history, the West. It's what kills and it's what dies. It's no accident. If the West is ending this century that never ends, the one that begins with the storming of the Bastille, it's long.
1:10:26 I told you that a century is... In anthropology, it's never 100 years. We don't care about the abstraction. This century, some are very short. The 18th century, this Age of Enlightenment, begins with the death of Louis XIV, in 1715, and ends in 1789. It's very short. Well, the 19th century is the opposite. It begins in '89. There are still 10 years to go before reaching what's called the 19th century. It begins in '89 and ends in 1914. I'd even say 1918. It's very long.
1:10:56 It never stops declining. It's no accident that I'm going to start with Harmonie du soir, our Attelage. So let me repeat this last paragraph. Oh, this dreamer would imagine a music whose rarest charm would be to know nothing at all of good and evil, except perhaps a vague nostalgia, for vague golden shadows, for tender weaknesses, which would sometimes brush against it. A music that would absorb into itself, come from very far away, the tints of a declining moral world, become almost unintelligible.
Deep and hospitable: Nietzsche, women, the roots of modern music 1:11:29 what does the music of Wagner mean on a Polynesian island. A music hospitable and profound enough to welcome these belated fugitives. Alright, I'll play devil's advocate just for this last sentence. I can't help myself. It's not just because I have a few correspondents, a few comments on my videos, who said, "But why are you bringing up Freud? Psychoanalysis is worthless."
1:12:00 Nietzsche, there you go, the will to power, there you go, the unconscious. The will to power is nothing determinate. We don't know at all whether it's the will of a social class, power, as in Marx, isn't it, or the will to kill my father, is it? No, no, it's the will to power. It's what he inherited from the arch-counter-revolutionary Schopenhauer, the one who called the police to say the demonstrators are there, the barricades are there. Well, that Nietzsche, isn't it — Freud would have smiled at that last sentence.
1:12:32 the tints of a declining moral world become almost unintelligible, music that's rather hospitable and rather profound. What can be both profound and hospitable — something Nietzsche never managed? Woman. There, I'll stop there for now, right? I say that because the only two women who truly overwhelmed him in his life are Madame Wagner, Cosima. You just have to look at the letter he sent her, the letter where he does nothing but stammer. I have a lot of affection and admiration for Nietzsche. Here, he doesn't stammer, he writes admirably.
1:13:03 But when he speaks to Madame Wagner, he stammers, after Wagner's death. A pitiful letter. He tries to make up for it. And then Lou Salomé, of course, right? Between the statue of the commander, Madame Cosima Wagner, and the Russian woman, as Nietzsche's sister called her contemptuously — as many a German reactionary of the time would — 'the Russian,' right?
1:13:33 It's roughly like a supporter of French Algeria talking about 'bougnoules,' or 'the negro' for a Ku Klux Klan member, you see. That's what 'the Russian' meant. Lou Salomé. So, a fantastic text, admirable, but of a beauty on top of that, right? Or the musics that would matter in the twentieth century. The Russian root, I go back to it, and Jess, right?
"Ignorance cannot be learned": Nerval and Hölderlin 1:14:03 And the root — I'll develop this another time — the Viennese root, the Second Viennese School, the one that extends Wagner's achievements while breaking with him, I'm thinking of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and the Spanish root. There. Very quickly. The other two texts are… So, first text, Nietzsche, a madman. The other two texts, Nerval and Hölderlin, two other madmen. It's a trio of madmen I'm serving you this time.
1:14:35 Yes? Ah, right. And it's not bad. Right. Yes, I just saw it, but I hadn't understood it was technical. I think it was technical. Right. We're not online, are we? We are? Well, in that case, since we have to interrupt the talk temporarily in a quarter of an hour, I recommend, in that case, that you get well acquainted with the other two texts.
1:15:15 I'm going to… I'm going to bend a little what I just read from Nietzsche, which is very well-grounded. It's very coherent to say: if truth is unbearable, if absolute knowledge is a knowledge of the unbearable, good heavens, why make it a value? Better to fight for absolute non-knowledge. Well, let me announce the program in advance. I'm going to quote you a text by Nerval where he says that phrase I've often repeated to you, but out of context, and this time, in the text, I'll place it in its context. And its context is a serious fit of madness.
1:15:46 He's in the process of recounting these fits. His doctor had told him, 'put your visions in writing, it will do you good.' And at the worst of his visions, he says, 'I try to cling to the beliefs of my childhood, to religion.' And then he says, 'but still, for a generation that has known the revolutions, the Age of Enlightenment, one can't just act as if nothing had ever existed, as if we hadn't seen those certainties collapse.' And there, I'm paraphrasing, and now I quote him word for word. He has this admirable formula.
1:16:17 'Ignorance cannot be learned.' Ignorance cannot be learned, Mr. Nietzsche. One cannot pretend not to know what one knows. We'd love to, wouldn't we? And that's what I'll develop next time on Nerval's text. And I'll conclude this great sequence of the three madmen with a text by Hölderlin that I recommend to you, but definitely not in the translations you most often find on the net, except on one site that I recommend, which I'll leave on our Facebook page, because I don't have the source here, but where there's a translation by Gustave Roud and the one found in the Pléiade edition, which is nonetheless better.
1:16:58 It's the hymn, the great elegy, called 'Bread and Wine.' 'Brot und Wein.' Bread and Wine. There. So, I'll remind, in passing, those familiar with Hegel's philosophy — I know that among my followers there are a few — that both in the preface and in the introduction, Hegel addresses the post-Nietzschean problem — you see, I do say, even though Hegel comes before Nietzsche, post-Nietzschean — of this consciousness that would like, you see, to shut itself up in a non-knowledge, that would like to flee what it knows.
Hegel, fear, and self-consciousness 1:17:41 Well, listen, I'm going to finish the ten minutes we have left. We have ten minutes, Philippe. There, I'm going to finish — thank you — the ten minutes we have left with this quotation. You'll see it's very explicit and that Hegel isn't as incomprehensible as all that.
1:18:15 There, so, let's go. That's good. There, I have to change, there. Here we are. Give me two minutes.
1:18:46 Sorry for this dead time. There, I'll give it to you now. So, I have to come closer because… There. You'll find this text on page 184 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in Hyppolite's translation. A subsection that Hyppolite put in parentheses, since the titles aren't Hegel's own — fear.
1:19:16 Fear. You see how we get there? It's one of the conclusions of the very famous chapter on master and slave. It had to be said that there comes a moment when the slave preferred to stay alive, even at the cost of returning to servitude, because he felt the fear of the absolute master brush him with the wings of death on the battlefield. So, I'll read this to you now. This consciousness has felt precisely this dread, not about this or that thing.
1:19:49 It's not the anguish of losing one's job, the anguish of losing the woman one loves, the anguish of losing both at once, as often happens. The dread not about this or that thing, not at this or that moment, but it felt dread about its entire essence, for it felt the fear of death when it had the knife at its throat, the absolute master. In this dread, it was inwardly dissolved, trembled through and through in its innermost being, and everything fixed within it was shaken.
1:20:28 But such a pure and universal movement, such a fluidification — the opposite of the statue — the absolute dissolution of all stability, that is the simple essence — it's almost ironic on Hegel's part — of self-consciousness, that's what self-consciousness is, it begins with this consciousness of death, absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which is therefore present in this consciousness itself even though it was not aware of it. There. So, read afterward another passage in the introduction where Hegel — I don't have time to find it for you now — says very precisely that in vain consciousness wants to escape into modes of evasion that make it forget what it knows, and he says this terrible sentence: thought comes to disturb the absence of thought, consciousness wants to take refuge in a thoughtless inertia — you see how topical all this is — a thoughtless inertia, saying nothing, if it weren't for the lockdown, I'd soon be on the beaches thinking of nothing, as Rousseau puts it in the Letter to Malesherbes,
1:21:40 when he is in his ecstasy on the island, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not philosophize — consciousness wants to take refuge in a thoughtless inertia, but thought comes to disturb the absence of thought, there, in short, as Rimbaud says — this will be my conclusion for today — there is no escaping, let us take up again the paths from here. Thank you. Next time, thanking you for your questions, I will begin by answering them right from the start of my next talk, and I of course thank Philippe, without whom we couldn't do any of this, we couldn't meet up and step out of our respective confines.
1:22:26 Thank you.
