English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin 0:00 Yes, as Thomas explained, I'm going to be a bit briefer than usual because, as he told you, this year it's divided into terms. And so if we do a quick retroactive calculation, we only have three months to approach the notion of revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin, with a few main courses along the way.
0:30 It's a French-style meal. I say that because in Germany, at 6pm they put a little slicer on the table that cuts slices of bread and then a piece of so-called sausage. I love Germany. We're talking about cuisines here. Whereas in France, my German ex-wife, who had been an au pair in France, told me — I didn't understand it — there's the starter, then there's the entremets, then there's the main course.
1:02 That's really the French-style meal. Well, we no longer have the time now, I know full well. So that's a lot. I have to gather my remarks a bit. The first thing is to specify that we're not going to... I don't know if some of you had the chance to watch the teaser, I think that's what it's called, but Philippe was kind enough to come and film a little video where I present this program on revolutionary thought a bit, and where I think I had the chance to specify that, you know, I'm a bit obsessed with problems of genre.
1:51 We are not in the genre of history of ideas, nor even history of philosophy. Let that be clear, I mean, I'm not saying that — I have the greatest respect for these disciplines, I'm not saying that contemptuously, far from it — but first of all it wouldn't be serious, in three monthly sessions like this, to treat such a sequence with a historian's rigor. Look at the time it would take, just for Rousseau.
2:22 In 2012, quite recently, there was the tricentenary of Rousseau's birth. On that occasion, there were publications — you'd think everything had already been published on Rousseau, not at all. And there was a magnificent volume that I recommend to you, available from the Imprimerie Nationale, on Rousseau and the French Revolution. That is, all the texts, the rituals, the graphic and plastic representations of Rousseau during the French Revolution — just on that subject alone, even a whole school year wouldn't be enough.
2:57 Yes? Yes, Tariq? Yes, it's kind of you to point that out to me, thank you. I'm having a bit of trouble getting out, but tonight — so I was saying, just for Rousseau, it would take much more than a school year to deal with his thought. But we're not here to deal with the thought of Marx, of Rousseau, of Hegel, but to see a revolutionary continuum running through this sequence.
3:28 So why did I bound it upstream by Rousseau, downstream by Lenin? Here, I'm going to — right away, if you like, right away, sorry — read you a short excerpt from a passage of Rousseau's, taken from the Confessions.
3:58 And you're going to understand the reasons why, before Rousseau, and probably very rarely after, we don't find what I'm about to read to you. I mean the coming together of problems that are often scattered among 200 authors and that are concentrated here under the same pen. "Besides, seamstresses, chambermaids, little shopgirls hardly tempted me." He's talking about when he was an adolescent, those are the first words.
4:31 "I needed young ladies." You know that at the time, a "young lady" plain and simple meant belonging to the establishment, as we'd say today. I repeat: "Besides, seamstresses, chambermaids, little shopgirls hardly tempted me. I needed young ladies. Everyone has his fancies; that has always been mine. I do not think as Horace did on this point." Sorry, let me make a quick improvised comment, but "estate" here of course means social class at the time — very precisely, people were thinking of the Third Estate.
5:07 So it's not a question of class. "It was not at all, however, vanity of rank and estate that attracted me. It was a better-kept complexion, prettier hands, a more graceful adornment, an air of delicacy and cleanliness about the whole person, more taste in the way of dressing and speaking, a finer and better-made dress, a daintier shoe, ribbons, lace, better-arranged hair."
5:44 "I would always prefer the less pretty one who had all that. I find this preference quite ridiculous myself, but my heart gives it in spite of me." What is this Rousseau all about? It makes me think of a passage — no, I say that because there are those who said, "Ah, finally Pagani is going to deal with serious things, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, finally, we'd had enough of poetry, Nerval, the dream, that's all very nice, the ballad, walking through the Valois, the ponds, the mists, what is this?"
Nerval's Pandora and Marx's three traditions 6:16 I'm in the process of welding this year's discourse to last year's discourse. I'll come back to it afterward. I'm thinking especially of those who weren't there. And I'm going to start again, yes, yes, yes, from the passage in Les Filles du feu where Nerval arrives at Rousseau's tomb. Right? So that there's a continuity. Now why am I thinking of Nerval? Because in a short story I recommend to you, even though it apparently has no connection with this year's subject, called Pandora — one of the wildest, indeed one of the most malevolent of these stories, as has been noted — which often takes place in Vienna.
6:56 Pandora is the name he gives, of course, he's always within his mythology. You know who "the crafty Pandora" is, as he calls her, you know, in mythology, the one who let escape all the ills that have weighed us down ever since, that weigh down humanity. It's not just that she opened Pandora's box. And when she noticed, but it was too late — a woman, so, well, of course, mythology, it's Greek, it's Mediterranean, if you like. She hastily closed it again, and only hope remained at the bottom.
7:26 That's not bad, that's rather well observed. And in fact here she designates very precisely Marie Pleyel. Yes indeed, the daughter of the piano-maker Pleyel, who was one of the prettiest girls in Europe, who was tall, of course. At the same time, that's it for that clause, I don't know what's gotten into me. But Nerval describes a girl — a woman, sorry, excuse me — you'll see, it's an important nuance in the story. In this short story he writes to a friend, probably Théophile Gautier, back in Paris, he says: your friend is here, he's well dressed, he wears fine linen, he makes an impression, he's just come from Paris, he indulges in paradox which is out of fashion back home but still makes an impression in Vienna.
8:03 There are three women, a blonde, a brunette, he gives his little travel account, like that, a bit of a gossip-column chronicle, he talks about one of them, he says — well, he's not crude, he doesn't say she's got mileage on her, but he says she's past her prime, she's this, that, and he describes ribbons, bits and pieces, you see, it resembles a text of Rousseau's, and then at a certain point I pick up on Rousseau's last sentence, you see — "I would always prefer the less pretty one who had more of all that" — all that, what is it?
8:36 And Nerval says we don't know what's underneath all that, but all that is so well arranged — you see, we're not far off. So where am I getting at? I'm saying that Rousseau introduces the class relation into the erotic relation — we're not far from Marx, but that Marx, people don't talk to you about him enough. I don't see, I don't see what remains interesting in Marxism if you take that out — no, let's be serious, I mean if you reduce Marxism to an abstract universal, I understand why there are revolutionaries who have trouble catching on when they speak, recruiting, spreading, you understand. You have to see: when Marx says "I am the result, I am the candidate" — that's in the famous letter to the French translator of Capital — Marx takes precautions, he doesn't want his French translation to be traduttore, traditore, translation, betrayal — and he says: I'm trying to synthesize the English economic tradition, famous as it is, the French political tradition, and the German theoretical tradition, the weak point of the French,
9:46 he says, it's theoretical, so be careful with translations — look already, in Hegelian terms, at the result that Marx, the prodigious becoming of which he is the result: the English economic tradition, the French political tradition, the German theoretical tradition — but what is the German theoretical tradition? It's German idealism, which is itself the result of German Romanticism, and bam, we come back to the lace, to the poetic. It's important — we finished last year on a sub-chapter I had introduced into the last outline, called "aesthetic illusion," illusion and truth of the aesthetic, if you remember, in the second-to-last outline, that is, in video number 8 of the Angélique series.
10:38 The last one being number 9, for those who want to refer back to it. And I had spoken, as I've done several times, of the veritable hecatomb that German Romanticism was for its main figures, authors, creators, whatever you want to call them, writers to stick with that. Because there's a literary Romanticism, there's a musical Romanticism, of course, especially in Germany, there's a legal Romanticism, there's even a geographical, historical Romanticism.
11:12 Well. A hecatomb, why? Because a great number ended up mad or having committed suicide, or both. Marx is the result of all that. Well, Hegel is the result of all that. And Marx, when he says "I am heir to the German theoretical tradition," there's that too. That is to say all that poetics — how does he put it?
11:42 It's the extraordinary passage that I extracted from Rousseau's Confessions, book 4, for those interested. "Seamstresses, chambermaids" — well, where does he come from? He comes from the little suburb of Geneva, his father is a small craftsman of no importance whatsoever. There you go. "What I needed were young ladies." Extraordinary. You might say, but who does he think he is? Wait, wait. I repeat, I'm trying, with you, to model the sequence ahead of us.
Angélique: Rousseau beneath Gabrielle's tower 12:15 We are dealing with serious matters. I mean, if I now refer back to a passage taken from Nerval's Angélique — remember, the old-timers should recall this — but I recall that in Angélique they walk quite a bit, and shortly before arriving at Ermenonville, which is 40 km from here, from Notre-Dame, at Rousseau's tomb, 3 km before that, there's the Abbey of Chaalis. I'll go over it quickly, we've seen all that, I won't go back over it. And with his friend Sylvain, with whom he's walking, some of you know the painter Caspar David Friedrich, the greatest painter of German Romanticism.
12:53 There is a painting, one of his most famous, called Two Men Contemplating the Moon. He made several with the same theme. It's a bit like Nerval and his companion, that. There you go. Well, he also died mad, like Nerval — Caspar David Friedrich. So, they're out walking and here comes the gamekeeper's son, as he says, so, a peasant of the area, who shows them the château. And it's a château, I'll tell you, for those who don't know, it's anecdotal but important to understand what follows — it's a château where Henri IV sheltered his affair with Gabrielle d'Estrées.
13:27 I'm not leaving the gossip column behind. Well. But you'll see why it's so important not to leave the gossip column behind in order to get to surplus value. "We came back to the château. The concierge did not allow us to visit the apartments because the masters were in residence. Artists have more luck in princely châteaux whose hosts feel that, after all, they owe something to the nation." Nerval scatters little digs like that at a moment when Prince Louis Napoleon is tightening the screws in France.
14:00 "We were only allowed to walk along the edges of the Grand Lac, whose view to the left is dominated by the so-called Tower of Gabrielle — Gabrielle d'Estrées — the remains of an old château. A peasant who accompanied us told us: here is the tower where the beautiful Gabrielle was locked up. Every evening Rousseau would come and pluck the guitar beneath her window, and the king, who was jealous, often watched for him, and eventually had him killed." I can't help laughing every time I read it. I must have read it a million times and I'm surprised every time.
14:35 Of course, it's historically nonsense. I mean, Henri IV — that's two centuries before Rousseau. So, Nerval, like us, like me, we're cultured people, we laugh. "Yet this is how legends are formed. In a few hundred years, people will believe this. Henri IV, Gabrielle, and Rousseau are the great memories of the region." "One" has confused — the peasant populace — has already confused, across a 200-year gap, the two memories, and Rousseau gradually becomes Henri IV's contemporary, as the people would like him to be.
15:05 Ah, Nerval starts to dig deeper. The people are on Rousseau's side in this story. There you go. "As the people love him, they suppose that the king was jealous of him and betrayed by his mistress in favor of this man who was sympathetic to the suffering races." There's no word "class" there — "the suffering races." Nerval digs. It's not over. "The feeling that dictated this thought is perhaps truer than one believes." And there's Nerval siding with the peasants. He's wrong on accuracy. He's right at bottom.
15:36 He's right to say that Rousseau came to dispute surplus value with the propertied. But listen, I'm not making anything up — it's a madman speaking. "If everyone reasoned this way..." So look at the reasoning: "The feeling that dictated this thought is perhaps truer than one believes. Rousseau, who refused a hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour, profoundly ruined the royal edifice founded by Henri." I remind you that Rousseau had a great celebrity-style success, as we'd say today, with his rather short little opera, Le Devin du village.
16:08 Charming. I recommend it to you. It's not as good as Rameau — yes, I take Rameau's side when it comes to musical composition. He was Rousseau's sworn enemy, even though Rousseau was the greatest musician of his time. But here I'm talking about his prose. In terms of notation, I don't want to say too much, he doesn't hold a candle to Rameau. But still, Le Devin du village, in the pastoral genre, is rather charming. And so, success — Marie-Antoinette, sorry, offers him a hundred louis. That's how it was done, one would give a pension. I say that in passing.
16:39 So that he wouldn't be, for too long, an intermittent performer, as we'd say today. And Rousseau refused. Already, he had his motto "Vitam impendere vero," you know — "to devote one's life" — you can hear me at the back? Thank you — "to devote one's life to the truth." And Nerval concludes very precisely: "Rousseau, who refused a hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour, profoundly ruined the royal edifice founded by Henri" — Henri, the founder who inaugurated the accession of the Bourbons, of the Bourbon dynasty, to the most prestigious monarchy in Europe.
17:15 But what is he saying, Nerval? "Ruined," ruined. That means all that, hold on, "I buy you." It's not so old, all that. It's not that old, you see? All it takes is not playing along with the system, and bam, that's... So look at what follows. "Everything collapsed" — I'm alluding to the French Revolution — "his immortal image remains standing upon the ruins. Oh!" It feels like a gossip-column anecdote, where the guitar player comes to serenade, à la Casanova, the rope ladder, the balcony.
17:45 Ah no, no, no. It becomes a triangle. A triangle of staggering precision. The possessor of the productive forces, the master of the relations of production — the king. Don't you see? Like in Lacan's "Purloined Letter," where there's the king who sees nothing, the gaze that sees nothing — I'm talking about the Purloined Letter — the queen who, seeing that the king sees nothing, believes herself safe and leaves the letter lying around, which the minister slips beneath her robes.
18:16 Watch out. When you think you see without being seen, you're in the position of the pervert who's about to get caught — that's the moral of this fable. But that's not our subject. Still, it's the same roles: the king. "You see nothing." While you see nothing, Rousseau comes to pluck the guitar beneath her window. I like the guitar — it's a popular instrument at the time. It's an instrument that came from Spain, a somewhat vagabond instrument, of gypsies. It's also an instrument...
18:46 There are instruments — it's a noble instrument. The guitar is not the harp. If you look closely, what comes to contest Rousseau is the king's enjoyment. I'm not over-interpreting, I'm just taking the letter as it is. What is the favorite mistress? She's what grants enjoyment to the king. If we ask ourselves why she's there. What does the possessor of the productive forces and of the relations of production, of millennia of extraction of surplus value, enjoy?
19:23 And that's exactly what Rousseau comes to challenge. So, I'm not in a work by Rousseau here. I'm in what the peasant says about Rousseau, commented on by Nerval. You see the different levels. And now I come back to my little text of Rousseau. "What I needed were young ladies." That's exactly what the peasant says Rousseau comes to challenge, comes to attack right away. He doesn't leave property in the hands of possession.
Social Contract I, 8: justice substituted for instinct 19:54 What am I talking about here? We're going to see this distinction right away. I'm going a bit fast — we only have three months to go from Rousseau to Lenin. But we'll have time to discuss. So I'm obliged here to move on to The Social Contract to help us see more clearly into this matter of possession and the distinction between possession and property. I won't waste any time.
20:32 Book 1, chapter 8. If some of you remember. This passage from the state of nature to... let me go quickly here because I've repeated it often, but it's not the passage that interests me most, even though it's crucial. I say it anyway so we can understand what follows, which I'm going to dwell on — to the civil state. That's the title of this chapter. Book 1, chapter 8. That's it. "This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked."
21:09 "It is only then that the voice of duty, succeeding physical impulse" — those are metonymies, appetite is everything that's instinct, what's purely natural impulse, as opposed to what we'd call today cultural, historical. For now let's set that aside. "It is only then that the voice of duty, succeeding physical impulse, and right succeeding appetite, that man, who until then had considered only himself" — that means until now I was an individual who could go left, right, forward, backward, I was free because I wasn't in society. That's what the anarchist believes. We'll see that I'm very far from that.
21:41 A fine illusion. "Man, who considered only himself, finds himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations." You see, on one side we have inclination, physical impulse, appetite. On the other side we have right, morality, reason. "Although in this state he deprives himself of several advantages given him by nature" — say, we're not in the Confessions or in La Nouvelle Héloïse anymore, among the frills and the lace, this is rigor. "Although he deprives himself" — because here he's weighing what one gains, what one loses. It's not all black or all white.
22:13 "Although he deprives himself in this new state of several advantages he holds from nature" — I told you, go right — "he regains such great ones, his faculties are exercised and developed." I'm going to do like Africans, start with the little finger. "His faculties are exercised and developed." Think of the relation between language and thought. Look how elliptical everything Rousseau says is. It would take 500 pages to comment on "his faculties are exercised and developed." What would our thought be without language, for example? How could you...
22:43 Which language? It's not the tongue. When we haven't learned language as such, well, we've learned a tongue — the mother tongue first, then others if we can. But at the start, it's not as if, had I been born in China, I would speak Chinese. Chinese children don't have any more time than little French children to learn to speak — it's not that some languages are harder or easier for babies. So when you see the impact — if you don't picture it, you're modern people, I don't know if you've heard about the impact of language on thought — you see, when he says "his faculties are exercised and developed" in passing to the civil state, that's no small thing.
23:19 His faculties are exercised and developed. That's purely on the intellectual level for now. His passions - we change ground - his passions become ennobled. Well yes, hunger is a passion. You mustn't take the word only in the romantic sense. It's still a bit early for that at the time. It's starting to loom, but here it's very precise, it's passion in the classical sense, that is, everything that is passive, everything I undergo, and not everything that depends on me, but everything I depend on. I remind you here that when we say the wind shakes the branches of the trees, you learned in primary school, as I did, that the wind is active, grammatically speaking, and the branches of the trees are passive.
23:59 The branches of the trees are stirred by the wind. If I turn the sentence around, I can do the same thing, and I already pointed this out, but I repeat it here, and it can never be repeated enough, that this is metaphor. The wind is no more active here than the branches. The wind itself depends on the differences between cold air and warm air, and the wind - there's a question - and the wind, that's metaphor. The difference in temperature. In pressure.
24:29 Yes, it's the same, that's fine. Yes, in the difference of temperature and pressure, thank you. There, the wind is itself the effect. And so on, in the infinite causal regression of causes and effects in the order of nature. In other words - and here it becomes, well yes, you have the impression, but it's going to be more brutal, you're going to jump, when I tell you: there is no action in nature. Well yes, that's the philosophical upshot of my sequence. It's a metaphor when we say the wind shakes the trees.
25:02 So these passions, it's in that sense, everything that is in me - so these passions, sexuality for example, it's not culture that invented sexuality, it's not history, it's not a convention among men, man codifies it, but otherwise the very existence of the Trieb, we can speak as Freud does of the sexual drive itself in its raw state, I mean, it comes from nature and it is not at my service, it is at the service of the species which tries to make me believe it's for my own pleasure, but no - grasshoppers mate and die immediately afterward.
25:34 They've done their job. We play extra time. Well, this extra time, for Rousseau, that's culture, that's the basis. These passions become ennobled, that means sexuality becomes love, marriage, instinct becomes institution - I'll go quickly. Well yes, if there hadn't been the marriage between Iseult and King Mark, there would never have been the passion with Tristan. What interest would there be otherwise! Look, when they're finally alone, Tristan and Iseult, in the forest, how bored they are!
26:04 Isn't that so? Look, I'm not distorting the text. They go back to court immediately - it was actually nicer when they had to hide. There. So I won't spell it out, I'm going quickly, it's not the subject, but you have the whole of Pascal to remind us that what determines our drives is not, as they try to make us believe again, those laggards - what's it called - cognitive science. No, no, but it's very serious on a technical level, I respect that, the guys who do brain imaging, no, no, but it's the way we always do the philosophical calculation each time, what gets smuggled through without a Corsican customs officer to tax it.
26:46 Well yes, smuggled in - what is that? It's the conclusions - as for me, the series of equations, I take them on faith, I know nothing about it, it's not my field, but when we translate that into natural language, we fall back into ideology - we'll see that again with Marx. So these passions become ennobled, you see, I'm obliged to develop a little, but not too long, but to show the richness of this text. Behind its dry abstraction, this is not, once again, the Rousseau of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker or Julie, or the New Heloise, it's the implacable logical process of the Social Contract.
The abuses of the civil state bring man below the animal 27:23 His faculties are exercised and developed, his passions become ennobled, crescendo, his whole soul is elevated to such a point that - you know, those who are used to hearing me give this passage know that I like to build suspense with what - but it's objective in the text. Because if I stop there, and if I take a derivative, that's fine, that's fine, that is, if I take the tangent, that's fine, one gets the impression that we've gained everything by moving into civil society.
27:54 And so, we've been taught Rousseau very badly, made to believe that someone who is for nature - not at all, he's telling us that everything of value - law, morality, passions, all of that - is thanks to civil society. Except there's a small reservation. And so now I continue the sentence after the 'that': his whole soul is elevated to such a point that, if the abuses of this new condition did not degrade him, often below the state he came out of - I'll finish the sentence with commentary because it's grammatically complicated - he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy moment which tore him from it forever, and which, out of a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man.
28:36 Now wait, we have to linger here. We have to do close textual commentary, it's too dense, isn't it? If the abuses of this new condition did not degrade him - we're in the indicative - often below the state he came out of; he ought - we're no longer in the indicative - if that were the case, he ought, ideally, to ceaselessly bless the happy moment that makes us pass from the state of nature into civil society, which tore him from it forever. We need to linger a bit more. For Rousseau it's irreversible, you don't just go back to the state of nature like that.
29:08 Here again, there's a memory of sacred texts, you know that if you want to go back to earthly paradise - some people search for it, some think it's in the Canary Islands. No but seriously, I've read things like that. Why not, yes? Because there are bananas in the Canaries and the fruit will not be the apple but the banana. There are incorrigible realists in an indefensible sense - a magnificent realism, but that's not the case here. If by chance you're a stubborn realist and you search for it, you know that even if you find it, entry will be forbidden to you by the angel with the flaming sword.
29:44 Ah, yes. Which tore him from it forever, and which, out of a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man. We've gained everything, well fine, what has he gained? What is there? He's quibbling, I mean, fine, we gained by it. Ah no, but wait, this is enormous. If the abuses of this bad condition did not degrade him often below the state he came out of - we passed over that a bit fast. Now, he's saying: degrade man below the animal. The state he came out of, that's the state of nature, that's the animal.
30:14 That means that the abuses of civil society make humanity, when these abuses occur, lower than animality. That's enormous, that's bestial, that's monstrous, that's the theory of evil. Rousseau anticipates not only the mal du siècle he's going to inaugurate, but the century of evil that will follow the mal du siècle. The mal du siècle is Romanticism.
The letter to Malesherbes and the birth of the mal du siècle 30:44 He is the first, Rousseau. I'll show you a passage later in the letter to Malesherbes. I'll tell you the passage right away. Yes, he's in nature, he's in ecstasy - Malesherbes was a decent fellow who wanted to be an interface, as we'd say today, between the Encyclopedists, Rousseau's enemies, and Rousseau. You explain yourself badly, you defend yourself badly. I'm sure that if you explain properly, we can patch things up. Malesherbes was a good guy. And on top of that, he was in charge of censorship, and he was favorable to the new ideas. He was quite an honest man, an honnête homme.
31:17 He tries to explain to them what you find when you walk in nature. That seems obvious to you. It was nice when we went to the forest. That was Hugo. Thank you. It's nice. When you have the grass under you, it was nice. Nature or landscape? But at the time, it was famous - Madame de Sévigné, when she came back from Grignan where she went to see her daughter, in what is now the Drôme, and passed in front of the Alps, she would draw the curtain.
31:47 The Alps were horrible. All right? Whereas now it's one of the greatest tourist regions in Europe. It was horrible. 'Alpine cretin' - just simpletons up there with goiters. But yes, isolated valleys, misery, it was serious. It's recent. And so, when he explains to him, paints him a picture, everything he finds there, at one point he says that from time to time, all the same, his happiness had a shadow, fell under a shadow, when he became aware of the nothingness of his chimeras, the nothingness of his reveries, etc.
32:29 'Sometimes the nothingness of my chimeras suddenly saddened my soul. And I was pervaded by a delicious sadness that I would not have wished not to have.' That's the beginning of the mal du siècle. A delicious sadness that I would not have wished not to have. This deadly process is already beginning, one that Rousseau will get out of, and which will cause carnage in the generation that follows him. There. That's not my immediate subject, so I'll set it aside. We have to talk about revolutions - this is also a revolution in literary expression.
The telescoping of classes: Chantilly and the pale complexion 33:01 It's important. And not only... Expression only ever expresses something that's already in there. And what's in there, you have it in you, as I have it in me. It's modernity, these feelings. So there was a revolution. After the French Revolution, there was a revolution in interiority. We'll have occasion to come back to this. That's why I started there. I began with this text from the Confessions where he talks about the two young ladies, to show you this collision of social classes that's starting to occur in what we now call the middle classes.
33:37 Rousseau is not a peasant. Rousseau is not an aristocrat. He's like you and me. Everything in between. The aristocrats now are the ones who show up at the Bouygues board meeting for 10 minutes a year, pocket a fortune, then go back to their private island saying, 'I started from nothing.' Well yes, even those old aristocrats were tinkerers by comparison. Once, I was with Clouscard, I showed him what's called the difference between the old aristocracy and today's.
34:12 There are quantitative differences that produce qualitative thresholds, to speak like Marx, Engels and Lenin. And there we were at Chantilly. Yes, we're not leaving Nerval country. Clouscard and I, walking between Chantilly and Ermenonville. And so, Clouscard, the first time he came to Chantilly, I had built it up for him: you'll see the château, it's one of the finest, the park, it was Le Nôtre who did Versailles too, etc., etc. And we arrive in front - you know Chantilly?
34:45 You have to see the stables, it's extraordinary. Chantilly is the horse capital. And here we are, Corsicans in Chantilly. And Clouscard looks at the stables, not knowing that's what they are. He says, 'Damn, the château, it's fantastic.' See? I tell him, 'No, wait, that's the stables.' At first he doesn't even hear it. He says, 'No, but look' - I tell him, 'No, that's for the hor—' He realizes it. 'It's for the nags that they built all that.'
35:15 But Hitler is a small-time provincial tinkerer by comparison. There, that's my parenthesis on the new aristocracy. But when I make this little detour through this little passage from the Confessions, where it seems he's saying, well, me, Rousseau, my taste - besides, he himself downplays it, it's a bit of a folly of my soul. Personally I liked girls, as he says, who had a preserved complexion.
35:45 What does that mean? You can guess, precisely, concretely? Yes, bravo. Girls with a pale complexion, with white skin. Whereas now, look, because we're in the full swing of naturalism. A stunning thing that sometimes worries me, so I need to let off steam. Today you show up at the beach with a woman who has that complexion, and people say, 'You're white as an aspirin tablet,' you were told off. It's become a negative value aesthetically.
36:16 It's not appealing. See how it's reversed. Where is the invariant amid the variation? We appreciated girls with white complexions, you can guess, with white skin, because if you had dark skin, it meant you worked. Because at the time, working meant working in the countryside, there was no industrial revolution yet, right? They called them 'darkies.' And so, if she had brown skin, it meant she worked, and if she worked, she wasn't for me. Not for me, Rousseau - extraordinary.
36:50 But afterward, it reverses. End of the 19th century, the first sea bathing, you've seen the paintings, with striped bathing suits going from the ankle up to where? You risk a little, you dip a toe in the water, ooh, chilly, yes. Except - except the avant-garde, I'm thinking of Renoir's admirable bathers, or Cézanne's of course. But still, it's a minority who go bathing in the sea. Deauville is not yet La Grande-Motte, it's not the middle classes. You see what I mean?
37:20 So, being tanned meant having the privilege of going to the Côte d'Azur. Now everyone goes to the Côte d'Azur - well, not everyone goes to the Hôtel Negresco, but to a mass-produced campsite in Cagnes-sur-Mer, why not? Fine, I'm not against the mayor of Cagnes. There, so it's become a negative value, the same skin color. So the sequence we're dealing with is much more homogeneous than we think.
Praxis and psyche, science of the measurable and deinotaton 37:51 I'm not dwelling on Rousseau to linger over the chimeras. And if I started with him, it's because he's the first to put all this into relation. Of course, being the first, he does it in a way that sometimes seems confused to us and often contradictory. You'd have to look at Nietzsche to find as many contradictions on every page. Is that clear? Yes. Except that Nietzsche couldn't resist the pressure of these contradictions.
38:24 They gripped him so tightly that he ended up collapsing at the feet of that mistreated horse in Turin, which triggered his madness. And the sequence that follows isn't so funny, is it - giving in to the feeling he said was the most anti-Nietzschean of all, pity. Which makes me think of Lenin, who says in an admirable passage of What Is to Be Done? He quotes a Russian proverb - I'm not quoting Leninist thought to you yet, that will come, but for now he's just citing a Russian proverb.
38:59 Popular good sense, if such a thing exists. And it says, 'Don't spit in the well, because you might have to drink that water.' Well yes, Nietzsche - pity - don't spit in the well. Whereas Rousseau - I often wonder how it is that he didn't die mad or by suicide like the generation he sends to the slaughter, the first, you see, that he practically initiates. It's interesting. No doubt because he never abandoned that collective side, and this independence.
39:33 So that's why I began my sequence with Rousseau. He's the first to hold together what, much later and quite recently, Michel Clouscard would call praxis and psyche. Praxis, that is, the one domain - and this is Marx who initiates this - where human history can be observed scientifically, that is, measurably. Not merely something that can be experienced, because experience, when it isn't measured, you know.
40:04 I lived 40 years in Africa, the natives, I know how to handle them. There are guys who think they have experience, they've seen nothing. Nothing at all. No, scientific experience, experimentation - it would be better to say that, experience being such an overused word, and something that presupposes an immense detour through theory. I won't give you a whole course in epistemology - and in particular, through measurement. There is science only of the measurable. I didn't say only of the measured, there's still plenty to measure.
40:34 I'm not stupid, but there is science only of the measurable. There is science only in a field where things can be transformed into measurable reality. We transform concepts into indices, if you like. The notion of color is qualitative. You learned that too in primary school. Yellow, red, blue, green - these are adjectives of quality. They're qualities. Whereas since Newton we know that it's a quantitative difference in frequency, that is, the number of vibrations per second, that makes us pass from one color to another.
41:13 You see. So when I say measurable, it's in that sense. We have to manage to grasp physical realities in such a way that they can lend themselves to an experience introducing what only the deinotaton was able to create. The deinotaton is - excuse me, I have a frog in my throat - from a magnificent chorus in Sophocles' Antigone.
41:44 Deine is what gives us 'dinosaur,' it means terrible. Dinosaur means 'terrible lizard,' literally 'terrible reptile.' Deinos - I'll give it to you in Greek first because it's hard to translate - 'many are the wonders' - man is the most wondrous. It's a hymn to anthropology that is unique, this famous chorus from Antigone. Man who has tamed rock, fire, etc. It's a summary case of praxis. From the chipped flint stone right up to the moment when Sophocles writes about cities, about navigation - what a marvel that is, that's praxis.
42:25 But praxis, insofar as it takes hold, through the mediation of reason and reasoning - insofar as it takes hold, the way a ship is boarded and seized - of the external world, it expands the internal world. Here I take up again what Rousseau was saying: the passage from the state of nature, thanks to this passage, his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions ennobled, his whole soul... Interiority - your interiority, ours - expands exactly to the extent that Descartes's great design, making man master and possessor of nature, begins to take shape.
43:07 So I keep circling around this synthesis that Rousseau makes of things that until him were separate, even opposed. Now, I'll end on this point for now: what does it mean to hold together opposing things, as within a synthesis where contradiction does not result in cancellation? That's called dialectic - I'll come back to it, I haven't defined it here, but I'm deliberately smuggling it in through the back door. Now, in the sequence we're dealing with, Rousseau, Kant - I'm taking chronological order to simplify - Hegel, Marx, Lenin - well, there are quite a few dialecticians in there. Let's go, Hegel, first and foremost - all the same, it had been 2000 years before Hegel since anyone had spoken of dialectic in positive terms. I say that because just before him, Kant spoke a great deal about dialectic, but in Kant...
Negative dialectic in Kant and Aristotle, positive in Plato 44:17 it's negative, I should mention in passing - I said I wasn't doing the history of ideas, but I take the occasional opportunity to give a few brief notions of the history of philosophy as landmarks. In Kant, dialectic is what he calls a logic of appearance - not a logic of what is true, but a deceptive logic of appearance. So dialectic in Kant is the domain of the antinomies - there will always be disputes between those who say the world had a beginning or, on the contrary, that the world has no beginning at all, that the world is guided by finality but no, by mechanism. For Kant these are antinomies in which reason struggles for all eternity as long as it hasn't understood that they are illusions. But still, dialectic remains negative in Kant, as it already was. Can one of you tell me which illustrious philosopher before Kant spoke of dialectic, but in negative terms? Yes, how - negative? Plato? But say, not far off, not far from Plato, yes.
45:30 Who said - Aristotle, bravo, yes, of course, Aristotle spends his time criticizing the dialecticians, that is, precisely the Platonists. He spent 30 years at Plato's school, Aristotle - he knows him better than you, and even better than me - no, he knows him better than us. So as for me, I side with Plato - that's anecdotal if I say so, I'm not the only one, but I mean, Heidegger sides with Aristotle, and I side with Plato. I still don't want to get into that, I'm like that, some things are set, but Aristotle knows Plato well, yet there are things that escape us. I refer you to Kojève, no doubt the best approach there has ever been - a little-known work of Kojève's, indeed one not talked about enough - no, it's not the work on Hegel, it's the Reasoned History of Pagan Philosophy, the greatest monument ever produced on Greek thought, as far as I know, in three volumes, from the Presocratics up to the so-called moral schools.
46:41 The Stoics, the Epicureans, passing of course through the main course, the Athenian school, Plato-Aristotle - anyway, you'll find all that, I won't wander off, but in Plato there is, in ascending order of knowledge, the cheapest kind, you might say, at the bottom of the cave - the world of illusions, shadows, simulacra, copies. I'll go quickly because all this is familiar, this is textbook Platonism, to which corresponds, as knowledge, the zero degree of knowledge, which is opinion - café-du-commerce chat, if you like. I've always said I don't despise café-du-commerce talk, it's even quite pleasant, for knowing the odds between Marseille and Bastia, for flirting, for showing off, for impressing friends by buying a round you can't afford - no, I have no contempt for any of that, far from it. But it's not the place where truth is expressed, neither scientific nor philosophical. It's not made for that. There may be better things to do than that. There, so, the bottom of the cave, opinion, doxa, the shadows, then afterward we move on to serious things, science begins.
47:51 We move from doxa to epistēmē by way of what he calls dianoia - ah, there we are, it's no longer feeling, touching, seeing, it's no longer immediate knowledge. I'll do a quick philosophical summary: it's mediate knowledge - dia, through - I know by means of, that's why we say mediate knowledge. In mathematics, a theorem is true when I can show that it doesn't contradict earlier statements already held to be true, which I use for the demonstration - isn't that so, Thomas?
48:21 I got out of that not too badly there, yes, but no, that's non-contradiction, that's discursive knowledge, dianoia, but Plato doesn't stop there, so I can move on to dialectic, he says, yes but that's all very well but the geometers, not the mathematicians—it's still geometry, which had an imperialist position at the time with respect to the rest of mathematics, even though Euclid developed arithmetic a great deal—but the geometers start from hypotheses, from first notions, we'd say axioms today, in view of a conclusion, instead of going back up from hypotheses toward the unhypothesized principle. That's where you see the great metaphysician that Plato is, indeed inaugurating centuries of metaphysics, when he says this at the end of the sixth book of the Republic, quite simply—this crucial passage where there's the famous line that goes from the bottom of the cave up to the sun, in short from opinion toward theoria, toward silent and intuitive contemplation, passing through dianoia—and precisely in order not to remain at dianoia.
49:31 at the discussion in mathematics which doesn't go back from hypotheses to the principle, the discipline whose task is to start from hypotheses and try to found them, that's dialectic. Now here, in the positive sense, a beautiful image of Plato's—dialectic, the clash of two opposing thoughts—he says it's like two stones, the spark only arises from their friction; it's in their confrontation that the spark arises. Truth isn't the stone on the left, the one in my left hand, nor the stone in my right hand, but it's the third term that arises from their confrontation—it's always ternary, dialectic. I'm not giving you a definition, we'd never be done if I gave a definition—that's a pretentious word, it means you're done with a notion like that, can you imagine? I'm sort of taking it as it comes to me and trying to prepare the dish a bit, the way cooks do. So what's inseparable from dialectic is the notion of opposition, of contradiction, and so—I could also say—of movement. And so, to understand the link between the two, take a balance, a Roberval balance, the simplest one.
Two conceptions of dialectic: the path or being 50:41 If there's only the same weight on the left and on the right, there's no movement, it's death, it's equilibrium, it doesn't move—it's like rock music for the last 50 years, it doesn't move, excuse me, I can't help it, rock, pop, folk, it's on a rail—no, I'm not talking about rails, well, it's often related. It's because there's opposition, difference, that there's movement—difference of potential, for example, and as soon as the power is actualized—think of a hydroelectric power plant, which requires a turbine fed from up above, with water falling down; those who live among trees understand what I mean—when it's arrived at the bottom it no longer has power, once it's actualized it's cancelled itself out. So you see, for there to really be energy, there always has to be opposition. Let me take the opportunity, before leaving dialectic—because we'll come back to it, no doubt, with Hegel and Marx—but to say what needs to be known since Antiquity, there are broadly two conceptions.
51:53 of dialectic in the history of thought. There's a conception that makes dialectic the good method—method, way, Tao in Chinese, because the Tao is that, it's the Logos, it's the path, the discourse that leads—leads to what? To truth, to the absolute, to whatever you like, to Nirvana, depending on the place and the era, to the sun outside Plato's cave, out of the cave. So dialectic is sometimes the path—a good path for Plato, a bad path for Aristotle, for Kant—but it's considered as a path, you see?
52:30 which one then judges to be appropriate or not, or a false trail—Kant. And at the same time there's a very different, even opposite conception, which says that dialectic is not the path that leads to being, but that it's being itself that is dialectical, it's being itself that is contradictory and in motion. And you can guess which thinker is the first to develop this? Sorry? Before antiquity—Hegel himself pays homage to him, bravo—Heraclitus, the one who says we never bathe twice in the same river, the thinker of dynamism, of becoming, and not of being, isn't that right?
53:14 So there you go, we'll come back to it, but know that when one is being dialectical, one has to be careful, otherwise one quickly slides into sophistry, into intellectual dishonesty—one needs to know what one is talking about. Either one is talking about the path of dialectic as a method, method, way, the mean, that which is in the middle between the two, between A and B there has to be a path, all of that is the same thing; or it's the path that leads to the true, and about which one can say it's the good path or the bad path—one can always argue, that's all we did for centuries; or else it's not the path, it's being itself that is dialectical, and that's Heraclitus, then nobody until Hegel—although the old Plato, this time, after the Republic, in the great dialogues called metaphysical, gets close—that's the limit, that's where Plato is at his very greatest, in the great series of dialogues that begin with the Parmenides and close with the Statesman, passing through the Sophist and the Philebus, sorry to go a bit fast—the philosophical upshot is simple, let's leave aside all these proper names, Plato
54:24 ultimately concludes that there is no identity if there is no otherness, there is no sameness if there is no the-other, and there Plato is an immense dialectician—you'll find that in the Sophist. I'm closing that parenthesis, but I come back to my subject, to our sequence, so—there are gaps there. Marx, of course, not only takes dialectic into account, but it's even what defines his materialism as against all preceding materialisms: that his is not mechanistic, not naturalistic, it's dialectical—we'll come back to the difference between materialism and naturalism, there's so much confusion between the two these days that it's worth the trouble; there's nothing more immaterialist than contemporary naturalism, and nothing more mystical, more mystified. So Marx speaks of dialectical materialism; Lenin underlines ten times, when he discusses Hegel's Logic, that what's essential in Hegel and what he brought to Marx, irreversibly,
Clouscard: Rousseau, the greatest dialectician 55:34 is the dialectical method. So in our sequence there are already two out of five—Hegel of course, three out of five—but Kant, he talks about it, but in a pejorative way, Kant; Rousseau, he doesn't talk about it at all. So, Pagani, your story doesn't hold up—it's not dialectic that's going to provide the thread? Yes it is, because—read Modernity, subtitled Rousseau or Sartre, do you know that?
56:05 Yes, well, thanks, Michel Clouscard—it's been reissued by Éditions Delga with a new title, isn't that right? The new title is Critique of Libertarian Liberalism, which is the most philosophical work, in terms of genre—I didn't say the most profound, though it's not bad, Clouscard—anyway, the one where he takes on the philosophers of his time. You know that in Clouscard there's history, there's sociology, and there's also philosophy, and even studies of manners. Sartre also belongs to the great tradition of French moralists—read that extraordinary prose poem, I can't call it anything else, called The Country House, at the end of The Capitalism of Seduction, you'll understand what I mean, you'll say it's like La Bruyère, but there, there, he really confronts the philosophical establishment, if I may say so, and the first 80 pages of that book are devoted to Rousseau, which is why I come back to it.
57:15 And to say what? To say that Rousseau is the greatest dialectician in the history of philosophical thought—your arms fall off, and I didn't mean to make that pun. Rousseau connects to our sequence, and that's why I began with the text on the maidservants, the chambermaids, the shopkeepers, the little fruit-sellers—what a good idea it was to put the little fruit-seller—it's true, Hugo, on the homepage, it's a very good idea, since I wish you a glorious autumn in my little editorial, and Hugo very rightly thought of that magnificent text where he speaks of the fruit girl, isn't that right?
57:55 And yes, autumn is the season of fruit, and what fruit! I think I'm telling you, for instance, that figs are still ripening at my place in the Valinco right now—go there if you're not going away for the November holidays, this is the moment, I think, to make the bark—but otherwise, this is being recorded, otherwise it's by far the best season, it's far cheaper, it's splendid, and the sea is warm until mid-November, it's even warmer than ever because it gets a bit cold when you come out, but still, in mid-November, when you get back in the water it's even warmer, in short there isn't even the heat haze like in summer. So we have a dialectical sequence where dialectic is discussed from Rousseau to Lenin, with only Kant speaking of it negatively—how the landscape has changed. What's dialectical is that the little chambermaids Rousseau spoke of—the contradiction is right there, that's why I made the detour through Nerval's text where the peasant says that Rousseau is going to dispute with the king himself, the primus inter pares.
59:06 that is, the foremost of the feudal lords—you couldn't be more socially at the top, especially since the King of France—we can't imagine the prestige of the French monarchy in the Europe of that time; when English knights arrived on the cliffs of Dover and looked across, during the Hundred Years' War, looked across at the cliffs of Calais, they said, over there, France, land of great chivalry. Yes, the first unified, centralized kingdom, France. France and England are old nations; Germany and Italy arrived at nationhood much later, and that produced fascism and Nazism—I'll go quickly, well listen, these aren't untruths either—France has problems, Germany is a problem, do you know that saying?
59:57 He's a historian of Germany, one of the best, who wrote a history of Germany that I recommend to you, René Badia, B-A-D-I-A, a remarkable history of Germany, quite simply—it begins with this sentence, France has problems—I can't help putting an acute accent on it—France has problems, Germany is a problem. And yes, when Germany was divided into 600 states etc., that was good, we had Kant, Beethoven, and Hegel—that's fine, the one who said, along with Voltaire, a world has ended, with Rousseau, a world begins—we're talking about revolution—but as soon as it's unified, the world is at war. Historically that's not false, well, I'm not going to get lynched, everyone knows I'm a great Germanophile, well, precisely, I'm wary, I know Germany as if I'd made it myself, and many Germans think the same thing, don't worry about that, they didn't wait for me. Dialectic is present from Rousseau to Lenin, and that's an effect
Faust against Racine: the split within the subject 1:01:07 of modernity—modernity involves a split within the subject. I'm going quickly, but you see, if I hadn't made all these detours, what I'm saying now would seem very abstract, and it starts to make sense from the little chambermaids and Henri IV onward—there's a contradiction within the self that's characteristic of modernity. I was talking about Goethe earlier, he's one of the initiators of modernity, he's an immediate successor of Rousseau—I'm shuttling between my two subjects, between revolutionary thought and nature or landscape—I say that because I'm thinking of a passage in Faust where Faust is asleep in a magnificent landscape, and he wakes up and says: what a spectacle, but alas, only a spectacle—where might I grasp you, infinite nature? That's modern, that didn't exist before, you can't imagine Racine saying, where might I grasp you, infinite nature—well, first of all, might I grasp nature at all, what is all that?
1:02:13 Look in Mithridate at how he speaks of the Racinian landscape, when the son collaborates—what's his name?—Xipharès, the one who collaborates with the Romans against the one who held the Romans at bay for 40 years, Mithridates, an oriental, a resistance fighter, a Palestinian, in short, king of Pontus—you'll see, there's a tirade in Mithridates, we'll come back to the geopolitical aspect of Racine—well, when Xipharès, believing his father Mithridates dead somewhere—of course it's a bit like in Phèdre, you know, we believe Theseus is dead, the king, the father is not there, so the mice can dance, the tragedy can unfold—and the son, one of the sons, decides to collaborate with the Romans, and before leaving for Rome he wants to snatch, in passing, his father's favorite, a little Greek slave who must be 40 years younger than Mithridates but who had been kept in reserve after all, and the son snatches her anyway—that's just not done, as they say in the projects, that's just not done—I'm talking about landscape.
1:03:23 Here's what he says to her to convince her: Come, flee the sight of this savage climate, which speaks to your eyes of nothing but sad slavery—you see, landscape, for which millions of tourists now compete to go and contemplate. How long, madam, will you wait for my father? Witnesses of his death arrive at every moment to condemn your doubt and your delays. Come, flee the sight of this savage climate—Turkey—which speaks to your eyes of nothing but sad slavery; an entire people awaits you on its knees under a happier sky—well yes, in Rome there are palaces, there are villas, in Pompeii there are those—Cocody, excuse me, that's in Abidjan, well I mean, it's Beverly Hills, whatever you like—yes, an entire people awaits you on its knees under a sky happier and more worthy of you—well yes, the split within the subject is unthinkable in Racine, whereas the most famous passage, which every little German schoolchild knows, is that in Faust, Faust says: two forces were fighting over my soul, one pulling it upward, that's the ideal, the other pulling it downward—that's the division found in Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, Spleen and Ideal, spleen downward and ideal upward, and in a sawtooth pattern; one understands that it ends
1:04:33 sometimes in suicides and madness, because it's not very comfortable, that sawtooth pattern of mood. And yes, that's what Rousseau inaugurates, these contradictions—one must not take them as incoherence, one must on the contrary seek the place—I'll say seek, it's not a matter of interpreting, above all seek the text, the passage in the text that lifts the contradiction, that is, that rises dialectically to a level where the contradiction cancels itself out, not because it was a false problem, far from it, it's a great advance, a real contradiction is a real problem that gets resolved, but not in order to arrive at an absence of problems, like that fool Adorno, with a hitch, in Hegel—what doesn't work, according to Adorno, is that the thesis is fine, the antithesis is fine, but when you get to the synthesis, oh dear, that's bourgeois, the synthesis, there's no more conflict, no more revolt, so it's not leftist, it's not good—I'm caricaturing someone very intelligent and very cultured, as they say in Paris, and who knows music admirably, though he understood nothing about jazz, well, he does know the rest of music well, there are class prejudices with regard to jazz, but apart from that
Hegelian synthesis and Freud's psychic unconscious 1:05:44 in Hegel, every time one arrives at a synthesis, it's not in order to abolish the contradiction—listen to what I'm saying—it's in order to exacerbate it, to arrive at an even more global, more encompassing contradiction. Let me give you an example: master and slave—here's an opposition, I am the master, there's the slave, I am the slave, there's the master, it doesn't matter, external, physically, to one another—but when we move on to the treatment of Stoicism in the Phenomenology, what does Hegel say? That from Stoicism onward, the subject has internalized the master within himself—that's moral conscience, what Freud will later call the superego, which is one's own master. The master who was outside until then—so I could defy him when he wasn't there—the master is now always inside; the eye was in the grave and it watched Cain, as Hugo says, isn't that right? So you see, it's not a resolution of the contradiction, it is a resolution of the previous contradiction, that of master and slave in the ancient city, but it's a new contradiction, and one that hasn't finished producing effects. So I'm saying that what happens starting with modernity, tied to my story about the mixing of genres, is that the contradiction moves inside the subject.
1:06:54 When Freud brings in the notion of the unconscious, he's not the first to speak of it, because we often credit psychoanalysis, Freud—Althusser puts this to work in Reading Capital—Euclid opened up the mathematical continent, very well, Euclid, or the teams that worked around that name, fifteen centuries later Galileo—I'll go quickly—inaugurates the physical continent, very well, that's for the natural sciences, because everything else is internal divisions, even biology, as Claude Bernard said, the living is the dead, it's in physics, and action, and all that, we know it. Marx, on the other hand, inaugurates what we would now call the human sciences or the social sciences, or at the EHESS, in short, culture—and there I agree with Althusser, he inaugurates the science of history, because all these disciplines unfold in history, if you look closely, if we take history in an extensive sense, of course, not only in the disciplinary sense which only begins with writing, but even if we trace it back to the chipped pebble, that's anthropology.
1:08:05 So where I'm going with this, I'm getting at the fact that when Freud brings in his unconscious—it didn't wait for him, and all of German Romanticism talks of nothing else, and moreover everyone knew, before Freud, that when the doctor does the patellar reflex, you know, like that, it's not voluntary, that's unconscious, but that's a physical unconscious, that we knew before Freud. What is unconscious? That's not what Freud contributes, it's much more serious and scandalous, I'm telling you, it's a psychical unconscious. So it's not by replacing one word with another that you're going to achieve—no, we need to dig a bit—a psychical unconscious, what does that mean?
1:08:41 That the split passes into the subject itself, that is, that there are thoughts in me that I don't think—what am I saying there? You see, that's serious—and desires I don't want, that's what the split within the subject is. I don't know whether it's true or false, but that's what he says, that's what's unbearable, and that's what makes people say, ugh, psychoanalysis is disgusting, well, to say that children have a sexuality is abominable—one always starts by saying that, thank you, bravo, one doesn't start by saying that, then afterward, when one is forced to deal with it, one says, oh it was already in Plato, then afterward one analyzes, well, after all—and then there's your generation, there's Deleuze who liquidates Freud in Anti-Oedipus, and Onfray—I'm not even going to stoop that low. And there you go, for Freud, you know, the revelation people make about Freud—Freud had mistresses, did you know that?
1:09:49 That's not serious. What's serious and important about Freud is that he ratifies—not as a philosopher, that's not his job, philosophy, he had patients who came to consult him—well before psychoanalysis he was a psychiatrist like everyone else, he was a positivist like you and me, so to speak, at the time, like everyone, everyone went through that phase, believing the model of the hard sciences suffices to understand everything—and then he noticed that everyone was telling more or less the same story, you understand, and it's someone who, at the outset, was not himself prepared for what he discovered—that's why what I prefer in him is a bit the opposite of the statue of the commander in which he's enclosed, it's his hesitations, his opportunism, when he says, I say this, I'm not sure, I take it as a hypothesis, I'll see how far it holds, but it doesn't work, I backtrack, I abandon it—I like that a lot, a great researcher, great explorer of unexplored archipelagos. So, since I'm talking about him
Politzer, Timbaud, Jena, and Hegel's 1807 letter 1:11:01 within the framework of a sequence where he doesn't belong, and which is called and centered on the notion of revolution, let me point out that an admirable essay by Politzer has just been published by Éditions Critiques—our comrade Politzer, I speak as if he were alive, executed by firing squad at Mont-Valérien, along with quite a few communist comrades, as hostages—Politzer, who was, who is of the same generation as Timbaud—you know who Timbaud is, the one from Rue Jean-Pierre-Timbaud—you know how he died, Timbaud? He was shot by the Germans too, but do you know what his last words were before the firing squad? A beautiful dialectical phrase—but no, I'm not here to tell anecdotes, I'll stay on subject—Long live the German Communist Party, that's called political consciousness. I mention it because we're at the exact opposite of today—couldn't be more opposite—today people say, you're a woman, you're a man, you're a Hutu, you're a Tutsi, you're a forty-something, you're young, you're old, we're in identities, you're an Arab, you're black, you're white,
1:12:11 you're a supremacist tired of his nonsense—and he says, long live the German Communist Party, I hold nothing against the Germans as I die before a firing squad—not German but Boches, I adore Germany, I don't like the Boches, I adore the Germans, I don't like the Boches, that's the distinction I have to make, you understand it. Long live the German Communist Party. Politzer had published Revolution and Counter-Revolution, I recommend that book, published precisely by Éditions Critiques—now why am I mentioning this? Because Politzer is one of the few Marxists before Clouscard who wrote Critique of the Foundations of Psychology—it's the first time a Marxist takes on Freud's work, that's why I allow myself to recommend it to you. There, I won't go on about what he says, but I want to get back to my point—five minutes left before questions—my point, namely modernity, if I had to characterize it by two attributes, is firstly the dissolution of the separation
1:13:21 between genders, just as there's a dissolution of the separation between classes—the moment we start talking about the middle class, I can say it now, it's clearer than if I'd said it at the start—when the people of Paris arrive at the Tuileries after having brought Louis XVI back from Versailles to Paris—you know, after bringing back the baker, the baker's wife, and the little apprentice, these are women, 200,000 women in the streets, on the road, because from Paris to Versailles that was the road at the time—they went to fetch the king to bring him back to Paris, bravo the women, because there was famine—and when the people came, they asked the king to come out on the balcony, they asked him to wear the Phrygian cap, the red cap, Louis XVI wearing the cap—this telescoping of social classes inaugurates an interpenetration of worlds that until then had completely ignored one another—in the time of the Duchesse de Langeais, in the time of Madame de Lafayette, I mean, at the time when one spoke of the peasant woman as the dark-skinned wench, as I said earlier—those worlds did not interpenetrate then, and so there,
1:14:32 I'm going to read you an excerpt from a letter—there, 1807, the battle of Jena—this is that famous battle where Napoleon enters the city, not, this is before defeating the Prussians, there's no Germany yet—at the moment when Hegel, in Jena, is putting the finishing touch on the Phenomenology of Spirit—you couldn't make this up—at the moment when, for the first time, a philosopher says that it's history that made him what he is, and not God, nor nature, but history—Marx didn't just fall out of the blue like some deaf man—Marx, it's man who makes man, it's not God who makes man, it's not nature that makes man, it's man who makes man—it's not the theological standpoint that counts, it's not the naturalistic standpoint, it's the anthropological standpoint—there, you can agree or not, but one has to be clear—at the moment when he's writing its final line, the Phenomenology,
1:15:42 in the conclusion, and it's history that has constituted me—there, history, with cannon fire, knocks at Hegel's door, and the little corporal enters the city. Well, for the German intelligentsia—let me extend this a bit before reading the text, very briefly—Napoleon isn't what you think, he's not the tyrant, no, no, no, quite the contrary, it's the blue-white-red flag finally arriving here in Germany, with our tyrants, our petty grand dukes, etc.—in short, the ideas of the revolution are going to come and free us from ten centuries of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Indeed, with one signature, Napoleon is going to put an end to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, even so—and that won't last long—let me just extend that little parenthesis into the musical domain, but this is well known to those interested in this period—Beethoven, who was born the exact same year as Hegel, 1770, one year after Napoleon's birth—Hölderlin and Hegel, Beethoven, born in 1770—it happens like that, vintage years—and Beethoven
1:16:52 writes his Third Symphony—at that point he's on his third—about which he would say for a long time, before writing the Ninth, that it was his greatest symphony, the symphony called the Eroica. Why heroic? Because it was dedicated to that hero Bonaparte, who was going to come and deliver him from our tyrants—you see, I'm right on track—but then suddenly he learns that Bonaparte has had himself crowned emperor, so he tears up the dedication and writes instead: heroic symphony, composed in memory of a great man—that has quite a ring to it, doesn't it. Another time I'll tell you about Bettina, that woman who runs through all of Romanticism, who slept with Beethoven, Napoleon—well, we'll talk about her another time, but it's very important because she wrote a remarkable text about Hölderlin—no, no, no, she was someone serious, that marvel of the sea, as Goethe called her—so, ah, no, I have to redo the door code, it's a pain, that period—right, for my security, yes—so you see, letter of 1807, Napoleon hasn't entered the city yet, but Hegel is already an admirer, like a large part of the intelligentsia of his time, of the French Revolution, he's impatient for it to rub off
1:18:03 a bit onto Germany, and he writes this—now listen carefully because every line relates to our sequence, revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin: "Thanks to the bath of its revolution, the French nation has not only been freed from many institutions which the human spirit, having outgrown its childhood, had outgrown"—privileges and all that—"and which consequently weighed upon it, as upon others, like absurd chains"—that's the classic version of the revolution, yes, there were injustices, things like that, but in addition—this is pure Hegel, pay attention—"the individual has stripped himself of the fear of death"—the French took risks—"the individual has stripped himself of the fear of death and of the usual course of life"—it should read, of the usual course of life—"to which the change of circumstances has removed all solidity." When I tell you that Louis XVI put a red flag on the balcony at Versailles, you understand the connection with this text—I said a flag, a cap, a red cap, I don't have one to sell you yet, a flag
The extreme center and the fate of the middle classes 1:19:37 with the point M in the middle—on the left the half-segment is blue, on the right it's red—what color is the middle, where they meet? Sorry—purple—yes, bravo, yes, of course—no but you needn't be afraid, I'm not trapping you with these elementary things, I mean, just to answer as at elementary school, we do like—sorry, my somewhat mathematical Corsican side, I'm sorry—yes, purple, well spotted. What does that mean? It means it's not clear—I'm in the process of denouncing, of denouncing to you, the extreme center, worse than the extreme left and the extreme right—there's the extreme center, that is, the extreme right passing itself off as the left, the extreme center, red-brown, you know, you hear talk of notions like that, that's your generation, yes or no, it's not a cap anymore, then with the disciple of the most Nazi of philosophers who fabricates the notion of totalitarianism to say it's the same thing, Nazism, Communism, we've heard that
1:20:47 I'm not making anything up, be careful, we are vulnerable to this kind of propaganda because we are—myself first—in the middle classes, we are no longer, right now, while I'm speaking to you—not at this hour, and yet, and yet, but I mean, you'll see, tomorrow morning at dawn in Mali there are women who are going to walk 15 km on foot to fetch water before starting their day—what do you want to do without water?
1:21:17 Nothing. Don't say, while the guy sleeps—don't listen to Caroline Fourest's nonsense like that—meanwhile the guy has gone 300 km south to sell his labor power in Ivory Coast because it rains a bit more there, he can be a farm laborer—it's shared misery, even though I concede, to be serious, all else being equal, the woman is always the more exploited within the exploitation, all else being equal, wherever and whenever—but anyway, I mean, there's no dispute, both are quite wretched—so she walks 10 km to fetch water, 10-15, then afterward she walks 10 km to fetch wood to heat the water—that's not the middle classes, I insist, because we're so immersed in it that we forget what that means, middle class, you understand what I mean—we are freed from manual constraint, not because we're in Paris, you know, while I'm speaking there are dishwashers in restaurants, dishwashers of whatever nationality, that's just how it is, and we're not either, on the other hand, on the board
1:22:29 of the CAC 40, a big CAC 40 company—we're tossed back and forth between the two, we try our luck a little, and that's why I worked on Nerval for a year—but yes, you thought I was doing this out of a love of literature—Nerval comes a bit late, isn't that right, he's not Alfred de Musset, he's not Alfred de Vigny, great writers, I'm not criticizing their literary work, I'm noting that it's not the same social milieu—it's not François-René de Chateaubriand, great diplomat—no, but I admire him, it's extraordinary, Chateaubriand the enchanter, "then I heard in the distance the voice of a shepherd, which reminded me that in all the—ah, I was forgetting—in all the places I traveled, and God knows he traveled, as far as America—the song of man is sad," great man, Chateaubriand—yes but still, François-René de Chateaubriand, the chief reactionary of his time, and openly so, which is still better than the extreme center passing itself off as the left. So Nerval doesn't have the means
1:23:43 that was new, travel—the greatest traveler of his time, Nerval travels to the Orient, travels to Germany, travels in the Valois—with time the passion for great journeys fades, the circle shrinks, well yes, there's no old money left starting from your thirties—what am I getting at? I'm saying that's the middle classes—there's an aristocratic model, and I try to follow it, and I don't have the means—that's our destiny, we have a model and we don't have the means for it, it's interesting—that's why I started with Rousseau and his chambermaids, or rather Rousseau who doesn't want, isn't that right, to compromise himself with the chambermaids but who wants—how do you say?
The three meanings of "to abuse" and the return of force 1:24:28 How do they say it at the Popular Front? Take the money where it is—yes, even so. There, I've gone five minutes over the time for your questions—I greet Samuel in passing, since it's the start of the new season, and I permit myself to say that without Samuel none of us would be here, isn't that right? Because it's him, after all, who founded this association out of nothing, with makeshift means and no resources at all, which has led it to what it is now, that is, to having quite a lot of people, actually—there, thank you. If you're a philosophy teacher one day—I say this for those who have already been here a while—know that the terms that pose the most difficulty are the unnoticed terms, the most everyday ones, of ordinary language—you already suspect this a bit, in the exercise of your duties, but here you have a fine illustration of it. We can quibble over dialectic, over apagogic and ostensive proof—that's in Kant, yes, it looks complicated, but Kant has the merit of having complicated words that tell you right away what they mean—he gives you the key and so it's much simpler—whereas here, 'abuse,' that's a word we use all the time, we use it and abuse it, what does it mean?
1:25:40 Yes, "to abuse civil status, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition from which he had emerged"—a crucial question, since it asks us about this monstrous possibility of being lower even than the animal, isn't that right—you see what degree of cruelty the human species can reach. The animal knows no evil because it knows no good either—careful, we're not angelizing the animal and demonizing man—it is with man, Rousseau says very well—"the passage from nature produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked"—freedom is not the good, freedom is the possibility of doing good as well as evil, don't forget, let's not treat all subjects at once—"the abuses of this new condition"—I told you I don't like to interpret, interpreting is cooking things up, one must analyze. Rousseau doesn't specify—now language gives several meanings—to abuse, to abuse drink, what does that mean?
1:26:47 It means to take too much of it—so here, to abuse means too much, too much civil status, what does that mean? I leave the question open—unless it's the second meaning of "abuser," quite different, to deceive—"he deceived me," do you agree? To con, to smuggle through, to make one take vessels for lanterns and so on, and finally, to abuse, to violate—"this person was abused," "he abused this person"—well, that gives us quite a range of meanings, doesn't it. Rousseau doesn't specify, so we take them all, one must be rigorous when I say I'm not interpreting—and let's take the one that sums them all up, the one meaning "to deceive"—to abuse civil status is to deceive me about civil status. Now Rousseau had just shown—what is civil status?
1:27:42 It's what gets us out of the state of nature—I seem to be, seem to be, making a tautology, I'm doing it on purpose—how can I be made to believe, how can I be deceived, if by making me believe I'm in civil society, I'm in fact being made to reinstate the state of nature, that is, to reintroduce the principle of—not of right, but what's opposed to right? Thank you—force. It's no accident that the Social Contract—there, I'm answering the question fully—it's no accident that the Social Contract begins with the right of the strongest: "the strongest is never strong enough to always be the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty." Rousseau, the first who doesn't do morality in the sense in which Nietzsche said, very rightly—I must pay him homage from time to time—Nietzsche spoke of "moraline," he's right, he stands in the great lineage of a Pascal who said true morality mocks morality—moreover Nietzsche said of Pascal, "he runs in my blood," it's rare for Nietzsche to speak that way about a Christian, I tell you, hats off, Pascal.
1:28:53 True morality mocks morality—it's not an "ought to be," he doesn't say we ought to make a contract, that it would be better than injustice, no, he says that human society has always been based on this, it cannot be based on force, because if it's force that makes right, if it's the right of the strongest, you seize power, two days later I stage a coup and it's I who now hold the right, as much as you did—right can never get established, I'm as legitimate as you according to your own logic, even if you say it's force that makes right, and it would then be chaos. So, to abuse civil status is to reinstate relations of force while making them out to be legitimate relations—saying that property is a divine right, for example, yes, that you have it by nature, that it's attributed at birth—nature, that means N-A-T-
1:29:53 Never forget—I have nothing against nature, people think I have an anti-naturalist obsession—yes, I am anti-naturalist, but I'm not against nature, that has nothing to do with it—N-A-T, it's by birth (NAT) that I have eyes of such a color, that I'm a boy and not a girl, or that I'm a girl and not a boy—fine, that's birth, but that doesn't make a man, that makes an animal, it doesn't make men and women, it makes males and females—that's not the same thing, both exist—it's because there are first males and females that there are afterward men and women—there are men and women in culture just as there were males and females in nature, it's not the same thing—the distribution of roles is not due to nature. So wanting to legitimize a state of fact by making it out to be a matter of right, and moreover a natural right, that's precisely where the con is, and where there is abuse of civil status, when I'm being lied to, made to believe that I am
Force in physics and the prophecy of Emile 1:31:03 in civil society, when we've reintroduced the concept to its proper place — I myself have nothing against the notion of force when it stays where it should reign, that is, in physics. I remind you here that a physics course begins with the notion of force, and after that notion of force, we build all the fundamental concepts of physics: force, energy. Remind me of the joke — who was it who said 'give me the energy,' what was that? Who was it, no, no, no, no, he's clever, no, no, that's force, no it's energy — but you told me about the notion of force, someone had said something similar, a joke, wasn't it Einstein or I don't know who, who said: if you give me — you told me someone had said, give me the notion, don't ask me what energy is because I can deduce everything from it, but I can't tell you what it is. Well anyway, I know there was a physicist who worked at CERN, no less — the CERN in Geneva, the particle accelerator.
1:32:13 and I asked him, what does energy take? He told me, listen, give me the energy and I'll give you all of physics, but don't ask me what it is. There you go, we start with the notion of force, it's in its proper place. For example, if I take the force needed to move this pair of glasses, that's called work; whether I do that movement in an hour or in a second makes a difference in power — the ratio of work to time — and so on, you build all of physics starting from force. So I have nothing against this notion when we talk about the Earth's attraction on the Moon: there's a relation of force, you know Newton, the Earth's mass is greater, so the Moon has no choice, it revolves around it — it doesn't say to itself, 'how about that, I'm fed up with the Earth, I'm going to orbit Saturn instead, that'll be a change of scenery.' It has no choice. You'll tell me, well, we're determined too — I've listened to the neo-Spinozists, what are they called, Lordon and the rest — it's all illusion, we're determined, you hear that too, I'm not joking, and I'll finish on Rousseau because that's what the question was about.
1:33:23 Rousseau, in Émile, settles the debate not by closing it off but by opening it, by posing the real problem. What he says to the mother of his pupil, who belongs to the aristocracy — don't forget that Rousseau deliberately staged, in Émile, a pupil whose mother is an aristocrat, because there are many prejudices to overcome, etc. — and it begins with this sentence, which is somewhat more relevant to our subject this term: 'We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions.' If anyone was ever a prophet, frankly — this was said in 1765, you know — and he's not talking about the Revolution, he goes beyond that, he sees clearly that it won't stop starting in '89, we'll come back to that. I mentioned earlier, I recommended Politzer's book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution — so if there's a counter-revolution, you have to make another revolution, and so on. 'We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions — who can answer for what will become of you?' So he's saying what's going to happen, moreover, to the émigrés afterward, those who will flee to England.
1:34:33 when you arrive in London, you'll have fled to avoid the guillotine, or because you don't want your property confiscated — what are you going to do in London? Well, you no longer have — before, you used to look — as I said to Negroni once, Negroni is a marquis, a 'red marquis' as the filmmaker puts it — he never takes offense, so I'm being a bit provocative, I hope he'll take it well — but once I was in Sartène in Corsica, magnificent, you can see Italy across the water, and from Sartène you can see everything, you can see Joëlli's vineyard. I said, well, your ancestors just had to wait for the harvests to grow, then swoop down like birds of prey, you know — noble families are always up on high, Hohenstaufen, Hohenzollern, Hohenlohe, that's what aristocratic families are called; in French we'd say 'la haute roche,' in Italian, excuse me — they just had to swoop down and seize the goods in kind. Yes, but if you're in London, you can't take Joëlli's vineyard or the wheat fields of Artois with you. So then you have to work, and it's true that many nobles took up a bit of locksmithing, watchmaking, I tell you.
1:35:43 because Louis XVI liked watchmaking — 'who can answer for what will become of you? Then the great becomes small, the rich becomes poor, the monarch becomes a subject; what will this fool, stripped of all his pomp' — he's talking about his son — 'whom you will have raised only for gold, what will he do in his baseness, this satrap who has never known how to make use of himself and who has put his whole being into what is foreign to him' — the first definition of a concept we'll find again in Marx today. I insist that my sequence, all the way to Lenin, keeps circling around — I don't want to do Hegel first, then Kant, then Marx, no — you see there's something circulating that I'm making spiral, otherwise we'd go around in circles, and that wouldn't be very nice. So the notion of alienation in Marx is right there: 'who puts his whole being into what is foreign to him' — alienation comes from the Latin alius, which simply means 'the other,' into what is not himself — like Harpagon in Molière, who put his whole being into his strongbox; his strongbox disappears and he wants to die because he is nothing other than his strongbox. That's the height of alienation. It's not so long ago — during the crisis of the 1930s, bankers were jumping from the 40th floor in Wall Street — yes, but no, that's stupid.
1:36:53 like a good... frankly, I hope you've already been ruined like me, that's fine. 'Let people admire as much as they like this defeated king who wants to bury himself in fury under the ruins of his throne — I despise him. I see that he is king only by his crown and is nothing without it; but he who loses it and does without it is thereby above it.' Rousseau the dialectician — Clouscard would illustrate this — 'the rank of king can be filled, like any other, by a coward, a madman, a villain' — you could never have said that the century before, you see royalty had already lost its standing — Louis XV with his little fifteen-year-old nymphets at the Trianon, that's not the fourteenth — 'the rank of king, which a coward, a villain, a madman can fill just like anyone else, he rises to the state of man' — Rousseau the dialectician of the rank of king — 'he rises to the state of man, and he adds that so few men know how to fill it' — in case you thought he was some naive little humanist who believed it's enough to pass from animal to man and everything is won, no, no, 'he rises to the state of man, that so few men know how to fill' — there are great texts by Rousseau, there's also nonsense in Rousseau, I'm not a Rousseauist, nor a Hegelian, nor a Marxist.
1:38:03 100%, I mean — there are things worth keeping in all of that. I only insist on what is revolutionary in each of them, sometimes even to their own detriment, without their knowing it — that's what interests us if we want to go further. So there, amused by civil society, yes, I haven't finished — the most important thing, to answer the question, is that in Émile he ends up saying: we must therefore work, because — and this is where determinism matters, I pick up my thread again, I had alluded to Lordon and to what — everything that men have made, men can destroy, can undo. There is no ineffaceable character except what nature imprints — the law of universal gravitation that makes the Moon revolve around the Earth, you see I'm keeping my thread — that's ineffaceable, I cannot change the law of universal gravitation. But on the other hand — I'll finish Rousseau's sentence — 'there is no ineffaceable character except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither the rich man, nor the prince, nor the great lord.' Ah yes, that we can change — that's what revolution is, a way of changing what can be changed, but not demanding the impossible.
Two determinisms: natural and social 1:39:14 of being what centuries of metaphysics have made — no. So there are two determinisms, I'll conclude on this point. There is of course a natural determinism to which we are subject until the end of my life, of yours — we must eat to live, that's not a law decided by men, by culture, by history, agreed. Except that when we eat, we don't merely eat to survive biologically — we eat humanly, with forks here, with chopsticks over there, with the three fingers of the right hand elsewhere, in semolina or in a ball of dough, as they say in Niger — yes, that means we have rites, customs, we don't content ourselves with what is biologically necessary through natural determination, and we eat by decorating the table a little, by making it a bit nicer on Sundays than other days because there are friends over and we put out a prettier tablecloth — we don't just throw ourselves at the food like that, on the ground, no, there are plates.
1:40:25 there are tables — sometimes we're reclining, it doesn't matter, it's the magnificent diversity of cultures — no, not the diversity of animal species in space, but the diversity of cultures spread out across the time of history, which they now want to pass off to us as relativism — oh, that's valid for us but not for the Bantu, as if there were no universality. Parts in space is one thing, moments in time — a Hegelian concept — moments are something else. So, I don't want to stray too far — abusing the state of nature is reintroducing the notion of force fraudulently, by making people believe it's a matter of right — there, it's abuse in the true sense of deceiving, deceiving about the merchandise. And that's why Rousseau spends his time saying, for example — he takes the example of slavery — he says Aristotle claimed there are men born to command and men born to obey, that there are servile natures — born that way — and masterly natures. Nietzsche — especially the little Cold War Nietzscheans — Nietzsche
1:41:35 is worth more than that, all the same — he's an aristocrat of the spirit, Nietzsche, they don't have blue blood — and Rousseau says Aristotle was right, don't be startled, but he mistook the effect for the cause: every man born into slavery acquires a slave's mentality, that's certain. And Rousseau adds, 'slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape them' — you see, the very popular current notion of voluntary servitude is entirely contained right there — 'slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape them. Force made the first slaves' — I'm quoting him word for word — 'their cowardice has perpetuated them.' Well, we outnumber them — Spartacus — 'if all the slaves of Rome had united' — proletarians of all countries — 'if all the slaves of Rome had united, they wouldn't have lasted long' — and the praetorians and the emperors, that's what Rousseau says. There are determinisms we can do nothing about, which are always there in us — I'm not saying that man has nothing animal in him, agreed, but man begins — we pass from the zoological to the anthropological — when, on top of that animal determinism, another determinism gets grafted on.
1:42:46 which we can change, but which we're made to believe is unchangeable, that it's in the nature of things — 'you know, my dear sir, there will always be rich and poor.' Well, you hear that — I forgive the little old lady who says that, who's been made to give up hope — but I don't forgive the intellectuals who prop that up with sophistic arguments. Not all religions speak of a beyond, I'll grant that — I know we're among ourselves here, we're in the Mediterranean, so between Islam, Judaism, Christianity, we're a bit related, these are the religions of the Book, as they say, isn't that so — there's a beyond. But for the Greeks, that's not the case — the Greeks, at a banquet, would parade a skeleton around to say memento mori, remember, in Latin, that there is death — I mean there's nothing after death, so enjoy. I'm just correcting that, but anyway, I'll answer your question, I don't want to avoid it, it's crucial, because you're asking me about religion just as I've been developing — building a case around an author who opens my time sequence, Rousseau, who comes to close the Age of Enlightenment, that is, the century that most called into question the reign of religion
Religion, an answer given before the question 1:43:58 over society, yes or no — even if the bulk of the work was done by Voltaire, isn't that so, that's important. I'm saying this as a kind of conclusion I'll come back to a little next time. You see, we hadn't finished with Nerval, we had gotten to Angélique — why does it end in madness and suicide? Because the Romantics were the first to take the full brunt of it in their faces — and here I answer your question — what a society gives you when it no longer has the luxury of having answers given before the questions are even posed. That's what religion is — man's existence on earth, seeing all the consequences of finitude, of death — this thought was not possible because the religious solution preceded the very posing of the problem. We have to wait until the end of the 18th century, and that's the real revolution — there's a revolution in mores, in facts, in mentalities, before we speak of revolution in the political sense — that's the last stage, when suddenly we become aware — I'm in the process of distinguishing
1:45:08 objective reality from its subjective repercussion, to sum it up in philosophical terms. When Marx speaks of objectivity, he speaks of the productive forces, of the infrastructure, of what is underneath — in spatial terms, we'll see later that's rather crude, he himself says it's not a part, it's a moment — the whole set of the productive forces of society, that's objective, measurable. And then there are all the effects induced in men's interiority by this material base, what he calls the superstructures — we agree so far, this is classic. Now what are these superstructures? The forms — I quote Marx — 'in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.' At a certain stage of their development, the productive forces of society enter into contradiction with the relations of production within which they had moved until then; from forms of expression of these relations, they turn into their fetters. Then an era of social revolution opens. You couldn't be clearer. Sometimes the relations of production, that is, the relations of property — that's what Marx says — he was the first
1:46:21 who posed the problem of property as fundamental — well, wasn't that the one who wrote about the inequality among men? That's where the real stake lies — not the ownership of your toothbrush and your wife, which someone's going to nationalize, no, no, because we shouldn't scare people over nothing — that's fine — but the great means of production and exchange. You see how these terms, which we think are outdated, take on their full meaning. So, to answer your question, religion is designed precisely so that this problem is never posed. Well, religion is a discourse, just as there's a scientific discourse, a religious discourse, just as there's a political discourse — we agree, just to remind ourselves that these are still ideas — religion, doxa, I mean it's made of words, it starts with the Ten Commandments, those are statements, agreed. I could answer your question — let's take it in order, agreed — in Marxian terms, I won't settle it definitively, but in Marxist terms, it's not ideas that run the world; so it's not religion that divided society into classes — religion is itself
1:47:31 the effect of the division of society into classes, agreed. And I'll answer your question, to be fair to religion, that you find both of the solutions you've just laid out within religious discourse. You find a religious discourse that permanently justifies the division of society into classes by saying that if the poor are poor, it serves them right — no, it's not like that — no, but listen, have you read Max Weber? No, it's not that — not Max Weber himself, he actually analyzes this, but in his famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where it's well demonstrated that if capitalism had this prodigious development preferentially in countries that embraced the Protestant Reformation rather than in Catholic ones, that's not a coincidence — it's that, insofar as it's God, it's God's grace, that determines that I deserve salvation, and not good works, as Catholics think — I don't know what Catholics think, I'm Mediterranean, that's my culture, that every time I do a good deed I've earned myself three square centimeters of real estate in paradise. Well yes — whereas, in fact, what counts is having grace. Yes, but how do you know you have grace? All you have to do is see whether your business is doing well or not, well I never—
1:48:41 who would have thought of that — if your business isn't doing well, it's because God isn't with you, you're a loser, oh dear, I won't let my daughter go out with you — but yes, you see, there's the religion that says that, there are religions — that's not exclusive to Protestantism, there are excellent aspects of the Reformed world, it's not just that, I'm not dealing in black and white, or the reverse. But there's also the religion where the merchants are driven out of the temple, yes or no. There's also — and I'm not speaking only of Christianity, because people are always opposing things — no, it's the fashion among the neo-pagans, the sub-Nietzscheans who don't have Nietzsche's culture, on top of it — excuse me, I'm tired, because every time you open a newspaper, a magazine, someone opposes Judeo-Christianity, guilt, slave moralities — you know all that by heart — and then the pagans, the courageous religion that embraces pleasure, death, that doesn't believe in the nonsense of the beyond. Precisely, I take up the myth of Prometheus.
1:49:55 here I'm among the Greeks, I'm among the pagans, I'm not in Christianity. So what does the myth of Prometheus say? That one day men will come to free me from the servitude to which Zeus has condemned me, because I came to give man intelligence, fire, knowledge, enlightenment — fire in every sense, the fire that forges metals, praxis — but fire also as a metaphor, light, intelligence, because you need both the engineer and the worker to build the bridge — the condition being a republican school system that gives as much chance of becoming an engineer as of becoming a worker, all the same, you need both. There's Prometheus, the friend of man, the friend of progress, the one most fought against by today's dominant ideology, which says that value lies in nature and that man is the ulcer that comes to spoil nature — I'm reading this, I'm not caricaturing — I heard a poor kid, poor guy, he was 18, he had his phone to his ear, he was saying, 'no, I had my phone,' and someone said, 'watch out, you'll get leukemia from that phone' — poor thing, what are they stuffing into their heads? So technology is deadly.
1:51:05 etc., well anyway, I've lived in countries where life expectancy is 42 years and where people are dying for lack of industry — I'm telling you what my African students used to say: 'Sir, if you have too much pollution, just give us a bit of it, because we're dying from not having any industry.' That makes you think. So Prometheus announces a revenge of man over the gods, so he doesn't make social relations eternal — there's both sides, we have to be fair to religion. Religion is the unconscious expressing itself, it's the symbolic order, if you want to speak in Freudian terms, I'm fine with that, it doesn't bother me — in Marxian terms we'd say the ideological order — but ideology doesn't mean it's nonsense, that it's rubbish, that's especially not what it means — thank you, yes, I've run over — ideology means the forms in which men become conscious of material reality and carry that conflict through to the end. But there will always be a division between reality and the way we think about it. There, I've run 7 minutes over, 5 minutes, well, I wish you a good appetite, thank you all.
1:52:20 it's the fault of the too-good questions people ask me — thank you all.
