English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The École normale, the Convention and Hegel in the middle of the sequence 0:30 Before all the Greeks speak to you through my voice, allow me to dare here to flatter myself for their choice, and let me show you, my Lord, some joy at seeing the walls of the École Normale Supérieure host this talk. No, frankly, symbolically, that's quite a responsibility, I'm going to have to deliver, I don't know if I'm up to it, because I'm a bit at the mercy of the signifier, as we say elsewhere here. No, no, it's not about difference, simply.
1:01 It's that all the same, my lecture cycle this term, let me remind you, is about the revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Lenin, and via the chronology, Kant and Hegel-Marx. Now, this school was founded ten days ago. It was founded by the greatest government France has ever had, the Convention — the proof is that it created this school. One day in Vendémiaire, I believe it was the 9th or 10th, Vendémiaire, that is, November.
1:39 You see, you can't make this up, when I say symbolic weight, it's a matter of chance, but still, is there such a thing as chance? Come on, let's not get paranoid. But by the most revolutionary government we've ever had, that of the Convention — it's from it, and even Bonaparte my compatriot couldn't change this, that the marshal's baton was revealed. Before, you had to be born noble to be an officer, now, any peasant, you know. We were talking about Carnot, who was called the organizer of victory. Carnot who, it seems, studied his lessons by the light of his father's baker's oven, you see.
2:13 And who became a general in the army. Still, you see, there are things like that. All that is the Revolution, that is the Convention. And let's not talk about that bloodthirsty Robespierre. Robespierre was furious at the drownings organized by Carrier in Nantes. We have all the texts documenting that, but of course it's concealed by counter-revolutionary criticism and by the obscene bicentennial of the Revolution that took place under the abject Mitterrand era.
2:44 I don't know if you remember, but it was really, you had to be ashamed of the French Revolution to put on a bicentennial like that. Well anyway, I'm not even going to talk about that. Within these walls, it would almost be sacrilege. There you go. But when I see at the entrance of the school founded on 10 Vendémiaire, well, somehow, when we have to talk about Rousseau's revolutionary thought, it wasn't long after here, right, Vendémiaire, right, not long after Rousseau had said, as early as 1765 in Émile, we are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolution.
3:19 What lucidity, huh, about revolutions, not even about the great revolution, they knew this revolution wasn't going to end. So you'll tell me, ah, you're still on Rousseau, and we have a program, we're supposed to go from Rousseau to Lenin, we have one term, and you talked to us about Rousseau last time — yes, no, it's understood between us that I'm taking a circular approach, otherwise we'll never be able to cover this sequence. If I go about it linearly, if I talk first about Rousseau, then Kant, in 20 years we still won't even be at Kant.
3:53 Already, the richness of Rousseau — no, I talk about all this all the time, from Rousseau to Lenin, constantly, at every stage, has been dominant, Rousseau was the dominant note last time, I concede that, and this time I'm going to move to the middle. I have a few reasons for that. That is, to Hegel. The middle in the most simplistic way it can be conceived, that is, in my sequence from Rousseau to Lenin, there are two chronological extremes, Rousseau-Kant, at the beginning, two extremes at the end, Marx and Lenin, and Hegel in the median position.
4:28 So when I say the middle, it's quite simple. This brings me to — he's known, Hegel, as being the... I'm sure there's a seat available. But you're not bothering me. Because Jérémy deserves to be seated. We walked together near Rousseau's tomb, after all. He's known in the history of thought as being, as it says in the textbooks, the philosopher of Vermittlung, as he says in German, of mediation.
4:58 The act of making something pass through the middle, middle, as in German, middle, in German, Mitte, we understand each other. You see, so it's overdetermined, tonight. I'm only going to talk about mediation, but you see the different levels on which this can be conceived. Within the walls of the École Normale Supérieure, the year Hegel is on the agrégation exam syllabus, we're talking about a transmission, a mediation, that is, within these walls where the mediation leading to Rousseau is no doubt most intense, the filiation.
5:33 There's only one reason to contest it, in fact, in any case by right, is that within these walls where the one who was Hegel's mediator in France, Hyppolite, with his charismatic placidity that was uniquely his own, nonetheless directed the École Normale Supérieure during a decisive period. You see, after the war. So all this means that, when I tell you it's overdetermined to speak within these walls tonight, I couldn't help but begin with a quotation from the great century, if you will.
6:10 It's not very revolutionary, before all the Greeks speak to you through my voice. Although, if you read — I got sidetracked in my digressions — in Racine's Mithridate, you see, honestly, I reread it to see if I wasn't overdoing it. There's a great tirade, the first Mithridates gives his sons. You see, who is Mithridates? He's the one who gave the Romans the most trouble. He harassed them for 35-40 years. Before they finally got the better of him, and even then, because he was betrayed by one of his sons.
6:43 Otherwise this is going to run over. But Mithridates has a plan he lays out to his sons, a plan to reconquer Rome, the Empire, through the East. It's not exactly irrelevant today, is it. I'll stop there, but read it. It's striking how relevant it is. So, mediation, today. And since I was on Rousseau and got you talking about Hegel, I'll go back again, to last time, because I hadn't quite fulfilled my contract last time.
Nerval at Rousseau's tomb: the last echo of ancient wisdoms 7:20 It's a management of time that's a bit borderline at times. And I'm going back, you're going to laugh, I'm going back to Nerval. Yes, I can't skip it. People think I'm not dealing with serious matters, the revolution of Rousseau, of Lenin. I'm going back to this dreamer, this wanderer, this Wanderer, as they'd say in Germany, right, that there's something else to do besides making revolution, apparently — although there's no political quote from him, but there is one where he says don't say I do politics, I've never done anything but opposition.
7:53 But anyway, yes, Nerval, when he arrives, well, at the end of Angélique — I'll go quickly there, because we've worked on this enough. And when he arrives where he wanted to end up, where he hadn't told us from the start, but where he wanted to lead us, to Rousseau's tomb, that is, to the spring that didn't flow, that they prevented from flowing. Or rather, I'll let him speak. Here are the poplars and the island. That's in Sylvie. It's not in Angélique, it's in Sylvie, another autobiography, and it has nothing to do with the personal story he tells in Sylvie, which is why it's all the more interesting.
8:28 It happens that Sylvie is sleeping because she danced all night at the Saint-Barthélemy ball, and so, since he can't visit her, he lets her sleep, he says to distract myself, I took a walk to Ermenonville. You see, it's an intermezzo, an interlude, it wasn't planned. That's very Nervalian. Zwischenspiel, as they also say in Germany. Zwischenspiel, as they say in theater too. You see, practically an intermission. And so, he arrives there, we're speaking within Ermenonville, and here are the poplars and the island.
9:06 O sage, you... You know that Rousseau's tomb is on the Island of Poplars. O sage, you had given us the milk of the strong. I'm just reading what allows me to connect to Hegel today. You had given us the milk of the strong, but we were too weak for it to nourish us. We have forgotten your lessons that our fathers knew. Little tone — we're in 1850, and Rousseau is already forgotten. That's only one generation. You see that censorship isn't new.
9:36 Even now, Popper says Rousseau is totalitarianism. You know that. It was already like that. It's infuriating. We have forgotten your lessons that our fathers knew and we have lost the meaning of your word. Last echo of the ancient wisdoms. That's where I'll pick up. End of quote. Last echo of the ancient wisdoms. What does that mean? It means that the Social Contract is the last echo of Plato's Republic.
10:07 The two texts echo each other across more than 2500 years. A way of radically rethinking public affairs, the res publica. So when I tell you I'm dealing with the history of revolutionary thought, I'm not joking. It's a bit rhetorical. How are you going to get to Hegel with all this? Nice one, Rousseau, Nerval, that's Plato all right. Hegel is a philosopher, as Jacques D'Hondt puts it — excellent study by the way — a philosopher of living history.
10:39 Hegel, philosopher of living history. Excellent text in the Éditions Sociales. Yes, only, there you go, in the Republic. Plato's Republic is often presented in the imagery, in their presentation — I'm quoting Hegel — as the proverbial image of an empty ideal, as the very model of utopia. The very type of thought, of the city, thought in the mode of what ought to be, of what should be, but of what will never be.
Plato's Republic according to Hegel: the Greek finite and the infinite 11:11 Well, utopia, the opposite of Spinoza, of Hegel, but who think what is, or Marx, who thinks capital and not the future communist society. That's not Marx. Marx thinks about how it works. That's what needs to be gotten rid of. You have to know how it works first. There you go. So, the Republic apparently is the opposite. He alludes to this precisely, in the preface to his political testament, that is, in the famous Elements of the Philosophy of Right, where he says the following: Plato's Republic, which is the image of a proverbial, of an empty ideal, essentially grasps nothing other than the essence of Greek ethical life.
12:05 In other words, it's not at all an ought-to-be. In fact, Plato, without realizing it moreover, expresses the real problems of the world he lives in. He sensed that a deeper principle, understood as opposed to that of the Greek world, was beginning to make a breach in that world. I quote Hegel. But since at this stage, and this principle was still in an embryonic state, Plato, moved by this aspiration, tried to curb it.
12:36 To curb the manifestation of what Hegel calls, and which will characterize the period that follows, the one we are in, the modern world, infinite free subjectivity. So I could give... I don't have time. We don't have time. I could give abstract developments on everything that opposes the world of the Greek peras — peras, peripheral, perimeter, everything that has a contour, everything well determined, defined, limited, finitude, limit, perimeter. Don't think I'm partisan of the infinite against the finite, or the finite against the infinite.
13:09 We are all condemned to... fortunately for us, in fact, to grapple with both. It would be unfortunate if we only had one or the other. But there you go. You know, there are women who tell their husbands, everyone else travels and all that. We're homebodies, we never go out. She wants the infinite, she wants... she wants the ocean, she wants beaches. She's right. Then the husband who travels too much, the wife tells him, can't we have a little house of our own, a little quiet corner? Or the reverse. It could be a couple of men, doesn't matter.
13:41 There you go. We always have both. Fortunately, there are moments for each, each is necessary. I'm not making preferences here. I'm saying what characterizes the Greek world is the predominance of the finite, the determined, the limited. I'll always remember this, that's all, Cape Sounion. You know, in Greece, everything is very limited, everything is very... I'm talking about the scenery. It's not the ocean like in Brittany. It's not the infinite. There's a cove, a peninsula, the view is... it's a well-delimited landscape.
14:11 Except when you go to Cape Sounion, you know, a few kilometers from Athens, about fifty kilometers from Athens — there, you look, and there are three infinities. Literally, no shape at all. There's the wind, the sea, the sky. That's all there is. And that's where the Greeks chose to build the temple of Poseidon. And there, you can't get over it. You see, right angles, columns, the lintel, a triangle facing the infinite. As if the Greeks wanted to make us understand.
14:42 That, the infinite, is not us, it's the realm of the gods. It's important, we respect it, but it's not us. We must turn our backs on that, and take care of the city. That's the Greek world. Otherwise, it's hubris. The infinite is for the gods, it's hubris. That's the Greek world. I'm giving you intuitions to save the time we don't have to build out chains of reasoning, but not to exempt you from doing so once we've turned our backs, right? You have to dig deeper. I'm in the process of contrasting the Parthenon with the cathedral.
15:13 The cathedral is the opposite. Like the mosque. It's the religion of transcendence. It's not finitude, it's the infinite. Al-manâra, as they say in Arabic, the minaret. The higher it is, the more it expresses faith. In Beauvais, you know, Beauvais has the highest vault in Christendom. Not the highest spire. The highest spire is Ulm, which separates Bavaria from Swabia. No, Beauvais has the highest vault. But it was even higher in the Middle Ages. It collapsed — sorry, I'm laughing.
15:44 It collapsed on a worshipper during the Easter mass. You see, that's the height of hubris. It seems that while they were building it, with every extra meter, the whole city below was shouting 'Hurrah!' You see? That's not Greek at all. There you go. That's what Hegel means when he says Plato sensed that infinity was starting to appear in his culture and that it terrified him, Plato. He tried to curb it in secondary forms. It's still him speaking, in secondary forms.
Rationalism, pivot of the world revolution 16:16 He's alluding to Plato's fight against the sophists, where there's already the infinity of thought, of skepticism, which comes to eat away at settled certainties. You see? That's interesting. And there's a reversal here. And yet he proved that he was a great mind. Because for now, I'm not talking to you about revolution. On the contrary, I'm talking about a Plato who seems conservative and rigidly attached to his values. He proved that he was a great mind. For the principle on which he founded his initiative, what makes Plato matter in the history of thought, is the pivot around which — I quote again for us — is the pivot around which the world revolution then being prepared turned.
16:59 Colon, here it comes. Hegel's most famous phrase. Yes, who said it? Louder. What is real is actually rational and what is real... Thank you, yes. The real is rational, and above all the rational is real. Yes, that famous phrase we bandy about, often the wrong way. It's here that it's formulated to illustrate the world revolution inaugurated by Plato.
17:29 Good grief, what is Hegel getting at here? He's saying that Plato's greatness lies in having made the sacrifice of what needed sacrificing. The great ones are those who know what must be left behind. You mustn't cling on, you have to let go, that's over. What's over? Dogmatism, brute authority, force. It's true because it's traditional, because I've always done it that way — that's finished. It has to be demonstrated, a definition has to be found, it has to be rationalized. It's the logos, it's the concept and the definition that matter first, before speaking.
18:00 Callicles, the little baby-Nazi, the little pre-Nietzschean — Nietzsche is worth more than that, but Callicles is exactly like these little baby-Nazis who claim Nietzsche now, since the Cold War. Callicles says in Plato's Gorgias that it's force that should make right, nature shows it, in nature the vulture devours the innocent lamb and the lion devours its prey. So in cities it should be the same, you see, very fashionable, this continuity between nature and politics. Taking nature as a model, that's coming back strong. I need to calm down.
18:32 Yes, when you get to the dominant ideology, it's true, no, no, because Aurélien Barrau — I need to calm down. Well, and then Macron, and then the price of gasoline. You see, I need to calm down. So I'm coming back to my point. This is essential, what we're seeing. At the moment when we might think Plato is going to turn into an old reactionary, all of a sudden, making the sacrifice of what needs sacrificing, that is, saying what is irreversible, is rationalism.
19:10 That's what appeared. That is, a thing is true, not because it's my opinion, not because it's yours, not because I've agreed with myself. I tried to make a non-contradictory argument and we'll see how far the two of us can go, how far we can agree. Of course, mathematics developed at that moment. I like to point out, it's not just Euclid, his first notions, the postulates, the axioms, the definitions, those without which nothing can be done, nothing rational — Euclid calls these 'demands.'
19:47 look how democratic that is, I ask you — a demand is addressed to someone, it doesn't concern a thing, a demand. It's someone speaking who addresses someone who can answer, who can say no, that's not how it is. I ask you to grant me that through a point one can draw a parallel line, and so on. And we'll see how far we can go without contradicting ourselves, on what we agree. The pivot of the world revolution then being prepared. There is something that heralds the modern world and Christianity.
20:18 I'm speaking in Hegelian terms, and a whole system of equivalences we'll see. It's not the church, it's not a priest, not at all. He was closely watched by the church in his lectures. I'll open a parenthesis, but I pity the censors. Because he wasn't employed by the Ministry of National Education — don't go looking at it that way, but that didn't exist yet, the Ministry of National Education. He was employed by an institution called the Ministry of Religious Affairs. It's true, in Berlin, the Ministry of Religious Affairs was serious business. That means this gentleman here who talks a bit too often about the French Revolution.
20:50 Our children are in his hands. Tell me, go and see what he's teaching in his lectures. I pity the censor. To decide whether the reversal of the predicate into the subject means he's to be arrested or not — the only question that interests him is the censor, that's it. Understand? I say this because Jacques D'Hondt, an excellent reader of Hegel who died not so long ago, and I pay tribute to him here, who had founded the Center for Hegelian-Marxist Studies in Poitiers — Jacques D'Hondt said that part of the amphigoric quality, the difficulty in reading Hegel, came from his way of sowing confusion to dodge the censors.
21:28 You see? So I'm not speaking entirely at random. There you go. And, but yes, no, no, Hegel is not a priest, far from it. And he even, he composes — he's not German either for that matter, he's not Prussian, but he's a Swabian who nonetheless died in Prussia and who asked to be buried next to Fichte at the end of his life and who doesn't want to make waves. He was quite close friends with Goethe, who said this appalling thing.
22:00 I love Goethe, he's an immense... He hated everything that would lead to German Nazism, he hated Germanness, the Deutschtum, as he called it, Deutsch-dumm, it's wordplay. Dumm means stupid. And Deutschtum, Germanness, he called it German stupidity. In short, Goethe preferred Italy, he preferred the Orient, he preferred Arabic poetry. And as Nietzsche once said very well, Goethe is far above the Germans, he will never belong to them. But Goethe still said this terrible phrase that only a German could say.
22:32 I have trouble repeating it. I prefer an injustice to disorder. Don't touch the geranium on my windowsill. So Hegel has a side like that. No, but I want to say, I'm not a Hegelian. I don't care about persons, about individuals, about physical persons. Hegel has his habits, his quirks. Descartes's glory isn't having said that the lungs were bellows fanning the heart, which is a furnace. That's not what makes Descartes's greatness in the history of thought.
Not taking everything: Descartes's piece of wax 23:04 Not everything is to be learned. From anyone, from Rousseau to Lenin, not everything is to be learned. When Rousseau says that the man eats red where the woman eats white, that's Rousseau. That's Switzerland. Women eat creams, I don't know, things, whatnot, you know, fresh cheeses, all that, while the man eats meat. The man eats red where the woman eats white, that's Rousseau. That's not what makes Rousseau's greatness.
23:34 You see, I don't take everything. No, I'm trying to make you understand the use I make of my own approach, from Rousseau to Lenin. There is no idol. I am looking at what, in each of them, made the revolutionary path move forward, sometimes perhaps to the detriment of the one who wrote it, sometimes even against his own thought, sometimes he even goes further than he would have thought. When Descartes works on the piece of wax, really, he works on it, the gaze — it was beeswax at the time — in order to understand.
24:12 It wasn't stearin. In terms of sensation, it was rich. And when he says, let us take for example, I am not speaking of bodies in general, for these general notions are confused, but of one particular body. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax. It has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained. So that's the good candle. Its size, its shape, its color are apparent. It is white, it is cold, and if you strike it, it will give off some sound.
24:43 In short, all the sensible qualities — colors, smells, etc. — by which a body can be known are found in this one. But now, while I speak, it is brought near the flame of a candle. The white becomes yellow, its size increases — he doesn't say this, but the pleasant honey smell becomes a burnt smell — and however much you strike it, it will no longer give off any sound. And he poses the Cartesian question, the great split, philosophy since Socrates — since Socrates, it's a constant.
25:14 Does the same wax remain after this change? Because I do like everyone else, I'm an empiricist, we're all empiricists at the start. What is the tablet? It's some rectangular thing, which is red here, black there, and green over there. You see, I describe its sensible qualities, it's a bit cold here, it goes like this. If that's what wax is, everything has changed, so can I still call it wax? He raises a real problem: does the same wax remain after this change?
25:44 What merit? Here we go, we're entering philosophy now. Full stop: certainly it remains so, and no one could deny it. Damn, that won't last long. Well yes, they're all in it together, we really can't ask — these are fabulous advances, Descartes, agreed? We can't ask him to reach the twentieth century, when people will start saying that it's language which creates the unity of the world around us. We'll have to wait for the Phenomenology of Spirit — I'm getting there — volume 1, the passage on force, force and understanding, the phenomenon, look closely, where Hegel ends up concluding, I quote, word for word: the act of positing something as a One falls to consciousness, which must avoid letting them coincide in the thing.
26:25 It's us, it's the subject who decides that the piece of wax is white, that it is sweet, and that this makes a unity — this unity is in the word, that's all. That's the only thing that remains between the piece of wax as it was when it was white and now that it's yellow and looks burnt. I keep calling it wax. You can't ask Descartes to be that much of a linguist. I'm making a nominal convenience. There you go, I'm showing you that I don't take everything from every philosopher, I take Descartes — he liberated us.
26:57 A thing is true not because nature willed it, not because God willed it, but because I have thought that it holds up. I saw no reason to doubt it. That's enormous, that's enormous, he liberated us. We bow before nothing. It's the French Revolution in singular form. Descartes, that's it, isn't it? Shut up in a stove-heated room, to use his own image, in a well-heated room where he was held up by his winter quarters. Because otherwise he was a professional soldier. There. So I come back to my story of the world revolution of rationalism.
Hegel's letter on the French Revolution 27:29 You see, and I'm going to read you a text where Hegel, this time, speaks of the French Revolution within these walls, in these very walls where the French Revolution opened this school. That doesn't happen every day. He says this — it's in a letter to Zellmann, for those interested, 1807, that is, the year he finishes the Phenomenology, and the year, according to legend, he supposedly put the final period on the Phenomenology at the very moment Napoleon entered the city.
28:01 There are things you couldn't make up, there's always a Corsican who... Let's go. So look at this astonishing text, letter to Zellmann: among other things, 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 outstripped. He is saying that it is not only the French Revolution. And what is it not only?
28:33 This whole trajectory characterizes it for Hegel, but that's not the essential point. Look closely. 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 outstripped, and which consequently weighed on it, as on other nations, like absurd chains. But moreover — in short, it was time to set the clocks straight. But moreover, the individual has cast off the fear of death.
29:03 People went into battle. People took risks. So this is no longer... I prefer an injustice to disorder. The individual has cast off the fear of death and the ordinary course of life — the daily grind, we'd say in French — from which the changing circumstances have removed all solidity. That's what he attributes to the French Revolution. The great strength it shows toward the others.
29:35 The other revolutions. They weigh down under the narrow-mindedness and apathy of the latter. He's thinking of course of his compatriots who, finally forced to abandon their indolence in favor of reality, will pass from one — indolence — into the other — reality. And perhaps they will surpass their master. Perhaps they will go further in revolution than France did. Extraordinary letter.
30:06 which shows that what is, in Hegel, properly revolutionary in revolution, is the fluidification of human relations. It is the fact of having dealt a decisive blow to everything that claimed to be unalterably stable. You see? So we are quite far from the image we have of Hegel as somewhat conservative with all that 'rational and real' business. That also means, mind you, everything real is rational. So the Prussian state is real, therefore it is rational.
30:40 Some people think fast, all the same. But anyway, on that note, if I now quote you — I'm going to try to find it — you'll tell me we're still quite far from Marx. You are not unaware that the young Marx's first major publication is the critique, the dismantling, the deconstruction, as we'd say today, of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's political testament.
The afterword of Capital: a critical and revolutionary dialectic 31:10 Yes, but here's what he says about it. In short. Ah, there we go. Thank you. So I'll start with a famous passage. My dialectical method not only differs in its basis from the Hegelian method, but is its exact opposite.
31:43 So I'm supposed to be showing you the relation of Hegel to Marx, and I start with a sentence that announces disjunction rather than conjunction. I remind you that this text, for those who want to refer to it, is the famous afterword to the second edition of Capital, if you're looking for it. My dialectical method not only differs in its basis — voice-overs are rare, let's make the most of it with Marx — from the Hegelian method, but is its exact opposite. For Hegel, the movement of thought, which he personifies under the name of the Idea, is the demiurge of the real, which is but the outward, phenomenal form of the Idea.
32:20 With me, on the contrary, — a moment ago it was 'opposite,' now it's 'contrary' — the movement of thought is nothing but the reflection of the real movement transported and translated into the human brain. You're already placed in front of your own image in the mirror, nothing resembles you more, except that everything is reversed. I'm telling you this because he talks about reflection. You always have to take words seriously. I criticized — here it's total disjunction, not merely different, it's the opposite — I criticized the mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic nearly 30 years ago, at a time when it was still fashionable.
32:58 So there, he finishes it off, meaning on top of it, it's outdated. But although — watch, the meter starts — thanks to its quid pro quo, an ambiguous term, it's a complex text, the Marx-Hegel relationship is complex. There are two very complex relations, upstream from Hegel, the Hegel-Kant relation, downstream, the Hegel-Marx relation, believe me. But although, thanks to its mystifying quid pro quo, Hegel disfigures dialectic through mysticism, it is nonetheless he — and here the conjunction begins — who was the first to set out its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner.
33:32 He didn't just say 'a detail,' which is still not to be thrown out entirely — no, the movement as a whole. With him it is standing on its head — again the image of inversion, the third time. It is only necessary to turn it right side up again in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. Under its mystical form, dialectic — he no longer says Hegel, dialectic, we could call this a metonymy for Hegel — became the fashion in Germany, there were the young Left and Right Hegelians, because it seemed to glorify existing things.
34:07 Dialectic is used to legitimize what exists, since Hegel critiqued the ought-to-be, the utopias, all that — what matters is understanding what is, which is what Marx spent a long time doing in Capital. Because it seemed to glorify existing things in its mystified form; in its rational form, if used as Marx used it, it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeois governments and their doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists, at the same time, the recognition of its negation, its inevitable breaking-up.
34:41 'necessary' — you find again the Hegel text I just read you about the French Revolution. He glorifies dialectic for the same qualities that Hegel attributes to the French Revolution: having introduced becoming, time, where one thought there was being, stability, eternity — out of time, isn't it? So I repeat this sentence: in its rational form it is a scandal, dialectic. One of your intellectual mentors — well, 'your' in the generic sense, don't think I'm talking about anyone in particular here.
35:15 To speak of infamous dialectic — yes, counter-revolution exists. It's being used now that popular discontent is there, now that capitalism rules unchallenged, because now it is unchallenged since the fall of the Wall. So it does whatever it wants, it's not going to hold back. It knows — and this matters, what I'm telling you — before, it had to be careful. You never knew Suez? The French, the British landed at Suez, they thought we were still in the colonial era.
35:47 What? How could this new Hitler...? Nasser. He's a new Hitler. You know why he's a new Hitler? Because he dared to nationalize the only thing that brings in a bit of money in Egypt — there's no oil — the Suez Canal. It didn't belong to Egypt, it belonged to the British, the French. And nationalism, Hitler. Have you heard that one before? But well, it's Saddam, it's Assad, it's Putin, well, you know. There, it's about energy. We land. The gunboat — now we don't say gunboat, we say the pea-shooter.
36:20 Humanitarian. Right, the right of interference, the humanitarian thing, yes you're educated, that's it. Oh no, we're clever now. We've understood, you need a left-wing discourse for it to go down, because the masses have changed, after all. So we tell them, we're going over there, because our interests — well, we're taking you into account, that's a bit better. But you're still being had. We land. The Soviet Union sends an ultimatum, because at the time it was powerful. You pack up, or else it's nuclear war, it's serious.
36:52 The Americans were forced to say, I'm not going to start a world war over Nasser, pack up. Can you imagine. Now it's not like that, it's unchallenged. So it's a very dangerous era you're living in. Me, I don't care, I've got one foot in the grave, but for you, still, you have your future ahead of you. That is to say, it's tempting — if I were the most powerful in this world, it would tempt me. There may be no more Soviet Union in 50 years, at most, when you weigh the arsenals.
37:23 Well, anyway, so I have a window there. It's now or never. There, I have to play it all. You understand, that's the era you're living in. There. Infamous dialectic. I'm in the middle of doing an infamous dialectic myself. But no, I mustn't get worked up. In its mystified form, dialectic became the fashion in Germany because it seemed to glorify existing things.
37:53 In its rational form, it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeois governments and their doctrinaire professors. You see, we're talking about the egg here. Ouf, riders. Because in the positive understanding of what exists, it includes, it implies as understood, the recognition of its inevitable negation. When you understand dialectic, you understand that whatever is not sustainable will have to give way — monarchy. It's Göring who said he'd be happy to be called, I don't know, a house painter, Birnbaum, something like that, if he lost the Battle of Britain.
38:31 You see? What a fool. And he also said the Reich was there for a thousand years. So, in its rational form, a scandal and abomination to bourgeois governments and doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists, at the same time, the recognition of its negation, its inevitable breaking-up. Not because one wants to destroy, it's necessary. The hand has to be passed on. Feudalism has to hand over to the bourgeoisie, which will hand over to the proletariat. Because, regarding every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, it takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence, because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
39:10 There. I've made a bridge from Plato to Marx. Hegel congratulates Plato for having established, for a master — Plato is a master, I mean in the strict sense, there were slaves — he belongs to Greek citizens, he's not part of the majority. What were there? There were about 20% free men and 80% slaves in Athens. Even Aristotle thought Athens was already too big, he had something of an ecologist's outlook. He says the ideal city is one you can take in from the top of the acropolis.
39:43 40,000 inhabitants — that's what Athens was for him, and that was already too much. It was like New York. Not possible. Decadence. He congratulates Plato for having said, for the first time anyway: before I impose my ideas on you, before you impose yours on me, we impose on each of us the requirement to be in agreement with ourselves. Non-contradiction.
40:18 Which avoids lies, propaganda. But it matters. They're counting on your amnesia to make you forget there's a contradiction. They're counting on your amnesia. They'll tell you good things about the Shah of Iran — sorry, excuse me, about Ayatollah Khomeini. I'm getting ahead of myself. At one point everyone will speak well of him. It's good, there's a return of religious ideas. Then afterward, when it turns against us, they'll speak ill of him.
40:50 They'll tell you good things. I told you Nasser was treated as a new Hitler. But at first he was well received by NATO forces because he was an Arab nationalist and not a communist. Communist means internationalist, that's not good. So, nationalist, you see, and then it turns around. Afterward they have to speak ill of him. Everyone's forgotten they used to speak well of him. You see, Saddam Hussein, you know him better, closer to your generation. He's a little killer of communism whom the British pulled out of the ranks. At the time, they were the masters of Iraq. The Americans didn't yet exist to bring him into the army and make an officer of him.
41:24 Like us, almost all of Africa's dictators — they started by training them, having them kill Viet Minh in Indochina and afterward Fellaghas in Algeria. I'm serious, the dean of African heads of state at one time, General Eyadéma of Togo. I lived through Togo's independence, I was 12. It awakened political life in me. He had fought Viet Minh and Fellaghas.
41:55 He had served his country well, and so we helped him become president and above all to eliminate his opponents. There. So it's not that people will say he's a bit of a Hitler. And even Hitler himself, a contradiction — why do we speak ill of him now when we spoke so well of him back when he was putting the unions and the communists in prison? That was the time when the whole French bourgeoisie was shouting 'Better Hitler than the Popular Front!' Yes, indeed, even so.
42:25 You know, Mr. Galdon, let's be fair to the people who said that, there were no camps yet, all that. Yes, we knew the communists were imprisoned, but that's not serious, they're just Reds. But still, it wasn't yet the horror we later learned about, the death camps and all that. No, it was just that Mr. Blum had tamed the unions. We, we had to deal with the horror of paid vacations. The 36-hour week, how appalling. I'm telling you this because all of that is currently being deconstructed. You know, alas, because it's happening in your lifetime that we're seeing this.
Death and the absence of immediate relation to nature 42:55 So, there, I wanted to insist on these aspects and at the same time bring together — could someone tell me the time, sorry, since there's no clock. Ten to six. Six o'clock. There's an hour left. That's fine. And I won't cut short your questions. I'd like to couple this theme of mediation — I'll develop it further, it's not finished — but I'm telling you now in case I wander off, so you can remind me — with the theme of death.
43:28 The Hegelian approach to death is essential for understanding anthropology and for understanding the very essence of dialectic. So I'm telling you this before returning to mediation — it's actually in order to get back to it, it's not a different subject. Hegel says, somewhat didactically, that death is the immediate being-there of nature become immediate. I'm telling it to you as it's written. Death is being-there. Being-there is how it's translated in philosophical language. You say Dasein to a German, he says it means existence, it's the ordinary meaning of existence.
44:02 Am I mistaken, Marguerite? No, but you should always ask someone who knows German well in the street, in order to understand the most complex words. It's the best method. You see what the phenomenon is for Kant. The word is Erscheinung. So you say phenomenon, appearance, we mix them up. You ask a German in the street. Erscheinung, that's a ghost. An apparition. Ah, that's not the same as an appearance. An apparition. That's more sudden, still. That's more unsettling. Well. You see, it's interesting to really ask what the ordinary meaning is.
44:34 So, when Hegel says — it means death is the only moment when we are in immediate relation to nature. Well now, that's not very ecological, is it? No, but it's not an article. Me, I am an ecologist. But yes, I'm surprising you. No, but I'm serious. People always think I'm anti-ecology. Yes, environmentalists — but me, I don't bash ecology. I don't lie down under cars, delightedly inhaling the exhaust fumes.
45:05 Well, anyway. I want to have the healthiest environment possible. I want my children to have an even healthier one than me. I'm not an idiot. And above all, that it should be valid for humanity, because I am anti-naturalist. I am for defending the environment against nature. Go on, explain that to an environmentalist. You'd drive him crazy. Whereas it ought to be taught in primary school. It's not that complicated. Anyway, that's not the topic. Why am I bringing it up? Because Hegel says we are never in an immediate relation to nature.
45:35 We believe we are. Ah, how good it feels. But look at that landscape. I'm Corsican. You can go there. That's next term's subject. Nature and landscape, I remind you. Well, in Corsica there, man had nothing to do with it. It's calming. Have you seen Asterix in Corsica? When Ocatarinetabellatchitchix shows the Gauls around Corsica and Sentmesomaquiller as if they had anything to do with it. The mountains and all that, they run away. For nothing. No, still, even in the desert, even in the Sahara, even Robinson on his island.
46:09 Come on, let's stop on Robinson, since Marx immortalized himself talking about Robinsonades. Robinson there — you really can't say man is in nature there. Not at all. The first hundred pages of Daniel Defoe's novel are the exhausting efforts Robinson makes to go retrieve from the ship the pinnacle of human technology of the time, that is, English maritime technology. I'm not joking. Reread it. Don't take my word for it.
46:40 "And I brought back a sextant, and I brought back a calendar, I brought this, I brought a compass, you see, and a rifle, because he'd noticed there were goats on the island so he could eat." So that — that's the relation to things, whether natural, the island, or artificial, the sextant — it's not the relation to the other. The other will emerge much later in the novel in the form of a poor wretch called Friday, right? And the first relation that gets established — you'd think Hegel had whispered it to him — is the master-slave relation.
47:15 That's really striking, Robinson — a great novel. A great novel. That's not the point here. So anyway, we never have an immediate relation. Now, I haven't said we don't have a relation with nature. I too love breathing in the sound of the mountain stream, that's great. But I mean, it's not an immediate relation, it's mediated. I hear the murmur of the stream — is it the sound of dead leaves, is it the wind in the trees, is it the murmur of the stream? It's a mixture of words in my head that I'm decoding, and in any case, the simple fact that I have a standard of living that lets me enjoy all that in the middle of nature — whereas someone else has to walk to find water, that's already 8 km, she's exhausted, and then she'll walk the same number of kilometers to find wood in a country with no trees, to heat water in a country with no water.
48:07 I had water easily; water is scarce for her. She doesn't have the same relation to nature. We are not in an immediate relation — our relation to nature is the very opposite of immediate, it is mediated, mediated by millennia of praxis that are completely unconscious in us. It doesn't matter that it's unconscious. What matters is persisting in saying that this, nothing else, is my immediate relation to nature — really, come on. From the moment stones are chipped, we take a distance from nature.
48:38 Children born in the Bronze Age don't start from zero, whereas little wolf cubs, for example, each time, through heredity, have to start the history of the species over from zero every time. Bees or wolves today have the same biology as they did 10,000 years ago. Whereas with the chipped-stone age, the polished-stone age, the Bronze Age, the child of the Bronze Age doesn't start from zero — he starts with a tool.
The school and the triple mediation of the First Philosophy of Spirit 49:12 And now I'm going to read you my third text, about the tool. I'm telling you I'm dealing with mediation. I alluded to one form of mediation — the one I'm engaged in with you right now, transmission, the École Normale Supérieure, school, the revolutionary school, that's very good. Without school, revolution doesn't exist. The revolution is there to proclaim liberty, equality, fraternity. We must be clear about the concepts, we must be rigorous. Equality does not exist — it exists in law. That's what the revolution proclaims.
49:45 But in fact, there's a road to travel. Depending on whether you're born wealthy or destitute, whether I have a father at home with a whole library, or, like my former African classmates whom I used to see from my air-conditioned window studying their lessons by streetlight — those aren't quite the same conditions for going to school. So, factual equality — well, you know about legal equality, I won't dwell on it. What fills the gap between the two? School, precisely — especially if it's compulsory, secular, open to everyone, right? Now, this is exactly what I read under Hegel's pen.
50:25 So here, let me give you the reference — this is before the Phenomenology, this is the Jena period, the period that the writing of the Phenomenology brings to a close, which is undoubtedly one of Hegel's most fertile periods. And the title — I'll give it to you — is translated into French as "First Philosophy of Spirit"; these aren't Hegel's own titles. We note that this is the first time his system takes shape — the first philosophy of spirit — where a systematic structure begins to appear that we'll find recurring in his later works.
51:03 There are indeed a few seeds of it. Now, I warn you, there are two works by Hegel from the Jena period bearing this title, one from 1803 and one from 1805. I'll give you the 1805 one. So we're two years from the Phenomenology, which is the great break from which Hegel takes on his final, almost definitive, form. So, I'll read you this text. First let me say by way of introduction that this text is almost entirely about mediation.
51:35 What I mean by that is that for Hegel, the passage to the human order — what we now call the anthropological order — is the fact of spirit. What he calls spirit — above all, don't think that spirit, for him, is pure thought opposed to matter. Spirit is not at all what — forgive me for laughing, you're going to laugh — it is in good old Plato, in the Phaedo. Isn't it? In the Phaedo, Socrates is about to die. This is that last conversation, he's about to drink the hemlock. Someone worries he hasn't managed to prove it, it's a bit of a...
52:06 Well, since he likes telling his friends, the whole dialogue is forced to prove that the soul was immortal. But before that, there's a little prologue. And then there are some rather exhausting demonstrations, and at one point a disciple says, "You should start again, Socrates, because I'm almost convinced, but you can't take away my fear that at my death my soul will dissipate like smoke, like..." Socrates: "Listen, I'll take up the demonstration again, but try to say a prayer to Aeolus that there be no wind that day."
52:37 He's good, Plato. Well. And then afterward, when that section is finished, there's Crito. Crito is the nice one, the naive one, the Saint Peter, a bit slow. He's not very good at philosophy, but he's very kind. And he says, no but this matters, he says, that's not everything, how do you want us to bury you? You haven't given us any instructions. And Plato has Socrates say, "You'll throw me on a dung heap, Socrates?" He says, "But how? Wild bones and beasts of prey." "It's not me that you'll be touching, it's not me that you'll be burying — I'll have long since departed."
53:10 "Bury me however you like, according to custom, if you can catch me." You see? There. No, spirit is not that for Hegel — spirit is what I was saying earlier, it's the chipped pebble. He says somewhere that making a hammer may be more anthropologically significant for man than making a child. He has nothing against children, he made some. But there's even a natural instance found in the Dutch army in Java. Let's not descend into tabloid gossip.
53:40 He says, on the other hand, that making a hammer presupposes, you see, an invention that did not exist in nature. Making a child — I mean, any mammal can do it, it's not complicated. Carrying it, yes, that's complicated, but I'm not saying anything against motherhood, I'm talking about men. So there are these three mediations. Yes, a tripartition — to reach the human stage, three mediations are needed.
54:11 He names them in order, in chronological order, which for him always corresponds to the logical order, increasingly rich. Memory, language, the tool. I'm not giving a demonstration, I'm just telling you how it's presented — memory, language: there is no spirit without memory, language, up to that point. That's 2,000 years of philosophy, so it's not a huge surprise. Look at the role of memory in Plato — all knowledge is recollection, whether or not, yes or no, or to know is to remember, as you like, in Plato.
54:45 I'm not proving this, it would take work, it's profound, it goes far. Well, if I say this is a book, it's because I recognize it as a book, because I already have in my head, somewhere, I remember that it corresponds to an idea I have in my head called "book." A dachshund and a Saint Bernard are not the same thing, yet I say, "it's a dog," I see — you see, that means I have something in my head after all. Yes, it's funny, it's true. And he also poked a bit of fun at that skeptic who let himself die of hunger because the doctor told him, "My poor fellow, if you don't eat fruit, you're done for."
55:18 And the other one lets himself die because he can't find fruit anywhere, only figs, cherries, grapes, and apples. You see? He hadn't understood the passage from the particular to the universal. So, memory, language, up to that point — fine. But the tool — for the first time in the history of thought, a philosopher says there would be no spirit — Marx isn't far off — if there were no tool. Productive force, he'll say, that's the tool.
55:48 Call it whatever you like. Now I'm going to read you the passage specifically about the tool. There have been great developments on language. But each time, it's mediation, you see, between us here. There's the French language, which is a mediation — that's the code. There's the channel, the air that carries my voice, the light, etc., which lets me read texts. There are mediations everywhere. Hegel's isn't a philosophy of media — except in one very particular sense. Now, excuse me, where did this text go?
Destructive desire: reading Rimbaud's Conte 56:30 Excuse me. There. "Thus the individual, insofar as he works" — underlined — "is acting, and the object is suppressed." I won't dwell on this because German idealism is complicated — I'll clarify when we get to our topic. Let me give you the few lines that come before. "Thus the individual, insofar as he works, is acting, and the object is suppressed."
57:02 If I make a table, I am suppressing a tree — the carpenter, I mean, had to get the wood from somewhere. In short: "Desire, in its act of annihilating, desiring to make a table, annihilates a tree or a branch. Desire, in its act of annihilating, does not manage to obtain its own satisfaction." It goes very quickly, because tomorrow I'll be hungry again, etc. There will always be a renewed object, and I will die before objects run out.
57:32 So I'm the loser if this keeps up. Look. "And objective being, the external world, even as it is annihilated, nonetheless continues to subsist." I illustrated this when I gave my Hegel-Plage talks, with a text by Rimbaud that is a marvel. And it's a marvel not only because it's beautiful poetically, though of course it is that too. But Rimbaud is written like Racine — there isn't a word to change. Though — I don't know if he'd have appreciated the comparison.
58:04 But it's a tribute. It's also lucidity on the theme of destructive desire. I'll tell you because it's less than a page. "A prince was vexed..." — it's called "Conte" [Tale]. C-O-N-T-E, like for children — "Once upon a time," etc. Yes, it begins with a prince, in the Illuminations. "A prince was vexed at having devoted himself only to the perfection of vulgar generosities." I'll gloss this because it can be... His mother had said something, because people understand nothing of these texts. What does that mean?
58:34 Do you know what he answered? It's time you knew. No, I did know something, but you said it. He answered his mother. I told you what it says literally and in every sense. I'm giving you a lesson in pedagogy: don't make the text say more or less than it says. Don't look between the lines. If you have to read between the lines, it's because the author failed at his job. He's a writer.
59:04 If it's not in the lines, then he didn't need to be a writer — he could have done something else. As someone said, "they'll never manage to make anything but our paintings speak." That's enough. The guy says, "in my painting I wanted..." — that's all there is now. So: "A prince was vexed at having devoted himself only to the perfection of vulgar generosities" — like all princes, giving handouts to the poor and that sort of thing. "He foresaw astonishing revolutions of love" — ah, that's interesting — "and suspected his women" — a prince, so he has harems, try to picture, for what follows, a Roman emperor.
59:42 That fits rather well with everything he's about to say. Let's get a bit more concrete here. "And suspected his women of being capable of better than that complacency of courtesans, adorned with sky and luxury." Women, bing bing, perfume, gowns. "He wanted to see the hour of truth:" colon. "That of essential desire and satisfaction." Seventeen years before his death — even 80 years later, he still hasn't understood that. I myself barely understand it, I'm only just beginning to grasp what he means.
1:00:15 How true this is. "Whether or not it was an aberration of piety, he wanted it." It's an aberration of piety to believe you can have both desire and satisfaction, and to throw about childish things. We should all know that desire is never satisfied — there is always something lacking. He, the prince, wants not only to desire but to be satisfied. I'm not talking about needs, because thirst is quickly satisfied — the third sip is already less interesting than the first.
1:00:46 No, no, no. It's about satisfying desire. Desire is infinite. You know your Pascal and all that, I won't insist. "He wanted to see the hour of truth, that of essential desire and satisfaction. Whether or not it was an aberration of piety, he wanted it. He possessed at least what neither you nor I have" — talk about it, I'm not a prince, but I'm no Roman emperor, no Chinese emperor either. Imagine, "bring me a slave from Illyria" — we have the perfect setup — "he possessed at least," that's the vast human power, that's the tales.
1:01:24 And all of a sudden — "all the women he had known were murdered." We switch to the simple past. It begins. This is what Hegel calls destructive desire. Go on, eliminate them. Next consumption. "All the women he had known were murdered. What a sack of the garden of beauty! Under the sword, they blessed him!" Now, note this well, there's an inflection here. Because they could have struggled, resisted. No — "under the sword, they blessed him." There's a cunning of the object here, as Hegel puts it.
1:01:54 The object continues to subsist, Hegel says, despite all my effort to suppress it. And here, the object doesn't resist — quite the opposite. "Thank you for suppressing me." "Then he amused himself killing all those who followed him, after the hunt or the libations." "All those who followed" — yes, the court follows him, right? He liquidates those who follow him. "Then he amused himself slitting the throats of luxury animals." I'm alluding to the Roman emperors here, going down into the arena.
1:02:24 This is an allusion to the emperor Commodus. You may have heard of the decline of the Roman Empire. The emperor Commodus would venture into the arena. Facing a leopard — no, not that crazy. He faced — you know what? Yes? Does anyone know? Geese. Oh, well — yes, bravo. Geese. No, mind you, geese are vicious — they bite your calf. He was scared, but he'd approach like this. He'd wring their necks, it was appalling. There are dormant frames here.
1:02:54 But anyway, there it is. "He amused himself slitting the throats of luxury animals. He rushed at the crowd and cut it to pieces." You see there's an acceleration, a kind of hypertrophy of destruction. Look at the final scene of Don Giovanni — that feast where he even devours his own servant, he's a bottomless appetite, an ogre's appetite. It's not normal, you see. There's an acceleration of desire that has no limit, no obstacle. Don Giovanni wasn't headed for the proletariat. Neither was the Marquis de Sade.
1:03:26 Nor Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. No, I mention this because libertines are very fashionable. I'm not against it — you need the means. "The crowd, the golden roofs, the beautiful animals still existed." That's Rimbaud's text. So there's still a political obstacle left. "Could one become ecstatic in their refinement, grow young again through cruelty? The people did not murmur."
1:03:57 There isn't even a political obstacle. "No one offered the support of his views." Well, can it go on like that? And now we go back to the imperfect tense. "One evening he was riding proudly. A genie appeared." A genie, what sex? We don't know — indeterminate, imagine that. That's powerful, quite beautiful. "A genie appeared, of ineffable beauty."
1:04:30 "Unavowable. From his physiognomy and his bearing" — he's talking about the genie — "radiated the promise of a manifold and complex love, of an unspeakable happiness, even unbearable. The prince and the genie annihilated each other" — a Hegelian term, probably — "in essential health." You may say, I don't quite understand it either. It's not always clear, but there's a physical story in there. "And they annihilated each other in essential health." Let's not try to understand.
1:05:00 There's a bodily dimension to it. "How could he not have died of it? Together, then, they died." But — new line — "This prince died in his palace at an ordinary age." Yes, it was a tale. The prince was the genie, the genie was the prince — and only when he encountered himself, you see, his double. And you know, when a... a physicist here, correct me, I'm afraid of saying nonsense — when a particle meets an antiparticle, it annihilates. No? Isn't that it?
1:05:30 Ah, there — phew, I wasn't wrong. There. And yes, when things... same force, same encounter of opposite sign — really? — they release energy. "He died in his palace at an ordinary age. The prince was the genie, the genie was the prince." There. That was to illustrate this incredible passage where Hegel speaks of desire as a fury of destruction — if it relates solely to an external world. Now look carefully: "Desire, in its act of annihilating, does not manage to obtain its own satisfaction."
The tool, the middle term in which labor has its permanence 1:06:05 That's the whole text I just recited. "And objective being, even as it is annihilated, nonetheless continues to subsist. Labor is..." — now we move on to labor, no longer animal destruction. You see? "Labor is this practical consciousness insofar as it is the relation of universal beings, and the being of one of the two extremes." Let's explain: first extreme, the worker; second extreme, the object worked upon; between the two, the instrument, the tool — that's where we started.
1:06:36 The middle term. I'm speaking as if it were a syllogism. You learned that syllogisms are propositions: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. Here, Hegel constructs a real, practical syllogism. When Lenin, in his notebooks on dialectics, when he finally has the courage — because for once his activities as a militant are set aside, since he's exiled in Switzerland, hunted by the Tsar's police — and he tackles with great courage the most difficult work ever written, Hegel's Science of Logic (though Plato's dialogues from the Parmenides onward aren't easy going either, nor is Kant's Introduction to the Critique of Judgment).
1:07:19 Lenin starts off being very wary in the first pages. He has heard, like everyone else, that Hegel is good. He's still better than the average bourgeois philosopher, according to Marx. But still, look at what you're saying. Well, he's a mystic, this, I'd say, the Prussian state. Then as he goes on reading, he is dumbfounded and stunned by Hegel's pre-Marxian pertinence. And then little by little you see the compliments coming. So I recommend this text to you, because it's a reading of a reading. And you see Hegel's text, and in the margins, Lenin's annotations, sometimes in Russian, in German, in French.
1:07:50 It's because the Slavs are great polyglots, since nobody speaks their language, they're forced to speak other people's languages. It's admirable. So, at a certain point, Lenin comes to this sentence, I told you, because there are few Marxists who know that Lenin wrote this. Hegel writes that action is a syllogism. Action is a syllogism, no less. Action, I'll get to that. And Lenin adds, "And that's true!" Two exclamation marks. There, I'll stop there, because I'll come back to Lenin at a later point.
1:08:20 And you see, I'm talking here about a quite concrete syllogism. The worker, the road-mender, the object being worked, the stone, the quarry, I don't know, in between the two, a sledgehammer, a crowbar, whatever, a middle term, in the proper sense first because it is in the middle between the two extremes, and because it is the means, for me, of reaching my end. Right? So, the instrument, and here's the moment, now I'll slow down, because this is the essential passage of what I want to read to you, the instrument, the tool, for now, makes no difference.
1:08:53 It can be a small knife, it can be a particle accelerator, that's the whole history of technology, from the club to the cyclotron. The instrument is the middle term, existing — this isn't in my head. It's no longer in my head, it's no longer a thought. Nor is it merely words either. The middle term, existing — it's underlined — rational, the existing universality of the practical process, appears on the side of what is active as against what is passive.
1:09:26 It is itself, the passive instrument when considered from the side of the worker — the hammer, I do what I want with it — and active on the side of the object being worked. Admit that's not badly thought out, for a supposedly idealist thinker. It is that in which — listen carefully, this is a second crucial determination that will found history — it is that in which labor has its permanence. Because up to now we were in fluidity, things that disappear, right? The rock disappears in my work, the tree disappears in my carpentry work, what remains — I myself wear myself out in this work, the worker will die in the course of the labor process, the object has already disappeared through the worker's action — what will remain, and what will be passed on to the next generation, is what we thought was secondary: the middle term, the tool.
1:10:15 Hence the crucial anthropological and historical significance of the tool. Look closely, this is why I'm dwelling on this text. It is the only thing that remains, of the worker and of the object worked, as well as that in which their contingent being perpetuates itself. It perpetuates itself, it is passed on in traditions. It even has a didactic value — I come back here to school. So when I tell you that he is the philosopher of mediation, look at how many senses this now holds true in.
1:10:50 First, memory — the fact that I see my grandmother, that's not memory, that's a sensation. And then I close my eyes, I think of my grandmother, because it's been a long time, I no longer see her unfortunately, it's ephemeral, my grandmother. My memory is not an immediacy, it's through the mediation of memory that my grandmother can be there. Mnemosyne, among the Muses, in ancient Greece, was the muse of memory, and she was said to be the patroness of poets.
1:11:26 There is a magnificent hymn by Hölderlin called Mnemosyne, which will bring us back to death, and I'll tell you why. Because in its last three lines, Hölderlin says this, in a hymn called Mnemosyne, dedicated to memory: "Much, from the morning onwards, / Since we have been a discourse and have heard from one another, / Has human kind learned; but soon we shall be song." For they cannot, all of them, the gods, the mortals — you and me — the mortals reach before them, before the gods, into the abyss. We have a superiority over the gods, a knowledge they don't have, which is the knowledge of death; by definition, this isn't an opinion for Hölderlin — the gods, they are immortal.
1:12:02 Everything that escapes them is everything that is for us, and the anxieties of precariousness. But the joys too, at the same time. I always give this example, I say it because since I've been living in the suburbs, I say — this spectacle of girls waiting for their boyfriend at the RER station, a little checkout girl from Franprix, what used to be contemptuously called a "midinette," panicking because he's five minutes late. And then they see him arrive, they act as if the gods had been kept at bay. You see, the greatness of Hölderlin, the superiority of man over the gods.
1:12:43 "Men before him reach into the abyss." Thus, I'll go on nonetheless — with them, with men, with mortals, the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes to pass. That's where the hymn ends. Look at the density. How can an echo change? An echo cannot give back more than the sound that was emitted. And yet suddenly, thanks to death, which will found an anthropology, the echo changes. It's a bit more complicated, what I'm saying here.
Man is mediation: Pascal and the nocturnal point of contradiction 1:13:15 I've been talking about mediation up to now. Now I'm talking about death, as I told you I would. I guided you there. The intermediary is Hegel's statement. Death is the being-there of nature become immediate. Immediate is the opposite of mediation. If you understand that the whole meaning of history, since the appearance of the anthropological sphere, is to flee the immediate relation to nature, you understand that man does not perform mediations — he is mediation.
1:13:47 He is there all the time, passing beyond, so as not to sink into that nothingness which is the stillness that immediately brings death back. Look at the greatness of this. And yet I won't turn to a Marxist or a materialist, I'll turn to Pascal. A century earlier, Pascal had understood very well the function of diversion. "When I set myself to consider men, I found that all their unhappiness comes from one single thing, that they cannot stay quietly in a room." Afterwards, you all know these famous passages.
1:14:18 Why, why, why? Why is this man who has just lost his son in the war and who should be dying of grief, all happy, because he is concentrated on the ball he's trying to return against the wall? This was the beginning of tennis, it was called "jeu de paume" back then. You see, rubber had just been brought back from America. Because it distracts him from his misfortune. To be human is to think about something other than what would annihilate me. And here I'm forced to lay out an almost mathematical axiomatic. Why is this business about death so important?
1:14:49 And why is it anthropologically foundational? I said that, I'm dwelling on it a bit because... We won't retrace the whole history, but when Marx says "I am the synthesis of the English economic tradition, of the French political tradition," for which he had great admiration, "and of the German theoretical tradition," which is the weak point of the French according to Marx — what is the German theoretical tradition? It's German idealism. Which culminates in Hegel. And what is German idealism? It's the Aufhebung, difficult to translate.
1:15:20 It's the sublation, the "suppress while preserving," of German Romanticism. German Romanticism is a hecatomb of madmen and suicides. That's why I'm dwelling a bit, I'm making a somewhat brutal shortcut here. You see? But we cannot understand what is positive in Hegel if we don't understand how far he pushed the negative. In a famous letter, he speaks of a period when he experienced what today we would call a depression. At the time it was very common. And he says, yes, in wretched Frankfurt, just before Jena, "I reached the nocturnal point of contradiction."
1:15:54 That's a nice expression, isn't it — the nocturnal point of contradiction. There, I mean, there cannot be... 1770 is the year Beethoven was born. There can be no Ode to Joy if we hadn't heard the first two movements of the Ninth. Nothing is more despairing than the first movement of the Ninth, which ends in failure — very rare at the time — a movement that doesn't even end on a major chord, not even a resolution, nothing is resolved. There are still three movements to go.
Preface of the Phenomenology: a time of gestation and transition 1:16:25 But there you have it, it's the same era. I'm telling you this because sometimes it seems that Hegel's words resonate a bit in harmony with the musical illustration I just gave. Look rather at what is said here. "Besides, it is not difficult to see that our time is a time..." What time? He was born in 1770, as I told you. So he is... This is the generation that is 20, 19, 20 years old at the taking of the Bastille.
1:16:56 Hölderlin, 1770. Napoleon, 1769. Beethoven, Hegel, 1770. Good vintage. Yes indeed. Kant, the dissertation of 1770, which is the great turning point of his thought. There are periods like that. Good. It's the generation that is 20 years old. Starting from a period, then afterward, Europe is plowed over from Spain to Moscow, for instance, and Napoleon. Things are moving. "Besides, it is not difficult to see that our time is a time of gestation and transition to a new period."
1:17:30 "Spirit has broken with the world of its being-there and of the representation that has lasted until now." I'm talking about the music. Well, yes, it's not... ta-da-dam, ta-da-dam, I love it. Hegel is one of the first, in his Aesthetics, to rehabilitate the music of Bach. At the time, it wasn't fashionable, believe me. But, I mean, it's stable. In a Bach piece, from the beginning of the movement to the end, you have the same meter, even with extraordinary development. But it's stable. Whereas the pa-pa-pa-pa, you hear it, across twenty different aspects, sometimes tender, sometimes terrible, I mean, there's a gestation there that corresponds to what we're looking at.
1:18:09 There is a whole correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. I mention this for those interested — where they oppose becoming-as-unfolding, which is found in Bach for instance, to becoming-as-development, which is found in Beethoven. A vegetal becoming-unfolding, an animal becoming-development. It's very interesting. Two enormous powers. But one is the power of an oak and the other is the power of a lion. "It is not difficult to see that our time is a time of gestation, of transition, of a new period." So, we are in the middle term. We are not in the old regime. We are not in the new one. We're in transition. You see how I stay within my mediation.
1:18:40 "Spirit has broken with the world of its being-there and of the representation that has lasted until now. It is about to bury this world in the past and it is in the work of its own transformation." You say, well, we're lucky or unlucky with the values we have. But there are eras when nothing moves and then suddenly everything moves. No, no, Diego, listen carefully. "In truth, spirit is never found in a state of rest." You've understood that spirit means history. If you still haven't understood, think of Criton's smoke.
1:19:14 "In truth, spirit is never found in a state of rest, but is always carried along in an indefinitely progressive movement. Only, here it is as with the case of the child" — he's thinking of the fetus, of course — "after a long and silent nourishment lasting nine months, there is development, but scarcely visible; the first breath" — this is the dialectic of evolution-revolution, if you look closely — "the first breath, in a qualitative leap, abruptly interrupts the continuity of merely quantitative growth, and only then is the child born."
1:19:47 "Thus" — a very beautiful image — "the spirit that is forming matures slowly and silently toward its new shape, disintegrating fragment by fragment the edifice of its previous world" — think of Voltaire and his critique of religion, which is shaking everything that had been the pillar of society until then, the religious bond, like a termite attacking the building, so that Rousseau has only to blow on it and build the social contract in its place. So thus "the spirit that is forming matures slowly and silently toward its new shape, disintegrating fragment by fragment the edifice of its previous world; the shaking of this world is only indicated by sporadic symptoms" — the basis of Mozart's music — "the frivolity and boredom that invade those who still subsist, the vague foreboding of something unknown are the harbingers of something else that is underway."
1:20:42 "This continuous crumbling, which did not alter the physiognomy of the whole, is suddenly interrupted" — the Ninth of Beethoven — "by the sunrise which, in a flash, decides at once the shape of the new world." Extraordinary passage. I'm making a point of being somewhat concrete because if you read this abstractly, you don't see the stakes that bring us to where we are. So, there — a heavily overdetermined mediation: mediation, language; mediation, tools; mediation, transition; and finally, mediation necessary so as not to remain stuck in death — that is, I promised you an axiomatic which I haven't yet developed.
The finite annihilates itself before the infinite: second nature and synthesis 1:21:23 Here, I'll turn to Pascal to raise the question. He's a great mathematician. He's the one who calculated probabilities and even built the calculating machine. He's even a technician, a technologist. And above all, Pascal's triangle, for those who know it, is not bad. Pascal says, at one point, the finite annihilates itself before the infinite. Take it as a theorem. The finite annihilates itself before the infinite. It's exactly the era when Newton and Leibniz were about to create infinitesimal calculus.
1:21:55 It's not entirely by chance. None of this is fortuitous. When Leibniz learns that Pascal is dying, he tries by every means to arrive first in order to get his mathematical manuscripts. He knew Pascal was on the verge of advancing infinitesimal calculus, even though it was he and Newton who formalized it. So, the finite annihilates itself before the infinite. What does that mean? It means 10, 100, a million, a billion — that's nothing compared to infinity. That's what it means. It's clear. The finite annihilates itself before the infinite.
1:22:25 We don't realize what infinity really is. If we did realize it, finite quantities — you can put as many zeros as you like on them in the world — they're nothing. Take that as a theorem. Now, man is finite. Second part of the reasoning. In space, through his body. And in time, through death. So man, yes, is nothing. He is nothingness, if he stops there, if he remains at his first, natural, animal condition.
1:23:00 But fortunately, as language tells us — it knows things. It knows everything we don't know. What we seek to know, it makes us say without our even noticing. French says: "habit is a second nature." You know that. Language says it. The first — our first nature — is natural nature. Which we will never fully learn even by the end of our life. I'm not dreaming here. I'm not an immaterialist.
1:23:30 Until the end of my life, I will have to eat in order to live. That's a natural law. But, meanwhile, something else has happened. Among natural beings, there is one who, suddenly, becomes conscious of death. So all finite satisfactions — think of Rimbaud's prince — all finite satisfactions lose their value. We must therefore create another world. That is this world of mediation. Man is only at ease in a world he has produced, not in a world that is given, whether by nature or by God.
1:24:01 So, if you're ever lost in philosophy, here's a small piece of advice, a bit didactic, but it's a way to find your bearings: in all the theories offered to you, there is always a tripartition to be made. Take whichever one you like, but there are those who say it's nature that explains — think of cognitive science today, nature, as we try to understand something, we need a stimulus, a reflex, a lipid, a — I don't know, that's not my field. Second part, the antithesis: it's the supernatural that explains man, that's the religious explanation.
1:24:34 So, the first explanation is naturalist, physiological, physical — I mean nature, playing on both senses. Second solution, the supernaturalist, theological solution — not physiological. It's God who explains man, not nature. I can't do it any other way. And now I move to the third, to the synthesis. I don't want to move to it mechanically. Oh, I had the thesis, I have the antithesis, all that's left is the synthesis. No. Why must there be a synthesis? It has to be necessary. And it becomes necessary once we've understood that there is a common point in the first two — which is what?
1:25:08 What is the common point between things as opposed as naturalist materialism and mysticism, the religious attitude? Yes? No? Yes? It's man who studies how it works? I can't hear, sorry. The common point — is it that it's man who takes a discourse for sure, but that it's by his... That's a good start, but... Yes, but that's roughly it, actually. Bravo. That is, I don't know if I understood correctly, but I think that's what you mean.
1:25:39 It's that... the common point between nature and God is that for man, it's something given, he had no part in it. Is that it? Oh, that wasn't it. Besides, you're being honest and yet you're wrong. You should have said yes, that's what I meant. No, but the common point is that if you want to overcome an opposition, you have to try to see what does not oppose. That's one of the great secrets of dialectics. I say this because oddly enough, this should be taught in elementary school — common sense, it's simple.
1:26:09 Well yes, there are those who... I take the things people have always argued about, you know, they say you should never discuss tastes or colors — well, for 10,000 years that's all people have discussed. There's no reason to it, but it's interesting. And, well, you ask yourself, what is beauty? Take some Athenian boor from Plato's time, he'll say, well, beauty, it's not me, when he says, I don't know, that is, who is it, that is, the Parthenon, there, that is, beauty, that is, the equivalent of Pericles. So then you say, is the sunset not beautiful?
1:26:40 Yes, yes, of course it's beautiful, it has nothing to do with your Parthenon. Yes, it's true — Socrates, and Alcibiades, isn't he beautiful, he's the model. Yes, well, that has nothing to do with your sunset, the Parthenon, no comparison, etc. That's easy, that's the dogmatist, easy to refute. Who is the dogmatist's worst enemy? The skeptic. Good, the skeptic, bravo. Well, you've got the reflexes, don't you? Yes, so there, it's the opposite. So what is beauty for you? There is no beauty, my friend, go looking for beauty, it doesn't exist — for us, beauty is this, for the Bantu, it's callipygian women, well, I don't mean specifically the Bantu, I mean anyone really.
1:27:15 Well, yes, Alain imposes the beauty of his own backyard — here's a guy who hasn't traveled much, and the other one has traveled a bit more, he's seen that in Africa it's not the same, well, there. So that is to say, this one is a bit more than the dogmatist, he's fair. For the philosopher, this is indeed already a bit closer, but still, I mean, he says there's no such thing as beauty. So what does Socrates say, Plato? He looks for what is common — what's common between them?
1:27:46 He doesn't look. Yes? He doesn't look. That's the result, bravo. Why doesn't he look? Because? Because it's... it's like before with nature and God, because it's given. There's one who sees the partnership, that's what's needed. Both look with the eye, except one eye has only ever seen Athens, Athens or Montauban, doesn't matter, and the other has traveled a bit more. But both are looking for a model of beauty on the outside.
1:28:16 One sees callipygian women, the other sees the Venus de Milo. But in both cases, what do they have in common? It's that there are people who say, "Ah, I like that one." No matter how she looks to the eye, if I like her. That's what's common. There's an aesthetic pleasure — Kant first worked this out very well — which is sui generis, which has nothing to do with the pleasure of eating, which doesn't involve material consumption, which is on the contrary found in contemplation. That's interesting. If I like it, if there's pleasure — come on, you're mathematicians, or logicians I suppose — what does pleasure imply?
1:28:51 Good. If I take pleasure in drinking, it's because I was thirsty. So, if I have an aesthetic pleasure, it's because a desire has just been satisfied by that object, whether it's callipygian or by Phidias or Praxiteles, who cares? In both cases, I mean that I had a desire that was satisfied. The object knows more than I do about what I want — which is a bit humiliating.
1:29:21 So, what matters in order to understand why an object is beautiful is to see what I desire. And so, the synthesis is: know thyself, quite simply, instead of continuing to look outside for the criterion of beauty — my poor friend, if you look for it in grasses and stones, you're off to a bad start. Ask a fox and a cow, they don't have the same ideas about green as a value. The cow finds green valuable, not the fox. Though the fox does like grapes well enough. You've got about twenty minutes left.
1:29:53 That's kind, thank you. So, I've stressed mediation and the importance of the relation between mediation and death. That is to say, fluidity, the passage. That's why I read you the text of Marx where he says why don't we like dialectics? Because it forces us to realize that we are not stable, it reminds us that we are perishable, quite simply. And rather than seeing the positive side of it, right, it's a pain, a revelation for those who have a lot to lose.
Man makes man: the anthropological synthesis 1:30:23 Now, the position you know well from Marx is that the proletarian is the one who has nothing to lose but his chains. Right, let's maybe move on to questions. How much time do we have left? 20, 25 minutes. Yes, yes. I wouldn't want to nibble away at your half hour of questions, from which I've already stolen five minutes. Yes, Thomas, sorry. Just, you didn't answer about the opposition between naturalism and supernatur... No, no, between naturalism and supernatur...
1:30:54 That's true, that's true, that's true, that's true, that's true. The physiological standpoint, naturalism, says that it's nature that makes man. The antithesis says it's supernature, God, that makes man. The synthesis is that man makes man. That's the standpoint of Hegel and Marx. From the anthropological standpoint as a synthesis of the theological standpoint and the naturalist standpoint. So your question is very important because many people confuse materialism and naturalism. One can be perfectly materialist and recognize the depth of all religious traditions.
1:31:28 The depth, I didn't say... That doesn't take anything away from the necessary critique of all the hypocrisies committed in the name of religion, in the collusion between religion and power. That's another matter, isn't it? But religious first means what binds together, what makes men feel they share something in common all the same. So, as I showed earlier, the difference between the Greek temple and the Christian cathedral corresponds to differences that are opposite historical moments where the finite is the supreme value: the Greek escapes nature into the city.
1:32:00 The Greek dreads natural infinity and cherishes the circumscription of the city. With us, it's the reverse. I quote Hölderlin in a magnificent letter where he says, "With us, it's the reverse." We are eccentric. We, the Romantics, the moderns. In a very broad sense. The Christians, if you like, the Muslims, transcendence. So the synthesis is the anthropological standpoint. Man makes man.
1:32:30 I admire those who speak of love in essentialist terms. I say that because I have excellent psychoanalyst friends, some of whom have a solid philosophical culture and know very well the importance a Lacan, for instance, attributed to Hegel's philosophy, which is so important in Lacan. But there's a way of speaking outside time, outside history, that I sometimes find disarming. Love, desire, with a capital D.
1:33:01 Desire in The Princess of Clèves, that is, in the feudal-monarchical universe of the seventeenth century. And desire in Cro-Magnon man, love and error in Cro-Magnon man—those won't have quite the same manifestations. That's where we see the importance of historical determination in anthropology. It's not a matter of saying man has a history, man is history—we see it clearly there.
1:33:31 And as Hölderlin says, thus much binds, binds, links and separates time. It is what links us, time, and at the same time what separates us. We have trouble understanding the Greeks' relation to their world, for example. We think we're on equal footing with it, but it's very different. We often commit anachronisms, we judge by our own values. Thus, specialists now know that their painting, their sculpture, supposedly a bit disembodied white marble, was painted in extremely vivid colors.
Rationality, equality and Lenin's text on dreaming 1:34:02 The Parthenon too, the temples were painted in colors. There you go. Well, I've answered you, it's the anthropological standpoint, synthesis of the naturalist standpoint and the theological standpoint. Yes, Tristan? Yes, you almost said in two sentences what linked Plato, Hegel and Marx. And you said in particular that Hegel congratulated Plato for having put in place the principle of non-contradiction, and then you went off on a detour and didn't actually say what... Oh yes, no, I mean, he says that having put in place rationality and contradiction and everything that follows, and dialogue, etc.
1:34:39 And that, as Plato's very beautiful image puts it, the spark does not spring from the stone in my left hand or the stone in my right hand, but from their friction. It's magnificent. A third term. But he says... Yes, precisely, this introduction of rationality by Plato—Hegel says it's the pivot of the world revolution that was then being prepared. It's revolutionary already, right there, the simple fact that we're all on an equal footing at that level.
1:35:10 One has to start by agreeing with oneself that if A equals B, B equals A—there's no more social class, it holds for everyone. And it's so... You're now saying, in laconic fashion, you're saying that Plato—ah yes, well yes, Aristotle, and Rousseau attacks this right from the start of The Social Contract, excuse me, I'm speaking a bit informally, he reproaches Aristotle—I mean well of Aristotle, but on this point it's not really where he's most pertinent, being a good Greek, for saying there are men born to command, men born to obey.
1:35:40 Right? Rousseau quotes him in The Social Contract, it's really force, that's all. Whereas Plato, in the Meno, in the passage, shows that the slave can perfectly well solve the problem of the ratio of the diagonal to the sides of the square if questioned properly. And in Plato's Republic, there's no more slave. All the same, it's no coincidence, the two are linked, rationality. I mean, the three letters of the Republic, liberty, equality, fraternity, which are still the mission of the school, equality, is also found in this transmissibility.
1:36:16 There, your question—I had kept a text, I didn't know if I could fit it in, but I'm delighted you give me the chance to quote it. Come on, I'll try to make you guess the author, it could be quite interesting. I'll just change some geographical terms, otherwise you'd recognize it, and I'll keep the predicates, or rather the judgments. There. So, the author says—he's an author, a revolutionary militant—and he says it would be good if we had a newspaper that was spread around a bit everywhere and we could advance our ideas.
1:36:51 It seems simple, it seems humble, it doesn't look like a very big task, but well, it could be... Anyway, I'm telling you this for context. And he says this: here is what we must dream of, a newspaper that would spread. One must dream. I write these words and suddenly I'm afraid. I see myself sitting at the congress of unification with, facing me, the editors and contributors of some revolutionary newspaper or other, and there stands comrade X, addressing me threateningly.
1:37:27 Permit me to dream. Does an autonomous editorial board still have the right to dream without having referred the matter to the party committee? Then comrade Y rises and, deepening philosophically what comrade X—who has long since deepened comrade Z—continues, even more threateningly: I will go further. I ask you, does a Marxist in general have the right to dream, if he has not forgotten that according to Marx humanity always sets itself achievable tasks, and that tactics and the process of the growth of the party's tasks grow along with it.
1:38:00 The mere idea of these threatening questions gives me chills. I can only think of one thing: where to hide. It's ironic, but it's certain. Let us try to take shelter behind—he quotes an author, and here is what the author says. "There are dreams and dreams," wrote Pisarev on the subject of the disagreement between dream and reality. You heard right. There are dreams and dreams regarding the disagreement between dream and reality. My dream may run ahead of the natural course of events, or it may veer off in a direction where the natural course of events could never lead.
1:38:39 Could never lead, sorry. In the first case, the dream does no harm at all. It may even sustain and strengthen the worker's energy. Nothing in such dreams can pervert or paralyze the force of labor. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the capacity to dream, if he could never from time to time run ahead of the present and contemplate in imagination the fully finished picture of the work just taking shape in his hands, I truly could not imagine what motive would drive man to undertake and carry through vast and exhausting labors in art, science, and practical life.
1:39:13 This text is magnificent. The disagreement between dream and reality is not at all harmful, provided the man who dreams seriously believes in his dream, observes life attentively, compares his observations to his castles in Spain, and generally works conscientiously toward the realization of his dream. When there is contact between the dream and life, all is for the best. That's not all—there are unfortunately far too few dreams of this kind in our movement.
1:39:46 I want to say this because it's still relevant today. And the fault lies especially with the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal tailism, who parade their moderation and their sense of what is, in quotes, "concrete." Who is this? I'm sure some of you... Yes, yes, it's Lenin. Lenin? Bravo. Yes. Lenin—one must dream, on condition of going through with the dream to the end. And he mocks...
1:40:16 He makes fun of those who say, but how can we advocate dreaming when we're materialists? But how? No, but I'm serious—he's saying, the passage I like best is the one that says you have to go beyond the immediate task at hand, otherwise I am... And that makes me think of a famous text by Marx—can't you guess? Between the bee and the architect. Doesn't that remind you of anything? He has the house in his head first. Bravo. Yes. That's satisfying.
1:40:46 Yes. The difference between the bee and the architect. The difference between the most skillful bee and the most inept architect is that the architect has the house in his head before producing it in reality. Marx. I tell you this because we're within the walls of the École Normale Supérieure, and it's been 30 years that we've been doing counter-revolution by saying teleology is an outdated, reactionary ideological term. Precisely—I thank you for a reason you can't suspect.
Marx, Lenin, Althusser: reading Hegel in order to read Capital 1:41:17 Please, go ahead. I want to say this here because I'm used to being, on the internet, rather in contact with another—I'd say realm of sects—of people interested in Marx, Lenin, and revolution. There you go. I had heard your name, I haven't read you yet, and the two or three points I want to come back to regarding your talk are at least two things. About your remarks, at least two things.
1:41:48 First, the difference between Lenin and Marx—in my opinion I can still say the essential, and the essential is what? It's that the Science of Logic—the first book is the logic of being, the second book is the logic of essence, the third book is the logic of the concept and of becoming. I won't hide anything from you. There you go. Whereas in Capital, Marx is concerned with the concrete reality of humanity, that is, humanity produces—first book; humanity consumes—second book; and it's extraordinary, in the epistemology of the social sciences I know of no equivalent—he says, since production and consumption are not separate, but I separated them for the purposes of exposition, in the third book I will reunite them to show the real movement, and so I will study productive consumption and consumptive production. There's the difference between Hegelian abstraction and Marx's concrete. Let me finish by putting to you a problem I've often asked myself and never resolved, concerning the nature of the Science of Logic—what's remarkable as a problem is that in the passage on the negation of the negation, at a certain point he gives a form of this negation of the negation and he says...
1:42:58 one of the forms of negation, very hard to understand in my view, and I'd like your opinion on this—it's indifference to indifference, and to say that indifference to indifference is a form of negation, I find that absolutely extraordinary, it's a dizzying prose, Hegel's prose. Just two points, because I don't want to steal the other people's questions either—regarding your position on Marx and Hegel: Marx was never as opposed to Hegel as in his youth, when he was still Feuerbachian; the more he evolved, the closer he drew to him. First point. Second point: someone as little suspected of concession to idealism as Lenin, reading—like you, and I congratulate you for it—Hegel's Logic, arrives at one point at the passage most suspect for anyone who suspects idealism of mysticism etc., that is, the end of the last chapter, called the Absolute Idea. It seems to be the very opposite of dialectical and, a fortiori, historical materialism.
1:44:08 We do agree, at least at the level of the titles, and there Lenin makes marginal notes—he literally frames the passage—he says this passage on the Absolute Idea is exceedingly remarkable, I quote word for word, it's the most materialist—sorry, the most idealist and the most materialist passage in Hegel. It's contradictory, but it's a fact. First point. Second point: everyone who has read Marx, up to—they've heard, up to me, up to me, Lenin—read him through Plekhanov and Bukharin, in short, without having read Hegel's Logic. So I quote Lenin: not a single Marxist, half a century after him—you were talking about Althusser—Althusser says apparently the exact same sentence but in reverse. Althusser says—I'm summarizing, for those here who know Althusser, correct me if I'm distorting his thought, I'm summarizing but I don't think I'm betraying it—when he says, roughly, and this is the lesson of Reading Capital, which is his major work after all, in several volumes: all readers of Marx before me got it wrong—they speak better than I do because they had...
1:45:19 too Hegelian a reading of Marx. Never was the decoupling of Marx and Hegel as radical as with Althusser—except for one man, Lenin. I'm not distorting his thought, nor even his letter—I take Lenin, there's the same sentence: all the thinkers, all the readers of Marx before me got it wrong because they hadn't read enough Hegel. The one Althusser picks as the exception says, on the contrary, that precisely to properly understand Marx—and I add a sentence from Lenin—one cannot understand Capital, and in particular the first section of the first book, the famous theory of value, which makes more than one reader tear his hair out, without having read Hegel's Logic just as thoroughly—a passage about which Marx says he 'kokettierte,' I don't want to translate it, to be faithful—how would you translate it, Marguerite?
1:46:11 I don't know that word, because—no, because it's a French word borrowed... I flirted—yes, bravo—I flirted with the Hegelian style. There you go, so as I said earlier, I haven't decided, you'll notice I said there's nothing more complex than Marx's relation to Hegel, except perhaps Hegel's relation to Kant, which is another matter. There, no, it might interest me—revolutionary thought, especially since Kant claims to embody what he himself calls the Copernican revolution, that's why I keep him in my sequence on revolutionary thought. So, up to now, in my understanding of Hegel, for me Hegel is the philosopher who, to sum up very quickly, spent his time positively exalting freedom, and even a dialectical exaltation, through this slightly more complex word, liberation—no freedom without liberation, no liberation without freedom. But just now I learned that according to Hegel—well, I'm going to read you my notes without pretension—the whole of anthropology consists in the historical...
From freedom to liberation: the role of negativity 1:47:21 movement of building mediations to escape the immediate being-there of nature, that is, death. So that means that in fact the concept, the principle of freedom, is death—well, either freedom or death, we shall overcome, that's Sankara's motto. So I had understood, up to now, I had understood Hegel's dialectical logic as—as a comrade Erwan told me one day—Hegel is actually doubly positivist, except that he takes on the negation in the middle. But now today I learn that in fact what founds anthropology is something negative, and that I can't manage to understand. Yes, because one has to move from negation to what Gilles called—reminded us—negation. So apparently, I'm the specialist, I discovered it because I told myself he wrote a huge book like this, Less Than Nothing, in tiny print, I don't know, over a thousand pages, where negation comes up, he says: see Dominique Pagani's book. There you go.
1:48:31 I don't know, he's attributed a lot to me, I don't know if I'll be as clear as he thinks, but I'll answer you very precisely—for freedom, yes, and Gilles, the thinker of freedom, bravo—of making a progression from freedom to liberation, since we move from an ontological prefix—one is free or one isn't, we don't care about that—to the act, to get out of determination, to enter a less determined stage, that's liberation, and as mediation between the two, which is Marxian praxis, right, I'm making a synthesis. Now, the sentence from Hegel that sums this up, and which is the only one to give a meaning to history without having the drawback of a meaning of history that would be totalitarian—it's anti-totalitarian thought, if you give a meaning to history, are you a totalitarian—yes, except when that meaning is precisely freedom, it's hard to call it totalitarian—this sentence, you know it: the Orientals knew that one alone is free, the Greeks and Romans knew that a few are free, the moderns know that all are free. The Orientals—it's not geographical, he's not saying there are people...
1:49:43 far more qualified in nuclear physics in Iraq and China—it's the historical Orientals, of course. The Orientals knew that one alone is free—the Emperor of China, Pharaoh, king of kings. The Greeks—there's progress, for the first time a community is democratic within itself, even if it excludes a whole part, another part of the city, from democracy. There you go, no, but the point is—yes, it's freedom that is indeed the meaning, but if there weren't the negation of death, it would have no meaning. Yes, Samy—I mean, you spoke about it without really addressing it, but the role of the negative in mediation—I've said it, we're going to have to stop there, it's 7:05 pm, we saw it with the tool, it seems to me we saw it fairly well through my illustrations, Rimbaud's text and all that, we can see clearly, I mean if you don't understand the negative—I'll finish on this, Thomas—Thomas, grant me this, it's very short: put in front of any individual everything he has negated in Hegelian terms, consumed in economic terms.
1:50:54 in one lifetime—I don't know how many steaks you eat in your life, but imagine the number of cows, that's no small thing, the number of trucks of milk, of butter—I can't get into your life, it's random, I don't know—and suddenly we realize that what I am exists through an enormous concrete negativity, and all the mineral salts that plants pump up at every instant in order to be, something else has to cease to be. That's negativity. There you go. If you have questions, don't hesitate to send them in online, we'll do some intermediate questions before the next online workshop. Thank you.
