English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Presentation of the term and change of format 0:00 Good morning Dominique. Good evening Philippe. Thank you for being with us tonight. So we're going to do a Facebook Live tonight to present workshop 4 which will take place at the Goscinny center on February 1st. Next Friday, yes. There you go, listen, I'll hand it over to you right away. Thank you very much. It's an opportunity to present it and at the same time to announce the coming term, since it's a little reminder I'm giving to those who are kind enough to follow us and whom I greet this evening, whether they're coming or whether they are, a fortiori, if they're further away, I thank them for their loyalty, we had announced that this year would be split in two phases.
0:57 Instead of having the same theme from the autumn start of term through to June, there would be a first term focused on revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin, passing, in stupidly chronological order, through Kant and Hegel-Marx. And that afterwards, we would do a monthly session, the fourth one, where we would raise the questions that had been stirred up during that first term.
1:44 And finally, the second should be devoted to the answers that we can give, if we can, to the question nature or landscape, question mark. It's a slightly elliptical question and without a verb, but anyway I'm sure the question is clear, or if not, in any case, I'm not saying it's easy, but well it is clear and simple. So, first departure from what we had announced, I'm not going to devote a whole session to answering questions, because in the meantime, thanks to you Philippe, thanks to our technical team, and thanks to the efforts of various people, we have multiplied what I jokingly call the by-products, that is to say all the sessions we do between the monthly workshops, in particular the live question-and-answer sessions, and also other interviews.
2:58 The trend is going to keep increasing, I'd say, of shorter video sessions, noticeably shorter than the two monthly hours of the heavy, regular format that we of course maintain, but shorter, which could range from a commentary on a text to a reflection on a question concerning a musical or pictorial work, it doesn't matter for now, or a current event, of course, that goes without saying.
3:33 So, insofar as, in addition to the question-and-answer sessions we've been doing for years at the end of a session, in the last half hour, we now also devote long live sessions to answering the questions raised by the previous workshop. It was becoming duplicated, even triplicated, to do a session devoted solely to questions.
4:03 So, I'm moving straight on from tonight to the question of nature or landscape. So, as for...
Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, archetype of classicism 5:12 Well, there are two extreme paintings, one on the left, one on the right, and one in the middle. So, the order is stupidly chronological. The one on the left is one of Poussin's best-known paintings, "The Shepherds of Arcadia." There are actually several versions of it, but never mind that for now. We're not at the École du Louvre, which by the way gives very valuable information. But there it is, "The Shepherds of Arcadia," which I'm using as an emblem, as an archetype of classicism in painting.
5:54 So, of course, these academic notions, in the best sense and also in less good senses—the less good ones being those where we believe that because we've said the word so many times, we know what it means, don't we? It actually covers more complex realities. But well, we'll have other opportunities to come back to that. But anyway, you only have to look at the painting. We can't see it there on the... Yes, yes, it's online there.
6:24 Ah, very good. So the painting, if we click on the painting itself, the painting on the left, to see it enlarged, it depicts a landscape exactly like the one on the right. But you can clearly see that the two landscapes are opposites. The one on the left is a daytime landscape, the one on the right is a nighttime landscape—they couldn't be more opposite. The one on the left is considered the apex of pictorial classicism, particularly French classicism. In any case, when we say classicism, it means Versailles, it means France, and that's what served as a model, doesn't it?
7:00 For so many castles and buildings throughout Europe at that time, at that time. So, to continue my parenthesis, it's pathetic, even overwhelming, for Franco-German relations, which have had their ups and downs, to see that the castle which the King of Prussia built for himself in order to imitate France, to imitate Versailles, the Potsdam palace, was named by its commissioner, by the man who resided there, Frederick of Prussia—was named the palace "sans souci," "without a care," but in French.
7:37 You see, there's nothing more French, seen from Germany, than being carefree. Whereas, as Nietzsche says, the German drags his soul around like a ball and chain. There you go. So, the summit of French classicism on the left, and one of the most commented-on paintings, well, the total antithesis, painted by no doubt the greatest German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, who also, by the way, made several versions of this same theme, this theme that appears frequently in the title he gave it, "Two Men Contemplating the Moon."
8:17 You see? So, I tell you, day on one side, night on the other, a superb arrangement on the left, isn't there? Look, still in Poussin's painting, at the counterpoint of the elbows. I'll use a musical term on purpose. And here, I'll open a small parenthesis to answer Samuel. I promised him I'd answer a question he asked me on Facebook about the three paintings. I promised him I'd answer tonight. So I'll take the opportunity, since it coincides with what I'm saying to the audience. Samuel, who knows me well, thought there was a hidden musical intention, and that each of these paintings corresponded to a musical expression.
8:57 He drew a blank for the first one, if I remember correctly, for the Poussin. He was thinking, not without excellent reason, of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, his Third Symphony if you prefer, for the painting in the middle, which is of course the famous Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, so a revolutionary, and indeed Parisian, sequence—Rimbaud makes exactly this distinction, for example. And he was thinking of a Schubert impromptu, one of the most romantic of the Germanic Romantic musicians, for Friedrich's painting, a painter he knows very well by the way.
9:38 I suspect Samuel of knowing the history of painting even better than I do. But no, for once, I had no musical ulterior motive, it really was pictorial, I've just explained why, I'll go on. And so I answer him, yes, one would have to find a musical equivalent to the first painting, it's so ordered. I'm talking about counterpoint, you see the elbows of the two shepherds, which sit along the diagonal of the painting, it's the classical diagonal construction, I'm no specialist, but well, it's so classic that even a near-layman like me knows it, there you go, look also at the legs of the shepherds, everything forms counterpoint, the limbs, the arms and the legs.
10:21 The landscape is extremely ordered, it's a pastoral landscape, and for good reason, since the painting itself is called The Shepherds of Arcadia. I recall that in Italian, shepherd, in the plural, is pastore, pastoral means relating to flocks, doesn't it, to the Virgilian, bucolic world. But the flocks, already there, you see, already there, we're being challenged as to whether we're dealing with raw nature—the Colorado canyon, the Amazon rainforest, the Siberian taiga, the great erg of Bilma in the Ténéré desert, none of that—or whether we're dealing with a considerable arrangement of nature by man, and we can clearly see, in Poussin's painting, it's very ordered, very civilized, I say this with great admiration, this painting is magnificent, you shouldn't see any irony in it, but it's a summit of the genre.
11:21 But the genre is classical, the human figure occupies a central place there, four characters, including a woman, and three shepherds, they're idyllic shepherds, you see, and moreover, one of them is leaning over an inscription on the stele, and the inscription is "et ego in Arcadia," a quotation from Virgil, there's been a lot—I won't settle the mysteries—there's been a lot of reflection on...
11:53 ...what this inscription suggested, which means, in the Latin translation, "and I too am in Arcadia, I too am in Arcadia." There you go. And Arcadia was precisely, in the ancient, Greco-Roman imagination, without it necessarily being the actual region, the paradise of the pastoral world, let's say. There you go. And... So, this painting, I would think of the great school of French lutenists and harpsichordists, I'm thinking of Nicolas d'Anglebert, of Nicolas de Grigny's organ book, but, of course, of Couperin, of François Couperin known as the Great, to distinguish him from his son Louis Couperin, who is an admirable musician, but well, who doesn't always reach the heights of François Couperin the Great, both are buried at Saint-Gervais, in Paris, behind the Hôtel de Ville.
12:49 There you go. And I recall that Ravel, in the 20th century, another French composer, wrote, as homage to Couperin, Le Tombeau de Couperin. Couperin's actual tomb, in the literal sense, is only in the church of Saint-Gervais. Yes, I think of Couperin, and I come back to this admirable symmetry between the arms, the legs of the shepherds in Poussin's painting, because Couperin divides his keyboard work into ordres, first ordre, second ordre, third ordre, there you go, very quickly. And so I move on, I skip the middle one, I go to Caspar David Friedrich's painting, it's the same thing, we're not in day, it's night, isn't it?
Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon: romantic night 13:26 So, no question of shepherds, shepherdesses, and flocks, is there? There isn't a place for everything, and everything in its place, as in Poussin's ordered world. On the contrary, these people, visibly, don't live in the place they're contemplating, because it's a strange place, deep in a forest, we imagine perhaps a torrent below, who knows, we can't know, because precisely, unlike Poussin's painting, where everything is given to be seen down to the smallest detail, here, the radiance of the moonlight floods the whole setting and prevents us from making out any detail whatsoever.
14:02 I don't mean detail in the sense of analysis—an art history teacher would of course point out the admirable care Friedrich takes with detail—but I mean detail in the purely visual, realistic sense of the term. There you go. So, why do I take this triptych, and why haven't I yet spoken about the painting in the middle? Because such a contrast between what is supposed to represent nature, but in a somewhat literary sense if you will, and the Romantic landscape—closer to us chronologically, more modern par excellence—the one that lets us escape from the human world, from life, whether it's the world of the Neapolitan countryside or, well, a wilder nature.
14:58 How do we pass, in a fairly short span of historical time, between the 17th century and the beginning of the 19th century, from one style to the other, when it's the same subject? The subject is to depict a landscape, what seems to be a landscape. I'm not deciding, for now, I'm not forcing the nature-landscape distinction, a natural setting, daytime in one, nighttime in the other, or a landscape, if you prefer, a pastoral landscape and a lunar landscape in Friedrich.
The French Revolution as a rupture between the two worlds 15:33 Well, it's that between the two, what separates these two worlds, and what means we will never again be able to depict a painting like Poussin's, we will never again be able to be in that world where there is a place for everything and everything in its place, is that between the two there was the French Revolution. So it's precisely in the middle that the admirable Delacroix painting rightfully belongs—well, it doesn't need my homage, I repeat, admirable, because that doesn't prevent me from admiring it, but I do specify that it doesn't represent a scene from the French Revolution, but a scene from the Three Glorious Days, revolutions that took place much later, in the 19th century, but Liberty who appears bare-breasted bearing the flag of the Republic, her birth certificate is the storming of the Bastille, that's why it's a metonymy, let's say, for the French Revolution—I won't go back over it, we've seen with Rousseau, we're approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions, there you go, it's the revolutions, it's the French Revolution which never stops generating itself
16:43 its own offshoots, its own, I don't know, both 1789, and 1830, and 1848, and the Commune in 1871, and 1917, and the revolutions that punctuated decolonization, it never stops, right up to the revolutions currently underway, in a Europe that seems to be waking up from a kind of end of history it had been assigned, well, an end of history, not Hegel's version, but Fukuyama's, you know, where it was thought that liberalism was after all the model—in fact one should say capitalism, but you know liberalism serves as a fig leaf for capitalism, so let's be kind, let's say liberalism—was such a perfect model of society, despite all its flaws, but all the others are worse, you see, that is to say, you're suffering, you're suffering, but all the others are worse, the outlook is magnificent, for young people, it's that in the future, we're heading straight into a wall, but there's no other solution, you know, it's like someone said about the euro, it's a highway with no exit,
17:58 oh surprise, the peoples still exist, all right, so I don't know, I'm not trying, I'm not trying to deify or demonize, I don't know where all this is taking us, it could take us to the worst, but in any case, I find that for now, it's better than the despair that reigned until then, we do owe that, at least, to the gilets jaunes taken as a whole, and I take them all together, thanks to my friend Bachir—I don't know him, I've never met him, but I allowed myself to post, well, to share, on Facebook, a post where he's interviewed, you see Bachir, what a first name, very Frenchy, isn't it, and clinging to his hexagon, isn't he, and closed in on himself—Bachir said, sorry, but there's a Corsican here, so I'm a Mediterranean paying tribute to the other shore of the Mediterranean, Bachir said, among us, I mean among the gilets jaunes, there are, yes, there are fascists, there are some too, that's French society, there are fascists, there are lefties, there are whites, there are blacks, there are Arabs, we don't care, for me, that was one of the most liberating sentences of the last 40 years,
19:08 you see, all of a sudden, we don't care, you see, which pulled us out of all those TV panels where all people talk about is identity issues, men, women, Hutus, Tutsis, Corsicans, French people, red caps—but we only talk about that because it's Brittany—no, that's over, all of a sudden, there you go, I say this because for those who might be tempted to see something narrowly nationalistic in the fact that the French flag is omnipresent among the Gilets Jaunes. I recall that this is a flag that the men of progress in Germany awaited impatiently to deliver them from their petty tyrants who had lasted through all the centuries of the Holy Roman Empire.
19:49 There you go. Even if that flag has been made to serve the worst causes, I have no illusions about that, but still, it never remains solely a despised emblem of the anti-republicans. I say this, I'm going on a bit, I'm in the process of commenting on the middle painting which is neither nature nor landscape, which is a riot scene, isn't it? Well, is it a riot? No, it's a revolution, it's a famous phrase.
20:21 The question does arise, that's why I recall the phrase. Is it a riot? I can just imagine Macron with someone in his ear. It's a riot, Philippe. He replies, I'm afraid, Mr. President, that it's a revolution. There you go. So I'll take the opportunity to point out that it's this revolutionary rupture which never stops extending itself.
20:51 I'm not talking about an event confined to the past, between 1789 and Thermidor. No. It has its phases, it has its pauses, it has its comings and goings, its counter-revolutions. We've lived much longer under counter-revolution, haven't we? Already, Thermidor is a counter-revolution. Most aspects of a certain Bonapartism, from the Consulate to the Empire, then Guizot, then Napoleon III, isn't that so?
21:24 Of course, the Congress of Vienna, the Holy Alliance. The Holy Alliance was already Anglo-Saxon money financing continental cannon fodder, namely, the Austrians managed Europe politically. It wasn't yet Germany, which didn't exist as a state, but it was Metternich, the master of Europe, wasn't it, in Vienna. And within the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with England, which financed every attempt to prevent a return to the infernal ideas of the French Revolution.
Modern escape: Rimbaud, Rousseau, and the Letter to Malesherbes 21:58 There you go. Well. Friedrich's painting has no relation to the Revolution. It's even the opposite. We're at night, we're far away, far from the city, of course, but even from mankind, from history itself, if you look closely. We're in a keyword of Romanticism, escape. Rimbaud says of himself, in the most striking self-portrait he made, in A Season in Hell, in "Délires I, Vierge folle," doesn't he?
22:34 he says, I never understood why such a foolish thing had such a rage to escape. That's not quite it. There's a word escaping me, but that's roughly it. I never understood why he, he, himself, Rimbaud—but well, modernity in general, isn't it, is marked by escapism. To be modern is to spend one's time wanting to escape from modernity. It starts with Rousseau, of course. The Letter to Malesherbes, with a discourse one could almost believe paranoid if Rousseau hadn't suffered real threats, hasn't he?
23:06 where he recounts his days at the hermitage, to good Malesherbes, to whom he writes, saying that he was letting go of anything to do with mail, letters, relations with others, in his home near the forest of Montmorency. Instead, I filled my room with hay and specimens for my herbalist's hobby. There, I'm not quoting from memory. And now I come to the exact text.
23:39 I quickened my pace for fear that someone might seize me before I could slip away. You see, it's almost the speech of a paranoid person, except that he was being hunted by three of the most powerful states in the world for having had the insanity to publish The Social Contract, Émile and other horrors. So, I repeat, quickening my pace for fear that someone might seize me before I could slip away.
24:11 But once I had managed to get past a certain bend, with what beating of the heart, with what sparkling of joy, I said to myself, here I am, master of myself for the rest of this day. I then walked with a more tranquil step into the forest, seeking out some wild spots where nothing showed the hand of man, comma—if I stop there, and I've already said this in the workshops that I don't apologize for too much, if I stop there, we get the impression that basically it's the complete opposite of the Social Contract, it's a man who thinks the further he is from humanity and society, the better off he is.
24:42 except that, yes, where nothing showing the hand of man, comma, would announce—with a circumflex accent—announce what? Servitude and domination. This is the first prefiguration of that fundamental pair, master-slave, which will later become class struggle in Marx. That hasn't stopped either. It's not society in general that Rousseau flees. And perhaps not even the two men looking at the moon, even if in their minds they perhaps think that nothing is more hateful than society.
25:13 Still, Rousseau himself, very explicitly, says—he's not fleeing society in general, but this particular society, which I'm singling out because it is specific, there can be others—marked by the pairing of servitude and domination. There you go, I've got my complete triptych. An idealized, pastoral nature—this isn't a value judgment on the paintings, one can create masterpieces with the most contradictory ideas—an idealized, daytime, Apollonian nature, I might as well say it since we're talking about classicism, the Greek reference is never far away, is it?
25:54 Moreover, the inscription alludes to Arcadia, doesn't it? And so, to Virgil—Virgil is a Latin poet, but well, his models are Greek, to the point that, while the Romans militarily and economically subjugated the Greeks, like the rest of their empire for that matter, it's said that they were spiritually and culturally colonized by their... by the subjects they had colonized, by the Greeks themselves, there you go.
26:29 And when a Roman wanted to read a book or make a quotation for his friends, he would call a slave, who was often Greek, often even more educated than the master, isn't that so, who would come and read aloud a passage from Theocritus, if we're in the bucolic register, or the Pastorals of Longus if we're in a somewhat racy mood. And that's not unkind, and it's admirably translated by Paul-Louis Courier, or else from the Iliad, etc.
27:02 There you go. And the other great Latin poet, Ovid, isn't he—his most famous title, apart from The Art of Love, is the Metamorphoses—the Metamorphoses is also a compilation of Greek mythology. There you go. So, an ordered nature, idealized, formal perfection, we don't escape the world where we already are, we're so at home in it. First of all, this world that the painting shows, isn't it?
Distinguishing between things that resemble each other: nature and countryside 27:32 And then, on the contrary, two men looking at the moon, isn't it, with, I repeat, this sort of liquid moonlight spreading over the whole setting and seeming to bewitch almost every square inch of the painting. So, there you have what I'm going to use to introduce the question of whether nature and landscape are interchangeable terms.
28:02 So, as I now dig a little deeper into the question, I would like us to move—I'm saying this now so we don't lose the thread—toward understanding that I would prefer we reserve the term nature in both cases. Before pointing out differences, let me apply to myself what I advise my listeners. To make differences understood, one must first recall what is common. We don't bother making a distinction between a car and a cherry. On the other hand, between things that resemble each other, that's where we're led to dig into differences and study them.
28:36 I mean, between an African elephant and an Asian elephant, for example. Yes, Asian elephants have smaller ears, a more domed, slightly bumpier head. And also, it works—it can be domesticated, which isn't the case with African elephants. Well, there you go. That's where you need to draw distinctions—when things seem alike. So, nature, landscape, for everyday use, it's all the same to me. You say, isn't it nice in this setting, in this nature, in this landscape? Fine. But you rarely say how nice it is in this nature when you're in the subway.
29:07 So it's always an outdoor landscape where the hand of man is nonetheless less present than in the urban world. Even if each of us is moved to see a blade of grass forcing its way through the concrete at the corner of a façade and a sidewalk, isn't that so? Between a vertical façade and a horizontal sidewalk. So let's try, for now, to start with a small dichotomy—but without cutting it with an axe just yet—to reserve nature for everything outside us in the setting where the hand of man has not set foot.
29:55 Sorry for that bad joke, which I found in Tintin and which we owe to the Thompson twins. But anyway, there you go. Ultimately, almost everything we call nature in the countryside, isn't that so, shouldn't already be called nature. I'm already starting to problematize this. I recall that campagne [countryside] has its origin in Campania. Campania, in the Roman world and in geography, even now, is the region surrounding the city of Naples.
30:31 it was that of the Roman patricians. Wealthy Romans all had a villa near Naples, in Pompeii, Herculaneum, you know that. But that's what the countryside is—it's the region around Naples, the capital, but the surrounding region is very agro-pastoral, as we'd say in geography. And the word campagne, isn't that so? This region was used to designate the countryside, that is, not where human activity is absent, but on the contrary, where there is human activity, but rural activity.
31:13 Rus, that's the countryside too, isn't it, and rural comes from that. And so, yes, I was saying, it was the Luberon, because when Michel Clouscard writes La maison de campagne, a true prose poem with which the most widely read of his works probably ends, Le capitalisme de la séduction, I recall, having gone on quite a few walks with him at his request, since he was voracious for walks, between the Drôme and the Vaucluse, I remember that we often went precisely to the Luberon, and I would say to him, as we passed through Gordes, look, this is where Lacan treats Althusser—and that gave him, well, it gave him, isn't that so, the idea that a country house can very well be in the Auvergne, wherever you like, isn't that so; you just have to look at all those country houses the English have bought in the Aquitaine basin, isn't that so, or the Dutch in the southeast,
32:24 but the concept, the common point, is this, isn't it: it's the—it's where the second home is of someone who is not among the poorest in the city, there you go—I don't know, what I called the Roman patricians earlier. So already, going to the countryside, maybe you're escaping, but at the same time you're carrying your world along with you, aren't you, otherwise the countryside would be unlivable, isn't that so, if it were subject to natural conditions—there, I'm digging a bit into the notion. And as for landscape (paysage), I'm also digging a little into the historical depth of the word, isn't that so; a Corsican is telling you this—among us, a village, we call it paese, as in Italian, è bello questo paese, this village is beautiful, isn't that so; so what is designated by paese, which will give paysage in French, because a good part of French comes from Latin via Italian, isn't that so, quite naturally, through geography and history, the word paese,
Paese, landscape, and the compromise sung by Hölderlin 33:35 which will give paysage, at first designates the opposite of nature: the settlement, of course, small, village-like, rural, where there is more bleating of sheep or lowing of cows than car horns, isn't that so—at least outside tourist season. So already, you see how this becomes problematic, and so it's not entirely arbitrary if—I would like us to reserve, at least, even though, once again, in everyday usage, I'm the first to use one for the other, and to say what beautiful nature, even simply, when the weather is nice in the Parc Montsouris—that's not forbidden at all; when I see the beauty of the plane trees in October, I have every right to say superb nature in autumn, even in the Parc Montsouris, or in the Luxembourg Gardens—but I prefer, to be rigorous, so we don't get our wires crossed, and that's what we're here for, now, in philosophy, that we reserve
34:45 in a stricter way the notion of nature, when it is distinguished from landscape, for places that don't bear the mark of human activity. Now, of course, if I'm a despairing environmentalist, an unhappy consciousness, as Hegel would say, generally privileged economically but unhappy psychically, I'll say there's none left, there's none left, man has spoiled everything—well, still, I mean, look at a documentary recently on the taiga, which is, along with the Amazon, the largest forest in the world, and then Canada, of course, the great Canadian north—there are still quite a few beautiful remnants; but then again, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, once again, the desert, the great Sahara desert, and that's not the only desert in the world, far from it—when you're in the heart of the Australian desert, you know, these are more adequate to the concept of nature, that is, what is around us when we abstract from what man has added to it, and what man has arranged there, or what man has hidden there—there's all that—from what he's built there, from what he's destroyed there,
35:55 no matter, and to take, and to designate by landscape a kind of compromise between the natural given and the arrangement man makes of it. I'm thinking of a rather lovely passage—I say lovely, though that's not quite the right word for Hölderlin, who's usually better than that, but it's so beautifully expressed—when he says, 'O good town,' thinking of tiny towns that, for us now, would be villages in the German Swabia on the slopes of the Black Forest, where he says, 'O good town, not shapeless, but blended without violence with the enemy.'
36:31 Whereas in Canada, you'll see a ranch in the United States with rather aggressive right angles—that's normal, because nature there is raw, mind you, that's what they call the wilderness there. But in old Europe, the boundaries between the human part of the village and the first meadows announcing the pastures for the herds—that's not so clear-cut; it all intermingles, 'O good town, not shapeless, but blended without violence, without force, with the enemy.'
37:03 The old struggle between man and nature—blended without violence with the enemy—an admirable compromise. That's it, the ideal landscape would be that. There, that's what we're going to dig into, of course with the help of examples. But now I introduce a new notion, well, a new aspect of how to approach this question—I mean that I took as a starting point a pictorial triptych, three paintings.
Literary and musical landscapes: Gide, Beethoven, Schumann 37:37 But there are landscapes, of course, admirable ones—perhaps among the most beautiful in literature. There are landscapes, I'd say, perhaps the most beautiful in music. As for landscapes in music, I'll content myself with quoting, just like that, so we'll have a landscape both in literature and in music. You'll see a passage from a novelist who is read much more now than he was in the 1950s.
38:08 I'm thinking of André Gide, who was the figure of neoclassicism. Well, anyway, let's leave that now—it seems quite academic, these quarrels. But there was a neoclassicism in poetry, that was Valéry, and in prose, in the novel, that was Gide. And among the novels that had the most success, especially since that one was made into a film—I believe with Michèle Morgan, though I'm not sure—there is La Symphonie pastorale. You see how we get there.
38:39 So, very quickly, the pitch: it's a pastor speaking in the first person, he's the narrator, a pastor, for now, in a mountain setting. So you see, closer to nature than to the city, but still there are meadows, because high mountains, that's raw nature, when it's even beyond the tree line, as they say in English. So the pastor, once, in a remote village, you know, there was great poverty, in the Alps, not so long ago, before tourism, in these isolated valleys, and so the pastor had noticed a little blind girl in a destitute farmhouse, and he had adopted her into his family, because her parents were dead, and he raises her with his own children.
39:27 And, I'll go quickly, this blind girl grows up, becomes a beautiful adolescent, with all that entails, of course, and, of course, the narrator falls in love with her, and, you need only read—I was about to finish for you—you need only read the novel, it's not long at all, rather than watch the film, which isn't as good; the contrast between book and film is more marked there than elsewhere. But, there, I get to it now, he goes walking with her, of course, holding her by the arm, because she's blind, and he takes a shortcut across a meadow, at the edge of the village, in—the weather is splendid, he crosses the meadow, and suddenly, the little blind girl, I don't remember her name anymore, says to him, 'Father, is it so beautiful?'
40:22 So, of course, the priest says to her, 'But as beautiful as what?' Then she says, 'Well, this scene, by the stream'—she's alluding, in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, which he had had her listen to, on a record, at his house—she's alluding to the very beautiful scene, 'Szene am Bach,' Bach, B-A-C-H, meaning the musician means stream, 'Feuerbach' means stream of fire—there, you see, and of course, the other answers her, 'Nothing is as beautiful as what you feel when you listen to this music.' There, something along those lines, more or less. And, there, another example, a little to justify myself, when I say that the most beautiful landscapes are perhaps those we don't see but hear, isn't that so—I've pushed things a bit far, I admit, so let me justify myself: poor Schumann—I said poor Schumann, because everyone knows he went mad, and he was not, a poète maudit, no, he was a good family man, who had his children, his friends,
41:32 who had many children, with Clara, the beautiful Clara, and who himself asked to be committed, so as not to become a danger to his family, and in his final days, he would call for Clara, to tell her he despaired, he despaired of ever being able to set to music the landscapes he heard, he said, that I hear, in my musical imagination—there, well, that's to say, you see, when I say landscape, the extension it can have, isn't that so, the interest, the appeal, the charm a landscape can hold, can be expressed, of course, first by going outside, you see, out into the countryside, by a painting, by a description in a text, and of course, in music—there, to say, I mean, the examples will be multimedia, as our young people would say, there, that's what I wanted to make clear.
42:37 Thank you, Dominique—so, let's recap—do you want to go on to a question, you told me at the start that you wanted to perhaps answer a question that had been asked of you, do you want to do that now? There are some who must be thinking, apparently rightly, that I move a bit abruptly from revolutionary thought—I barely sketched it, I lingered a bit on Rousseau, on Hegel, on Kant a bit at the end, then Marx and Lenin, I spoke of them each time through quotations, but I didn't really treat them properly.
Continuity with revolutionary thought and return to the Nerval cycle 43:11 It's not over. We're going to keep answering questions on revolutionary thought, well, if you're willing, Philippe, I mean, if you're still available, whenever we get the chance between two workshops. And, I just recalled that today's workshop, which begins—sorry—next February 1st, Nature or Landscape, is not meant to turn our backs and change the subject like changing a shirt, in relation to revolutionary thought. I'm staying with current affairs with my middle painting.
43:46 And there are very topical discussions, I don't know, between zadists and proletarians, things like that. You see, some say nothing beats local production, we can do without—if everyone produces locally, capitalism collapses, you know, there are people who believe that—but when a child is sick, or a cancerous tumor, a parent, I mean, it's not local production that's going to give us a scanner to detect the cancer, or things like that.
44:16 I mean, there are still interesting discussions on nature and landscape, isn't that so? And quite often, there are those who believe they are returning to nature, when in fact they're carrying their social class along with them. And that's why Seneca, a great traveler, said: you can go wherever you want, wherever you are on earth, the distance to the underworld will always be the same. There. We're going to keep talking about revolutionary thought alongside our reflection.
44:46 How could we not, since it's the arrangement of nature—we do speak of land-use planning, in administrations, isn't that so? And I ended my last workshop with the distinction Kant made between domain and territory. You see, we're not straying so far from the continuity of the topic. There. So, yes, I would like to both confirm and refute the impression that for some time now, our conversations have been stuck on a bug.
45:18 A bug in the sense that we're always answering more or less the same questions, instead of moving forward. Well, we need to take our time. Because if moving forward means rushing and leaving behind problems that are going to blow up in our faces if we don't deal with them, that's not really moving forward. As the language itself puts it so well, isn't it—it knows more than we could ever think—it's stepping back to jump further. Isn't that so? That would be moving forward only to explode all the sooner. So, what am I referring to?
45:49 I'm going all the way back to the end of last year's workshop. I had ended our journey following in the footsteps of Gérard de Nerval, on the theme of wandering, which I had compared to Schubertian metrics, to the Wanderer, the discreet and solitary traveler. I had finished with a long answer to a question that Hirouane, our friend Hirouane, our physicist friend, had asked, saying, yes, it's all very nice, everything you say about Nerval and so on, but why be interested in someone whose practice, after all, seems to concern only his own particular fate.
46:33 And then, of course, in discussing it, we realized that it wasn't Nerval's mother who was of interest, but our mother, all of ours. Which makes me think that Nerval, in a letter to his father, says, 'Germany, our mother to us all.' It's pathetic for someone who never saw his mother, but only knew that she was buried over there. And why do I come back to this? Because I had ended precisely with a comparative reading of a dream taken from Aurélia and a seemingly descriptive passage drawn from his journalistic wanderings in the Île-de-France, in this case in Senlis.
47:20 And I had shown—I won't go back over it, I had attempted, let's be humble—that the comparison of these two passages might perhaps open for us the famous Northwest Passage that all of modern intelligentsia has been seeking between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Nothing less than that—finding a system that allows one to take account of cultural facts, I speak a bit like anthropologists, that's not really my discourse, but why not—to speak a bit of human things, of social sciences, of the humanities, but also of literature, of art, of everything that isn't dealt with as strictly, with the same rigor as physicists and chemists speak of sodium or the dance of the stars.
48:20 Am I being too elliptical? There. So we're still stuck bugging on this same problem which apparently we can't get out of. It seems I'm hearing a periodic noise, that's normal—there are small cuts on your line that have been happening for about five, six minutes—I hear something like someone breathing, but it's very loud.
48:53 Don't you hear it? No, no, I don't hear it. I can see there are disruptions in your broadcast from your end. I can see that, but I hope it isn't too bad—there, now I don't hear the breathing anymore. It's calming down. It's as if someone were there. Ah, there it goes again. What is it? It's like the sound of wind on a microphone with no windscreen, you know? You hear it very loudly. Nothing's changed.
Every science defines itself by its object without defining it; naming 49:23 It's started. You can go on, it's fine, I'll continue. So, we're still on the same problem, since our last question-and-answer session, not so long ago, a few days ago, in passing, I returned—thanks to the questions from our listeners online, both from Lionel, to sum up, and more indirectly from Hugo and Samuel—to the very origins of philosophy and to what makes it specific, particularly to the definition and the question 'what do we call that?'
50:06 I believe I answered Lionel, who simply found it wasn't very clear, that every science is defined by its object, but no science defines its own object. There. Besides, let me take advantage of this, no, I won't slip past it so quickly—I had taken as an example the fact that it's not up to the botanist to define what a plant is; he takes plants empirically and then studies them, and he knows far more about them than I do or than anyone, but not as a botanist.
50:36 But at the outset, there is for him something within a representation, and that's not scientific—it's a raw given, so to speak, called plants, and another called animals. I had said it's not so simple when you look closely, taking mushrooms, for instance, which, when I was still even a teenager, were still classified among plants, and which are the subject of a separate order—I learned this at the Museum of Natural History—a separate order along with lichens and certain mosses, and even some algae, which are neither plants nor animals.
51:07 You see? Because if someone tells you, 'but it's simple, take a hen, analyze it, and you'll see what makes a cell animal, and then take a blade of grass and you'll see what a plant cell is' — yes, but that means you've already decided that this one is a plant and that one is an animal. I bring this up again because I just learned that tomorrow, Saturday at 2 p.m., at the Museum of Natural History, there's a lecture, though access is easier for those who have the Friends of the Museum card, on precisely the difference between animals and plants.
51:46 There, I'm closing that parenthesis. But that wasn't the case the last time I answered Lionel. I had concluded with the act of sovereignty, the act of naming. This, according to the Old Testament, is the privilege of man, since we know that God gave Adam the privilege of naming. This is a piano, this is a sink, this is a desk, this is a tablet. Named. Now, the example of the picnic table that I had used showed clearly, isn't that so, that no external object will, by opening its chest, tell us, 'there, you can call me piano, I am a piano.'
52:29 It's not... The name is not to be sought in the object. That's why even with the finest microscope, we could never, by visually scrutinizing an object, isn't that so, obtain its definition. We decide, through the role we assign to it, how it should be named. And that's why a mere rock in a clearing, insofar as it is flat enough for me to lay out the picnic on it, I can say it will be our table. And so the baptizing, in the strongest sense, is the table.
53:01 We always come back to the same things. I say this to marvel at these delightful paradoxes, whereby linguists, in order to distinguish the learned language of chains of equations, things the layman understands nothing of unless initiated—it's open to everyone, it's not sects, when I say initiated, it's a goal anyone can work toward,
53:31 and mathematical analysis, soil mechanics, and fluid physics. But, but it's a highly specialized language that is contrasted with everyday language, the one I'm using right now with you and with our listeners, our followers, as they say. Namely, in linguistics they call that natural language. What a paradox! I just showed that there's nothing natural about it, that it's an almost supernatural decree—God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures.
54:05 Right? Even from a completely atheist perspective, one would admit it's not entirely foolish that religion goes so far as to invoke God to explain where the name comes from. The name is not the grunt that says, 'there's food over there'—animals didn't wait for us to do that. Nor is it the dance of the bees which, by the angle their dance makes with the position of the sun, indicates roughly the direction, to the rest of the hive, of where the loot they've spotted is located, and so on.
54:38 No, no, that, there, is a name. You can change it, moreover, from one language to another. Once again, it's delightful, this contradiction that no one notices, that we call natural language the language that is the least so. As for forms of communication—because there is very developed animal communication, there's bee communication, there are dolphins, and so on—but on the other hand, communication in the form of language, which is almost miraculous in the double sense of marvel and exception, is precisely not natural at all.
55:12 We are in the symbolic order, to speak a bit like the analytic field, the Freudian field—it's in the symbolic order and not in the natural order. So, yes, I've just sketched out a bit of an extension of the questions, but I still haven't finished. The problem will come back, we keep grappling with it, that's what I call our bug, ever since the cycle on Nerval.
55:44 I say this so we can step back and see a bit bigger and a bit more clearly. And since I'm talking about a bug, I'll translate it into more refined terms. Now, you might think that this doesn't mean we're paralyzed and stuck in some... But, on the contrary, it might be the most fruitful moment for philosophical inquiry, when you're stuck on a difficulty like that. What am I alluding to?
The Socratic torpedo fish and Perceval's silence 56:14 To the fact that Socrates' interlocutors compare him to the torpedo fish. This is famous in Plato's dialogues. Socrates, you have the effect on us of the torpedo fish. This isn't about the military torpedo here. It's not about the sea missile. No, no, it's about fish. Called torpedo in English. A torpedo fish that the Greeks, great sailors, were familiar with and knew that if you touched it, you got an electric shock. Some fish do this, even in freshwater.
56:45 There are also eels that give you a 400-volt discharge, which is formidable. Which can sink you to the bottom. Well, a torpedo fish has the shape of a ray. A ray. And why does he make this comparison? Because when he asks us these questions, we no longer know where we stand. We're numbed, we're blocked. We thought we knew what virtue was, a table, a piano, and then we no longer know what it is at all.
57:32 There. If I may bring up something too that you mentioned, I don't know if it was in the last or second-to-last workshop of the season, on Nerval — you talked about Perceval and the question he didn't ask. Ah, you haven't forgotten that. That's the second time you've brought it up with me. Ah yes, no, it... It stayed with me because it's difficult to ask questions. Everything you've just said about language, about what it represents, makes me think — it underlines for me the fact that you talk about bugs, about questions.
58:06 It's difficult to ask a question, and one hesitates, and not simply out of fear of being off the mark. That's not it, because in the end there's no shame in asking a stupid question. Quite right. But there are subjects on which we are... I won't say we're paralyzed, but either we always repeat the same question, or, as usual, we ask questions when we often already have the answer, and there, we don't have it. So we hesitate a bit to... We hesitate. That's maybe why you have the impression that we always ask you more or less the same question.
58:41 Ah no, no, I'm not blaming you. I'm very pleased with your intervention, and your example is perfect, because Perceval is precisely the one who cannot manage to ask the question, who only has to open his mouth to ask the question that would lift the curse reigning over the world. Over the wasted land, as they say in Arthurian romances, the devastated land, wasted in English, dévastée in French, the wasted land, radically, the sterile land that no longer yields anything because the Grail has not been recovered.
Perceval, Parsifal, and the Buddha: the fool raised far from the world 59:11 Now, Perceval saw it — he happened by chance upon it during his wanderings as a knight-errant. He came upon it, he saw the Grail, he was sheltered in the castle, he woke up, he attended the ceremony, and then he never found the castle again. But above all, during the ceremony, he did not ask the question — he was stupefied. Stupefied, stupid — when Wagner renames him Parsifal in the German version, and this is the testament, the work that Wagner spent his whole life thinking through, more than 60 years.
59:44 I don't know, he sums it all up. And he calls him der reine Tor. Tor means idiot in German, the idiot in the Dostoevskian sense. We had been promised a Petey — someone who would take up arms to rid us of the Romans, a great warrior in the style of Moses, or David, David with his sling. And instead we're sent an idiot who tells us: if you're struck on one cheek, turn the other. But what is that? That's not... That's Perceval, that's it.
1:00:16 And, since you're again alluding to his silence, when finally he — I'm glad you give me the chance to quickly give a few extracts from the most beautiful story ever told at a royal court, this is li contes del Graal. I quote the way one of our greatest poets put it — and the first to speak the word Grail, the syntagm Grail — research has been done, thousands of pages have appeared since to figure out where he picked up that thing, there are plenty of hypotheses, look, that would take us too far, ranging from Kral, an Arabic word, to Graillon, because the Grail nourishes, grilled — it's Chrétien de Troyes, Chrétien de Troyes, who was at the court of the counts of Champagne, and so, addressed to the public who listened to this at court, of course, young girls and young women, they knew very well what he was doing, isn't that so, he does a bit of teasing before telling, before telling the details, I am going to narrate for you
1:01:26 the most beautiful story ever told at a royal court, this is li contes del Graal, or else Perceval the Welshman — so I'll also refer you to Rohmer's very beautiful film, very stylized, but above all to the text, in the Folio edition, there's a good translation accessible to everyone, of Perceval the Welshman, yes, I'm alluding to this idiot, his mother, why is he an idiot, because he was raised far from men, far from civilization, far from schools, far from culture, far from where one learns to handle arms, whatever you like, and good manners — she raised him like a wild child in the forest, why?
1:02:04 Because she's a widow, she lost her husband, who left on crusade as a good knight, and she has only one fear, since what remains to her of the mad love she bore her husband is only this pledge, the son he left her, Perceval — she has only one fear, that he too will become infatuated with chivalry, that she will lose him too, right, over girls, in some challenge, etc. She raises him, as Wagner has Kundry say, far from shocks, wars, and hatreds.
1:02:41 You look closely, this is an allusion to the Buddha, you know that Siddhartha, the historical figure at the origin of the Buddha — Siddhartha would have been raised by his maharaja father in a kind of paradisiacal setting, with a prohibition on all the palace staff letting his son leave the palace, which was immense, with gardens, but where everything was beautiful, where he must not leave the palace and see everything India can bring in the way of misery, ugliness, and decay.
1:03:12 And you know what happened — always with children — one day he found a section of wall, climbed up, and saw, on the other side of the palace, he saw an old beggar, and he saw old age, ugliness, suffering, filth, decay, in short, all the misery — that in India, through nothingness, through nirvana, it's better to feel nothing at all than to exist in that kind of suffering.
1:03:42 In any case, then, an old reminiscence in Wagner, who knew everything about Buddhism — everything there was to know at the time anyway — and about Christian compassion, he mixes it all up a bit, he mixes up the rites too, well, if we start on that, it would take ages. So he's raised like a wild child, but one day he hears clattering in the woods, he sees knights passing by, it's love at first sight, he wants to follow them, he takes his bow, and follows them, and he leaves — maybe that's what birth is — he leaves the maternal palace, a fine metaphor for the trauma of...
1:04:19 He leaves, he hears behind him his mother, who rushes out frantic to see him leaving, he sees her fall in a swoon, and he pays no heed, he goes off, and it will take the whole romance, and thousands of verses, before a wise man, a hermit, at the end, tells him: your tongue was tied, you didn't ask the question, because you bore the weight of not having gone back when your mother died behind you, because it is you who killed her, by leaving to follow chivalry — so your intervention is quite right, it's very good, it's grist for your mill, it's very difficult to ask a question when you see all the stakes behind it, of opening your mouth, all right, I'm well aware of that, but I have a little surprise in store for you, because I would still like to finish, I have the time, a little, I'd like to finish, I'd just like to finish — you reproached me last time, very kindly, the sort of reproach I love, for having brought up the example of the dams,
Reading of Rimbaud's "Mouvement" 1:05:31 since we've just privatized the dams, without giving back a text I like to quote elsewhere, which is Rimbaud's Mouvement, so I'll read it this time, as perhaps a first sample of what a landscape might be — it was strange, since it's an industrial landscape, I do it on purpose, go on, I'll read it whole first, without any commentary, it's short, Mouvement, singular, I'll still take one precaution, there: the winding movement on the bank of the river's falls, the gulf at the sternpost, the swiftness of the incline, the enormous sweep of the current, lead through unheard-of lights and chemical novelty the travelers, surrounded by the waterspouts of the valley and of the strom, they are the conquerors of the world seeking personal chemical fortune, sport and comfort travel with them, they carry along the education of races, of classes and of beasts, on this vessel,
1:06:42 rest and dizziness in the diluvian light, on the terrible evening of studies, for, from the small talk among the apparatus, the blood, the flowers, the fire, the jewels, agitated accounts on this fleeing side, one sees, rolling like a dike, beyond the hydraulic motive road, monstrous, endlessly lighting up, their stock of studies, they, driven in harmonic ecstasy, and the heroism of discovery.
Commentary: the Noah's ark of science and the old savagery 1:07:14 Full stop, with the space. To the most surprising atmospheric accidents, a young couple isolates itself on the ark. Is it ancient savagery that one forgives, and sings and takes its post? Thank you for bringing me back to this poem, for I realized it wasn't off-topic to place it in our new cycle, because it offers us a setting.
1:07:45 Rimbaud walked enormously, on foot across France, the Ardennes, sometimes alone, sometimes with Verlaine, but here he's clearly alone. And I say this — I'm not interpreting, he recounts all this, here or there, in the poems of A Season in Hell, I don't know. He witnessed the emergence — imagine what that must have been for the era — the Industrial Revolution, the countryside of iron, a succession of forges, I'm thinking of a poem by Verlaine from the same period, called Charleroi, where he's on a train — already the train, the noise, the coal train of the era.
1:08:30 Charleroi, in the black grass, the Kobolds go, the deep wind weeps, one prefers to believe, more like hovels than houses, what a horizon of red forges, you see, the metallic factory, what a horizon of red forges, sinister noise, what was that, what was buzzing like sistrums, the noise of machines, you see, he witnessed all this — and there, apparently, from what — I'm not interpreting — but the fall of the river, the bank, the gulf at the sternpost, sternposts are for locks, the swiftness, so the speed of the incline, the enormous sweep of the current, leads through unheard-of lights and chemical novelty, the travelers, surrounded by the waterspouts of the valley and the strom — strom, of course, is stream in English, it means current, in German, quite simply, it also means river — well, and there begins a kind of hymn to modernity, right, these are the conquerors, they're talking about the world of scientists, technicians, engineers, this whole new world, right there, it's as if they're remaking humanity anew, they are the conquerors of the world seeking personal chemical fortune, as one seeks the Grail, right, or the magic mountain, sport and comfort
1:09:40 travel with them, it's new, sport and comfort, both words come to us from English usage, England, there's a lead, in standard of living, in technology, the English invented sport and comfort, sport and comfort travel with them, they carry along the education of races, of classes and of beasts on this vessel, rest and dizziness in the diluvian light, let's not interpret, the words are there, diluvian light, is the light of the flood, this vessel is Noah's ark, the old world is collapsing, but a future world is promised to us there on this ark, they carry along the education of races, of classes and of beasts, it takes the form of Noah's ark, on this vessel, rest and dizziness in the diluvian light, on the terrible evening of studies, for all this presupposes engineers of fundamental research, let's leave the voice-over, for from the small talk among them there begins that magnificent crescendo, the apparatus, some apparatus, we're indeed in the world of advanced technology, the blood,
1:10:50 it's stranger here, the flowers, the fire, the jewels, agitated accounts, accounts, like from the verb to count, figures, agitated accounts on this fleeing side, one sees, you see, the crescendo and the support, rolling like a dike beyond the hydraulic motive road, hydraulic confirms that we're dealing with a dam, monstrous, endlessly lighting up, that's the stance that doesn't hold back, what do we see? Their stock of studies, a kind of escape no longer into moonlight, as with Friedrich, but an escape into the thirst — never — for knowledge, isn't that so?
1:11:29 They, driven by harmonic ecstasy and heroism. So, everything seems, in that world, everything seems saved, right? The old world, right? The horrors, sin, the inequalities, all that is over, we have science, we have technology. Ta-da — new line — to the most surprising atmospheric accidents, and this is perhaps the only moment, but then it's brief, but what is it? where suddenly Rimbaud's genius as a landscape poet appears, because I say this for those interested in literary history, Rimbaud is one of the first to rehabilitate nature, in the literary sense, and landscape in poetry, whereas Baudelaire used to say, to anyone who would listen, that he was incapable of being moved by vegetation, and that he preferred a thousand times the urban landscape, and that he only loved right angles, metal, marble, and water.
1:12:21 Rimbaud, you only have to look at his poems, like Aube, for example. Well, and there, you see, to the most surprising atmospheric accidents, we imagine a rainbow, after a shower, I mean, it's superb, in front of this industrial setting, he speaks of an ark, so we imagine a bridge over a canal, since we're between Belgium and France, to the most surprising atmospheric accidents, a young couple, and there, we're no longer in science, and we're no longer in the future, and in technology, what could be older, what could be more familiar, the old world, than a young couple, a young couple, isolates itself on the ark.
1:12:56 You see, he says, not even a young couple, but well, a young couple, isolates itself on the ark. And there, a dash, a question: is it ancient savagery that one forgives? Question mark, dash, and takes its post, full stop. Is it ancient — the ancient savagery, fortunately, has not disappeared, is not banished from that world. And here, when I say that until the end of my life I will have to eat to live, that we will always be animals in certain respects, I do not oppose, by iron and by fire, man to nature — man is a plus, isn't he?
1:13:40 So there, is it ancient — it's magnificent that he put in contrast, this chemical novelty, to quote him, this heroism, this discovery, their stock of studies, the hydraulic motive road, that he set in perspective what is more familiar, youth on the ark, and in another, younger poem, youth on the ark — is it ancient savagery that one forgives? There, thank you for giving me the chance to recall the almost unheard-of beauty of this poem, which slightly anticipates new settings, brought about by the revolution, and thus new wonders.
Announcement of the workshop and priority of questions 1:14:25 Thank you very much, Dominique, thank you for having thought of this little question last time, I think everyone will have appreciated this reading and these comments, because there you had the time to — you often talk about it in your workshops, but there we had the time to go, from beginning to end, a bit further, we didn't skimp on this poem. Well, listen, let's remind everyone, to give a little idea, there were quite a few people this evening, in all 135 people watched the video, all right, thank you very much, thank you for their presence, for sharing, 35 reactions, etc., so since we did this a bit off the cuff, it's not bad, we'll put this on the YouTube channel, and then we'll see everyone again on February 1st, at the Goscinny center, as usual, for Nature or Landscape.
1:15:29 Yes, so one last little detail, sorry, I believe — first I apologize to the listeners, I'm a victim of a flu that's causing quite a bit of havoc right now, and I'm sorry for these unfortunate interludes, and for my voice which is affected, but I'd like to make clear that I don't answer all the questions I see on our Facebook page. Let me explain: I do answer, and I love answering everyone who asks questions, and they come from five continents these days, questions that nonetheless relate to the exchanges held in the workshops, by myself of course, but also in the form of questions, contributions, and the subjects that were opened during our talks.
1:16:26 I said that because, well, the latest one, among plenty of others, I can't answer because I won't have the time, and above all it's not directly related to the continuation of the discussion — someone asks me, is it true that Marx said he was a citizen of the world? I don't know, first of all, I can't guarantee I've read every half-line of all of Marx, I mean, I'm sure the young man asking me this question is a much better surfer than I am, since I only took up surfing rather late, to find that out, to verify it more easily than I can, but above all, I can't answer all these questions, I'd spend all my time doing that, so I give priority, of course, to questions related to the problems and issues, even if very indirectly, even if it seems to be, even if the question concerns a small point of detail, within a broader problematic, but still within what has been stirred up in our shared, public workshops.
1:17:22 There, that's what I wanted to take the liberty of clarifying. Ok, thank you Dominique. Thank you, Philippe. Until February 1st then. I'll point out one last thing — that my cat was better behaved than last time. He didn't walk in front of the camera again during... There, because since it's a bit colder, he keeps hidden. I know my cat has a lot of friends, so I say this to reassure them. She stays hidden, her nose and paws against the radiator. There.
1:17:53 Have a very good night. Goodbye. Goodbye everyone.
