English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Rousseau against Chateaubriand: circumscribing the setting 0:59 The idea, so as not to suspend for too long, given the anticipation surrounding it, the continuity of our series, so to speak, nature and landscape, which is to occupy our second term. So this is our second episode, after the first one which we launched at the Goscinny Centre. So I can't provide for you here, in my 25 square metres without a shower — I say that every time to make households weep, I don't know why, but I'm very happy here.
1:32 If my cat weren't taking up half the room, I unfortunately can't project behind my back, on a big screen, the three paintings by Poussin, Delacroix, and Caspar David Friedrich. And that's why, I announce it right away, I'm going to make use mainly of literary illustration, of texts, which relate of course to landscapes. I recall that we still haven't clearly, for now, decided between landscape, that is nature, or else a disjunction, landscape versus nature.
2:08 We haven't decided that yet, we've taken one for the other, in the ordinary sense. Look, we look at the scenery, what a beautiful landscape, nature is beautiful, that's it for now, we're not problematizing their disjunction too much. And I'm going to cite a few landscapes that push to their limit a phenomenon we saw expressed in a particular text. And it's not chosen at random, since these are texts by Rousseau, extracts from the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, that is, this text, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, divided into walks — the chapters are walks, if you recall — and we'll note in passing the temporal dimension of this musician that is Rousseau: they are walks, we move about, they are not fixed shots, as in Chateaubriand.
3:03 And we had drawn the parallel last time. Now, what did we see taking shape in Rousseau? Something that is totally opposed to Chateaubriand — both are masterpieces, this isn't a matter of aesthetic value, it's not that kind of opposition — but the procedure is exactly reversed. Chateaubriand gives us an enormous amount to see: we get the colour of every species of bird swarming in the forests of the Orinoco or lining the Mississippi, with their specific names, avalanches of vegetation, the names of trees, magnolias, maples, the American tulip tree, whatever you like — in short, it gives us something to see, there's a fixed shot where we keep sweeping our eyes from left to right across the picture, so to speak.
3:47 Whereas in Rousseau, it's no different, it's exactly the opposite. He begins by apparently setting a visual scene: the shores of Lake Biel are wilder and more romantic than those of Lake Geneva — I'm trying to quote from memory. If one sees fewer fields and vineyards there, that is, less human activity — nature and landscape start to be problematized — one sees more shade, forests, secluded shores, etc. But it's as if he only gives us the visual in order to circumscribe — that's indeed his expression — that this lake is perfectly suited to the happiness of a man who loves to circumscribe himself.
4:26 I remind you that circumscribere, the Latin term from which circumscribe comes, means: I place myself at the centre of the setting. You can guess that we're not far off, not far at all, from the foetus in the mother's womb. Since he speaks of an unprecedented happiness experienced on an island, surrounded by water after all, isn't that so? And since he says 'this beautiful basin of an almost round shape,' you see how language expresses, quite unbeknownst to the author, staggeringly precise things.
4:59 This beautiful basin of an almost — for me it's the word 'almost' that is perhaps the most important. It means, he knows well — when one knows the place geographically, coming back to realism, the opposite of the poetic, naive empiricist realism, I'm not talking about Balzac's visionary realism — when you look, the island of Saint-Pierre is not at all in the centre of the lake, it's extremely close to a point on the shore, a village called Erlach, which is the first German-speaking village when coming from French-speaking Switzerland.
5:33 In ten minutes' boat trip across the lake, you go from La Neuveville to Erlach. So he feels the need, the unconscious drives him to want the island to be in the middle, circumscribere, to place himself at the centre of a circle. Like a fortress surrounding itself with water, with moats, ditches, as if that were going to make it safe. It's well known that every fortress can be taken. But still, that's supposed to create some difficulties.
6:03 I'm sure it's above all a psychic protection. So where am I heading with this? I want to get to the point that after having drawn the limits of this landscape, where we learn that there are mountains bordering it — so that mainly serves, this visual situation, to tell us that this particular spot, the shores of Lake Biel, is cut off from the rest of the world, at the end of the earth, that access to it is difficult for walkers, there aren't many roads leading there, etc. — I'm not quoting from memory.
The fifth walk and the focal point of the interior landscape 6:34 But once he's inside — that was for the relation to the outside world — once he's inside, there's a progression in the text, if you recall, I'll go quickly since we saw it last time, there's a progression in the text that consists in gradually annihilating all external perception so as to be attentive only to internal perceptions. I'm taking up a dichotomy dear to Kant, recalling that for Kant, space is the a priori form of all external perceptions — meaning that if there's no space, I can see nothing, if space isn't given, so it's a priori — and time is the a priori form of all internal perceptions.
7:12 I see this microphone, there, it's in space, I see it in space, but if I close my eyes and think of this microphone, I represent it to myself, so then it's internal, it's a duration, this microphone, it's no longer a space. You can't say it's a metre twenty tall — I don't know how tall it is — in my head, I'm not going to say anything. There, that's time. So gradually — I'll go fast now because I'm heading toward the final result — there's the famous passage where he stops botanizing here and there on the island: 'when evening approached, I would come down from the heights of the island' — anxiety of the falling evening, anxiety of the fading light, and so a descent toward safety — 'and I would gladly go and sit by the lakeshore, on the beach, in some hidden refuge' — there is refuge only for a fugitive.
8:07 There is refuge only for an outlaw, for a fugitive, for someone who is being hunted. That was indeed Rousseau's case at that time — I won't repeat it thirty-six times — since he had taken refuge there in great haste on this island, leaving all his manuscripts with a friend in Neuchâtel, and taking with him only the Confessions, which he had begun writing, and the draft constitution for Corsica. I recall, all the same, isn't that so? It's the word of a fugitive, isn't it? 'I would gladly go and sit by the lakeshore, on the beach, in some hidden refuge.' And there begins the high point of the reverie — I'm not the only one to say so, it hasn't escaped anyone.
8:37 One could say that the modern sentence, for the first time, arises here — the sentence of modern literature, which will give the twentieth century Proust's interminable sentence, the sentence that follows the slightest convolutions, to borrow a term from Baudelaire, when Baudelaire says he dreamed, in the preface to his prose poems, of a prose musical enough, supple enough, to match the slightest convolutions of the soul, etc. Well, that language arises right in this passage, and so I won't repeat for the umpteenth time the passages, the fact that not only does he not fix, as, he doesn't ask, like Chateaubriand, to look at what is an active attitude — the landscape, I am the subject, the landscape is the object of my act of seeing — but it's the opposite: it's the objects that fix him, isn't it, 'the ebb and flow of that water, fixing my soul' — glueing it, as we'd say today — 'immobilizing my eyes,' which until then had been turning left and right, hypnosis, 'fixing my soul and driving out,' sorry, 'fixing my senses' — the senses are made to be, to see, no, here, to be fixed — 'fixing my senses and driving from my soul'
9:48 'any other agitation than that of the senses' — you see there's a kind of gradual annihilation of the whole external world, all internal perception, plunging me into a delicious reverie in which night often surprised me without my noticing.' Good, and the key sentence is this one — thought returns, an active attitude seems to return, let me illustrate: 'sometimes a few faint and brief reflections arose on the instability of the things of this world, of which the surface of the waters offered me the image' — a rather banal comparison — 'but soon' — and here's the peak of the annihilation I'm talking about, the annihilation of the setting — 'but soon, these light impressions themselves faded away in the uniformity of the continuous motion that lulled me' — there's no longer an image, there's a sound, a lullaby, rhythm, still the rhythm of the ebb and flow of the lake's waters — 'these light impressions themselves faded away in the uniformity' — gone is the multiplicity that swarmed in Chateaubriand — 'in the uniformity of the continuous motion that lulled me'
10:58 'and did not fail to hold me so that, when called by the hour and the agreed signal' — he is woken from his reverie because he's told it's mealtime, with a horn or bells, I don't know — 'I could not tear myself away from there without effort.' There, I'm simply recalling the point we had reached, that is, the annihilation of the setting. Now I'm going to push that to its limit, that is, cite a few texts that are intermediate, that take over, that are almost immediately, chronologically and historically, later than these true Rousseauian revelations about the setting — it's a way of treating the setting, that is, it reaches the height of its beauty when there is nothing left to see, which is quite an extraordinary paradox — and at the same time it heralds, with Rousseau in the past and in the future, what will come to be called, starting especially with Baudelaire, the interior landscape, in the field of symbolist poetry, of the avant-gardes of the nineteenth century and soon the twentieth.
12:02 Let me open a small parenthesis here — if you're looking for a mediation between... I'm speaking here as much about landscape, I'm thinking in particular of a poem like 'Rhenish Night,' a nocturnal Germanic landscape by Apollinaire in Alcools. If you want to find a poet who mediates between the avant-gardes of the late nineteenth century and the surrealist avant-gardes of the twentieth, it's Apollinaire. So, the interior landscape — for that, you have to pass, you see, through a focal point this side of which we're still in the visual, beyond which there's nothing left to see, but where we find a landscape again, except it's an interior one.
12:46 You see why I use the image of the focal point. I'm going to find a few examples, especially in Hölderlin, so in the immediate posterity of Rousseau. We're really in the last years of the eighteenth century, or even the very first of the nineteenth, or later, even though he died in the 1840s, but he had 37 years of madness. I'm talking about the texts, the last texts before the onset of madness, or a few that belong to the very first period of the madness.
A paradisiacal Edgar Poe: Arnheim and the Heimat 13:19 We'll see that in a moment, but before that, to introduce them, I'd like to allude to a text taken from a short story by Edgar Poe called 'The Domain of Arnheim.' Now here I have to make a little reminder. Edgar Poe is rather known, I don't know, not for frolicking about in landscapes, but on the contrary for the most macabre, the most gothic things, as we'd say now. I don't know, it ranges from vampire stories — I'm thinking of the appalling story called 'Berenice.'
13:50 These are great and extraordinary literary achievements. But in 'Berenice,' where the main character literally goes into the tomb to rip out his sister's teeth — I mean, from the corpse — it's appalling. Well, here it's the opposite, this is a paradisiacal Edgar Poe. There are two stories that go in this direction. There are quite a few poems too... In these poems, one notices that Edgar Poe was much more luminous and seraphic, whereas in his stories he is extremely dark, and I say macabre because it's an awkward term, one that's a bit overused with him.
14:25 It's nonetheless more nuanced than that. But here, there are two stories that are downright paradisiacal. Let me give the titles: 'The Domain of Arnheim,' from which I'll quote an extract, and 'Landor's Cottage' — L-A-N-D-O-R, not Lindor, it's not chocolates, Lindor — which deals with roughly the same theme, that is, trying to imagine, literally — he was completely high on opium.
14:56 These are the reveries of a great opium smoker. He says so himself, in fact. 'The Domain of Arnheim' is the large-scale vision. We'll see later, I won't go into details. 'Landor's Cottage' is a bit more plausible, achievable on the scale of someone who has a bit of money. There. So let me come to 'The Domain of Arnheim.' First, the name Arnheim, A-R-N-H-E-I-M. I recall that the root 'Heim' in German is very common in place names, which will give the English 'home.' It's the hearth, the hometown.
15:28 The native land — there are two words in German. There's 'Heimat,' more common, that's not quite 'Heim.' So 'Heim' with A-T at the end. And then there's 'Vaterland' — literally the fatherland, 'Vater,' pater. 'Vaterland,' the land of the father. Well, 'Heimat' is the land of the mother. It's not the fatherland in the sense of the nation-state. It's not Germany. It's, I don't know, for Hölderlin, Swabia, or the slopes of the Black Forest.
15:58 Right? For Ernst Jünger, the great landscapes of the north-east on the border with Poland, with endless forests. For Thomas Mann, the shores of the Baltic. I mean, the Heimat is much more localized, much more intimate. That's why — I think of the maternal here. It's where one spent the first years of childhood. So Arnheim is a near-copy, with barely one vowel changed, of a village that exists in Holland — well, a village in a conurbation called Arnhem, H-E-M.
Ellison and the theory of happiness 16:32 H-E-M is the Flemish variant of the German 'Heim.' It's anecdotal, so I'll move on. Now, the pitch, very quickly — the narrator speaks of his friend Ellison. There. And I'll tell you the first sentence because you can immediately see what it's about: 'From his cradle to his tomb, my friend Ellison was always driven by a breeze of prosperity.'
17:02 He has a friend who — for one of the authors known, one of the most despairing, most macabre, most morbid — I was looking for the word earlier, it's actually more precise in his case than 'macabre,' Edgar Poe — here he paints the opposite portrait of someone characterized — can this even exist, even for a success of happiness which we so often say is impossible for humanity? From his birth to his tomb, he was driven by a breeze of prosperity.
17:32 And well, he tells us — and this is the continuation of the pitch — that it's no accident, the guy had organized things, he had a theory of happiness. So here we are inscribed in the great tradition of the eighteenth century, which we've only just left, Edgar Poe — that's the 1830s-1840s, an exact contemporary of Nerval, part of early Romanticism by the way, even though he's very different from the Romantics — who would have an enormous literary influence on the Symbolists, on Valéry, on Mallarmé, on Baudelaire, needless to say, whom he introduced into France shortly after Nerval.
18:02 There. Nerval alludes to him discreetly in Les Nuits d'octobre. So, here is Edgar Poe succeeding the eighteenth century — and, I'll insist enough on this, I won't come back to it — whose supreme value in the eighteenth century is happiness. It's even the one theme that unites a Voltaire and a Rousseau, even though they're completely opposed on the means of achieving happiness. The value of the Enlightenment philosophers, whether Voltaire or Rousseau — it's rare to find a point that unites them — is happiness, that is, I recall, neither the pleasure of the libertine, which is very intense, extremely intense, but limited in time, fleeting, etc., I won't go back over the difference, and, at the opposite pole, salvation.
18:46 In the previous century, the seventeenth, there is Pascal, whose central value is salvation, the beatitude of the saints. But that is beyond, that's after death. Happiness has an earthly dimension. Ah, how happy I was back then, you see, it's very concrete. When my aunt used to serve me my café au lait — I'm making things up, I'm not a very good writer. And it lasts through time, it's conjugated in the imperfect tense in texts, happiness, very often, as something that repeated itself, that occupied a certain duration.
19:17 So, as opposed to pleasure, which is fleeting, there's duration, and an earthly dimension that stands opposed to salvation. There, I recall my syllogism: happiness as the ideal middle term between the fleetingness of pleasure and the absent presence of salvation. On the salvation side, which follows from what Hegel pointed out, a logic of essence rather than of being — salvation, essence, is being that has vanished. 'My kingdom is not of this world,' that's salvation. So here, we are in this world, and this Ellison in question — a fictional character invented by the narrator, well by the author, by Edgar Poe himself — is supposed, in the story, to have inherited a fortune that one shouldn't even try to picture except by an artifice.
20:02 He imagines that he has an ancestor who bequeathed his entire inheritance — who was already fabulously wealthy — bequeathing his entire inheritance while forbidding it to be distributed for, say, a century; it's kept in reserve, invested, it grows, and so it reaches absolutely unimaginable sums, and it falls to his friend, who inherits it. So what are they, the means to put his own theories of happiness into practice? What are they? I'll read them out. It's very Anglo-Saxon, very pragmatic, it comes from the American side of Edgar Poe, it happens now and then, after all, where he says the following.
20:44 He says that the first condition — this is very Anglo-Saxon, you know how much more important sport is for them, the word itself is imported from them — is free physical exercise in the open air, first condition. But there's an intensity to it already, since happiness, since it has an earthly and worldly dimension, it's hard, no, to abstract from it. There: free physical exercise in the open air, hence a relative good health, etc., without the 'machine,' as the body was called in the seventeenth century, coming to spoil the picture. Second, the presence — for him, he says, of a companion, a woman — so we'll find, for the moment, this is not hugely original, all this.
21:26 And finally, third — there are only three conditions — an indefinite aspiration, a project that takes a whole lifetime to realize. Right? It's within this project that what makes up the essence of the Domain of Arnheim arises. He decides to devote himself, as he is an artist, a poet, but he doesn't want to work in genres that have already been sufficiently developed — music, painting, etc. He decides to dedicate himself to an art which, according to him, hasn't been cultivated enough: the landscape garden.
21:57 You see how we get there. That is, with his fortune, created on a scale almost equal to that of a French département, you see. There's something fantastic in the story. Something devoted to every square centimetre of his designs. There. So, I'm not going to describe the setting for you — no, no, I won't do that, I recommend it to you, it's not a very long story, it's extraordinary. What I'm going to quote is an extract from the first part, where he goes on trips with the narrator, with his friend, around the whole world to find the place that already naturally lends itself to the arrangement he dreams of.
"He who has death in his heart": unease 22:41 Right? 'Ellison, in search of the desired place and situation, travelled for several years, and I was granted the privilege of accompanying him. A thousand places that delighted me were rejected by him without hesitation, for reasons which finally proved to me that he was right. At length we found an elevated plateau of surprising beauty and fertility, which afforded a panoramic view almost as extensive as that seen from the summit of Etna.' I remind you that Etna is over 3,000 metres high, in Sicily.
23:16 One of the most fabulous views. He had never set foot there — that's how Edgar Poe is. You know that his two detective stories, since he inaugurated the detective genre in his Tales of the Extraordinary — 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' and 'The Purloined Letter' — take place in Paris, saying that so-and-so turns right on such-and-such street, and he never set foot in Paris. He worked from a map — that's Edgar Poe's extraordinary journalistic side. Moving on. 'Almost as extensive as that seen from the summit of Etna, and far surpassing it in all the true elements of the picturesque.'
23:47 Here, this is taken literally, it's not the sense of the Michelin guide's 'scenic route.' It's 'pittore,' painting in Italian, of course — it's a veritable picture that we have before us, 'far surpassing in all the true elements of the picturesque this view, so renowned though it is, that from the summit of Etna, in the judgment both of Ellison and myself.' 'I am not unaware,' said the traveller, letting out a sigh of profound voluptuousness drawn from the contemplation of the scene, after about an hour of ecstasy, 'I know that here, under circumstances personal to myself, nine-tenths of the most refined men would consider themselves satisfied.'
24:25 'How could one find anything more beautiful than what we see here? This is where the Domain of Arnheim must be built. This panorama is truly splendid, and I would delight in nothing but the excess of its splendour. The taste of every architect I have known has led them, for love of the view' — panorama, viewpoint — 'to place their buildings on mountaintops. There is an obvious error there. Grandeur, in all its modes, but particularly in that of extent, does indeed, it is true, arouse, excite, but afterward it fatigues and oppresses.'
25:13 'For an occasional landscape, nothing better.' Nothing better — once they've reached the peak of extent. 'For an occasional landscape, nothing better.' Listen closely, because this is the sentence I'd like to build on and for which I began with this text. 'For an occasional landscape, nothing better. For a constant view, nothing worse.' And here, the key sentence is — in a constant — sorry, excuse me — 'He who has death in his heart avoids distant vistas like the plague.'
25:48 I'll build on this in my commentary on Pablo Servigne's video. I recall that at a certain point, as opposed to the localism that is one of the recurring themes of ecological sensibility — doing my permaculture in my own garden, very good, I won't repeat myself — it's more worrying than that. If only it were merely ridiculous. I mean, on the other side, there is the essence of anthropology.
26:20 What is proper to man, I keep repeating it, I'm not the only one, is a restlessness — think of Pascal, or of Leibniz, who reminds us that in the German language, the word for restlessness, 'Unruhe' — 'Ruhe' is rest, 'Unruhe' is non-rest, restlessness — is the very same word used for the ticking of a clock. You see, the awareness of time passing, bringing us closer to death. Unruhe — I can't stress enough the crucial role that death plays in Hegelian anthropology, for example, death which he calls the absolute master.
26:53 So, here, the one who has death in his heart, that is to say the human being, I place myself here between the ecological discourse that Servigne illustrated very well, in fact, in an exemplary manner. And I'd like to devote a commentary to it soon, it's a bit like the same word play-pause, a text by Foucault on a well-known thesis, it's the critique of the theme of humanism, isn't it?
27:25 There's nothing typical about it, man is not a genus, that's very fashionable now, with anti-speciesism, isn't it? He's not an empire within an empire, to quote Lordon quoting Spinoza, and truncating Spinoza of the essential nonetheless, since he rarely comments on the last part of the Ethics called On Human Freedom. Yes, I'm the first to think that man shouldn't be thought of as an empire. I prefer Engels's beautiful phrase that we must substitute the realm of freedom for the empire of necessity.
28:02 Very topical, all this, isn't it? Imperialism. So I'm using this passage to say that even a fairly reactionary author like Edgar Poe, very aristocratic, elitist if you prefer, in that sense, not at all, who was raised in a large Virginia estate with a pony pulled by black slaves when he was very small. In short, someone quite anti-progress.
28:32 except that at the time it was obvious these were reactionary themes. Now there are people who believe themselves to be far-left, including within France Insoumise by the way, who develop the same themes. I'll come back to that. Now, this Edgar Poe reminds us that what is proper to man is this restlessness of having death in his heart, which makes him an eternal migrant, literally as well as figuratively.
29:02 It can be a metaphor too. You don't need to move through space to be a migrant. When Pascal says that all of man's misfortune comes from not being able to stay at rest in a room, that's a way of saying that I need to take my mind off things. That's migrating in the figurative sense, if you will. That I distract myself, to use a famous term from Pascal. There. And it's this indefinite aspiration—rather than infinite—that produces a kind of metaphysical trembling that characterizes the human animal. Good. So you see, I began with this passage where everything seems to push the narrator to say: this is where we should build, arrange the setting, and produce the ideal place.
29:47 the utopia par excellence, the locus solus. If that means anything to you, it's the title of the most important novel published by the strange Raymond Roussel. The one the surrealists called the magnetizer. Locus solus, the sole place, the unique place. Well, anyway. So, I began with this text to remind us that our relationship to setting, to landscape, was linked to things we have—to use Poe's expression—inside.
The Walk: the beauty that wells up from the very first image 30:22 Everything that is the opposite of landscape and setting, in the heart. Isn't it? And here I now come to the series of texts I told you about, which starts from the near-total effacement of external perception in the fifth walk of Rousseau, to turn it into a recurring theme, if you will, not a limit as in Rousseau. I'm thinking in particular of a progression contained in a poem by Hölderlin dating from the early period of his madness.
30:55 It's classified that way in the chronology, poem of madness. From the time he resided with the good carpenter, and it's simply called The Walk. Isn't it? Now, you'll see that contrary to what I just said, there's plenty to see. What interests me is the progression, and it's the ending—let's get to the ending.
31:25 Let me also take the opportunity before reading the text. Usually, Hölderlin seems, even when it's of extraordinary beauty, obscure, difficult, mysterious, whereas here he is exceptionally clear, almost as clear as naive painters, if you will. You see, like Verlaine who, after the drama of Mons prison, says, "The sky above the roof is so blue, so calm." You see, with those primitive colors of naive painters, if you will. See for yourselves, it goes roughly like this: "Oh forest so prettily painted on the slope of the green hillside, where my walk winds."
32:03 "For every sting in the heart"—see, we were just talking about death in the heart—"For every sting in the heart, a sweet rest rewards me. When it grows dark in my soul, art and thought have always earned their wage in pain. Oh lovely image of the valley!" You see, he flees the reflection that's beginning to form, a bit dark, and he's happily brought back to the landscape. Oh lovely image of the valleys, plural, trees and gardens, for example.
32:34 And then this very narrow path, the stream barely visible. "With what brightness gaily shines in the distance the splendid image of the landscape"—that I haunt. It's interesting, that I haunt. As if it were a ghost that's external, foreign to all this. It's proper to man to be nomadic and utterly foreign to the world he'd like to belong to. Man can only integrate into a setting he has himself arranged, in which he has left his own mark. Just as one can only eat what is cooked, seasoned, prepared, and not food as it's thrown on the ground.
33:10 There. So, "With what brightness gaily shines in the distance the splendid image of the landscape that I haunt?" And here begins the last part. I'm being a bit solemn because it's a single sentence that builds to a crescendo. Watch closely how it ends. Willingly, "the deity guides us" in a friendly way, with blue at first—the same blue as the sky above the roofs, if you look closely—with blue at first, then clouds that it arranges into a rounded gray shape, with flashes of lightning, you see the crescendo, the claps of thunder, the fields, their charm, and the beauty that springs at the sources, last line, of the very first image.
34:03 So the last line is: the beauty that springs at the sources of the image—other translations say of the original image, of the very first Image, with a capital I—to circulate, there's nothing left to see. We can't even go to the center of this image, we stay at the edge, you see, I repeat: and the beauty that springs, like water coming up from underground, like springs, and the beauty that springs at the sources of the very first image. There's a striking example of this annihilation of the setting, but not in order to fall asleep as in Rousseau, but to bring out the essence of the landscape—paradoxically, we don't get many details—the image, the beauty that springs at the sources of the very first image.
In Lovely Blueness: "poetically man dwells" 34:49 There's this example, still on the same theme, there's a fragment that says the following—sorry—where it's almost the reverse, in fact exactly the reverse: we start from a blue in which there's nothing to see, like the sky, if you will, not even the trace of a cloud, and we descend from the sky, isn't it, toward the differentiation of the world down here. This poem is extremely famous, it's already been commented on, it's a poem with no title, called "In Lovely Blue."
35:28 which also dates from the early period of his madness. Before reading it, as an introduction, I can't resist reading you a little note that relates to it, because texts like this are rare enough that it's worth pausing over. This poem comes from Wilhelm Waiblinger's novel—forget that name—Phaethon, where it's attributed to a mad poet for whom Hölderlin was the model.
35:58 Waiblinger is a not very bright fellow who used to visit Hölderlin and who, to make himself look important, wrote his biography: "I frequented, I knew Hölderlin during the time of his madness." That's it, that's Waiblinger. And in one of his novels, he quotes this poem. Right? Waiblinger notes: "Here are a few pages by his hand, the mad poet whom he doesn't name in his novel, which give an idea of the dreadful derangement of his mind. In the original, they are written in verse in the manner of Pindar." That already tells you something, since toward the end of his life he wrote commentaries on the finest odes of Pindar.
36:34 We recognize that it's the last one. They are translated here in the arrangement given by my acquaintance Friedrich Beissner, a great contemporary biographer of Hölderlin, who restores their arrangement into prose and refuses to consider them as—sorry, excuse me. André du Bouchet, who translated it here, writes: "The unsurpassed beauty of this poem, as well as its coherence, render such conjectures vain. Its clarity discourages any desire for elucidation." That's a beautiful sentence.
37:04 "Its clarity discourages any desire for elucidation." So, In Lovely Blue. Judge for yourselves, I'm telling you, it's the reverse. In lovely blue blooms the steeple's metal roof. Often there's a kind of zinc covering that gleams a bit in the sun, you know, zinc or tin. On steeples, bulb-shaped steeples in particular. In lovely blue blooms the steeple's metal roof. Around it...
37:34 I have to give a dense analysis here. It's a matter of a setting, a landscape. What does it begin with? With what is highest. We're clearly in a village here, a Black Forest village. What is highest. And we're at the very tip. In lovely blue blooms the steeple's metal roof. So we're already in what the Greeks would have called hubris, excess. We're not in the human world, in the city, down below, in the forum, discussing with friends, comrades, or opponents in debate, as in Plato.
38:07 That's not it. We're almost in the realm of the gods here. We begin with the divine. So, I insist, because you'll see it's an almost precarious position. In lovely blue blooms the steeple's metal roof. Around it hovers the cry of swallows. There's already a sound, isn't there? Around it, what could there be around the steeple? Well, the most touching blue extends. And we come back to blue. Again, something in which there's nothing to see.
38:39 The sun above. We're even higher up. The sun above, as the culmination of the sky, if you will. Like a zenith. The sun above rises very high and colors the tin. But, silent up there, in the wind, the weathervane cries out. Again, a sound comes here to double the image. So, I repeat, this introit, as they say in sacred music, at the beginning of a Mass or a Passion: In lovely blue blooms the steeple's metal roof.
39:11 Around it hovers the cry of swallows. Around it extends the most touching blue. The sun above rises very high and colors the tin. But, silent up there, in the wind, the weathervane cries out. When someone descends beneath the bell, down the steps, then the silence is empty. All of a sudden, a break. We were tempted by hubris, drawn upward—how could it be otherwise—to go higher than the lovely blue, than the sun that colors the tin.
39:43 We're almost about to detach from the steeple and glide with the swallows around it. We're in a threatening position, a bit like Icarus flying without realizing the danger. So it's time to come back down. And look: when someone descends beneath the bell—you know, there are wooden stairs to go repair the bells—down the steps, then the silence is life. Suddenly, life returns. For when the body—let me add a voice-over here because it seems obscure, but it's clarity.
40:16 The body is the complete opposite of what we've just seen. The body is plastic, Greek, not hubris. For when the body detaches itself to such a degree—since we've moved, we've come down—a figure so soon emerges from the man. The windows from which the bells ring are like doors by virtue of their beauty. Yes, the doors, still being of nature—it's a shorthand—the doors are made of wood, they come from the forest, if you know a bit about Hölderlin.
40:46 Don't forget he wrote this sheltered by a carpenter, a woodworker, in whose home he sheltered his madness for 37 years. Zimmer. And Hölderlin dedicated a strange little couplet to him in tribute, where he says: "To you, my friend, I'll tell my secret. From Daedalus you have the genius, and the forest." It's a tribute to a carpenter. From Daedalus you have the genius. Because it's work that requires intelligence. Making a table doesn't just require working with your hands, it makes the mind work too.
41:16 From Daedalus you have the genius, and the forest, the wood. So, the windows from which the bells ring are like doors by virtue of their beauty. Yes, the doors, still being of nature, are in the image of the trees of the forest. But is purity also beauty? From the diversity within—now he's looking inside the church—a severe spirit is born, those small Protestant churches where there isn't much, it's not the overload of Catholic decor, it's still—as he tells you—it remains its charm too, but more baroque.
41:51 A severe spirit is born, so simple are the images, so holy that sometimes one fears—truly—to describe them, the images, plural. But the heavenly ones, who are always as good as they are rich, have such restraint and joy, and man in this can imitate them. So, such is the measure of man—I'll stop on this quotation—such is the measure of man, full stop: rich in merit, man has plenty of merit, it's the famous chorus of Sophocles that he knows by heart, man has tamed the waves, he's built ships, he's tamed metals, he's Promethean, good, rich in merit, but poetically nonetheless dwells man upon this earth.
42:38 How is it that we still need poetry when it seems we've resolved all our problems technologically? In any case, that we're resolving more and more of them through progress, isn't it? Rich in merit, but poetically nonetheless dwells man upon this earth. And I'll end on this line. For someone who seems to divinize nature, but who is so little ecological, I swear—but the shadow of night with the stars, what Kant calls the starry vault of heaven, all the same, one of the most beautiful things nature has to offer, isn't it?
The Eagle and Faust: "Where shall we want to remain?" 43:17 Inexhaustible. But the shadow of night with all these stars is no purer, if I may say so, than man, who must be called an image of God. I'll stop the quotation here from this text, quite remarkable, isn't it? Well, still in this series of descriptions that don't give much to see but a great deal to feel, here now is a more mysterious text called The Eagle.
43:55 So I won't comment on the mysterious parts, we'd never finish, since that takes nothing away from the beauty of the text, isn't it, but you'll find our theme again in the second part. My father departed for the Gotthard, a mountain in the Alps, where the rivers flow downstream, surely toward Etruria—yes, from the Alps rivers flow either north, the Rhine, isn't it, the Rhine which ends up in Holland, at Rotterdam, or south, the Rhône—the Rhine and the Rhône, RH in both cases, Leibniz had noticed this in an extraordinary passage on the etymology of place names in the New Essays on Human Understanding, RH, the RH found in rhythm, in logorrhea, everywhere there's a flux flowing, if you will, interesting, it comes from Greek, when Heraclitus says everything flows, perhaps his most emblematic statement, that's the RH—so, my father departed for the Gotthard, where the rivers downstream surely flow toward Etruria, so there it flows south, toward Italy, isn't it, the Po for example, sideways and by a straight path too, over the snow.
45:05 toward Olympus and Haemus, where Athos casts its shadow—you see all these Greek names—toward caves at Lemnos, but originally, they are the ancestors come from the forests of the Indus—he takes up here of course the modern history that was just then emerging, isn't it, history begins in the Orient, the same scheme as Hegel of course, but originally the ancestors came from the Indus, the Indo-Europeans, the notion barely existed then, it's August Wilhelm Schlegel, a contemporary of Hölderlin, who would be the first to speak of the Indo-Europeans—the ancestors came, the very first ones, though—so he tries to imagine, isn't it, you see, I was talking about wandering man, errant man, like the Wandering Jew, like the ghost ship, always wandering the oceans to expiate a sin, incidentally, the ghost ship—I remind you that, in the legend, he cursed God during a storm, and so, to punish him, God condemned him to wander endlessly on the seas without ever being able to land, every seven years he has the right to land and to find quickly, since it's time-limited, a woman faithful to him until death—that would put an end to his torments—but of course, that never happens, so, then—
46:16 this nomadic side, Hölderlin liked it, there are other poems called "Migration" by him, like that, imagine, following the latest historical discoveries of his time, isn't it, how we arrived at where we are, we moderns, us Westerners, this finisterre of the enormous Eurasian landmass, since once you reach the Atlantic you can't go any further, isn't it? Well, so, the very first one, though, the one who guided the march, took flight above the sea—now we understand the title better, The Eagle—took flight above the sea, deep in thought, and marveled, its royal golden head, at the secret of the waters.
46:53 When, red, the clouds smoked above the ark, and the mute beasts looked at one another—think of food, remember that, food—but the mountains rise, motionless nonetheless, it could be the Caucasus, the Alps, no matter. And here comes the line for which I wanted to quote this poem, it's not a statement, it's a question: Where shall we want to stay? It sounds simple, but it's oddly phrased. Where shall we want to stay? Well, we find again the theme of Edgar Poe from earlier.
47:26 We search the whole earth for the place where we'll be able to build, isn't it, the locus solus, the ideal landscape, the ideal setting, isn't it, so that our restlessness may finally be soothed and, instead of being the eternal wanderer and vagabond, we might there want to stay. Where shall we want to stay? But wait, this is the theme of Faust that inaugurates all of literary modernity. I remind you that Faust's deal with the devil is quite simple after all. On the devil's side, it's the simplest thing, we know well what the devil wants: the sinner's soul, and one more client in hell.
48:03 And on Faust's side, I promise to give you my soul if and only if—here's the condition—you make me feel a happiness so intense that I could see myself in it for eternity without tiring of it. To the point of being able to say, at the instant, now I'm quoting because before I was paraphrasing: "Verweile doch, du bist so schön"—stay, moment, you are so beautiful. I remind you that in Goethe—Goethe spent 40 years, yes, elaborating his Faust, this is the famous second Faust.
48:41 And the devil, of course, has a lot of work to do because Faust here embodies, embodies human restlessness in general. The devil, Mephistopheles, goes so far as to resurrect the beautiful Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of all time, according to the tales and legends, isn't it, to give her to him as a companion. Right? Still, that was the second condition of the deal mentioned earlier. Helen of Troy, no less. And he is still devoured by restlessness, never satisfied, until he grows old.
49:14 Grows old. So Faust, at the end, is in Holland, still with Mephistopheles lying in wait, watching for the moment he'll agonize so as to be able to seize his soul, so to speak. And now he becomes blind with age, blindness. But he hears, he hears a rumor, he hears—we're in Holland—that they're building something near a dike, or not far from where he is. He listens closely. And he hears that they're doing it to protect themselves.
49:44 You see, there's a continuity in what I'm saying. Here, it's not about being a degrowth advocate and returning to nature, it's the opposite—protecting oneself against the threat of nature. I don't know. And then, all of a sudden, Faust says—now I can say it—at the instant: stay, you are so beautiful. For I have understood that the solution is to live free on a free land. And the devil, in a rage, understands that he has lost the bet.
50:14 The solution is collective in Faust, who is by no means a Marxist, a communist, far from it. He's the one who says this terrible German quotation: "I prefer an injustice to disorder." Never mind, in his work—which matters much more than his thinking, isn't it, still—there is this magnificent conclusion of Faust to the question, where shall we want to stay, posed by Hölderlin in this magnificent poem. He answers: there, where one can live free, on a free land.
50:48 I'll finish this mysterious poem, it's not what I want, the strangest part. Rock is good for pasture, as if one could eat rock. I warned you earlier about the food. Rock is good for pasture, the dry for drinking—as if it were in the desert that one could finally drink. You know, all visions of God take place only in the desert. Rock is good for pasture, the dry for drinking, and the moist for eating. That's lovely, the moist.
51:20 Does someone want to dwell? Again, the same question. Does someone want to dwell? To find the locus solus, a place where one can finally remain—that says quite well what dwelling and remaining mean, whether it be by the stairs, or there where a small house leans at the water's edge. At the water's edge, it halts. So look at the extraordinary synthesis of Parmenides and Heraclitus. At the water's edge, at the edge of what flows, Heraclitus, Heraclitus's river, you never bathe in it twice, it's already gone by.
51:53 And there, does someone want to dwell, whether it be by the stairs, or there where a small house leans at the water's edge, it halts. And what you have is to catch your breath. We've been walking since the Indus, so now we need to catch our breath. Has someone found it—we don't know what he's talking about, the complement—found what? No doubt the place, what he has been seeking forever. Has someone indeed carried it from the depths up to the light of day, from the interior to the exterior, you see, from the depths to the visual—he finds it now in sleep.
German Song: Hesperia and the native turn 52:26 You see that we started from Rousseau's reveries, from Rousseau falling asleep by the lake. For where the eyes are closed and the feet are bound, there you will find it. A magnificent poem called The Eagle. Well, one more text, the last sequence from Hölderlin, for this time at least. We haven't finished with Hölderlin like that, I hope, before crossing back over the Rhine and ending with a text in the French language.
53:02 For we must not forget that there are still all these points of translation that may separate us from the text itself. I'll give the reference: page 883 of the Hölderlin volume in the Pléiade, admirably translated, either by Jaccottet, who directed the volume, or—very honestly, when he found that others had done it well—he left translations by André du Bouchet.
53:32 Anyway, there it is. So, German Song, the title. Song, like a song, chant, c-h-a-n-t, German. So why do I quote this one? Because we're going to talk about Germany—of abstraction, not at all. It's that it's extremely concrete at the level of setting, since that's indeed our theme. And here, morning landscape, not the Hesperian landscape, to use a Hölderlin term. Hesper is the equivalent, or Vesper, vespers—that's where it comes from.
54:05 It's the counterpart of morning, it's evening, Vesper, vespers. And the Occident, Latin root occire, means to kill, is declined—the Occident, there where the sun sets, where the sun dies. The Greek equivalent is Hesperia, H-E-S-P-E-R-I-A, which takes on very great importance at the end of Hölderlin's poetry. I'll say it quickly, even if it's a bit off-text, but Hölderlin—his name is of course tied like an obsession, and there is practically not a single one of his texts that isn't an allusion to the Hellenic song, to Greece.
54:43 And yet, the great event of his poetry, especially toward the end, is what he mysteriously calls the vaterländische Umkehr, translated as patriotic turn, to literally render Vaterland, the land of the father, the native turn, as it's also called—native, this turning—in any case, what's much clearer is that it consists in suddenly understanding, a bit belatedly, that after having glorified the Greek world, like Nerval—it's funny, that other madman—and reproaching Christianity and Christ, quietly or more or less explicitly, for having put an end to the Hellenic feast, to the world of day, to the world, to the miracle, in order to create the world of unhappiness, one must not forget that indeed the symbol of Christianity is not serenity, is not Apollo, but on the contrary an aborted being writhing in suffering on a cross—that is the symbol that is in the world of Christ, in the whole world,
55:53 and I recall in passing, to extend my little parenthesis, that in Hegel, the great division of the Great Logic into three parts—logic of being, logic of essence, logic of the concept—logic of being, the immediate world, I won't develop this, we'd still be here in six months, a year—the immediate world, at the end, the absolute synthesis, the logic of the concept, and in the middle, as mediating term, the logic of essence—essence is being but that is no longer there, precisely, it is not immediate being, it is essence, Wesen, in German—I cite this precisely, not to imitate Heidegger, but because here it's called for—for any German, for a schoolchild, it's the past participle of the verb to be; the term that designates essence in German philosophy, Wesen, means having-been, so it is being that has disappeared, that's exactly it, the kingdom is not of this world, that's the Christian world, right, we had to do with being, with immediate being, with the sources, the nymphs, the ocean, it is there,
57:04 when it's called Poseidon, Neptune, it is there, in the sea's flow, the innumerable laughter of the sea's flow, there—the nymphs are in the springs, that's immanence, not transcendence, not beyond, it's not a world where the gods have fled, abandoned us—in fact that's not very interesting, that's the world of essence—so, I recall what this vaterländische Umkehr, this native turn, consists in: in the end, he understands that it's less beautiful than the Greek world, no doubt, but deeper; he becomes more and more fascinated, in the end, since we're talking about landscape—the modern landscape, that's it, it's no accident that I chose a nocturne, Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, or a couple contemplating the moon, there are several variations on the same theme—it's not the Greek world, that, the nocturnal world; the Greek world is the one irradiated by the light of Apollo, it's the temple you look at from outside, the Parthenon, and not, as in the Christian cathedral, where there are very beautiful things to see outside, the gargoyles and all that, but it's especially inside that the essential lies, with the stained-glass windows that filter the light of the world—it's the light of the soul, of inner fervor, etc.
Reading German Song: the poet in the shade 58:14 There, that has been developed in Hegel's Aesthetics. German Song, then—everything I've just said is to comment on what German means here, the Hesperian turn, we're going to see it. When morning, drunk, inspiring, rises—so here, we're not in evening, not in decline, we're in the Occident, apparently, we're in morning, the solar world. When morning, drunk, inspiring, rises, and the bird begins its song, and the river hurls its rays, and faster—now this succession of 'and,' I'm marking them on purpose, it's the famous Hölderlinian sentence that seems never to end, and that always begins with the subordinate clause.
58:52 When morning, you see, the main clause remains suspended, I say this to build up the wait. When morning, drunk, inspiring, rises, and the bird begins its song, and the river hurls its rays, and faster, toward there, the rough path goes over the rock, since the sun has warmed it, and the desire in another land, the young people—there are fragments like this with gaps, white gaps on the page—and the gate awakens, it resumes, and the marketplace, and from the holy hearth-flames the red vapor rises—then, the main clause: it grows silent, alone.
59:27 Who? We'll soon find out. So, he keeps his heart calm in his breast, and dreams in the solitary portico. Yet, when—the subordinate resumes, then, this time, it is interrupted—sits in the deep shade, when overhead the elm murmurs to the brook that exhales coolness. And there is the subject of the whole sentence: the German poet. So, it's worth going back—German Song, we understand why—it's not, the central character of the text—in what sense the German poet, German, is a metonymy here, it's the modern world, as opposed to the Greek world, it's German in the Hegelian sense, you know that Hegel says the Germanic peoples, that's just as much Spain, it's just as much Andalusia—it comes from Vandal, a Germanic tribe—it's the Vandalusias, that means, and the Visigoths even stayed in the Maghreb before the Arab conquest, right—so it's German in the sense of the Western peoples who peopled Europe, Celts, Germans, all that, especially since it's a temporal notion and not a geographical, racial one, not at all, especially not in Hölderlin, whatever Heidegger may say,
1:00:38 once again, so it's in relation to Greek antiquity. So then, in the main clause, everything is calm—the poet, you see, needs to protect himself against the first part of the poem; the first part of the poem is an enthusiasm, a kind of explosion of morning, it's the dawn, it's not—with everything one can imagine—it's the yellow and blue awakening of the singing phosphorescences, as Rimbaud says in The Drunken Boat, right, well it's almost too much, needing to protect oneself—so let me resume now that we know this, so we can watch for it: when morning, drunk, inspiring—drunk, Dionysos, inspiring—rises, and the bird begins its song, and the rays, the river hurls, and faster toward there, the rough path goes over the rock, since the sun has warmed it—we're in a cold country—and the gate awakens, and the marketplace, and from the holy hearth-flames the red vapor rises—then, it grows silent, alone, all of a sudden, alone in relation to this crowd of things stirring, and silent in relation to this magnificent uproar, which is the awakening of the world, the morning of the world—then, second, then, he keeps his heart calm in his breast,
1:01:49 and protects himself against the emotion, and dreams in the solitary portico—you see, the portico shelters, there's something like an arch that shelters from the sky, from what is above—yet, when, then, sits in the shade, and now the shade comes to oppose everything that was hyper-luminous in the first part, the sun that is hot—then, sits in the deep shade, when overhead the elm—the shade of the tree—the elm murmurs to the brook that exhales coolness—until now we had the rock that had been warmed by the sun, you see, now there's coolness as opposed to heat, shade as opposed to light—he rehabilitates in the end the Nordic world—then, sits in the deep shade, when overhead the elm murmurs to the brook that exhales coolness, the German poet, and sings—you heard it—and he sings, when he has water, holily sober—not the wine of drunkenness, water—and sings, when he has water, holily sober, on his own paths, listening from afar, in the calm, to the song of the soul,
The spirit of the fatherland: speech and the collective 1:03:00 so, one might say, well, isn't he a bit cold, compared to what we've seen, to the Dionysian enthusiasm that the Greeks knew how to express—no, and yet, and yet, is his spirit too full, that is, despite all that, he still has an excess in his spirit—yet, smile at the simplicity of this man—smile at what? The stars—we started with morning, and suddenly we're in the nocturnal—yet, smile at the simplicity of this man, the stars, which coming from the prophetic Orient—astronomy was born in desert country, go see the stars in the London fog, it's not easy, the sky is exceptionally dry and clear in desert countries, or else, the only places I've seen the same profusion of stars as in the desert, incomparable, is high altitude, on a beautiful night, in the Alps, at 3000 meters—that happened to me in Switzerland, extraordinary—well, you see, but four times more stars than usual—yet, smile at the simplicity of this man, the stars, coming from the Orient,
1:04:10 prophetic, over the mountains of our people, they come from the Orient to us, always the same movement, migration, of history—history begins in the Orient and ends, so to speak, in the Occident—when, coming from the prophetic Orient, over the mountains of our people, they, the stars, dwell, and like the hand of the father resting on his hair on the day of childhood, then a crescendo begins—thus crowns, from the verb to crown, trembling, the center, a sign, the head of the bard, the poet again, when—and suddenly there is, thou, suddenly there is a person, it was absolutely unexpected here, there is a second person singular, a presence—listen carefully—when thou, thou who, because of thy beauty, until this day, hast remained without—unnamed, without name, word for word, that's how it must be translated—when thou, thou who, because of thy beauty, until this day, hast remained without name, O most divine one, O good spirit of the fatherland,
1:05:22 his word, the German poet's word, in the song—of our hands, we have never managed to find a name for—well, what is more beautiful? The collective—one must not take 'fatherland' here in the sense, right, of a paratrooper, right, or of the Nartoune division, it's the opposite, it's the collective, because what—why he had been fascinated for a whole time, like his whole generation, like Hegel by Greece—is because, as he says very well in our poem, no one was alone in bearing life, there was a collective sharing, indeed when Sophocles or Aeschylus put on a performance, the whole city had a rendezvous on the tiers, we weren't scattered as we are, I watch my TV series, another goes to the cinema, a third goes to an after-hours place, a bar—that's the modern world, where everyone is a bit in their own bubble—no one was alone in bearing life, so the weight of beauty, instead of driving one mad, as is the case here—me, Hölderlin, me, Nerval, I go mad—because in the modern era, we take full in the face what until now had been spared to others, because there was religion, there were answers that preceded the questions, if I may say so,
1:06:32 in fact, this content, one can face it, if one is not alone, if there are several shoulders to bear it—so let's stop with abstraction, and look how it's said, even more precisely, it's not just anything—so the crescendo first: yet smile at the simplicity of this man—it begins with an admirable nocturne—the stars, which, coming from the prophetic Orient, over the mountains of our people, they dwell, and like the hand of the father resting on his hair on the day of childhood, thus crowns, trembling, a sign, the head of hate—when thou, thou who, because of thy beauty, until this day, hast remained without name, O most divine one, O good spirit of the fatherland—and there, it's made explicit, from the point: his word, in the song, of name—I still haven't found a name, but there is no name, there's no name that encloses this, it's the word, the unfolding of the verb, of the logos, which alone can be equal to such beauty, and which can no longer be interrupted, as before there was—having an image that shows nothing, beauty that opens onto the edges of the very first image, but it's not to close, it's the opposite, it's as if there were a kind
1:07:43 of perpetual beauty which, if one crosses these edges, one finds oneself in a kind of endless unfolding, right, of the very first image—there, so I wanted to end the Hölderlin sequence of texts with this extraordinary passage called 'German Song,' right—his word, that of the modern poet, a poet who took modern beauty full in the face, without precaution, from the moment poetry, art in general, and poetry in particular, took over from the religion that the Age of Enlightenment had liquidated—that's the stake, right, that's the stake, that separates Rousseau from all the rest of the Enlightenment, that Rousseau understands the importance of a natural religion, unlike a dogmatic, positive, clerical religion, etc., quite the opposite, right, but something that returns to the etymology of religion, not other-worlds, in the sense that both Marx and Nietzsche—for once—rightly criticized, who agree on this one point, but in the sense of what binds, religare, of what binds men to one another, of what has collective stakes, contrary to the relativism in which people want to lock us up nowadays, it's not that, it's valid for you, it's not valid for me, it's valid for us,
1:08:53 for our culture, but for the Bororo or the Bantu it's different—everything that opposes us, right. So, once again, it's a pact, right, the word, when he says 'his word in the song of a man,' it's the word of the modern poet, it could just as well be Rimbaud, it could just as well be Mallarmé, it could just as well be Valéry, even Lamartine and Hugo, at the moment of their great success—every time the poetic—it could be prose, of course, right—achieves this newness that modernity expresses, that is to say, a content as absolute, let me sum up now, as the religious, but which is no longer enclosed in representation, in superstition like the religious, but which is brought back to its place of origin, which is the political here—good spirit of the fatherland, all the same, but in the noblest sense, not petty politics, of course—the collective, one should say, but precisely, a collective to bear, to bear the weight
1:10:03 of what has the most value for us. So I'll finish just the last four or five lines: when thou, thou who, because of thy beauty, until this day, hast remained without name, O most divine one, O good spirit of the fatherland, his word in the song of a man—there, a denomination that doesn't pass through a name, but through a whole indefinite predicate. There. So now I can move on to my last sequence, right?
Rimbaud and the return of nature 1:10:36 It's the text taken from the Illuminations, and it's far from being, on the one hand, one of the least hermetic, that's why I speak of Dawn, so one of the most used, including at the school level, but that doesn't mean we've gotten to the bottom of it, far from it, and it's not I who will do so, all its stakes, right? It's a text of absolutely staggering density of content, but for now I'm staying within the nature/landscape framework.
1:11:13 First, a small clarification: with Rimbaud, there's a great return of nature. Avant-garde poetry starting with Baudelaire moves away—it's rather the city, Baudelaire, it's Paris, the Parisian tableau, one of the chapters in Flowers of Evil. And Baudelaire says explicitly, in a letter to a friend, it's fairly well known, you know that I'm incapable of getting sentimental about vegetables. So Baudelaire is not at all eco-friendly, for him it's a world of order, there all is order, and beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure—there's no order in nature, it's a jumble, nature is a magnificent chaos, but it's chaos.
1:11:46 Whereas what he likes is pylons, columns—at one point he dreams of going to Portugal, he'd heard that people had banished plant life from Lisbon, and he dreams, I quote now, of a universe made of metal, marble and water. You can't get more artificialist, if I may say so, non-natural, and that's the case with many decadent poets following Baudelaire, whereas with Rimbaud, extraordinarily, nature makes a comeback. So there, I refer you to a video where I answer a question from Wilfried Pintier, if I remember correctly, who had been struck precisely by a hypothesis I put forward, that since the appearance of modernity and its expression, which is Romanticism—whether musical, pictorial, poetic, political, legal, a legal romanticism, a historical romanticism, I'm thinking of Michelet, etc.—
1:12:46 Well, since the explosion and emergence of the first Romanticism—the Germans speak of Frühromantik, the very beginning, before it became a rhetoric, sometimes to the point of nausea, the Romantic themes, when it comes from less inspired people in a second wave—there is an alternation between literary currents, I won't name them all here, but the common concept is that of seeking to escape Romanticism, to exorcise this emergence of modernity: these are the neoclassicisms, the Parnasse, for example, art for art's sake, etc.
1:13:25 Gide, Valéry—Valéry later in poetry, Gide in the novel—neoclassicism; Gide says classicism is a tamed romanticism, that says quite well what it means, it's above—being classical presupposes that one has had Romantic temptations, even that one has overcome them. So there's an alternation between this movement, a neoclassicism, which gets shattered by a return of the initial, original Romanticism. It's this alternation that characterizes, in my view, the entire history of art, literature and the fine arts since modernity.
1:13:56 Now of course, what confirms this most is the extent to which, starting with Impressionism in painting, the object dissolves. The contours of the object—I'm not inventing anything—dissolve. And from empirical objectivity all the way to outright abstraction, abstract painting, where there is no longer even—we don't say 'object,' we say 'subject,' for painters—where there is no longer a subject.
1:14:26 And beyond even abstraction, the blank canvas of a Malevich, a Kandinsky, etc., which corresponds to Rimbaud's flight, Rimbaud's silence, the flight to Ethiopia, to Mallarmé's blank page, the empty paper that whiteness defends. I mention all this in passing. And so the poem Aube by Rimbaud, the prose poem, since it's taken from the Illuminations, a collection of prose poems, is perhaps one of the finest illustrations of this resurgence of Romanticism that we thought had been set aside, relegated to the past, so to speak.
1:15:05 Nature—people were fed up with it, throughout the first half of the century they'd talked of nothing else: the trees, autumn, the forest, the woods, the little valley, the lake, Lamartine's lake, etc. And then it makes a comeback with tremendous force in this young kid. Is it a coincidence that he comes from the deep provinces of the Ardennes, over there? Just by the way. So, let me recall the beginning.
Dawn: verb tenses and the front of the palaces 1:15:36 'I have embraced the summer dawn.' Aube, that's the title, without an article. Dawn. 'I have embraced the summer dawn.' I draw attention, without yet exploiting it in detail, to the fact that it begins in the passé composé. That is, a completed, finished act. He tells us the result before giving us the detail. 'I have embraced the summer dawn.' That's the subject of the poem. So, what follows is how a human being manages to embrace the dawn. Which already presupposes that it's personified, by the way.
1:16:09 'I have embraced the summer dawn. Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces.' Imperfect tense. So we go from a summary—'I have embraced the summer dawn,' there's the program and here's how it began—and then there's the long duration, nothing stirred. Extraordinary moment. Rimbaud often returns to this moment, in letters too. He lived on rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris. He says he used to spit fruit pits onto the roof tiles he saw from his window, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, on the sixth floor, near the Odéon metro.
1:16:39 He said, at this unspeakable hour, the birds begin to sing. It's a capital moment for dawn in Rimbaud—not only in this text. In any case, there's a duration, there's a process. 'Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces.' Second remark, after the imperfect and thus the long duration of this mysterious process—here we're a bit short of Hölderlin's poem. In Hölderlin, the sun has already risen and displays its glory over all the objects it animates.
1:17:13 Whereas here, it almost precedes sunrise, it's when it begins to redden on the horizon or whiten, at the hour when dawn whitens the countryside, Hugo—in my view, by unconscious projection from the word Alba, 'aube' meaning white. I'm not sure the dawn is white, but there it is. Here we're a little short of that, and second determination: the front—that is, the light begins up high, which is quite well observed. So it anticipates what follows, because he's going to say afterward: the camps of shadow did not leave the road through the woods.
1:17:48 Down below, there's still shadow. 'Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces. The camps of shadow did not leave the road through the woods. The water was dead.' For now, the waters are silent, motionless, dead fountains, one might say, like Nerval. 'Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces. The water was dead. The camps of shadow did not leave the road through the woods.' Interesting, 'camps,' as if there were a kind of struggle. A camp is a somewhat military notion, between the light that begins to rise and the shadow.
1:18:21 The camps of shadow, the same dichotomy as in Hölderlin, did not leave the road through the woods. 'The first undertaking was on the path.' You see the progression of verb tenses. We started with the passé composé, 'I have embraced the summer dawn.' Then the imperfect, 'Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces.' That's on the side of what one sees of the object, in its solemnity. And 'the first undertaking was on the path.' Let me go back a bit. 'Nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces.' For the palaces, we said it's up high. Second, there's the imperfect.
1:18:51 That, we've said. Third determination: the palaces are luxurious. It's a noble notion. He's a vagabond. It's fitting that he doesn't live in a palace. That means this moment makes everything solemn. It could be a shack, it could be a suburban house, no matter. It becomes the front of a palace when it's lit by the dawn's sun. This theme of luxury, which is by contrast a strong reference to Baudelaire—there all is order, beauty, luxury, calm and pleasure—as if luxury here below, an earthly, material, worldly notion, in an almost pejorative sense, regained all its value when considered as a reflection of what Mallarmé calls the anterior sky where beauty blossoms, of an intelligible world, a higher world.
1:19:34 Right? Of a divine world, in the Hölderlinian or Platonic sense. A world one can think, but not see, cannot represent to oneself, if you will—not see, which one can remember, which can only be interior. So, 'nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces,' there's for the luxury. 'The first undertaking was on the path already filled with cool and pale gleams.' Now there we see everything.
From feelings to sensations 1:20:05 Cool and pale gleams. You couldn't be more impressionistic than this kind of notation. I contrast the impressions: cool and pale. Cool, that's on the skin. Coolness. Earlier Hölderlin spoke of the coolness of the brook and the rock, since the sun had warmed it. Same dichotomies. Now, what is there throughout the first half of the century, under Romanticism? Feelings. Hatred, joy, love, sadness, melancholy, gaiety, whatever—but feelings.
1:20:38 Here, no, these are sensations. The body is much more present. The modern landscape par excellence is one that is felt with the body. Rimbaud had—Rousseau had initiated the process. That's why I get a bit irritated when people say Rousseau is a precursor of Romanticism. A precursor, I'll never say it enough, and forgive those who've already heard this, is—if I take the term literally, at the level of its meaning—one who does a little of what the successors will do a lot. That's what a precursor is.
1:21:09 Now, Rousseau is no less modern than the Romantics who followed him. He is more so, because he anticipates, beyond Romanticism, what will emerge starting with Baudelaire and blossom in Rimbaud and his successors. It's the triumph of sensation of the body and of impression, as one would say in painting. Impression, a term that exists in English too, as opposed to feeling or ideas. There are ideas, or feasts, in a realist novelist. It's not the abundance of feasts, of bodies.
1:21:41 In Balzac, you can have 50 pages on all the objects found on the mantelpiece of his characters, of his character's apartment. I'm not trying to reduce Balzac to being an enormous photo camera or a movie camera. Balzac is a visionary. He is not just someone who has a good eye. He has vision. He doesn't just have sight. But, I mean, there isn't this insistence on the relation, this magnificent synthesis that the notion of impression contains in the modern sense, namely, romanticism. All right, now I'm going to periodize all this. I'm systematizing it like a syllogism.
1:22:13 First extreme, the self, the romantic self which is the subject matter of all romantic literature. As Hugo says, when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves. So, I can speak of myself as much as I want and I'm speaking of you at the same time too. Whereas, in classicism, as we saw with Pascal, the self is hateful, one never speaks of oneself, one speaks of general subjects, etc. Romanticism is the rehabilitation of the subjectivity of the self. Fine. But, the self of feeling.
1:22:43 Realism, which will arise in reaction against romanticism and which invests itself more in novelists than in poets, is fairly logical. The vast world, what Hegel calls the prose of the world, the real world that surrounds us, lends itself, can be put into rhyme, and corresponds much better, on the other hand, to novelistic narrative. So, realism is going to talk about the object rather than the self. In the general sense, otherwise it's reductive, I mean.
1:23:14 It's going to talk more about objective things, the ambition of a Rastignac, isn't that so, the disappointments of Old Goriot regarding his daughters, these are things well observed, if you will. These are realities that are expressed there, hence realism. So, it's not Balzac telling us about these states of mind. Whereas, from the very first words of a poem like Lamartine's L'Isolement, you often have: on the mountain, in the shade of the old oak, at sunset, sadly I sit down.
1:23:46 I'm not being ironic, it's admirably fluid, that's one of Lamartine's great qualities, it's fluid. Often on the mountain, in the shade of the old oak, at sunset, sadly I sit down. Except you don't see anything precise. It could be anywhere, that. Often on the mountain—which mountain? It's not the Alps, it could also be a hill—in the shade of the old oak, sadly I sit down. And he begins by sitting down. The romantics are tired, we'll see, they're always lying down. It was Rousseau who inaugurated this in the fifth walk, and there, stretching out full length in a boat that I let drift. Well, that's a profound thing, that.
1:24:18 Which will come to an end with Valéry in Le Cimetière marin—so neo-realism, end of the 19th century—who, at the end of Le Cimetière marin, at the moment when he's almost going to be swallowed up in the midday sun, in the Mediterranean sun, before the blazing sea, the sea, the sea forever renewed, struggles hard against this temptation of annihilation and says no, no, up, up into the successive age. One must try to live. We see that romanticism is over. It's the opposite of lying down and sitting. It's interesting, these echoes that texts make with each other without having consulted beforehand.
Gratuitous luxury: Rousseau against Voltaire 1:24:50 So, I insist on: fresh and pale gleams which I continue along the already crowded path. Crowded with what? With things that concern first the body: fresh and pale gleams. Colon: a flower which tells me its name. So, an olfactory impression, fresh, pale, tactile, fresh, visual, a flower, auditory, which tells me its name.
1:25:22 Progression, we see that the sun is rising more and more. I laugh at the blond wasserfall. At the wasserfall—we see that it's a kid who comes from the Ardennes, on the border between German-speaking and French-speaking areas. Wasserfall, that's waterfall, it's simply a cascade, a fall of water. I laugh at the blond wasserfall. So, that's it, the sun is lit up, which tousled itself through the pines. At the silvered summit, again the passé simple, I recognized the goddess at the front of the palaces.
1:25:54 Luxury. The blond wasserfall. Gold, the color of gold. At the silvered summit. It's the unfolding of luxury that the sun brings. Here I go back to Rousseau. I'm doing intertextuality on purpose. It's been noted that in Rousseau there is no color. The musicians, more than painters—I develop this comparing with Chateaubriand, so I won't go back over it. No, I'll talk about it now, I'll come back to it because there are exceptions. It's very rare for Rousseau to use colors, but there's one that stands out, it's the third letter to Malesherbes.
1:26:26 After describing his ecstasy walking in the forest near Montmorency, Malesherbes had asked him to detail a bit what exactly he found so appealing in the forest. One is nevertheless better off near a good fireplace with pretty women and Mozart's music, I don't know. It was so new, he didn't understand. Bravo, but bravo, who wanted Rousseau to explain himself and defend himself better. And Rousseau suddenly lets this out: the gold of the broom-flowers and the purple of the heather struck me with a luxury that touched my heart. Why suddenly colors, and not just any colors—the gold of the broom, the purple of the heather, the Spanish flag, blood and gold, blood and gold, the royal colors par excellence, imperial, the colors of sovereigns since forever, blood and gold, red and gold.
1:27:09 It's interesting, in my opinion, it's a kind of revenge on Voltaire. Voltaire had just written the famous poem Le Mondain, where he says exactly the opposite, his happiness at being in an artificial world, arranged—I'm not taking sides for one or the other, it's very interesting. Well, of course, Voltaire doesn't come close, poetically speaking, of course, to Rousseau's prose, on the other hand, it's very generous. But, he insists on the fact that Voltaire can only be happy amid luxury, whereas the other is a vagabond in the forest.
1:27:41 But, catching up—the gold of the broom, he didn't... ah but wait, there's a political stake here, which is that this is given to everyone. That's also a result of modernity. Here there is a heritage that belongs to each and every one and which cannot be billed, access to which is not reserved for those who pay. Mr. Voltaire can never take from me the color of this sun rising or setting. The gold of the broom, the purple of the heather, struck me with a luxury.
1:28:12 I have my luxury too, that means. A luxury that every proletarian has a right to, free of charge, which cannot help but make one think of Clouscard, who couldn't get over discovering, in reading the Apocalypse in detail, the Apocalypse of John, of the Apostle John in the New Testament, at the end, that the Apostle says when the heavenly Jerusalem descends onto the Earth, so when it ceases to be a transcendence, when the kingdom that is not of this world ends up being of this world, well, the reconciliation of being and essence, of presence and absence, of transcendence and immanence—here the Apostle says: and now let him who is thirsty come, let him who is hungry eat, let him who is thirsty take the water of life freely, and the Bride and the Bridegroom come, it's written in so many words.
Lifting the veils: dawn and the child 1:28:57 There you go. So, these three connotations of luxury—nothing yet stirred on the front of the palaces, I laugh at the blond wasserfall which tousled itself through the pines, at the silvered summit I recognized the goddess, all this in the passé simple. Then, I raised one by one the veils. And here we begin to understand how he personifies the dawn. It's a feminine entity, and like every woman, she is veiled. It's said that truth comes naked out of the well. In everyday language, in common metaphors.
1:29:31 Right? And to unveil means to remove the veil and not to reveal. To reveal is very strange, it's been studied. Here, to be honest, Heidegger is relevant when he shows that veiling and unveiling happen simultaneously. One reveals and hides, and continues to hide at the same time. To reveal means to remove the veil and at the same time, revelare, velum, that's the veil in Latin, all while veiling, as if one removed a veil but there was a new veil.
1:30:05 Right? I extend my little parenthesis on thinkers toward whom I'm usually more severe—Heidegger, or then poor Nietzsche, toward whom I'm more indulgent, but still. An admirable passage in Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, a kind of little prose poem where he imagines a dialogue between someone who says to him: traveler—it's him, the traveler, the Wanderer, Wagner's Wanderer, Wotan's—why do you make this face, why are you anguished? The other doesn't answer.
1:30:36 He offers him everything, do you want the country—I don't know—the country of vineyards, I'm using Aragon's expression, do you want this—he offers him the treasures of the earth, and the other remains indifferent, and at the end, he finally opens his mouth, the traveler, to say: what I seek is rather a mask, another mask—you see the connection with the veil—the important thing is to remain masked, veiled. I'm doing intertextuality again since a while ago, because Hölderlin says it in a poem: for God himself wears surprising garments—one thinks God, that's it, no more masks, that's the truth, even God, to protect us, isn't it, God himself wears surprising garments—harm befell Semele when, to satisfy, to express the wish that had been asked of her—no doubt she had been a good lover since Zeus had told her, I offer you whatever you want—imprudently, she answered: I want to see you in your splendor, meaning as you are in yourself and not metamorphosed into a genie, a swan, as with Leda, and of course she was struck down instantly, and ash in the bosom of the storm, says Hölderlin, gave birth to sacred Bacchus—so then I raised
1:31:46 one by one the veils—that's when this crescendo of the passé simple ends, and here we linger over this race between the narrator and the dawn, because to embrace her you still have to catch her, in the avenue, waving my arms—it begins like that, the arms, you embrace with your arms—so then I raised one by one the veils, in the avenue, waving my arms, across the great plain, that's the clay, where I denounced her to the cock, to the town—suddenly we move to the town, that's not at all expected, since the beginning we've been in the natural landscape, so to speak, the flowers that tell me their name, the waterfall, the wasserfall, apart from the front of the palaces, everything else was vegetation or natural, botanical settings—and here suddenly, to the great city where she fled among the steeples and the domes, running like a beggar, I chased her—she's trying to escape, I chased her, it's a hunt—at the top of the road, we've again left the city, near a laurel wood, you see the olfactory impressions suddenly appearing,
1:32:57 it's fragrant, at the top of the road, near a laurel wood, I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, and I felt a little her immense body—a bit of modesty, modesty, a poet, and of course, the dawn is a divinity, how can you enclose her with your arms, but still, an achievement—I'm saying this is a magician's poem, it's he who triggers the dawn—in my, going back, my first undertaking is in the path, it's me who triggers it, in the avenue, waving my arms, across the plain where I denounced her to the cock, it's he who makes the cock crow suddenly, the morning, right, running, you see, it's him, and so there are two characters here, the poet who is the magician, and the divinity he's trying to catch, I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, like the veils, it's rather immaterial, veils are a bit like gauze, a bit—I don't have it here, but like those Cranach paintings where there are naked women who are all the more troubling because they are dressed, not quite naked, in a fabric so transparent that it's even more erotic, I mean Cranach the Elder,
1:34:08 I wrapped her up in her gathered veils, as if with several veils it were a bit more, I don't know, substantial than with a single veil, and I felt a little—in other words, it starts to become a bit more material and substantial—her immense body, the dawn and the child fell at the bottom of the wood, so the fundamental couple afterward is that of the child and a visibly maternal goddess, the dawn and the child, the narrator is no longer an immense magician who triggers the process, he's a child, full stop—you know the ending—upon waking, it was noon, it begins with a passé composé, I embraced the summer dawn, it ends with an imperfect, it was noon, good grief, all this was a dream, a dream from early morning apparently, those delightful dreams one has in the morning—Freud studied the question, the famous happy dreams one has upon waking, just before waking anyway, which often serve as a screen memory, that is, to mask more fearsome dreams one had in the middle of the night, so that only a more positive impression remains, and no doubt a dream
1:35:19 born of an excellent sleep, an almost paradisiacal dream, upon waking it was noon, no doubt the vagabond fell asleep somewhere in a ditch, chilled with cold, and warmed up a bit and produced it—a very hazardous hypothesis I'm making, it's just to give an analogue, please, to his admirable text. So here, I go back to my story about the focal length that I mentioned in the introduction, with Rimbaud's Aube, we finally get there. There are first Poussin's Shepherds of Arcadia, a nature that we can no longer call purely exterior.
Crossing the focal point and Rilke's ninth elegy 1:35:55 There is Chateaubriand, yet this is the beginning of romanticism, it doesn't prevent it, it gives an enormous amount to see, we plunge into the real, exterior world, with all the animal and plant species one could want. Then, with Rousseau—and it's not only chronological, Rousseau comes a bit before Chateaubriand—with Rousseau, there's a tendency that will increasingly prevail. Up to a symbolist movement that makes Verlaine say, in his manifesto Art poétique, music before everything else, in poetry.
1:36:26 That is to say, an erasure of everything visual in favor of an inner feeling, to the point that there's nothing left to see. I've quoted enough, whether Rousseau—the uniformity of the continuous motion that lulled me—or Hölderlin—the beauty that wells up on the edges of the very first image, or in adorable blue, the metal roof of the steeple. I haven't even quoted a poem called Grèce where there's nothing Greek in it. As detail, it speaks of London, of the carriage that's coming, of the English Channel, of the beautiful gardens that spare the season on the channel.
1:37:00 It's a bad translation, canal, over the Channel. And at the end: 'but all around, the ocean lies flat and it blazes'—there's nothing left to see. Or again, forward, backward, always the last: 'we do not want to see, let ourselves be rocked like a swaying canoe upon the sea.' We can see it clearly here. All this is the extinction of the figurative, to borrow a pictorial term. It's the extinction of the determined outline, of the figurative, toward the infinity of the imago.
1:37:31 And then, thanks to Rimbaud, we cross through the focal point and once again a landscape unfolds, but one that is an interior landscape. We haven't progressed for nothing. Inside, in the nocturnal world of the dream—upon waking it was noon—there suddenly unfolds a superb fantasmatics. And that's it, that's where the real returns in modernity. And here Rilke expressed this very well, that perhaps the purpose of all poetics, not only poetry, not only prose, art, painting, music, is to interiorize what first presented itself as exterior.
1:38:16 As if this process, Er-innerung, as Hegel says, word for word, interiorization, the movement of interiorizing. It's a play on words because Er-innerung means memory in German. Memory. Once, the thing exists really, life; another time, it is interiorized in memory. And here it becomes almost a metonymy for all artistic creation. And that is what Erinnerung is. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window.
1:38:54 Here, we are in the world of objects, the exterior world. At most, column, tower. But to say it, understand it, is to underline saying. To say them—more than the things themselves ever dreamed of being in their innermost sense. Is it not the hidden ruse of this taciturn earth, when it urges lovers on, that in their feeling each and every thing should rise again transfigured? Here is the age of things sayable. Just now Hölderlin was speaking his word in the German Song, as if a logos would unfold indefinitely to express infinite beauty.
1:39:30 It's not everything that is the highest, the collective. Here is the age of things sayable. Here is their homeland. Language, speech, is their homeland. Speak and proclaim. More than ever before, things that can be lived fall away and pass. The objective things. For those that chase them out to replace them are soulless tools. Tools under crusts that will burst of their own accord, as soon as action escapes and otherwise limits itself. Between the hammers our heart survives, as between the teeth the tongue, which nonetheless, despite everything, remains the one that praises.
1:40:04 Sing to the angel. So this picks up on: say, proclaim. Sing to the angel. You, man, sing to a supernatural being the praise of the world. Not of the unsayable world. Stop doing metaphysics. Not of the unsayable world. For you cannot impress him with the splendor you felt; he feels it with greater sensitivity. He's a divine being. A disciple who knows better than you. You are a novice. So show him the simple thing in the universe. So yes, there is a real return.
1:40:34 That's my focal point. A real return, but transfigured by speech. By the fact that it is said. Sing to the angel the praise of the world. Not of the unsayable world. For you cannot impress him with the splendor you felt; he feels it with greater sensitivity. You are a novice. So show him the simple thing in the universe, which, having taken form from generation to generation, has become our own, and lives close to the hand and in the gaze. Tell him the things.
1:41:04 He will be all the more astonished. Well, I sound like I'm rambling a bit here, saying now it's interior, now the things are exterior. But these are not things in the empirical sense, they're things restored by way of a detour through speech coming back from within thanks to expression. One can only express what is within. He will be more astonished, as you yourself were, near the rope-maker of Rome or the potter on the banks of the Nile. Show him how a thing can be happy, innocent, and ours, how even a grieving thing, purely of its own accord, consents to take form, serves some purpose, or dies to become a thing, then, beyond, escapes with bliss into the violin.
1:41:47 Into a sonority. And these things, whose life is decline, understand that you praise them. Perishable, they entrust to us the power to save—to us, the most perishable ones. We are mortal. To us, the most perishable, the most fleeting—the things want us, deep within our invisible heart, to transform them into—oh, infinitely—into ourselves, whatever our nature ultimately is. Earth, he addresses the earth. Is this not what you want, invisible one, to be reborn in us? Is it not your dream to be, one day, invisible?
1:42:22 Invisible earth. We are far from contemporary biologism and naturalism which takes exteriority literally. Invisible earth. What mission do you impose, if not transformation? Earth, you whom I love, I want it. Oh, believe that it would no longer take your springs to win me over to you. One of them, just one, is already too much for the blood. A bit like Hölderlin earlier was made anxious by the dawn and needed to keep calm in his heart, in his breast, there, a single spring that can already match a spring.
1:42:55 Isn't that so? Believe that it would no longer take your springs to win me over to you. One of them, just one, is already too much for the blood. Unspeakably, I consent to you. From far off I come to you. He speaks to the earth. Always you were right, and your holy inspiration is death, our familiar friend. Look, I live. On what? Neither childhood nor the future diminish. An overabundant existence surges up in my heart. That is the close of this admirable Ninth Elegy of Rilke.
1:43:26 There, I'll conclude on this text because we see that landscape, apparently exteriority par excellence, never has as much aesthetic, poetic value—I prefer to put it more generally—than when it has first been present in a real way, then has disappeared into interiority, as in the passages from Rousseau and Rilke that I quoted, and when it finally re-emerges with all the richness of its detail, as in Rimbaud's Aube, but once again transfigured into the invisible.
1:44:04 audible—it's not invisible in the sense of mysterious, something we'll never manage to grasp, but accessible only through the communication of subjects among themselves, through the intersubjectivity of speech. So there you have it, here is the age of things sayable. There, I'll conclude with this admirable elegy of Rilke. And I'll come back to more pictorial, even musical examples next time.
1:44:35 Because it's time we did what we haven't done yet—we've projected paintings, we haven't yet listened to landscapes, no doubt the most beautiful there are, those that arise from music. There we have no limitation at all. There you go, in any case the most gripping, if I may say so.
