English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Balance sheet of the year: Delacroix between Poussin and Friedrich 0:00 Yes, I presume they gave you the program, I was going to say, like at the theater. Yes, this is the second-to-last time we'll see each other before the summer break. And, for once, this year we didn't develop one theme, but two. One, in the first trimester, we did the revolutionary thought of...
0:33 Where did my stand go? I had a stand. Didn't they take it over there? I had a stand, didn't I? I've already worn myself out holding it. Yes, it was the revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin. So, from October to January, roughly. Then, and we're still in it, it was Nature or Landscape, question mark.
1:04 Yes, that's right, thank you. It doesn't work, there's no support. Ah, okay. And so, some of you—and I say this cautiously, and it's almost occult, but because it's practically everyone—have the impression that I moved from one to the other, a bit like that, from one theme to another, the way you go from the sea to the mountains.
1:36 And, in fact, it seems to me that I had taken care, right, at the first session of Nature or Landscape, when we had the projection of the three paintings, if you remember, there was Poussin's on the far left, Caspar David Friedrich's on the far right, and in the center, Liberty on the Barricades by Delacroix, which was the only one of the three that was neither a landscape nor nature, but, as you know, a barricade in the midst of a Yellow Vests uprising, do we understand each other?
2:15 And I say this because you've all seen, here or there, like me, this painting with Yellow Vests superimposed onto the figures in the painting. During that workshop I had specified—it's no accident that I put Delacroix's painting in the middle—that's what created the mediation between the history of revolutionary thought, since after all it illustrates the Three Glorious Days in Delacroix's painting, and Nature or Landscape.
2:58 First articulation—I'm trying to spell out the summary you were given, which is a bit sibylline, I admit, a bit dense, a bit abstract. Well, that's the nature of a summary; you can't have it be both a summary and fully spelled out at once. This is the last time I accept people arriving late. Fine, that's obvious. So, regarding this mediation, that's what I want to spell out for you, you see; that's why I made a point of specifying from the very first lines that the two trimesters—the history of revolutionary thought on the one hand, and Nature or Landscape on the other—are not a mere juxtaposition; that's why I spoke of the sea and the mountains, but we're going to articulate them together.
3:49 I'll try to work on this in case I did it too fleetingly when I tried to indicate this articulation. First, a purely spatial mediation: Delacroix's painting, expressing a revolutionary sequence, sits in the middle, mediating—mediatingly—between an Arcadian, Virgilian, neoclassical... no, sorry, definitely not neoclassical, full-blown classicism, landscape, and a harsh, bucolic landscape, and a romantic, nocturnal landscape—so both a spatial middle and a logical middle, since it's a mean between two opposed extremes.
Rousseau, a shared reference; one does not leave romanticism 4:45 Second articulation—one we did make, but which perhaps I didn't dwell on enough—is that in both sessions we have a figure, well, a common initial reference; you might guess who. For the first one it's obvious. Yes, it's Rousseau. The first sequence is from Rousseau to Lenin, so it's Rousseau who inaugurates my sequence; and in the second, Nature or Landscape, it's with Rousseau that, for the first time, we get a relationship to landscape that has since become—if you will—the ordinary, commonplace modern relationship to landscape.
5:28 Not modern only in the romantic sense—unless we take romantic in the Hegelian sense, which is equivalent to modern—and not in the very narrow sense of what happened between the French Revolution and 1853, the failure of Hugo's Burgraves as the most fashionable Romanticism giving way to Realism and then Symbolism—no. Not in that very narrow, strict sense, which is also historically important, but in a more dialectical sense, in the sense that we have never left Romanticism—you know my thesis—especially not when we're anti-romantic; that's when we're most romantic.
6:07 When you're into Baroque music, for example, you know, and you say we need to get away from the bombastic, emphatic romantic interpretations of the Bach and Vivaldi repertoire, we need period-instrument versions—there's nothing more romantic than that historical fidelity. You see, I don't think Racine cared in the least whether his Greeks had historical accuracy; he stuck feathers all over them, dressed his actors up in Versailles fashion, and had them speak like: 'Are you looking for me, madame,' 'how charming,' 'might I be permitted'—do you really think Homeric Greeks talked like that? They talked like Marseillais, like Mediterranean people. Greek here is harsh, it's epic orality, and before that, without going too far, people addressed each other bluntly. So already this concern for historical truth—Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo—it's because it's topical, alas, it's unfortunate that I bring it up again, but you know very well that in Racine's time,
7:17 people hated Gothic cathedrals—Gothic, moreover, being originally, as you must recall from school, a pejorative term that appeared in the classical era, in the 17th century precisely, meaning 'made by the barbarians, the Goths'—it's ugly art. You have a fine example in Paris of the clash between the two styles in cathedrals: Saint-Eustache, at Les Halles—it's the patron of Les Halles. When you look at it from across the way, from the other side of Les Halles, from the Rivoli side, if you will, when you turn toward Rivoli, you have in front of you what Nerval, who used to haunt Les Halles at night—the only place in Paris where people don't sleep, it's a transgression, he descends into the underworld, these are his own images, I'm not joking, the hell of the living—yes, Nerval said it looked like the skeleton of a whale. That's really well observed. If you look at Notre-Dame with its trees—I mean its flying buttresses—Saint-Eustache with its flying buttresses too, I'll tell music lovers, moreover, that it probably has the best organ in Paris, and there are free concerts I periodically recommend to you—why am I talking about this?
8:23 Because it's a cataract of Gothic—the flying buttresses, the pointed arches, what I meant—but if you go around the front, which people rarely do because the entrance is a bit recessed and you mainly see the flank, the south side—if you go to the front, you'll see what used to be called, in the 17th century, a 'Vignola-style' portal. Vignola was an architect who found Gothic architecture so ugly that, over the top of it, in front, he built a facade with neo-Greek columns. You find this too at Saint-Gervais, if you know it, behind the Hôtel de Ville—an admirable cathedral, again perhaps among the most beautiful flying buttresses in Paris alongside Notre-Dame's, where the Couperins are buried—you have Couperin's tomb—and inside, likewise, you have colonnades, I suppose, to hide that Gothic barbarism, there you go.
9:13 So this concern for historical accuracy is romantic. I keep developing the point that there's nothing more romantic than trying to flee Romanticism. I don't mean this as an outright critique of Romanticism, but of fleeing it—that is, I'm offering an interpretation of this critique. Just as, I often repeat, there's nothing more modern than trying to escape modernity. As Rimbaud says of himself in A Season in Hell—though it could apply as a metonymy for modernity itself, since with that kid we have a fairly emblematic sample of modernity—he says, 'I never understood this rage he had for wanting to escape.'
From Rousseau to Lenin: Castro's Social Contract 9:55 To the point where one could say—I'm opening a small parenthesis, stepping back a bit—that there are perhaps two great traditions in literature, in their relation to the real. There's a literature of commitment—Sartre, say, at random—or I don't know, let's call it a literature of action, if you prefer, and a literature of escape. An escapist literature.
10:25 It's 'scappa,' as they say in Italian—he flees, he escapes, he 'escapes.' And this literature of escape is a late development; it begins, interestingly, after the French Revolution, at the very moment of modernity. There you go—these are things I want to recall in order to say that the figure of Rousseau, all of this, has been a predicate of my privileged reference to Rousseau, who is present in both trimesters.
10:59 Once as the one who initiates the process of revolutionary theorizing that goes all the way to Lenin—Lenin being a metonymy, it could just as well be Ho Chi Minh or Castro. Don't think I'm saying this arbitrarily. When Castro was in the Sierra, when he was still underground before taking power at the end of the 1950s, when Cuba was nothing but America's brothel—it was where prostitution, alcohol, and the Hemingway of the era, an excellent witness, were found—when he took to the maquis, he always had a book under his arm the whole time he was in the jungle.
11:48 It wasn't Capital, it wasn't Lenin's State and Revolution, it was The Social Contract. There you go, that's worth knowing, for reference. So Rousseau is the one who initiates the process we tried to approach in the first trimester, but Rousseau is also the one who initiates a certain relationship to scenery. You see, I didn't say landscape or nature—I'll come back to that—so as not to problematize their relationship just yet. Take, for example, our relationship to the mountains.
The mountain, from Madame de Sévigné to La Nouvelle Héloïse 12:20 It has now become commonplace to say that the splendors—the Alps, the Pyrenees, I don't know about the Himalayas, but also the Massif Central, even the Armorican Massif, the Monts d'Arrée, that's not bad. Well, let's go with mountains, seriously. I won't talk about Corsica. Madame de Sévigné, when she used to visit her daughter at Grignan—Madame de Grignan, for those who don't know, I remind you that's in the Drôme, so not very far from Orange, between Orange and Montélimar—same level as Grignan, one of the most beautiful châteaux in the south of France, just mentioning that in passing.
13:03 When she comes back, she passes through the Alps, she passes at the foot of the Alps, she has the curtain drawn to hide that horror. The Alps inspired—not only was it ugly, it was terrifying. We still find this in expressions like 'cretins of the Alps.' There's no one else like that here, you're fine—actually, a mountain man is speaking to you, after all, as a Corsican. Yes, because these were isolated people, they had goiters, you know, from insufficient sunlight.
13:33 And it's a kind of misery we can't imagine now, when there was no tourism, no ski resorts. So it was not a place of contemplation. And then along comes La Nouvelle Héloïse, right from the first chapters, when Saint-Preux, in the first quarter of the book, if you will—I don't have the letter number in mind—leaves Julie for the first time, leaves geographically, to go toward Annecy, where there's this famous passage that inaugurates, that initiates, the poetry of the mountains.
14:12 'I had left sad from my sorrows and consoled by your joy, which kept me in a state of languor that is not without charm for a sensitive heart.' I'm skipping ahead, and at one point he says, 'It was there, up on the heights, that I tried to untangle this feeling I was experiencing.' And he gives an almost clinical analysis of the purity of mountain air, which comes to blunt what is too sharp, too acrid, as he says, in passionate feelings. 'Acrid' comes from the Latin acer, meaning sharp, pointed.
14:42 You see, this was unthinkable before. 'They seemed to gather all the seasons in the same instant and in the same place'—nature, that is—'here, the ices of winter, there, the mists of autumn, and there, the cascades of spring'—an admirable passage. But it was all brand new. So when I tell you that Rousseau initiates a certain relationship to the world around us, it's not entirely arbitrary, all the while—and now I'll stop giving proper-name references—for instance, it's still the first two lines: how to articulate these two trimesters, revolution and landscape.
Industrial revolution and romanticism coming from the North 15:26 Now, nothing could seem more incongruous, more distant from one another, than a riot scene like the one Delacroix painted, and a wintry grove. So I'll stop giving proper-name references to recall that it's no accident that we have to wait for Rousseau, or at least the era of Rousseau, for us to acquire this relationship, more or less, to landscape that we all now have.
16:01 I think it's a commonplace of travel guides, of advertising, whatever you like. Namely, the Industrial Revolution had just occurred. It's no accident. It's precisely when nature begins to recede, when it becomes less threatening, and when it is instead the other way around—when man begins to become a threat to nature. It's not that it becomes the object of a cult by chance. It's not an accident. It's as Madame de Staël says, isn't it, that she...
16:31 I'll use a sexist word, I'll say she was a bit of a ditz. That's not me, that's a witness of the time. She had gone to see all the German intellectuals of the time, at the height of Romanticism. Every time, he'd say—every time, in the letters, after that one—oh, here we go, with her questions. No, no. I say this because Napoleon said that this woman must be kept within an outer radius, a radius of 100 km around Paris. The body—watch out.
17:01 No, Madame de Staël—this unforgettable phrase, I think, since next Monday I'm giving my lecture in Norway, I'll tell them: 'The light comes to us from the North'—you know that famous quote—just to recall that Romanticism, of which she is one of the very first analysts, begins—this is a whole other matter—in England, in Germany; our French Romanticism, officially of course, all of this is a bit artificial, academically we don't cut the age that finely, we say that French Romanticism begins with the publication of Lamartine's Méditations poétiques in 1821.
17:48 In 1821, mind you, all the great German Romantics are dead, or busy sinking into madness in who-knows-what tower—it's, well, the last one, of course. There you go, there's a gap: Romanticism is chronologically Nordic first—the light comes from the North, you see the paradox—but how, how can the light... it's Corsica, Sicily, the Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, and yet the light comes from the North. Yes, well, poetry began first in England, which inaugurates the Industrial Revolution, with authors far too little known in France—we have an enormous flaw that we share with the Americans, and yes, we do have some cultural parallels, whether we like it or not—for instance, we're both very bad at foreign languages, Americans and French alike. You can guess it's for the same reason: at different periods, the whole world spoke each of our languages—the known world, at the time when French was spoken, from Brittany to Moscow,
18:58 and I'm not even counting Turkey—when Nerval arrives in Istanbul during his Voyage en Orient, all the newspapers are written in French, in Turkey, which was never a French colony. There you go: Catherine of Russia invites Diderot, Frederick of Prussia invites Voltaire, Christina of Sweden invites Descartes—yes, and the 'French doctors' didn't start with Baudrillard in California. And then the United States, now, because of their power of course, the whole planet speaks English. That's why in Germany they say a Frenchman is a short gentleman with a mustache who knows only one language, who speaks foreign languages badly. So we struggle—whereas the Russians, for instance, know French literature very well, if you ask us to name, say, an Englishman,
20:08 we'll say Shakespeare, then maybe Byron—I'm talking about England, I won't even reach for Byron—but you know, to cite, at the time when the romantic sensibility was starting to emerge, you have someone like Wordsworth, for example, who wrote a poem every schoolchild knows, the Daffodils, since we're in spring—'I wandered lonely as a cloud'—it's remarkable—'when all at once I saw a crowd of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze'—did you notice that rhythm? There's nothing like it in French. French, forgive me, I'm making a detour, French is a language with equal stress, that's very rare, very weak in rhythm—'the Principality of Monaco,' ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, there's no stress; whereas when you say 'popolo' in Italian, there's a bounce, you feel it there—and in English, 'bust out'—yes, so these languages play on rhythm in their poetry, and since we don't have that, we play on harmony, on assonance,
21:18 alliteration, and so on. There you go. But mainly I wanted to tell you about one of those who went furthest at the time, a Romantic who is both English and German in spirit, but who was already nocturnal in a romantic way—Coleridge. I'm sure some of you know him, and in particular a huge poem you should know—I mean his most famous one, you'll certainly find it on Wikipedia—the 'Rime,' which is a bit hard to translate—the Rime of the Ancient Mariner—'le dit du vieux marin,' 'l'ancien marin'—'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'—'the Ballad of the Old Sailor,' by Coleridge. I was telling you, this is quite extraordinary; you see one of the very first instances of the dichotomy of red and white, the likes of which hadn't been seen since Perceval, the Welsh knight, by—help me out—Charles d'Orléans, what's his name, someone other than me—Chrétien de Troyes, thank you, Chrétien de Troyes, thank you very much—yes, because there's an albatross
African night and the hearth outside 22:28 pierced by a crossbow bolt in the flank—red and white, like the swan that Parsifal skewers, right at his very entrance on stage. So it's no accident that nature becomes a spectacle—that's where I'm heading. For the African peasant, it's not a spectacle, it's a terror. How many times have drivers told you out there that you need to hurry back because you mustn't get stranded at night in the bush.
22:59 We understand them—it's terrifying, the spirits, and so on. I'm not even talking about the animals. And when they arrive, when you get within 10 km of the capital, and a bit of asphalt starts appearing, they're relieved. How many times has one told me: 'Wait, asphalt, it's soft?' 'Asphalt, it's soft?' I'll tell you, the environmentalists—it's not me, it's my driver, well, the project's driver. And then the lights, the streetlamps, there you go.
23:36 Come on, let me insist further on this example, because whoever hasn't seen the African night... I'm serious here. I love nature in the African night myself. It's like a philharmonic orchestra. But I'm talking about those tiny villages, really small villages, even very close to the capital—I'm thinking of Niger or Mali. I'm not talking about very large centers like Abidjan, but about certain metropolises where the moment you're out of the city, you're deep in the heart of Africa. And little fires that light up, literally, fires around which the whole village gathers.
24:12 Why am I bringing this up? Because that's what we call a 'hearth' [foyer]. You'll say, we don't need you to tell us that. Yes, except—look at the paradox—for us, a hearth is the inside. Right? It's not really the children in front of the fireplace or the TV. A hearth. Even now, in the countryside, people say, 'You see over there, there must be about 20 fires left down there, you see, in the valley.' That means 20 houses, 20 families, 20 hearths. Whereas, in the African bush, the hearth is what's outside.
24:44 Because there's nothing inside the huts. People only go there to sleep. There might be a little talisman under the bed, at most. It's a bit sacred. But there's next to nothing. The whole population gathers outside. It's moving. When you see these fires being lit as night falls, you understand they don't have the same relationship to nature. They're not making poetry at that moment. So there you go: nature had to retreat before technology in order to begin to be—that's the articulation, isn't it?
The surface and the language that distinguishes natural and artificial 25:20 So it begins to be the object—before being an object of admiration—of mere contemplation. And that's where I move to the second part of my summary. This contemplation has as its object what we've ended up elaborating as a concept: a surface. You remember, that's my story about the reflection in the water. I had spoken of the sun reflecting on the water.
25:51 I had thought of the sea because there's a very beautiful poem by Baudelaire that was quoted to me that day. A poem he must have written in Honfleur. You know, quite a few of Baudelaire's poems take place there. That was the sea for the Parisian bourgeoisie—Normandy, at the time. 'I love in your long eyes the greenish light, sweet beauty, but everything today is bitter to me. And nothing, neither your love, nor the boudoir, nor the hearth, is worth to me the sun shining on the sea.' But it could just as well be in Paris, on the Seine.
26:26 The boudoir is magnificent. And I had told you, this liquid gold—if you take a glass of it, I'm sorry, and you hold up the glass, you're very disappointed because you find yourself looking at something colorless; the magic is gone, because you've crossed the surface. Because you thought you were dealing with a nature, a universe, when in fact you were dealing with a surface. That's why, at the start, I didn't want to make...
26:57 That's why I call this the first moment, the conjunction. I didn't want to set up an opposition between nature and landscape. Because to be honest, in philosophy, you have to start with ordinary language. Ordinary language says just as easily, 'did you see the scenery,' 'did you see the landscape,' 'what a nature,' after all—all of this is equivalent in everyday usage, and that's not a big problem. But if we leave it at that level, we end up—and this is why I speak of a crisis of logic here, a crisis within words, logos, loquor, I speak, soliloquy, monologue—we end up in a logical crisis if we're not careful.
27:34 Why? Because what's natural in language—it's not up to us to decide language—because if it were up to each of us to decide the language, then I could say to you, 'pass me the sugar,' meaning 'I'm passing you the salt,' and I pass you the salt. Do you agree? We still need a shared meaning. Language is precisely that: what unites us. That each person has their own speech, that I have mine, my accent, my verbal tics—everyone has their own. Speech belongs to the individual; that's a reminder I'm making.
28:04 Language [la langue] is a collectivity, and speech [le langage] is like a double magnitude, so to speak. There are differences of extension, as one might say in mathematical logic. So if I place myself in the middle term, between the universality of speech, the human race, and the singularity of speech proper to each individual, you have the language. I recall that only speech actually exists, just as with the highway code, only a singular way of driving exists, but the highway code, we transgress it fairly often in practice, we cross a yellow line because there's a tractor, there's nobody coming the other way, normally it's forbidden, but we want to do it.
28:53 So singular driving is never quite equivalent to the code. In the same way, I make mistakes in French, we all make mistakes in our language, nobody speaks their language perfectly without making mistakes. And a German told me that Germans make many more mistakes than the French do in their own language, because there are agreement problems with masculine, feminine, neuter, which aren't obvious. Well, there you go. So all that to get to what?
29:23 To say that language opposes the natural to, among other things, the artificial. So there, we can no longer keep saying, yeah, landscape, nature, what man has made, what he hasn't made, it's all the same thing. No, it's not the same thing. You give a bouquet of flowers to your fiancée, they're plastic flowers, she found that strange. It's not the same thing. So, since we oppose nature to artifice, let's go, in artifice, I analyze, there's a word, there's an "art," which is the translation of the Greek technè.
30:05 You see where I'm getting at? Because the Greeks, unlike us modern romantics, don't oppose art to technique. We, we're romantic moderns, we say, ah, he makes lots of mistakes at the piano, he doesn't master the instrument, but doesn't he play beautifully, how inspired he is, what an artist! Yes, all right, fine, all the same, there mustn't be too many mistakes. And conversely, when Bach was asked how he managed to make music with such perfection, there are very few interviews with him, practically none, he's not a modern man, precisely, he's a man from before the French Revolution, very self-effacing, he answers, I worked a great deal, and I applied myself well.
30:54 It's not over, the most stunning part is coming: whoever applies himself as I did will achieve as much. Humility, work, and on top of that, transmissibility. Whereas any rocker or rapper nowadays tells you he's the genius of the century, and that it can't be felt, it can't be transmitted. And yes, if you pay 200 euros for a lesson, after waiting a year for the chance to have a masterclass with some fashionable pianist or violinist, and in front of the keyboard you can't manage to play the scale going up, and you say, ah well, my dear boy, either you feel it or you don't.
31:34 like that, I arrive, it's expensive all the same. The good teacher is the one who says, you move your thumb after the third finger, and there, bang, you've got your scale, that's honest. There, I'm closing this didactic parenthesis to recall that language makes us distinguish the natural from the artificial. So our problem should be clarified: we were in the conjunction, for the sake of convenience with everyday language, of nature, that is, landscape, that is, décor, and now no. We're going to reserve the word nature for everything which, outside us, bears no trace of human activity.
Defining nature: what man has not touched 32:11 For example, I don't know, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, the Sahara desert, the ice of Antarctica, the high mountains, that is to say, true nature. And, generally speaking, watch out, I reminded you earlier about the surface, everything that is 2mm below what seems to us to be the landscape. You see? That is to say that even in a very humanized, agricultural landscape, with fields and so on, when you go beneath it, you know, you don't have to go far, nature is there.
32:42 So there, it seems simple. We take the universe, we remove every trace of human activity, we get nature, and as soon as there's a trace of human activity — a trace which could not occur if nature weren't already there, don't make me say what I haven't said — a trace inscribed within an already-there which is nature. But someone as little of a naturalist as Marx did not hesitate to say that, until further notice, we have never managed to catch fish in waters where there were none.
33:14 nature is part of the process of production. So, that being specified, things being neatly separated like that, it's not so simple. Because even when I look — let's go, I come back to my examples of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado or the great erg of Bilma — do you know where Bilma is? Does anyone know? I feel that Anne knows. No? You, you know.
33:44 Well yes, I know you're personable, but you haven't been to Bilma. Nobody goes to Bilma, or if they do, they don't come back. There's a penal camp there. I met someone who had been in that camp who told me it's a camp with no walls, nothing. Do those who escape come back right away? They find themselves in the middle, in the middle of the desert. And how — someone made the point that there — no, sorry. Yes, it's one, one of the largest expanses of dunes, one of the largest ergs, as they say in Arabic, of the Sahara.
34:18 Well, even there, the look I have upon this desert when I get out of my 4x4 with a cooler inside, water, bordeaux wine. We did that, didn't we, Jean? Didn't you have the bordeaux? You had water all the same. Yes, yes. With sweat? No, no. It's because dad prevented me from being able to tell this anecdote.
34:48 All the same. I'm going from Niamey, the capital of Niger, to Agadez, capital of the desert. Now, watch out, you have to check your car carefully and everything. And then, if you have jerry cans, because there, for 400 km, there's nothing, there's no gas station. Well, we're warned, that's fine. And there you are, in the middle of the desert. A mirage, I see an unfolded table, a 4x4, next to it, a white man at the table, a bottle of champagne, an ice bucket, ice cubes, with the air shimmering in the heat, like that.
35:18 It's not possible. So much time, you know, the heat crushing down outside, it's a mirage. I get out, no, no, and there I find — what? A Corsican. But it's not jokes, you can't invent that, it's something too silly to invent, in Africa. Even more, even more, there it is. His name was Lecca, he's known in Niger, he was the technical advisor to the first president of independent Niger, Mr. Lecca, a great administrator. He was retired, but he couldn't help coming back to Niger, I don't know why. And with his 4x4, as long as there was still road ahead to look at, he would have his champagne right in the middle of the desert, with a butler in a white uniform with gold buttons, who waited for him to finish his aperitif.
36:00 It's extraordinary. We don't have the same relationship to looking at the dunes in that situation. We don't have the same relationship as the one who has little girls — they're often shepherds, I've talked about this, sometimes also boys — who come out, who spring up from the rocks, kids, they're the witnesses. As soon as you stop, you see that the desert, which seems like nothingness, there's always someone who comes out like that, with a slightly dirty 5-liter plastic jerry can, because he sees a 4x4, so a Nigerien minister or a white man, anyway, there's money, and so, someone who lives by fetching water.
36:38 I've already talked about this in relation to desire and need, because I must recall, so that we don't have a reductive vision of these people, far from it, that they teach me a profound lesson in humanity and anthropology, since before drinking, thirsty as they are in that setting, they pour a few drops on the ground for the gods. It's a way of showing — to me, who also has money — that I too am a human being, I can step back, take distance from my needs, in the portion set aside for the gods.
Anachronisms and the fall of bodies: the concept of matter 37:11 But there, it's not the same gaze. So, you see, all this is apparently a long detour, not at all, it's meant to stay at the center of our articulation of the two terms. The two terms are the genesis of our modernity through this double event constituted by the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution. I say this so that we learn to look at what came before as foreign.
37:44 I often find that we place ourselves too much on the same level, especially in films that want to have historical resonance, but these aren't films set in Marie-Antoinette's time, etc. Let's take for example — I saw a cult film, Amadeus, you see, for example, films about Mozart, the calls of the Hungarian, Milos — what's his name — Forman, yes, that's it, Amadeus, there, yes, I'm not judging it as a film, I don't know, I don't have the qualities you have, that some say I'm an excellent film buff, but the actor, I can't take him seriously from the start, he reeks of California, yes, Mozart, that's not it, maybe California is better, I don't know, I'm not saying, but that's not Mozart, that's not an 18th-century Austrian, that's a Californian, likeable, but there, we see that he went, he went clubbing until three in the morning, that's not Mozart. Mozart had enormous fun, maybe even more than him, but not in the same way, there, so there's a lot of anachronism in our vision of the past, we cannot
38:54 help doing a bit like what I said Racine did earlier, when he had his Greeks act like courtiers of Versailles, quite simply, there you see, so the need for historical truth I alluded to earlier, saying it was typical of Romanticism, it's not enough to feel this need to actually be within history, it's still a fantasized history, in a famous term Marx used, a famous term, Robinsonade — there, so I wanted to go as far as this disjunction, so back to it: firstly, in conjunction, nature, landscape, décor, we can take the three words for one another; then, disjunction: within what surrounds us — this is the last time I use this periphrasis, it's to arrive at a term that will satisfy it, which I haven't brought out yet — within what surrounds us, there's a part that presupposes human activity and a part that is virgin of all human activity, and it is to this latter
40:04 that we must reserve the term nature, natural epithets, and the rest is therefore artificial, cultural, historical, spiritual, depending on whether it's Hegel, Marx, or Lévi-Strauss, it doesn't matter, they at least agree on that, on the cut. But is the cut in matter or in form — I bounce the problem back, we're doing philosophy today — I forgot to sum up: I recalled that language obliges us to call, using different, even opposite epithets, natural flowers and artificial flowers.
40:43 but, it's still something I've already — it's an example I often use, but I'm tightening it here for another purpose — if we go up to the fourth floor of a building and drop two bunches of flowers, one of plastic flowers and the other of natural flowers — well, two bouquets of flowers, one plastic and the other natural — do both fall according to the same physical law, yes or no? A physicist, he hides — I'm told it's vulgar — but the physicist doesn't want to give it up.
41:24 Both fall with a half of g t², I didn't say g t⁴, which proves indeed that this law is not a law of nature. I myself say it, it's a law of nature, the law of the fall of bodies, by abuse of language — everyday language makes the conjunction, but that's... You see the logical crisis I'm talking about in the outline, it's right there. Since it also applies to artificial flowers, this means it's not merely a law of nature — so what's the concept that brings all this together?
41:55 Good. Yes? It's you, Étienne, thank you. Yes, yes, bravo, the concept of matter. Now there, we're starting to speak with rigor. Oh, we're not in mathematics. It's not a univocal rigor. We're not in physics. We're in language. There too, I insist, I'll never say it enough. Never will we be able, with language, to attain the rigor found in the terms of a mathematical equation or algebraic calculation.
Language is not made for rigor; the essence of philosophy 42:29 Never — not because language is powerless to do that. Careful, that's not what I mean, that would be a misunderstanding. It's as if you said, this screwdriver is worthless, it's powerless to drive in nails. It's not made for that. It's not made for driving in by hammering. It works by turning, not by striking. Language, it's not made — why? — for what mathematics deals with.
43:01 Mathematics wants to make statements that hold everywhere and always. Whereas language, we use it to seduce, to threaten, to forgive. Ego te absolvo, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Yes, some even speak to remove sins, absolution. You see? Language is extraordinary, really. But none of that is knowledge. The goal, there, is not knowledge.
43:34 To condemn, too. Condemn, absolve, threaten, seduce. So, we must avoid this misunderstanding. Yes, language has no rigor, because rigor supposes that we're going in the same direction and that one goes further than the other in that direction. That's not at all the same direction. There, I warn you in a general way, I remind you, as philosophers, regarding all these very common words, I tell you, philosophy is not about the most important, most treacherous technical terms, called "sublated," "outdated."
44:15 For one car to overtake another, you have to be quite sure they're going in the same direction. There was a whole controversy, even within the French Communist Party, about ten years ago I believe, over whether class struggle was an outdated concept, whether certain aspects of Marxism were... We must recall all the same that for car B to overtake car A, a necessary condition is that it doesn't stay at its level.
44:49 And if Marxism is outdated — in that case, if car B, which is ahead of car A, is overtaken, that means car A is even further behind. And since Marxism is a critique of capital, if Marxism is outdated, perhaps — I'm not deciding this for now — in that case, capital, even in the time it existed — well, we can do a bit of logic sometimes. But I'm not sure that either one is outdated yet.
45:24 So let's be careful with these expressions. Language will never have the same rigor, not because it's powerless and tries but fails to achieve it — sometimes it does succeed. Many philosophers, even great ones, have forgotten that the essence of philosophy is not in the cognitive. You see, this summing-up allows us to recap a little.
45:58 The essential thing, when we do a summary — I won't separate out the details — of what we've seen since the beginning of our workshops, more than five years ago now. I'm thinking of what I called the nature and origin of philosophy, as anyone beginning an introductory course to what is proper to this discipline would. And we had concluded from this question — what is the nature and origin of philosophy — that philosophy begins not when it is deep thought, since we made it begin with Socrates, well, all the same, there is Chinese, Hindu thought of a dizzying depth much earlier than ancient Greece, than the Chinese.
46:45 The Tao, Brahmanism, people think. And the Egyptian Book of the Dead is even older. There's the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol. And yes, I even speak Sanskrit, that's all I know of it. These are not philosophies, they are deep thoughts. The language is rich, we must take advantage of it to make distinctions. It's spirituality, thoughts.
47:15 So, yes, the specificity is when the question no longer concerns things or the world around us. We didn't wait for Socrates for that. Neanderthals already asked questions. But, on the words that designate this reality, that's when the concept kicks in, we start replacing "what is it," if you remember well, I'm going a bit fast because I've often repeated it, the first enclosure within which we're going to delimit, define, limit, finish a little the specificity of philosophy.
47:51 And the second, the more important one, is that the question of values is more important than that of knowledge. I didn't say that the question of knowledge doesn't... doesn't come into account. I'm saying that — and here I sum up the essence of philosophy — philosophy is an attempt to answer the question: what must I do? And there, I'm not in the cognitive, I'm not in the theoretical, I'm in the practical. But answering it, and that's what is philosophical, because "what must I do?"
48:23 is café-counter talk, everyone has their opinion. You know, after a football match, they say 60 million French people, 60 million team selectors, everyone says to themselves, I would have put Griezmann in place of... Ah yes! So, what is proper to philosophy is not merely to try to answer this question, it's to want to answer it with answers stated in a universal and necessary manner, that is, in the mode of knowledge and not in the mode of opinion.
48:57 And there, philosophy seems to lock itself into a terrible contradiction. I've just told you, taking my time, that language was not made for the univocity found, for example, in scientific language, mathematical language in particular. Now I tell you, yes, but the goal of philosophy is to achieve this univocity, while still remaining within the words of everyday language, because we've certainly seen — we saw a Spinoza in the Ethics produce a treatise more geometrico, as they say, resembling the customs of geometry, the way geometry proceeds, with definition, axiom, corollary, and at the end, QED — it had to be demonstrated that it's with everyday language, and there's a trick there.
49:43 Kant saw this very well. It's often been said that with Kant, philosophy was out of metaphor. That's profound, we'll have to note that. And so, yes, the words of everyday language — I keep taking the same examples because they speak to everyone — but if I say "the day rises," I'm not saying something outrageous, I have the right to say it in the morning, but still, I'm not doing astronomy there.
50:13 In astronomy, the day doesn't rise, it doesn't set, it's not like someone getting out of their sheets, like the sun coming out of the clouds. I say this because "crêpe," "crépuscule" (twilight) means little pancake, little veil, it comes from "voile," crêpe, in etymology. All that is metaphor, meaning we're in poetry when we say "the day rises." I don't mind, we understand each other. When I'm still lying down, the day rises — that makes me think of an anecdote which I'll tell you because it's fitting.
50:46 Let's see, I had a restaurant-owner friend whom I lost, to cancer, who had a Moroccan cook, Rachid, who slept right near the restaurant. He was worried because in the height of the season, at 11 o'clock he still hadn't seen him, he's not yet at the stoves, so he goes to see him. I say, Rachid, it's 11 o'clock, are you still lying down [couché]? Rachid answers with that Mediterranean cunning, that's good: "No, René, I'm not lying down [couché], I'm stretched out [allongé]."
51:21 You see that everyday common language isn't made for knowledge. Truth, reality. So it's worth recalling this: the priority of philosophy is not the cognitive. But, in order to answer its practical, non-cognitive question about values, it wants to answer, in trying to answer the question "what must I do," it wants to do so in a cognitive mode.
51:54 This is the contradiction that makes every philosophy start off limping. It wants to imitate the rigor at work in what today are called the hard sciences, the sciences of nature — formerly, we've seen that this deserved to be nuanced, because we just saw with my example of flower pots on the fourth floor, that it's the sciences of matter which apply just as much to natural matter, in the sense we said nature is what surrounds us once we remove what man has made, as to artificial matter.
Nature, a concept born of artifice; realism and idealism 52:28 That has nothing natural about it, but when it falls, it's the same law that makes the moon fall to the earth. Provisionally. There. So, you see, we started with a disjunction, and the more we reflect, the more we move away from this disjunction between nature and landscape. All the more so since, for those who know a bit of the Italic languages, how to put it, Mediterranean languages in particular, "paese" means village.
53:02 so it's precisely there that nature stops and we enter man's domain. You see, so as not to simplify anything. Paese means landscape entirely. And it's because of... this... rather from than because of this notion of surface that we became aware, I don't know, of the illusion we had of seeing that behind the word nature there was a reality.
53:36 There was matter. That's for sure, whether it be natural or artificial. But, if — I ask you to dwell on this example — if artificial flowers had never appeared, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't feel the need to specify that these are natural flowers. I'm suggesting that we only started specifying that this is natural once we were already in the artificial and in history.
54:09 In other words, that nature is a creation of man, or the concept of nature. I didn't say the reality that lies behind it. Otherwise I'd be in metaphysical idealism. Do you know what that is? Come on, we'll no longer — I've never done this, so let's take advantage of it, because all philosophy teachers do this. I'm going to do it by trying. You have a vocabulary notebook in your head or at hand. I never present a definition without saying what it's opposed to. Always in pairs of opposites, because you see green better against red than green against turquoise.
54:41 Turquoise, I've never known whether it's blue or green. So, idealism is what's supposed to be opposed to realism. So, -ism, in both cases, then a position of thought for which — this is valid for both, from there it changes — for realism, for which the world around us exists objectively. That is, if I disappear, the world continues to exist. And that, realism, it's not complicated. It's more or less everyone's way of thinking.
55:13 the mood is that we're going to die too, just as this world exists. All that, feasting while I'm suffering, it's sickening. It's Jacques Brel's song. It's hard to die in springtime. The Dying Man, what's that song called? That's it, The Dying Man too. Women are faithful to every proof. Yes, because he said there is only love. Well, come on.
55:46 Idealism, a position of thought for which — this is the reverse — the external world is an illusion, is only my representation. In fact, only I exist. That's already more unexpected, isn't it? For which only thought exists, isn't that so? What we call being, reality, is only a representation of thought. There's a title that illustrates this perfectly in a philosopher, it's Schopenhauer, who wrote — it's his most famous title — The World as Will and Representation.
56:22 Right? There's only one thing, which is the will. But it cannot represent itself to itself. Here, take spotlights, there are some here. It can light up everything else, but not itself. Unless man places a mirror in front of it. Ah, reflection. So, the world — only the will exists, but it never grasps itself directly, it only grasps itself mediately, not immediately, in the mode of representation.
Capital, May '68 and liberal-libertarian recuperation 56:56 There we go, I'm leading us to tackle concepts that appear a bit further on in the outline, aren't there? I ask you to refer here to... I'm a bit further along — it's not a chronological outline — to the second paragraph of my preliminary reminder. You see? When I say the economic, political, and historical evolution of Kapital, I express it — of capital, I could have put a C, it's not out of snobbery that I put a K. It's to recall that I'm talking about it like Marx, that is, to avoid the word capitalism.
57:31 You'd say, why do you want to avoid the word capitalism? Because now everyone is anti-capitalist. It's strange. We should have gotten rid of it long ago since everyone is anti-capitalist. No? It's strange. It's never been so omnipresent. It's like the devil. Because in the age of positivism, we know, it doesn't exist, it's old superstitions, it's nonsense, it's the devil. And Baudelaire, who admirably says in Fusées, I think, something like that — My Heart Laid Bare, well, personal notes.
58:05 The devil — everyone senses it and no one believes in it. Sublime, subtlety of the devil. It's like making people believe he doesn't exist. Capitalism is like that. It's over, that's an old word, moreover, we don't say that, we say liberalism. It's nicer. Pretty. There, I have a censored bit that's going to appear in public. But yes, no, but it's... That's why I said no, but it's too small, I want to be precise in expression, I put a capital K so as not to say capitalism and at the same time so it's not confused with a sum of money.
58:43 Anyway, what am I saying? That since the end of the Thirty Glorious Years, that is, in fact, your generation is the result of this period following the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s, and that '68 constitutes a sort of watershed, if you will, which serves as a marker, more visible than another, but overall it was global at the time. We shouldn't forget that the events, the demonstrations of '68 — I don't say '68 years, so as not to be ironic, to stay historical — began before France.
59:22 does anyone remember where? Yes? No? Before? Before, there were hippies, there was all that, but I don't know, protest with... right in the street, there were the sixties, with revolting youth, but where? The very same year, in '68, but well before... So, in '67, excuse me, well before the French '68, without having the same resonance, without having 10 million strikers, but...
59:56 Come on, let me put you on the track — countries where there were strikes are rarer — in Germany. It's in the Berlin of Rudi Dutschke, that doesn't mean anything to you, Rudi Dutschke? Look it up, Rudi the Red, they called him. It's also the era, you say, well, this one I'm sure you know better, because she was a rocker, Nina Hagen. Yes, you know her, I can hear you thinking. Yes, she comes from East Germany, it was a revolt, it started there, the Bhutchism (?), '68 art.
1:00:34 Which means that, when a Georges Marchais said 'that German anarchist Cohn-Bendit,' he knew what he was talking about, which the bourgeois press immediately disguised as 'that German Jew Cohn-Bendit.' It's not something new, that we decided to accuse of antisemitism any contestation of power whatsoever. You say the banks are exaggerating in order to be antisemitic. As if Rockefeller were a Jew, that's absurd.
1:01:04 No, anyway, come on, let's get back to it. I say that also to calm the antisemites down, who see Jews everywhere, running the world. So, when I say the economic, political, historical evolution of Kapital since the end of the Thirty Glorious Years, that is, since its liberal-libertarian recuperation of the great worker struggles. That's why I can neither condemn, nor idealize, nor deify May '68. Because two completely antagonistic things overlap and are designated by the same expression, May '68.
1:01:38 10 million strikers, that's unprecedented and unmatched in all of French history, that is, the country where more or less — the minimum wage nearly tripled at that time, where rights were recognized for company workers, union rights, organizing rights, intermediary bodies, as we say now, which had never existed before.
1:02:08 That's the positive part. And then there's the societal part. '68 is that we could go into the girls' dormitory, you know, that's what I was told. That's what they say about Nanterre. The real revolution, that's it. It always existed. You'd even think that the libertines of the 18th century hadn't waited like — for men, it's others like, well you know, Marc-Ensal. But it was reserved for an aristocracy. Well, well. And yes, every era has its own bobos.
1:02:40 It's true that thanks to the French Revolution, bobo-hood expanded. And so much the better, so much the better, I'd rather that than going to see the girls in the dormitory. We didn't mean to say that's reality, no. Likewise, as you'd say, staging learned women, some feminisms take shape, but it was reserved. The peasant woman had no interest in playing the emancipated woman, otherwise she was burned. That's the difference.
1:03:11 Whereas Madame de Lespinasse could hold a salon. And the précieuses ridicules too. There you go. So there, we shouldn't speak ill of feminism, or of ecology, or any of that. We need to look, we need to analyze the discourses through which they're expressed, and '68 is a case in point. There's a soixante-huitard discourse which is that of Cohn-Bendit, and there are great historical advances in the workers' '68 all the same.
1:03:41 So that's why I speak of liberal-libertarian recuperation. I recall that this is a Clouscardian concept, the liberal-libertarian one, even if now more than one person talks about it, isn't that so, which seems a bit like a square circle, doesn't it, because generally, there's Cohn-Bendit on one side and Pompidou on the other, facing him, but not at all for Clouscard, it's the same entity, as Clouscard admirably says, isn't it — it's the same standard of living, even if it's not the same lifestyle.
1:04:14 Clever, Clouscard. And yes, when you don't do like Althusser, that is, spend your whole career trying to understand what Marx meant and telling others about it, while adding beforehand that nobody had understood what Marx meant. But Clouscard, he doesn't waste his time figuring out what Marx said, he applies it to his own time, to music consumption, of will or societal, etc.
Representation is not immaterial 1:04:48 So, this liberal-libertarian recuperation of the great worker struggles forces us to move — I'm reading what I wrote — from presence-thought, an eminently revolutionary task, to its representation — I'm coming back to the history of landscape — to its aesthetic representation. It's a bit difficult today, I ask for an effort of abstraction, but you see well that the genre of representation, which we could only access conceptually once we reflected on the notion of surface with my glass of water, of liquid gold, of representation, emphasizing the negative side which is only representation — it's an individual representing his country, an ambassador for example, a diplomat, meaning the country isn't there, meaning there's no presence, meaning we're not in the real but in an image of the real.
1:05:49 That doesn't mean we're in the immaterial — I'm turning it around on purpose today. I worked for UNESCO, well yes, I extorted money, $10,000 from UNESCO, at the time when I was working in Niger with your money, because my budget was that of the European Commission, which financed the project, that is, the contributions of European citizens, that's what the European budget is. And to do what, in such a poor country, you'll say — well, we can't be dealing with music, that's to show you how frivolous I can be.
1:06:21 And at that time, I found that wasn't enough to extort, I dare not tell you how much, it was still more than a billion centimes for the music training center. Anyway, the students who went through it now travel the whole world, they think a lot of me, that was the point of the operation. And, seriously, I additionally extorted $10,000 from UNESCO so it would organize a meeting of all the African musical institutions to reflect on common problems facing all African countries, in the capital of Niger, in Niamey.
1:06:55 I'm proud. I'm prouder of that than of many things. That's when I saw that UNESCO agreed, because it had set up, a little before, a project it was attached to, entitled 'Protection of Intangible Heritage.' You see how our problem comes back? That's the way UNESCO talks. Traditional music needs to be protected, recorded digitally, put in the digital freezer, it mustn't disappear at the speed the bush moves to the city, that is, at top speed, and fade from memory.
1:07:36 Protection of intangible heritage — but it's not immaterial, the reality, when I say it's an image, even an image, even a representation is not immaterial. Because music, language, words, yes, it seems to be just breath, but for it to reach your ears, there still have to be vibrations in the air, waves. That is material, it's measured in frequency, in vibration, in sine waves, it can be represented.
1:08:07 There, these are nuances I'm making today. I'll sum up the most extensive concept, that of matter, which contains within itself two immense sets — a natural matter, the universe broadly speaking, because we're leaving Earth's suburbs behind. I recall that the biggest nuclear reactor in the vicinity is the sun. Oh yes! And a nature — call it what you like — artificial, cultural, historical.
1:08:45 Personally, if you ask my opinion, I have a slight preference for the concept of history, which integrates the temporal dimension. Isn't it made that way? A creationist manner, 'let there be light'? No, still, that's a metaphor. It took time, because, as Hölderlin says, 'for long is time, but the true comes to pass.' So there, these are fundamental reminders. There's the most extensive concept, that of matter, and all reality, insofar as it is reality — a word that comes from res in Latin, meaning the thing, which you find in 'reify,' in things like that, which you also find in res publica, the public thing.
1:09:33 All reality has somewhere a knowledge-bearing trace. And here I fault, I often criticize structuralism, but it did have the merit of reminding us that there's always a material support for the signifier, as they used to say in the great days of structuralism. That is, memory leaves an imprint somewhere, there must be a material trace for this to reach the psyche, representation.
1:10:04 It's silly to oppose something psychic to something organic. We can use the magical use of speech all we want — I call magical use the somewhat naive use. The one that makes us believe that with words we have the things themselves. That's fine for the child and for the 'savage.' The savage, as we all archaically are somewhere, it's not pejorative. But when it's the world of magic, it's 'Open Sesame' and poof, it opens. That would be the dream, wouldn't it, for words to be things. Obviously.
1:10:35 Still, still. That's where we see that the quarrel that ran through more than 20 centuries of philosophy between nominalists and realists has importance, and that the nominalists always played a progressive role. I'm not saying they're the ones who are right, I'm not deciding, it's complex, my problem. But in any case, the nominalists are those for whom names, words, are first words before being things. And so Socrates is quite right to say 'what do you call it' before saying 'what is it.'
1:11:06 There. You see how all this brings us back to this nature and landscape thing. You thought I'd wandered off a bit into literature and aesthetics. Yes, into aesthetics, but in the philosophical sense and in the medical sense too, you only have to look at anesthesia, which presupposes appearance. That means it's not at all the reality we think, or even the surface, but that doesn't mean it's immaterial. There, I come back to it. So this notion of trace, of engram, call it what you like, including fleeting memories — I said earlier, a moment ago, sorry, that the magical use of speech is saying, oh, that illness of his, in my opinion, is psychosomatic, that's verbal magic.
1:11:54 Psycho means the soul, soma means the body, that way we're sure not to be wrong. Oh, it's an illness of the soul and the body, well yes. Said the little way, it's less funny, but yes, it impresses less. Obviously, I had two ulcers when I was 40, this isn't a personal 'I.' 40% of men are threatened by an ulcer starting at 40, for the same reasons that give women migraines. What I'm saying is statistical, there are men who have migraines, women who have ulcers.
1:12:25 But statistically, there are more men who have migraines and more women who have ulcers. Why am I talking about ulcers? Because, it's obvious that seeing my mother-in-law every day gave me ulcers. That's not true at all, that's an impersonal 'I.' Because the mother-in-law is a bit emblematic in jokes. More seriously, when I used to drive from Paris to Nice, you see, arriving in Nice, I'd almost have a little seizure. I had to take medication, because from braking every kilometer behind a truck that would brake without warning, etc.
1:13:02 in the end, you can really feel it hit your stomach, every time, the stress, you see. There I'm stressing the psychic side of the ulcer. But still, if it ends up giving me a hole in my stomach, that's what an ulcer is. It's because there's also a terrain, here I come back to nature, to the organic, a terrain more fragile than others when it comes to the gastric mucosa. I don't see what's contradictory, isn't that so, between having a fragile terrain and the fact that something other than nature and matter is needed for everyone, or in short, something relational, which doesn't come from a substance — we even call it substance — but from a relation.
The Phaedo: that without which the cause would never be cause 1:13:45 There. So, you see, when I said a trace, it means that what I sometimes believe to be the most immaterial, on close inspection, leaves a trace. And here, I can't not — I told you I hadn't given the exact references, but still, here, the reference to Plato is called for because of this passage, so important that even at a time when very few authors were cited in general philosophy, and I'm thinking of a passage in Leibniz who quotes Plato, which is quite rare, you know, regarding the concept of causality.
1:14:28 I think I told you this at your workshop, remember this passage in the Phaedo — I'm giving the reference, in the Phaedo, Plato's last dialogue with his disciples — I'll close with this one, with this example, because it's going to be time to stop, and I'd like us to talk about the outcome together — the last dialogue, he was asked to prove the immortality of the soul, which is a bit sadistic, to ask someone who's going to drink the hemlock in five minutes, by the way, if you could, before dying — I'll say it in church style, the Greeks.
1:15:07 Well, so, Plato, at one point, alludes to the fact that he had heard of a philosopher — in fact he's a pre-Socratic — who had formulated the hypothesis that — it's true that all the pre-Socratics have a hypothesis, a principle that explains everything, the atom for Democritus, fire for Heraclitus, being for Parmenides, etc., number for Pythagoras, all numbers — and this one is Anaxagoras, from... what explains everything is the nous, I'll say it in Greek first, not to show off but to translate it — intelligence, most often; it means that the universe is produced by something intelligent — you find this across the Atlantic, as they speak of intelligent design, you see, it's not far off, no, but frankly, it can't all be chance, it's not possible, but there, it was thought out, it was willed. So, Plato heard about someone named Anaxagoras, so he says, I'll try to get hold of the book, because it suits me, me, Plato, I'm a finalist,
1:16:17 I don't know, I think it's worthwhile, so if someone explains everything by an end, he'd explain, for instance, why the earth is round, because the circle is the shape that encloses the most space with the least curve — well anyway, Plato gets hold of the book and, lo and behold, what a disappointment — Plato goes on — because as I advance in my reading, I see someone who begins by practically stating this principle, I'm going to deduce everything from intelligence, but as soon as he gets into detail, as soon as he tackles a particular case, he no longer invokes intelligence, but causes such as air, fire, water, weight, heat — you already see very clearly formulated by Plato the opposition that hasn't stopped to this day, we still debate finalism and mechanism, explained by an end, telos, teleology, or explained by a blind process, it's not the strikes, both, etc.
1:17:18 Well, that's not where I was getting at — Plato goes very far, and without settling such profound questions, he at least lets us save a huge amount of time by formulating the problem much better. He says, in short — it seemed to me, and here's his example, similar to someone who, when asked why I am sitting here talking with you — that's his example, not mine — would answer, because Socrates is endowed with muscles, nerves, and tendons, that these muscles have the property of bending, even to a right angle, and thanks to the bones, of remaining upright, and that is what makes Socrates sit here.
1:18:02 What isn't false, in a way, is the answer we have to that, because Socrates says, one could also answer that I myself judged it better, even though I had the possibility of escaping — you know Socrates had friends who wanted to give money — and he judged that the law of the city had to be defended against the human city. So, I judged that it was better for me to stay sitting here talking with you. Otherwise, he concludes, by the dog, his bones and muscles would long ago have been over at Megara or Boeotia, places somewhat removed from Athens where a judgment about what was best would have taken them.
1:18:43 And Socrates reaches a climax when he says — well, Plato, when he says — it is true that the causes, the true cause, the one I judged made it preferable to remain sitting here in prison, could never be a cause if I did not have bones and muscles. I forbid anyone to say that Plato was an idealist until they have read this passage. So one should not call his bones and muscles the cause, says Plato — I'm quoting him — but that without which the cause would never be a cause.
1:19:24 So even if it's my mother-in-law who gives me ulcers, that still presupposes that I have a fragile constitution — that without which the cause would never be a cause. Form always inscribes itself within a matter. There you go. Well, I hope you've given a sufficient enough summary, because I'd really like us to discuss it now, and I'll hand the floor over to you. Ah, I think you're raising your hand.
English industrial revolution, French political revolution 1:19:54 Yes, Thomas. Thank you, Dominique. I have two questions. The first is about when you recalled the articulation between the first semester's question of revolution and the second semester's question of nature or landscape. For me it was fairly clear because you mentioned the industrial revolution, which made possible a change in our relation to the immediate material environment, and afterward, something from which we became distanced, which opened up a possibly sentimental relation to nature or to landscape.
1:20:35 But I didn't quite understand whether there was also a link with political revolution, because in the first semester we were talking mainly about political revolution too. So does political revolution — how exactly do we articulate the political revolution side with the question of nature or landscape? And the second question I wanted to ask was whether you could go back over what you said in your second preliminary point, that is, what you mean by the fact that we need today an aesthetic representation of the present.
1:21:06 Thank you. We really are at the heart of this rather dense — sorry, this rather dense and abstract page, as you distributed it. First question: I feel like hiding behind Marx to answer almost literally with the famous 1859 preface — the relation is that if there was a political revolution in Paris, it's because there had already been the industrial revolution in England, and that a change in the productive forces — I'm quoting Marx here — cannot fail to bring about a change in the relations of production, even if the law being articulated is, to use a Marxist term, tendential, not mechanical. Otherwise I'd have you believe that on December 31st at midnight, bam, we switch from the feudal mode of production to the bourgeois mode of production — that's not how it happens. There are still, even now, entire portions of Roman law in force in our legal system — thankfully we've done away with what concerns women, yes, because Mediterranean law, take the Napoleonic Code—
1:22:17 it's quite something, on that score, given that four or five out of five European jurisdictions today still use the Napoleonic Code, with a few exceptions — I'll spare you the rest — to show that there is always a lag between the productive forces and the relations of production. So it's because there had already been a transformation outside the world of ideas, of politics, of the Enlightenment philosophers, that we recognize what a superstructure is, and we can almost say the reverse: if there could be an Age of Enlightenment, it's because something was being produced outside the light of thought. And we understand that in that same text Marx ends up saying that men have never posed questions to themselves except from the moment they had the means to answer them — from the historical moment when they had the material means, implicitly, to answer questions that otherwise wouldn't arise. Am I answering your question? So that's how it's articulated — now, why does the industrial revolution happen in England and the political revolution in Paris—
1:23:27 in France, in Paris — there we have to look at the singularity, the history proper to each nation. So here we come back a bit to my story from earlier about the stomach: there's one gastric loop a bit more fragile than others. Well, it turns out that in France there's a tradition of centralization, of revolt originating from Paris, and above all, a lag. Countries where revolutions happen — contrary to what people think — aren't necessarily at the avant-garde; there's often a lag instead. Look at the Russian Revolution — contrary to what people think, Russia was considerably behind industrially. I'm not even talking about art or music — quite the opposite, it was at the avant-garde of the music of that era compared to England, France, or even Germany, which was beginning to catch up with England and France. That's precisely where the Bolshevik revolution took place. France was behind in the eighteenth century compared to England — mind you, compared to England, which was at the cutting edge of progress in infrastructure. Again I'm choosing my words carefully here, trying to be rigorous—
1:24:37 without any value judgment — when I say progress, it's observable, measurable progress, not a value judgment. How long does it take to make this table with a machine versus by hand? That's where the difference lies — there's technical progress. Whereas civilizations may have nothing but bows and arrows and still be a thousand times superior to us in aesthetic and moral terms — that's what I was talking about. So why this gap, or rather, let me illustrate this French lag — it's very well illustrated in a passage by Voltaire, taken from his first major publication, the Letters Concerning the English Nation. At that time, England was America, it was the model for the young avant-garde. You know how nowadays people are always talking about the 'French lag' — you know America so well, you say, you'll see, in thirty years it'll arrive here too. That's rather ideological — as if we were bound to go through the exact same path. I don't think that in thirty years we're going to decide to put 'God' on our banknotes.
1:25:47 I don't need to borrow from our neighbor — I don't find, well, I really like American shopping carts, that's a fine invention, isn't it — no, I'm not joking, and that didn't exist when I was a kid, I'm not just making this up. In a letter called the Letter on Commerce, Voltaire contrasts the arrogance of the French aristocracy, which despises work — including business, what we today call business, that is, work that isn't manual labor, the work of enterprise — and Voltaire was at the cutting edge of business bourgeoisie, you know he had a stocking factory, stockings for women, in Switzerland, at Ferney, and he used the marquises who came to see him as his sales representatives at Versailles. No really, he was quite the operator — he had to cultivate his garden, complex character that he was. So in the Letter on Commerce there's this admirable passage where he says: in France anyone who wants to can be a marquis, and whoever—
1:26:57 arrives in Paris from the depths of some province with a name ending in -ac or -ille — Chirac, Couve de Murville, that's going to change a lot — can say, a man like me, a man of my quality — I'm quoting — and utterly despise a merchant. Yet I don't know which is more useful to his country: a well-powdered lord who knows exactly what time the king gets up and what time he goes to bed, and who gives himself airs of grandeur while playing the role of a slave in the antechamber of a minister; or a merchant who from his office thinks of the English, gives orders to Surat and Cairo, and contributes — and this is the punchline, and it's magnificent — contributes to the happiness of the world. And it ends on this essential theme of the Enlightenment century: happiness. You see how we've arrived at the very heart of the eighteenth-century superstructure, at Watteau's painting, at that concentration—
1:28:07 of happiness found in the Embarkation for Cythera, with that golden sky behind the figures, which contributes to the happiness of the world. So, second question — aesthetic representation and presence and historical present. I'm glad you're asking this because I come back — nothing personal — to this aphorism that Hegel set down in his private journal from his youth, which says precisely: you can never do more than speak to your own time — at best you will be your time. One must give up believing that I can surpass my time, that all these humans around me are backward and ignorant while I am not — that's the Romantic hero. And Hegel didn't stop there — he doesn't look down on the crowd, and it must be shown that this wasn't merely a youthful caprice — in his final political testament, I'm telling you this because it comes up, in his last published work, in the Principles—
The historical present as a limit, according to Hegel 1:29:17 of the Philosophy of Right — a volume published in any case — he says regarding philosophy that one must remember that every philosophy is the child of its time and that no philosophy can go beyond its present. It's stated in so many words in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, as if the present — I'm really getting at your question — the historical present, were the limit of our effort at elucidation, of our theoretical effort, as if our theoretical effort were bent, tropos, that's the curve in Greek, the tropism, without our knowing it — I'm almost in Freud here — without our knowing it our consciousness is bent by the constraints of the present political moment, what in Marxist terms is called ideology. Am I in science, am I in ideology — for instance in ordinary language, I'm not about to denounce equations as ideology because I understand what I'm dealing with there. So that's what I mean here by the historical present, it's something—
1:30:27 it's funny, I notice I'm mentioning Freud again — it's no accident that it came to my lips, I hadn't planned it, but the historical present plays, in Hegel, the same function that jouissance plays in Freud — that is, it's unattainable for knowledge. I'm going a bit fast — jouissance, and the state of development around this in Freud, is not pleasure. We can talk about pleasure, we can have it, we're in France, in the great tradition of the French moralists, we can roughly grasp what pleasure is. Jouissance, no — it's not that castration forbids us access to knowledge of jouissance, I'm not demonstrating this, it's Freudian, but I note that the function is the same — that is, the present is a limit, but a limit rather like an asymptote that is never reached. We don't know how, with Freud again — so we can at least be more or less close to it, move away from it or draw closer to it. Moving away from it is a period of regression — don't ever—
1:31:37 make me say that I'm a linear progressivist — I've never said that in 1946 we were more progressive than in 1944, especially not in France, that would be absurd. No — there can be a period of regression, and a progressive need not be ashamed to speak of decadence — there are such periods, that's just how it is, this famous historical progress. When someone tells me 'we don't talk like that anymore, those words are finished, Marxism and all that' — well in 1938 in Germany it was old-fashioned to speak of democracy and to speak well of Jewish culture, it was passé — yes or no? Watch out for that kind of argument, it's not a theoretical argument, it's what Ruskin would have called worldly arguments — bravo, good, you know your sources — exactly. So again, the historical present as a limit, but one can get closer to it — though it seems to me that since the recovery — I'm commenting on the text—
1:32:50 of the line you're questioning me about — the so-called liberal-libertarian recovery, I see there — of the remarkable struggles of '68, of the recuperation by which their momentum was throttled — it seems to me there's a regression there, which I sometimes illustrate in a way that's not mechanistic, never mechanical, to go a bit fast and polemically, when I say that this is the era when we passed — I don't know — from Hegel to Heidegger, from Marx to Nietzsche, from Aragon to Céline. Well, all these people matter — it's true I have an affection for Nietzsche, and reading Céline can't leave one indifferent, it's good at the level of expression, even if there's nothing more Nazi than his expression — that doesn't mean it's aesthetically worthless. Aesthetics has nothing to do with political values, let me remind you of that here — and scoundrels can be excellent—
1:34:00 painters, great poets, and vice versa — it isn't with generous ideas that one makes beautiful texts, you've all read what needs to be said about the heresy of teaching in poetry. There you go, does that answer the question? Yes, I heard someone whisper — now that you have the oral exam and the flu, are you still concerned by this? Yes, sorry, yes, thank you, I didn't want to let it go. I had a question — you keep coming back to the second part on the first dimension we can see between nature and landscape. I have a question that illustrates this with the paintings, the first one and the one at the end — I had the impression there might be other pairs—
Friedrich, unhappy consciousness and pure music 1:35:14 that we could have used, notably that of belief-knowledge, linked with the rise of industry — a bit stronger — sorry, linked with the rise of industry and the ability, as Descartes would say, to become master and possessor of nature. And in a somewhat similar way, another pair, immanence-transcendence, where I'm more uncertain and where I raise a question — and I have the impression that these two pairs form a kind of mediation between nature and revolution, so to speak — and I wanted to ask what evolution occurs with Romanticism, how — I have the impression that we move each time from the first to the second in the same movement, that we pass — sorry to interrupt — from the first, that is, from Poussin's painting — exactly — to the second, to Delacroix's — quite so — we're not talking about Friedrich's — so my question really is about the transition to Romanticism — right — is it a kind of return of belief, a return of paganism, something — ah good, because you've stirred up a lot of rich and interesting material—
1:36:25 at the start, but I wasn't seeing the question — now I see it, that's very interesting, insofar as the example you take, the succession of the three paintings, illustrates exactly what I was saying a moment ago about the fact that being progressive doesn't mean renouncing the concept of decadence, thinking that year x plus 1 is necessarily richer, more interesting, more profound, or even more beautiful than year x minus 1 — the proof is precisely that Friedrich's painting presupposes an unhappy consciousness — to use Hegelian terms, an unhappy consciousness — which, unable to fulfill the promise of the revolution, since we are at that point in the Restoration — we didn't say NATO then, we said the Holy Alliance, you know what that means — the return of faith, something—
1:37:35 that the Enlightenment had shaken — the religious, religion in power — I'm not criticizing, because with religion, he said, no, this is political — I mean, on the continent, by force and by the Germanic armies — Austria and what would become Germany barely existed as such then — and by England's money, to stifle any attempt at a return of French ideas — and here 'French' means revolutionary, not at all, I'm not talking about chromosomes, I mean French as in reactionary — there were plenty of those, and Pétain's France is no less French than de Gaulle's France, don't make me say what I haven't said. Anyway, at the time, 'French' meant, you understand, the Robespierrists, the Jacobins, and so on — this continues, mind you — at the time it was the bogeyman for the European far right, now it's the darling of all the regionalists, you see, in passing, I say this too — and I was talking about unhappy consciousness, why?
1:38:43 because precisely, with the revolution having miscarried, consciousness takes refuge in a world of fantasy — so your question is excellent because it makes us revisit, in concreto, through a singular example, the relation between the present and its representation: when the present has escaped me, I console myself with representations. But I'm not being ironic, because this is at the same time a deepening — and here, thanks to your question, I'll add a difficulty I couldn't develop earlier because we don't have all the time in the world, and which I can bring in here: even if it's a political regression, the fact of taking a detour inward is a training in seeing things closely and in detail that one didn't have in the heat of the action — I sound a bit muddled there, so let me take an aesthetic detour, since we're at it, I'll borrow from music rather than painting — the notion of 'pure music' is recent, appreciating a piece of music for its musical value—
1:39:54 and not for the ideas it conveys — you can appreciate a Bach Passion not because it depicts the Passion of Christ and so on, but for the value of its music, because at the time there were others writing Passions who didn't reach Bach's genius, for instance. As I said earlier, Baudelaire, a modern, saw very clearly that it isn't with generous ideas that one makes good poems — well, that that alone isn't enough. I say this because there are many well-meaning young people who admire a certain song because the lyrics are revolutionary — yes, very well, but the music should be too. When those revolutionary lyrics are set to music that's the same kind the American bombers listened to while bombing Vietnam — thank you, yes — ah, I forgot the director, Coppola — thank you, Francis — that's it, exactly — no, no, because they were listening to hard rock, and some say hard rock is young people's protest against the world we live in — that's me laughing — yes, yes—
1:41:04 that is, if you push me on it, precisely, what is least Wagnerian in Wagner — I challenge you to find, in all of Wagner, a rhythmic orgy like the one in the Valkyrie — that's very rare in Wagner. Wagner is infinite melody, a kind of music that sticks to you constantly, glue-like — you may not like it, but it's something else entirely, certainly not the rather rock-like rhythmic regularity of the Ride of the Valkyries — you see the little jump there. So, I haven't finished my example — music, at the start, was never pure: in Egypt, in the Middle Ages, it was devoted to religion, Gregorian chant, we illustrated the school of Notre-Dame the other time, and at a wedding, a wedding feast, look at a Brueghel painting, a Flemish wedding like that, full of life and vitality — there was music that must not have resembled Gregorian chant at all, I told you, generally people danced what was called the carole, a kind of thing that went round in a circle, the equivalent of rock music at the time, entertainment music — so 'pure music'—
1:42:14 that didn't mean anything — it was always in the service of something other than music itself: weddings, religion, war, hymns, war drums, the vanguard of the troops, fifes, drums, songs, all of that mattered, it wasn't pure music. And so music took a long time to become purely instrumental — to get to pure music, it had to detach itself from vocal music. Bach's music holds up on its own whether it's vocal or instrumental, but beyond that, music underwent its instrumental 'cure' very late — there had been a few isolated soloists here and there, watched with a bit of fascination because they were virtuosos — among the troubadours there must have been some fellow who played the lute or cittern or vielle a bit more nimbly than the others, or the flute — but it plateaued there. Whereas with the development of instrumental music, starting essentially from the seventeenth but especially the eighteenth century — sonatas — there's music meant to be sung, cantare, giving cantatas; there's music meant to be sounded, for instruments, giving sonatas—
1:43:24 there are words here that make it simple, we could go on. Still, the fact that music escaped from the world we live in — marriage, war, religion, love, etc., everything extra-musical — in order to shut itself up within music itself, made music, musical writing, musical thought take a giant leap forward. I won't finish this sequence without telling you the moment when we rediscover the interest of the historical present — I'm coming back to your two questions at once here — it's Beethoven's Ninth. The Ninth, what is it?
1:44:02 the Ninth Symphony. What is a symphony? It's precisely a musical genre that excludes voices — or rather, that gathers them all together, but as instrumental voices, for the orchestra. A symphony is not a cantata, not an opera, not a Passion, not a Mass, not a lied. And yet, from the very depths of the orchestra — depths, I say deliberately, just as earlier I spoke of the surface of the water and beneath the surface, as if the voice, thought, words, language, the logos, were what emerges from the surface — you see, from the depths of the orchestra, Beethoven has the audacity to bring forth, in the finale, the voice that an entire symphonic tradition had completely relegated to instrumental silence — silence of speech, not silence of sound, of course — to instrumental muteness — and to have it resurrected in order to say what? The ode to human brotherhood and to joy. And that's no accident — these are the contemporaries themselves of the great political and historical ruptures of the era, because the musico-poetic unfolds precisely when Europe is being torn apart—
The repression of materialism 1:45:12 from Spain to Russia. Did I answer your question there, at least in part — it was too profound for us to expect a full answer, but those are some leads. Now that people are hungry to go to the restaurant, you've decided to jump into the fray — go ahead, you've earned it. Yes, I just wanted you to clarify a bit what you said about — it's interesting, you used the word realism and idealism instead of materialism and idealism, I think that's classical metaphysics — yes, yes, no, but I know, but no, on the contrary, it's classical metaphysics — it's rather metaphysics, well, it's rather materialism and idealism, and it's starting in the twentieth century that we stop talking about materialism and just talk about realism, and then, when it's not materialism opposed to idealism, it's realism opposed to idealism — I'm not sure — no, but it's just to ask you a question actually, for fifty years you've often talked about the repression of dialectics in contemporary thought—
1:46:22 I just wanted you to say a couple of words about the repression of materialism in contemporary thought — right, well, I can only speak about it very briefly, so I'll say the essential — yes, so without demonstration, let's stick to showing rather than proving. Matter belongs to genesis, it is phthora — I'm not teaching you anything, since you want to know, in generation and corruption, you see — there, hey, we're speaking Greek, it's like Heidegger, because — listen, you're speaking to a crowd anyway — generation and corruption, in Buddhism it's the same thing, there is what has been born, so there's generation, and everything that is born must perish — phthora, generation and corruption, birth and death — only what is unborn is truly eternal. This is as old as the world, so I won't dwell on it, but it's profound: matter is precisely the instance of what belongs to genesis, it's phthora, matter is what exists in the course of becoming, of passage, right—
1:47:33 look and touch around you, you don't need to touch things for them to change — even Mont Blanc, unlike what even the Eleatics claimed when they said 'what is, is, and does not become' — that was a bit of a joke — Mont Blanc erodes, we know it's a little less tall now than when I was your age — well yes, that's erosion. In short, when it comes to matter, Heraclitus is right, everything flows — and here's my answer to your question, I said it in two words so I won't dwell on it — so we repress materialism because it's the image of death: if I am nothing but matter, well then — you don't believe I have illusions better than that — well, it interests me too that after my death, poof, I wake up somewhere else — ah, but no, that's exactly what doesn't work, and now I'll wrap it up and close — it doesn't interest me to be immortal, I mean, if it's to find new faces, it could be Saint Peter's face and all that — I mean, I'd rather find Hugo, Alexandre, and even you, you see — no, but it's true, no, no—
1:48:44 I'm teasing our comrade here because he's the guest of honor tonight, he's just passed the oral exam for the agrégation in philosophy — a little round of applause, bravo — he's asked us a good question — no, but it's this, unconsciously, completely unconscious — even there we can clearly see that there are, as Kant would say, interests of reason lurking behind the disputes of the understanding — there we grasp better the relation between the two faculties, there's a shadow-puppet theater behind these apparently peaceful relations, realism, idealism, you'd think they were quarrels among clerks — no, there are real, profound stakes at play, and I'll end on this, with the declaration of a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid — I'm thinking of Rimbaud, of course — 'the spiritual battle is as brutal as the battle of men.' There you go, thank you, bravo, bon appétit.
