English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Memory and forgetting are never one without the other 0:28 Chant.
1:33 Well, very glad to be back with you, despite this relentless weekly rhythm, which means that I barely have time to answer the questions I was asked about the last session before I'm preparing the next one, that is, tonight's. But of course, this kind of fatigue, you can well imagine, is something I actually seek out. So thanks again to everyone, those who are willing to keep following us, for being here, for being faithful, since I spoke about fidelity last time in connection with memory — after all, the most faithful person is the one whose memory reaches back the furthest.
2:16 I'll also take the opportunity to recall a small shift in my approach to the subject matter that continues to occupy us: anamnesis, amnesia, memory and forgetting. Not memory first and then forgetting, or the reverse, but the fact that there is never one without the other — that's what we'll come back to today, it's the hardest aspect to grasp, so it's worth spending time on, and going back to again and again.
2:51 A hundred times on the loom, so to speak — namely, that there aren't only external, outside causes that limit our memory. The aging of traces, the erosion of letters in archaeology on monuments. The world is the being of stone. The deterioration of memories, starting with mine, isn't that right?
3:26 Yes, well, you'll tell me, that's easy for you to say since you're about to recite three pages of... to us by heart. Yes, no doubt. But look how selective memory is. Because that same evening, that same day, when I recited that to you by heart — that memory, I keep it, fortunately. But I mean, I've forgotten some code I need forty times, some password I was told fifteen times, to call back someone to whom I had made a commitment. You all know that.
4:06 Memory is not... a tape recorder, I say this in passing, because if I were dealing with high school seniors, I would have started there — memory from the physiological point of view. Behaviorist, as our Anglo-Saxon friends say, who did very useful, very valuable, and very precise research. Memory is... it's not a tape recorder plus a camera. And forgetting would be the fact that the tape becomes a bit old and obsolete. No, that's not it.
4:45 Otherwise, we wouldn't understand why. And each of you knows this. What you did yesterday between 9 and 9:15, some of you will have trouble recalling in detail. But an event that happened to you in your fourth year, you can tell it in a gripping way with all the details even today. It's very selective. So that means it's not just things within us that make up memory. It's not a something, it's the memory of someone.
5:20 I recall this in passing. So, because of all this, I said I would go over this problem again and again — probably the most philosophically interesting one among all those, and I don't address all of them, far from it, that concern memory, but the ones that seem to me the priority and the most important from the philosophical standpoint of 'know thyself,' since that's really the essential thing. It's that what limits our memory is not only, I come back to it, external causes — obsolescence, the aging of traces — it's also internal causes, meaning there is a force within me, now speaking generally, within each of us, there is a force that perhaps does not want to resurface.
Proust's matrix memory and Pausanias's two fountains 6:10 You saw an example of this last time in the very beautiful text by Proust, which I read to you again for a second time, the one where he says that the memories that come back to him, or the memories he has — of which you have a very fine sample in the text sent to you for tonight — the water playing golden in the sunlight, the sound of footsteps without echo on the gravel of a path — all these memories which, he says, have crossed so many years while around them the memories of those who walked those paths have faded, in short, that all these memories are enveloped by a matrix-memory, in an almost strict and proper sense, with the maternal side in 'matrix,' erased by the sobs that never ceased — the sobs of relieved grief that burst out when he found himself alone with his mother, who, in his view, had taken a while to come say goodnight to him in bed because she had guests.
7:24 I laugh because I'm on the outside, I'm not little Marcel, but goodness, seen from within, these are tragedies, we all know it, either because we were children ourselves, or because we have children. We must take all this seriously. So you see clearly how one could spontaneously — not everyone is Proust, not everyone has the strength to unfold their memory all the way back to that most distant, most matrix-like past, so to speak, right?
8:01 I'll come back to this ambivalence of the mnemonic force, which explains the alternation of amnesia and anamnesis in both directions, and which explains why we did well to start with that mythological account given to us by Pausanias — the geographer, naturalist, chronicler of late antiquity Greece, who said, who recalled that the rituals for the deceased, after the moment he has just died, lead him to two springs: one that gives forgetting, the famous river Lethe, you know, one of the rivers separating us from the kingdom of the dead, where he must forget his entire past. And another, the spring where Mnemosyne flows, a source that flows, that proceeds from Mnemosyne, the spring of Mnemosyne, where on the contrary he must remember everything he is going to see in his new life.
9:04 The vita nuova, to speak as Dante does, precisely in the Divine Comedy. So it's on this problem that I'm going to insist. And for that, I'll begin. The first text we're going to work on a bit more closely is not going to be Proust's, it's going to be Senancour's.
9:36 The excerpt from Obermann that was given to you, even though it's practically not about memory and recollection at all. You'll ask me where I'm going with this. Well, it's quite simple. I want to draw from Senancour's text, and here he is irreplaceable, because I know few authors who went as far as he did — we already saw this for another topic.
Hölderlin's Mnemosyne: the immortal and the eternal, the echo that changes 10:14 In the almost clinical analysis of the 'mal du siècle,' as it will come to be called from his era onward, and the kind of nothingness it leads to, make understandable, by a kind of rebound effect, the passages of Hölderlin's poem Mnemosyne, which I went through a bit hastily at the end of last session. I'll begin. Well, the passage — we don't need to reread the whole text, I'm thinking here of Mnemosyne, second version, the one that begins with 'A sign we are, without meaning.'
11:01 I'm isolating this crucial passage, which I told you is philosophically the most important. 'For they cannot all, sorry — for they cannot all, the immortals' — the gods, that is — 'they cannot all, the immortals,' that is, you and me before them, 'they cannot all, the heavenly ones' — not to repeat the word, that's what's in your text as well — 'the mortals before them, reach the abyss.'
11:36 And yes, indeed — mortals, by definition, die. We move along a horizontal plane up to the edge of a cliff, and splash, there's a fall. Whereas by definition the gods are immortals. Careful, that's not the same as eternal. Don't confuse this with the religions of transcendence — the God of Israel, who becomes the God of Christianity, and who is also, in Islam, an absolute transcendence.
12:07 That is to say, he is not within time, he's not in an indefinite, unlimited time, because 'immortal' simply means that. In fact, the Greek gods are gods who have quite a few passions, just like you and me, if you will — Jupiter courts quite a few nymphs, right, muses, and so on. Let's not forget that it's by impregnating Mnemosyne that the Muses came into being — they are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne.
12:43 They are like you and me, except for one thing — the only difference from us is that their life lasts without limit. They are immortal. The word says exactly what it means: that they go on without an assignable end. So there is no death, and none of what follows from it — the anguish linked to death. That's where Senancour's text will become important to us.
13:14 For that, I needed to come back a bit to this crucial passage, which isn't so obvious — because on a first reading, afterward it's much simpler. 'They cannot all, the heavenly ones themselves, the mortals before them,' therefore us, 'reach the abyss. Thus with them the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes to pass.' I had some remarks and questions. Depending on the translation, it's 'with them this changes' rather than 'the echo.' I need the word echo for a line of reasoning, as you'll see, which tries to have logical rigor.
13:56 I say this to those who noticed the presence or absence of this word depending on the translation, that it's not at all a whim of the translators. In fact, it interests scholars — there are three versions of this poem. Hölderlin's manuscript was reworked three times. We have three versions. So when one knows the texts closely, there's Mnemosyne 1, Mnemosyne 2, Mnemosyne 3.
14:31 So, let me specify right away that 'cela' becomes 'echo' — with the word echo in German being the same word as in French, of Greek origin — in the second version. For those who want to refer to the originals, to Germanists, one never knows, it's in Mnemosyne 2, so you'll see why this makes sense, why we're not splitting hairs. It's in Mnemosyne 2 that he clearly says — so let me pick this up again and conclude on the word echo — 'for they cannot all, the heavenly ones, the mortals before them, reach the abyss. Thus with them the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes to pass.' You see the problem.
15:20 A problem of logic, first of all. How can the echo change? Except in the usual sense — you know what it is, you've all shouted as a child in a place with an echo to hear other voices repeated, it feels good. It reminds me of that passage from Hegel's Aesthetics about the child who amuses himself throwing pebbles into water and is delighted to see the concentric ripples. He, who is in that very weak part of his power over the world in childhood, sees that there's a whole part of reality that obeys him at will, just like that.
15:55 It's a bit the same kind of enjoyment we get when, as children, we never tire of hearing the echo repeat our voice. Yes, indeed, the echo changes, anyone can experience it, but it always changes in the same direction, that is, it grows weaker and weaker. In other words, the echo, physically speaking — so if I set aside all poetry for a moment and stay strictly literal — the echo is at most equal to the initial sound, more likely lower, but never higher. And here Hölderlin overturns this inequality. 'With them the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes to pass.'
16:44 That's the end of this period of a few hours. It takes time and patience — what Hegel called the patience of the concept. It takes an accumulated past to produce seemingly simple pleasures, like those abounding in Proust's text, for example. If I take — wait, because now we don't have it — oh yes, today's we do have it, so let's make use of it.
17:33 I don't have it anymore, that's odd. So I don't know if I can retrieve it here live. Today's text, yes. Okay, so let me try to... good heavens, I thought I had it. Oh well, no, I'll do it this way. Sorry for this short pause, I'll find it right away. There. Same thing. There, there, that's good, that's good.
Combray and its steeple: land reclaimed from forgetting 18:19 So let me remind you that in the Proust text sent to you for tonight's session, which is taken from the first part of the Search called Swann's Way, and within the first part of that first part called Combray — the village where Proust's parents often went on vacation, to Aunt Léonie's, actually called Illiers, in what is now the Beauce region, on the road between Paris and Orléans.
18:57 And this village that nobody talked about at the time has since become so famous that now it's called — you see it when you arrive on the road, on the sign — Illiers-Combray. The municipal authorities were forced by literature, which doesn't happen every day, to change the place name. And I thank Philippe Moreau for kindly and patiently finding, in the archives of the INA I presume, this short film — I'm reminded, by the way — about the setting in which certain passages of Combray take place, with the Proust family house and all that, a little black-and-white film, a short sequence.
19:44 He did very well to cut out the commentary, which really wasn't of much interest, and to replace it with music that is none other than Liszt's Obermann, which lets me have the music made for Senancour's text while watching the film about Proust. Bravo, Philippe. But let me note why I'm dwelling a bit on this film. Because the last image, for those who saw it, is of someone turning a corner.
20:16 We see him from behind, turning his back to the viewer, taking a small alley that turns a corner. Oh! Oh, that's really extraordinary! Because there's a passage I'm telling you about orally here, in Combray, where he talks about the church of Combray, remembered throughout his whole life through the steeple of the church of Combray, and so on. And he says this, right?
21:00 'And even today, if in some large provincial town, or in some quarter of Paris that I do not know well, a passer-by who has directed me on my way points out to me, from a distance, as a landmark, some belfry of a hospital, or a convent steeple lifting the pointed tip of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of a street I must take' — a small city-hall bell-tower — 'provided that my memory can obscurely find in it some resemblance to the dear, vanished shape' — that of the steeple of his village, Combray, that is, Illiers-Combray — 'provided that my memory can obscurely find in it some resemblance to the dear, vanished shape, the passer-by, if he turns round to make sure I am not losing my way' — you know, sometimes the person you've asked for directions turns around to check you're not making a mistake.
21:49 'may, to his astonishment, see me suddenly stop dead, oblivious of the walk I have undertaken or the errand I have been sent on, standing before the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying out and rebuilding itself.' That's a metaphor — I open a parenthesis, not really outside the subject since I'm still somewhat on topic, but I open a parenthesis within the reading of the text, because this metaphor of memory struggling against a flow — you see, 'drying out and rebuilding itself.' As if Proust were one of those Dutchmen draining the polders taken over by the sea, so that there be ground for man, reclaimed for man, right?
22:46 'The tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe.' One of Proust's most famous passages — he says that memory is like a worker laboring upon water, that is, laying foundations on a liquid, which seems almost contradictory. So I continue: 'and no doubt, then, more anxiously than a moment ago, when I was asking him the way, I continue my search' — it's no longer about asking where the street is, where he had an appointment with a doctor or whatever, no — 'but more anxiously I continue my search, and, retracing my steps, I arrive finally at a road along which' — there's an ellipsis here, but past the ellipsis — 'along which I make my way — in my heart.'
23:30 That's a tremendous passage, isn't it? There, since I broke it up, let me just give the ending again: 'trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying out and rebuilding itself; and no doubt, then, more anxiously than a moment ago, when I was asking him the way, I continue my search, I retrace my steps, but... in my heart.' So all these isolated memories, why? I began with the fragment from Hölderlin that connects memory — let's go there — and death. Because that is what is at stake.
24:21 We already have a beginning of an answer with this metaphor of forgetting — 'the tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe drying out and rebuilding itself.' Because what would figure death here is the flow, the disappearance. Besides, you know, all those who try to preserve things know very well that the worst enemy of preservation is dampness. Right? Whether in the culinary domain, or in cases where books must not mold, you have to protect them, seal them in plastic, whatever you like.
24:58 But there it is, it's complicated to fight against the ravages of time. I don't know. So, where am I going with this? I haven't yet said the essential thing. I'll need Senancour to anchor us properly in what's essential. But we're already beginning to see something here that is a struggle, a reconquest — that's the very word used, right? 'Reclaimed lands.'
25:31 A reconquest, just as there is a reminiscence. And just as anamnesis is a return of memory of what had first been forgotten, there is a reconquest of what seemed forever won over by the scythe of time, by death figured as time — an old man with a scythe, or as we've also seen in Goya's appalling painting, a masterpiece of painting but a dreadful one, Time Devouring His Children, in which Goya is faithful to the letter of the Greek myth.
The child memorialist and the Mandingo griot 26:08 And for this, I now turn to the text given to you for today, Proust's. And it's no accident that it closes the first part of In Search of Lost Time, after having multiplied the memories, since Combray is the earliest part of his life, that of his early childhood, hence the bedtime scene with his mother, and so on. There is a kind of stepping back, and this admirable text begins as follows.
26:39 'And certainly, when they were thus long contemplated by this humble passer-by, by this dreaming child, as a king is by a memorialist lost in the crowd.' A magnificent image, isn't it? This kid doesn't know he's superior to the king, because the king will disappear, perhaps even his memory will fade, or he'll be cursed, right?
27:10 You know that Louis XV, who had begun his career — well, not a career, his reign, right — with the title of Louis the Well-Beloved, and there had been so much hope placed in him after the Regency, had so disappointed the kingdom that in the end, someone, we don't quite know who, came and blew out the candle that had been lit when the king died — when it's lit, the king is dead — he who had become the object of disappointment turning into hatred. So the memory of kings can fade, but not the memory of the dreaming child, like a memorialist lost in the crowd — the opposite of a king, not the center of attention that the whole crowd watches, no? A memorialist, like you and me, lost in the crowd.
28:00 And you see, this makes me think of my griot — yes indeed, whereas Proust, from a milieu of wealthy rentiers of the Parisian establishment of the late 19th and early 20th century, what connection could there be, right, with the West African griot — I say West African because I know that region better than other sub-Saharan ones — because the Mandingo epic, which I've quoted a few times in other sessions long ago, has a magnificent opening, and I take this opportunity to urge you to read it — a text that plays, in West Africa, roughly the role that the Iliad plays in our European collective memory.
28:50 So of course, for a very long time there were no written traces, it was griots who repeated things orally, slamming, singing, rapping if you like, but every evening throughout the whole region, Bamako, but not only there, in northern Guinea, southern Burkina Faso, almost everywhere, in the north of Côte d'Ivoire, everything you like, and even quite a few neighborhoods of Abidjan. Throughout the whole Mandingo area, roughly speaking, linguistically, in the evening, as soon as night falls, it brings a bit of relief, you know, in the great heat, night falls, people go out in their boubous and you have music in the neighborhoods.
29:29 You hear the balafons, you hear — I'm talking about traditional music here, not pleasant music in bars, I'm talking about traditional music. And almost always, the lyrics, for those who understand them, sing the thousand and one variations that can still be made on the exploits of Soundiata Keïta, the West African Achilles, taken from the Mandingo Epic. So why am I talking about this in connection with memory? Because in the exordium of the Mandingo Epic, which we are fortunate enough to know thanks to its transcription by a Guinean who lived for a long time in Senegal, I'm thinking of Djibril.
30:06 I have it. Gabriel. Gabriel — it must have been pronounced closer to Djibril than to Gabriel at the time of the Gospel, believe me. At the time of the Gospel, in any case. Djibril, among Muslims as among us, is the one who is a messenger. Djibril Tamsir Niane — how fitting for someone who is a messenger — is the one who allowed us, thanks to his written transcription, which you can find published by Présence Africaine, I recommend it, it costs nothing, it's a little booklet that should serve as a school reference.
30:44 Children love it too, by the way. The very beginning of the exordium, the very first sentence, begins like this, where the griot introduces himself. "I am a griot," those are the first words. "My name is Djeli Mamadou Kouyaté, son of Djeli Kédiang Kouyaté and Bintou Kouyaté, griot from father to son. For generations, the Kouyatés have served Mandingo princes. Without us, the names of kings would fall into oblivion."
31:19 Good heavens! Just as in Proust — without us, without us griots, who are of course a bit like historians, poets, musicians, but also jesters, who are very low on the social scale, who are sometimes despised because they are somewhat ready for any flattery toward sovereigns in order to eat. And yet, the griot is superior to princes and kings: without us, the names of the king would fall into oblivion.
31:56 That's what I find here at the heart of Proust's text. So, certainly, when they were long contemplated by certain humble passersby, by that child who was dreaming, as a king is by a memorialist lost in the crowd, and finally — the subject of the sentence — this corner of nature, this bit of garden, could not have imagined, could not have believed that it would be thanks to him, to this child, that it would be called — and here is the victory over death — to survive in their most ephemeral particularity.
32:29 There, apparently... because you'll tell me, yes, but we do remember a lesson learned fifteen times over, we end up knowing it by heart. I remember what's written on the front of a café I pass every morning on my way to school or to the office. So, repetition, habit. No, no, it's the opposite. Here it's a matter of memories relating to things that perhaps lasted less than a second. But let's listen to Proust, shall we? "And yet that scent of hawthorn which strays along the hedge, where the eglantines will soon replace it, and all that is fleeting, a sound of footsteps leaving no echo on the gravel of a path, a bubble formed against an aquatic plant by the river water, and which bursts at once, an even shorter bubble."
33:20 "My exaltation has carried them and has managed to make them survive through so many successive years, while all around the paths have vanished, and those who trod them have died, along with the memory of those who trod them." It takes courage to admit that one remembers a scent of hawthorn better than a person one knew. "Sometimes this fragment of landscape" — here the discontinuous comes in, the discontinuity of all the rest of my life — "this fragment of landscape, thus brought forward to the present day, detaches itself, so isolated from everything" — I remind you that in Italian, an island is 'isola' — "detaches itself, so isolated from everything that it floats uncertainly in my mind like a flowering Delos." Delos is one of the most beautiful of the Cyclades, the Greek islands, isn't it.
34:21 Where there is a famous temple devoted to Apollo, which was of course the seat of the League of Delos. Let's leave that aside, but a very beautiful image — it's not a paradisiacal island, mind you — "floats uncertainly in my memory like a..." "So isolated from everything that it floats uncertainly in my mind like a flowering Delos, without my being able to say from what country, from what country," comma, "from what time," dash, "perhaps simply from what dream."
Baudelaire's La Vie antérieure 35:01 So, since this session set out to be a dialogue between texts which, by rubbing against one another, will bring out the philosophical problem to which I'm trying to give an increasingly definite shape, reading with you, hoping that you can make it out, that you will end up discerning it more and more clearly, I now move on to a text that was actually brought up by Philippe, just before we began this live session — he mentioned that very beautiful poem by Baudelaire called "La vie antérieure" ("Previous Life").
35:43 "I long dwelt beneath vast porticoes / which the marine suns tinged with a thousand fires." We're not in Proust here, or in the novel, or in prose, we're really in the fantastic, in poetry, a life before death. And this Baudelaire, who at the time he writes this lives miserably, in debt, in a more or less sordid Paris, here sees himself as an Eastern prince, having lived in palaces in a previous life. So: "I long dwelt beneath vast porticoes / which the marine suns tinged with a thousand fires, / and whose great, straight and majestic pillars / made them resemble, at evening, basalt caves."
36:24 Basalt withstands time, it's hard stone, volcanic. And up to this point, nothing moves — it's columns, isn't it. The vast porticoes, the straight and majestic pillars — we're not really in Romanticism at all, nor even yet in the symbolist musical fluidity that begins with Verlaine, we're still really in the Parnassian mode. And suddenly music comes in, movement, and suddenly we pass, don't we, from the Parnassian to positively Wagnerian harmonies — but rather, the swells — second stanza: "Rolling the images of the skies, mingling in a solemn and mystical way the all-powerful chords of their rich music with the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes."
37:17 Well, that's the vision he gives us. And now the tercets begin: "It is there that I lived in calm voluptuousness, / amid the azure, the waves, the splendors / and naked slaves, all steeped in scents." Imagine a sovereign surrounded by slaves, a bit of an erotic-exotic touch, isn't it, very much in fashion. Second half of the 19th century, the vogue for the Orient, the vizier. And think of a painting by Ingres like The Turkish Bath. Look it up on Google, The Turkish Bath, you'll see.
37:52 "And naked slaves, all steeped in scents, who cooled my brow with palm fronds" — no less! — "and whose sole care..." — the care, housework, cooking — what do slaves do? No, no, the women are there for that. "And whose sole care" — and this previous life — "was to fathom the painful secret that made me languish." Good heavens! No, this previous life is not a lost paradise.
38:23 It had all the appearance of one — vast porticoes that the marine suns tinged with a thousand fires. But already the worm was in the fruit, already the unease, isn't it. "The painful secret that made me languish" in this previous life — I was already haunted by a mortal languor. And even the slaves who cool my brow with their palm fronds, "whose sole care was to fathom the painful secret that made me languish."
38:56 So, I interrupted Proust's text at that very beautiful image of the memory floating uncertainly. It is, in his mind — I repeat, "in my mind, like a flowering Delos, without my being able to say from what country, from what time, perhaps simply from what dream" it comes. This is where the comparison with Baudelaire becomes inevitable. Did I really see this, or is it — I don't come from a previous life — yes, almost fantastical, the dream. And there's that final turn when, on summer evenings — now we return to the present, no, it could be Paris anywhere — "when on summer evenings the harmonious sky rumbles like a wild beast and everyone sulks at the storm."
39:40 "It is on the slopes of Méséglise" — that was one of the areas of Combray, wasn't it — "it is on the slopes of Méséglise that I owe it" — implicitly, thanks to memory — "to remain alone, in ecstasy, breathing through the sound of the falling rain" — breathing what? "the scent of invisible and persistent lilacs." A scent of flowers that are not there. So, I wanted to return to this text, though it still doesn't answer the famous question, it doesn't give a solution to the problem posed by Hölderlin's fragment.
40:28 "They cannot all — the heavenly ones — mortals, before them, reach the abyss." Up to this point we understand — let's admit it, since Pagani keeps repeating it — we're willing to be persuaded that we have a knowledge superior to the gods'. It's a bit sacrilegious, but after all, it's true that they know, since they are gods, all these emotions that we would not have if somehow life — if we did not know, deep down, that we did not have all the time before us. And if we did not evaluate everything we live through the sieve of passing time. As if the most interesting life only took shape in memory, which Proust often repeats.
Bernard Dimey's Syracuse: seeing in order to remember it 41:15 But you know, I quote Proust, I sometimes quote Nerval, I didn't think it would be — I limit myself to a few well-referenced authors. In French song, you have the lyrics of one of the most beautiful songs of the whole postwar period, everyone knows it, it's "Syracuse," made famous, performed by Henri Salvador — as for the music.
41:49 "I would so love to see Syracuse, / Easter Island, and Kairouan, / birds dressed by the wind." Here, it's not memory I'm going to take you into again. No, it's someone who's there and who would like instead — implicitly in a future which may never come, but which, if possible, he hopes is not too far off — to one day see Syracuse, Mount Fuji. It all hangs together quite well. I don't know what's underneath, but the lyrics are magnificent.
42:19 Only, here it is — at the end, I think I have it here, yes that's it. I'll just give you the final turn: "To see the Land of the Morning Calm, / go fishing with cormorants / and get drunk on palm wine / while listening to the wind sing." And that's the last — "Before my youth wears out / and my springs are gone" — we're still talking about the future apparently — "I would so love to see Syracuse" — last line — "to remember it in Paris."
42:59 Perhaps the finest thing about Syracuse will be in his consciousness when he recalls his vacation there, back in Paris. Memory is complicated — it's interesting but complicated. It mixes up verb tenses, memory does, between future, past and present. So that's where I had gotten to in my reflection, and so I'm setting off again from the problem stated by Hölderlin — why, up to now, everyone can take a bit more time.
43:39 [The] limit through which we have access to a knowledge that the gods do not have, owing to our mortality. But in what way does that authorize Hegel, Hölderlin, to go on to say — with them, the echo changes. I come back to my strange inequation. How can the echo give even more than the original sound?
44:14 How does a man who has gone through an entire history — this holds true for Neanderthals too, a Neanderthal lifetime is a duration — how does having gone through an entire history add value to human life? I do say human here, because there are elephant memories too, that's another matter. And you find the answer — and this is why I'm getting to it now — in the text, and we're getting there, by Senancour, whom I had quoted about three years ago, when we began talking in our talks about the emergence of modernity.
Senancour, pre-Romantic, and Obermann, letter XVIII 45:06 That's the subject I keep coming back to. The one which — forgive me for repeating myself, but there are new listeners — touches on it, doesn't it. It's a modernity that I periodize, trying to be as precise as possible, through the two great fractures — I always repeat that word, as there is one every twenty centuries or so — the English Industrial Revolution and the French political revolution, both occurring within a tiny span of time on a historical scale, namely the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th century, especially its latter part.
45:45 And Senancour is precisely someone who writes on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries, so he's a representative, one could hardly find a better example, to illustrate what literary textbooks call pre-Romanticism. Alongside Chateaubriand, for instance, people like that. That is to say, we're not yet talking about Romanticism, the word isn't yet widespread. Officially, it will begin much later than this text, written at the very beginning, around 1805. Officially, Romanticism as a literary movement will begin to spread from the publication, in 1821.
46:22 It's almost too precise — of Lamartine's Poetic Meditations, you see. In France, in Germany and in England — we know very well that light comes to us from the North — Romanticism began first in the Nordic countries. But anyway, here he's well ahead of the curve, it's in the works. And why do I make this little detour through the situation and the mention of pre-Romanticism? Because the term irritates me a little. It's a bit like when people say Rousseau is a precursor of Romanticism. After all, the first of the pre-Romantics is Rousseau. Undeniably, when you read Julie, or the New Héloïse, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, many passages of the Confessions, and so on.
46:58 No, no, but I... I'm not saying he brought nothing new, as in Goethe's famous formula — with Voltaire a world ends. Voltaire destroyed the old world, particularly its pillar of religious intolerance, etc. With Voltaire a world ends, with Rousseau a world begins. No, no, of course, but the word "precursor" implies, by its semantic logic — the precursor is the one who was first to do, on a small scale, a bit of what others will pursue on a grander scale.
47:34 That's not at all the case. Quite often, the pre-Romantics are more profound than Romanticism itself. As if the emergence of this new sensibility, spurred by the two great fractures I told you about, which belong to the modernity we're still grappling with, which will bring about industrial society, the middle classes — well yes, well yes, but we need reference points. It's an earthly problem, all of a sudden, to see just how close all this is, if we think about it.
48:06 So, there you have it, that was to put you on guard. Careful, when I tell you Senancour is a pre-Romantic, it's not to say there's better afterward. In this domain of the mal du siècle, no one has analyzed it as clinically as he did. That's what we're going to see. I'll comment afterward on what relates to the unresolved problem posed by Hölderlin. It's an epistolary novel. He writes to a friend he trusts completely. The novel begins at the moment when he changes his life somewhat. I recall that Monsieur Étienne Pivert de Senancour is, in reality, a young aristocrat of the time who has means. There are far wealthier people than him, but let's say, he's comfortable — well off, especially compared to the average population of the time.
48:55 He even owned the estate of Châalis at a time when important parts of Nerval's stories in Les Filles du feu take place there, by the way. Nerval names him among the famous names of those who succeeded one another at the famous supper at Ermenonville just before the Revolution. He's an aristocrat, but very much ahead of his social class, a fervent partisan of Rousseau. Not at all counter-revolutionary, quite the opposite. So, I've placed him quickly, and I'll move straight on to his text. So, he's going to change his life. He was in Lyon, and he says, "My next letter will find you in Switzerland."
49:38 And he's Rousseau — er, he's passing through. He expected to enjoy the landscapes, all that, and he says this: "My situation is gentle and I lead a sad life." I stress — it is gentle. He doesn't have, of course, the problems that most people of that time had, material problems, financial worries, and even less any concern about work, neither commercial nor manual. "My situation is gentle and I lead a sad life. I am here, could not be better off, free, tranquil, in good health" — that matters too, health, if you have a toothache the voluptuousness of melancholy can go hang — "in good health, without business affairs, indifferent about the future, from which I expect nothing, and losing without regret the past which I did not enjoy."
50:37 Well, I never! That's not a very cheerful balance sheet! Those who are attentive to the final silence — I'm sure there are some among you who feel this — must recall in Hölderlin: "Forward and backward, we do not want to look, but let ourselves be rocked like a swaying boat upon the sea." The end of the first Mnemosyne. I take it up again right from that point, don't I.
51:08 "Indifferent about the future, from which I expect nothing, and losing without regret the past which I did not enjoy. But there is within me a restlessness that will not leave me." There's the mal du siècle, among its very first expressions. "It is a need I do not know." It is first a feeling of incompleteness before being a reflection. "It is a need I do not know, which commands me, which absorbs me, which carries me beyond perishable beings." We begin to see death looming.
51:45 "You are mistaken" — he's speaking to his friend, implicitly anticipating the genre — what you're lacking, good heavens, is a pretty young girl, get married, enough said. "You are mistaken, and I myself was mistaken about it — it is not the need to love. There is a great distance between the emptiness of my heart and the love I have so desired" — this is a young man speaking. "But there is the infinite between what I am and what I need to be. Love is immense, it is not infinite."
52:19 Romanticism, for its part, will never go that far. Never will you get a Romantic to say that love is not infinite. If indeed there is the most beautiful expression of the infinitude of love, it is surely the second act of Tristan, in Wagner's version, the most insane act ever written, that any musician has ever composed. For nearly two hours, isn't it, this infinitude opens the gates of night.
52:50 So, otherwise, an implacable lucidity, isn't it. We'd say, in more familiar terms today, self-destructive, wouldn't we. When he says "indifferent about the future, from which I expect nothing, losing without regret the past which I did not enjoy" — that's no gift. And when he speaks of his restlessness, and says it's not a lack of love — love is immense, it is not infinite.
Pascal: the finite annihilates itself before the infinite 53:20 "There is a great distance between the emptiness of my heart and the love I have so desired" — but there is the infinite — the infinite as opposed to "great," I'll come back to that, we're starting to get abstract, we do need to be a bit. "But there is the infinite between what I am and what I need to be." Here I make a cut. Well, while still recalling the closing line, "love is immense, it is not" — life. I've cut it there. These cuts will take us back a century before Senancour, to Pascal.
53:52 There I would ask especially my mathematician friends to be very attentive to the rigor of the development of this immense mathematician, who was the creator of the calculus of probability, the designer of the triangle that bears his name, Pascal's triangle, no less. This "frightening genius," to use Chateaubriand's phrase, who had rediscovered the whole of Euclid's theorems at age fifteen and who, at seventeen, left us a treatise on conic sections.
54:28 So we can't do better in terms of reasoning. And he writes this — he formulates it in the Pensées, I'll give you first what sounds like a theorem, so to speak, even though it's phrased in ordinary language rather than in algorithms: "the finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite." One could hardly come closer to what Senancour says in that passage. "The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite."
55:04 No, not the small next to the infinite, of course, a candle in front of the sun, you can't see it. No, no, no, not the small one. The finite can be gigantic for us. It is zero. This is Pascal speaking. A small parenthesis for my mathematician friends, but I won't dwell on it long so as not to make a detour. Pascal writes this at the moment when, across the Channel in England and across the Rhine in Germany, Newton on one side and Leibniz on the other are finalizing the modeling of what would soon become the greatest mathematical event of the classical era, the creation of infinitesimal calculus.
55:54 And in this creation, the notion of annihilation, the finite, of annihilation before the infinite, is going to play a crucial role. I continue my little parenthesis for mathematicians, but here I ask those who are not specialists to pay attention, because, I myself don't go very far in algebraic calculus, but simply in what follows, the stakes are crucial. The problem with the worldwide question is that there's a little priority quarrel, it's a problem of history, not of mathematics. Whether it's Leibniz or Newton first, we now know that it doesn't mean much, they found it at about the same time, except that Leibniz's formulation was the one retained.
56:32 It's the most elegant and the most practical formulation. You all know it, because you learned it from your second year of secondary school, from the very beginning of infinitesimal calculus, when we started with the derivative. It's Delta Y over Delta X. What does Delta Y become when X, for heaven's sake, tends toward zero, annihilates itself? I go back to Pascal's reasoning. So I take this as a theorem.
57:02 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million, 1 billion, 100 billion, all of that is zero next to infinity. I go back to what I said about the Greek gods earlier, we now see better, through what is dizzying here, that a Greek god, even immortal, even if he had a life, say, lasting more than a billion years, is immortal. That's nothing next to eternity. Immortality is not eternity. It's the same distance that exists between the gods of the religion of immanence, who resemble us a great deal, almost to the point of immortality — that's why they have a bit of a hard edge — and the gods of transcendence, about whom one can say almost nothing.
57:56 Unrepresentable, unpronounceable. You know that when Moses first stands before the Eternal on Sinai, we believe that God says to him, "I am that I am." Yes, that's the meaning of what he says, but he doesn't say it that way, or rather Moses doesn't hear it that way, because it's unpronounceable. And in the Jewish language, as in the Russian language moreover, in Hebrew as in Russian, there's no conjugation of the verb "to be" in the present tense. You can't say "I am Russian." You say "ya russkiy." "I Russian." In Hebrew, the same.
58:37 So the term Yahweh — we added the A and the E to make it pronounceable, but God himself is content to write, you know, the tetragrammaton YHWH. Transcendence has nothing to do with immanence. So the finite annihilates itself before the infinite. Now that we've properly understood the stakes of this theorem, let's look now at the reasoning that follows from it. Now, man is finite, I continue Pascal's logic, in space through his body, in time through death. So man is — let's apply the theorem bluntly — man is nothingness, he is nothing.
59:28 He says precisely, in the famous passage on the two infinities, in the Pensées. It's the dizzying passage where Pascal — the discoveries quite recent at the time, from the new astronomy, show that the Earth is nothing but a speck of dust, lost as it is in the universe. And then he gives us vertigo with the immensity and infinity of the universe, new at the time. Not even reassured by all those celestial spheres people believed in in antiquity, in Aristotle's or Ptolemy's universe.
1:00:00 Then he gives us another kind of vertigo with the infinitely small — it's a famous passage which I'll go through quickly — where he imagines also a man with organs in his body, veins in his blood, drops within that blood, humors within those drops, and dividing those drops further still. He arrives — one might think we've reached the infinitely small, but not at all. He'll show us within that, in what we can see as through a microscope, a new abyss where he will see new worlds again.
1:00:37 He concludes this passage by saying — what is man, I could come back to man — what is man within the infinite? A nothing before the whole — sorry, a nothingness in relation to the whole, a whole in relation to nothingness, a middle between nothing and everything. I go back to Pascal's formulation word for word, Pascal's style is dazzling, so we mustn't miss a single syllable. What is man in nature?
1:01:10 A whole in relation to nothingness, a nothingness in relation to the whole, a middle between nothing and everything. You see? Oh! I go on, the reasoning isn't finished. If man is nothing — not in his being, but in his consciousness of himself when he knows, when he is conscious of the mortality of his condition. I'll spare you, I won't repeat it.
1:01:42 I've come across, in Pascal, the most famous case really — it's his analysis of diversion, essentially. Misery of man without God. When I have considered men, the perils to which they expose themselves, wars first of all, I noticed that all their troubles come from not being able to sit quietly in a room. Pascal here analyzes a notion whose importance will keep growing in the sharpest modernity. It's boredom. I won't give you vertigo with multiple references, on the contrary, it's a very homogeneous line.
Boredom, from Pascal to Baudelaire; the hunt, not the game 1:02:26 Let me remind you that the first poem of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, which is said to have inaugurated modern poetry in French, called "To the Reader," a dedication to the reader — it begins by saying: among the monsters that surround us, there is one more terrible than all the others. You know it, reader, that delicate monster, boredom. In one yawn it would swallow the world, says Baudelaire. I know it, that delicate monster — hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother — boredom.
1:03:04 So I go back to Pascal, to our line of reasoning. From the moment man knows that his term is limited, no limited satisfaction can satisfy him. And we understand much better now what the moralists — not at all in the sense of those who moralize, that's moraline to speak like Nietzsche, those who give us lectures, no no no no — but those who describe mores, in the sense of mores.
1:03:37 So the great tradition of the French moralists, those who have an almost clinical analysis — Senancour would not have arrived at that surgical precision if there hadn't been the arrival of a tradition going back at least to Montaigne. Montaigne almost analyzed himself when he had his colics, his pancreatic stones, and believe me that's painful. And Pascal wrote "Prayer to God for the good use of illnesses." So it's a tradition of analysis. Those who have studied mores know very well that it's almost a truism to say that what one seeks in hunting is not the game.
1:04:20 A true hunter — if in the morning, when the coolness is there, you buckle up your gaiters, as the saying goes, right? My companions are ready to leave with me, the dogs bark impatiently and off we go. I'm not a hunter, don't worry, I can't stand seeing a wounded animal, but I've studied mores, I'm not moralizing here. For centuries it's been like this. You won't satisfy the hunter by saying, "No, no, no, you don't need to move, you can stay home, watch the match. Here, I bought a hare yesterday, I had one too many, I put it in the freezer, it's yours."
1:04:59 A hunter — it's the hunt that makes the frame [châssis]. What I'm telling you today is complicated. It's the hunt, but I must not know that it's the hunt, I must convince myself that it's the game. Because if I say that it isn't really the game but the hunt, in the forest, the hunter is going to get bored. If I tell him, well, let's not go there, it's magnificent, look, it's autumn, the leaves are beautiful, there's not a single animal here, everything's been shot. The forest loses its charm if he isn't waiting to see a wild boar cross the path, or the dogs starting to bark before he even sees it. As much as hunting displeases me, as it does some of you, but not for the same reasons — I'm not vegan at all.
Diversion: we flee what is behind us 1:05:48 Let's move on to the game of — it's Pascal who takes these two examples, not me. When he analyzes what he calls diversion — everything we do, let me say the philosophical essential, then I'll come back to my example of the game — everything we do, the positivists explain by something positive. I rush to accept my friend Gilbert's dinner invitation, his wife cooks very well, or he himself cooks very well.
1:06:25 And all that. That's what motivates me — hunger, food, satisfaction, taste buds, blah blah blah. Hunger explains that I have to eat, undeniably. Until the end of our lives, we won't stop being animals in that sense, in the sense that one must eat to live, for instance, living beings, biological beings, and animals in particular.
1:06:56 That is to say, they cannot draw their nourishment from the inert as plants do, we need something already living in order to live. That includes lettuce too. So what am I saying? Well, let me recall what Pascal tells us, which is dizzying — it's the reverse. What motivates our actions is not something in front of us, the appetite, that pulls us, that determines us.
1:07:29 I have something behind me that I'm fleeing. That's diversion. Because I didn't tell you "I'm going to eat." I'm going to eat at my friend Gilbert's. There'll be five or six of us friends, we'll talk, I don't know. Oh, five — we're not allowed to be five, what am I saying? Pay attention here. We're going to discuss the lockdown, there's a storm brewing. So we'll first have the aperitif, which isn't necessary for survival or for nourishment.
1:08:07 Then afterward we'll sit down to eat — oh no, no, we won't rush straight to the main course, there are the starters first. Ah no, we're not French for nothing. When we can — France was the greatest agricultural nation throughout the classical periods, up until a more recent period, before the industrial revolution, nitrogen fertilizers, tractors and all that — France is by far the richest country at that level. Now, French cuisine's fame owes much to the fact that this country, crossed through its middle by the 45th parallel which passes through Bordeaux, that is, equidistant between 0 and 90, between the pole and the equator, the equator and the pole — the ideal country blessed by the gods, south of the region where it starts getting too wet and too cold, and north of a region where it would be too hot, too dry and too stony — France sits at that sweet spot.
1:09:02 We shouldn't be too surprised that there's this abundance. We like living well. To come back to it, the aperitif, the little pickles, the tapas during the aperitif, then the main course and the desserts. It was my German wife who pointed this out to me. She had worked as an au pair in her first years in France as a student. She had worked for an engineer, a researcher at Suchard — hard to pronounce — yes, the chocolate company. For her, coming from the deprivations of German civilians after the war, it was a kind of blessing.
1:09:36 Because the children were all sick of tasting the samples. She took them, she told me, "I gained 10 kilos in a year." She said, "I didn't understand, at home the courses didn't follow one after another." You know, in Germany, half a sausage, bread cut into slices at 6pm, and that's it. And spreadable sausage, that's all. And fake cheese, Laughing Cow. May my German friends forgive me, they know I adore Germany.
1:10:06 And that there are excellent dishes, in Swabia in particular. So, all of this isn't necessary physiologically, biologically. And I haven't even mentioned the coffee, the after-dinner drink — yes, from the aperitif, we're barely at the after-dinner drink. All that is time gained. If I'd been at home alone eating, I don't know if I would have had as much appetite.
1:10:37 Well, in my own body, I'm certain I wouldn't have. Right? And I know many people who say they eat more and better in company. And it's very important to understand what Pascal is saying here — what's determining is not a carrot in front of me, opposed to the stick, that I chase like a rabbit, stimulus, reflex, that's binary — no, there's something behind me that I'm fleeing.
1:11:12 There's even a reflection on the condition of kings in Pascal. He says that one of the greatest advantages is that people spend their time entertaining them. The court spends its time trying to divert them. When you also have entertainers like Molière and Racine, or Lully in music. Lully and Molière collaborated to write that magnificent musical comedy, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. That allows the king to move toward death with less anxiety, right? Than what is ignoble in misery — yes, in misery in the ordinary sense — what is ignoble is not only material misery, social misery, and odious.
1:11:48 Today, in our era, in the 21st century, in the richest countries, there's material misery, distress, people asking for something to eat. The worst thing is that they don't even have anything to make them think of something other than illness, death, need, determination, dependency. The walls of a beautiful house, thick, comfortable walls, that protect you from the cold with central heating. Oh yes, I have a bone to pick with the degrowth advocates. It really has to be an ideology of the privileged, all that.
1:12:26 So it's enormous, what Pascal saw there. I now come back to Hegel — we're starting to get a lead thanks to this detour, it's in the Pascal lecture course. But first let me finish, before coming back to Hegel, with Senancour's own text, right? It's not every day you see a text like this. So, how does that work? Yes, sorry. There we go.
The end of Obermann: boundless illusions 1:13:03 I had stopped there, so — "love is immense, it is not infinite." You've well understood Pascal's reasoning. Let me still finish, though, before returning to this text. Just the conclusion of the reasoning was missing. If man is nothingness the moment — everything that is limited satisfaction, like eating the same dish every day, sorry to keep circling back to food, but your favorite dish, the most delicious one, the one you dream of eating, if it's served to you every day, it will become sickening.
1:13:38 No matter how many days it takes, it depends on the person, but it will happen quickly, all the more so if it's a whole lifetime. So you see, everything that repeats itself, everything that shows us finitude, limit, is unbearable. Everything that bores us, everything that ends up sinking into boredom. Notice that I'm speaking here of food and not of love. To come back to that. And so, love is immense, it is not infinite, I continue. I do not want to enjoy — this is someone speaking, a century of libertinism, reaching its finest hours, not the century of Dangerous Liaisons, of the Marquis de Sade, and so on.
1:14:22 I do not want to enjoy, I want to hope. There is still something interesting to reach for. I would like to know. I need boundless illusions — bound, limit, end — that recede in order to deceive me always, whereas Hölderlin indeed said that we reach a limit. Mortals before them reach the abyss. But I must not think of it. I must think of something that makes those boundaries recede eternally.
1:14:53 And no doubt fortune will be that, but I'll come back to it. And yes, there are paths. It leads from Pascal, the Jansenist Christian, to Marx, the materialist. What do you want? I need boundless illusions that recede in order to deceive me always. What do I care about what can end, the hour that will come in 60 years is there, near me, a proper gentleman. I do not love what is being prepared, approaches, arrives, and is no more.
1:15:27 I want a good, a dream, a hope finally that is always before me, beyond me, greater than my own expectation, greater than what passes. This infinitude of human desire — I needed it to make you understand what Hölderlin says, why with man time changes here, why the echo changes.
Material hardship and boredom: The Little Prince, L'Assommoir 1:15:57 Senancour can express this lucidity about the human condition, but because, as he said at the beginning of the text, from the material point of view, he's fine. So he's not under the illusion of believing that what would put an end to all these problems is having the food that's insufficient for him, the roof he doesn't have, or through which the rain falls, or from which he'll soon be evicted by a bailiff because he hasn't paid his rent, and so on.
1:16:29 So material distress is appalling, but it has at least this positive side. Negatively, it's that it allows me to delay the moment when I'll taste boredom. And that doesn't stop... You know, someone can be in material distress and still know boredom. You know, in The Little Prince — I rarely make this kind of reference — in The Little Prince, there's a planet inhabited by a drunkard. Do you remember The Little Prince? And the Little Prince, like a kid, keeps asking why, why do you drink? To forget. Answer: to forget.
1:17:13 To forget what? That I'm ashamed. Ashamed of what? Ashamed of drinking. And Zola's L'Assommoir is there to remind us that when the worker of that time was paid, when he had the minimum income that would allow him, if he were an animal, if he were only an animal — but if he were only an animal, if there hadn't been this emergence from that knowledge of the limit of a human kind, you're starting to follow me, which brings in a new ontology, perhaps the only ontology worthy of the name, above the animal kind, without the two interpenetrating — at that point, they should go straight to the corner grocer, the worker of Zola's time.
1:18:13 To buy himself the exact and strict quantity — not that it's limited, you can imagine the pay of the time, the day laborer surely doesn't have enough to buy the quantity of lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins that would let him go back to the factory the next day and keep on losing his life while earning it. He doesn't do that. He gives us a lesson in anthropology. He goes off to find his friends at the Assommoir.
1:18:46 It's not that he gets extra food — on the contrary, it's not good for his health, what he does to himself. He's going to drink and drink. But there's the relation to the other, the friends, diversion. So we've made progress, we understand better why — because if this goes back millennia, let's go, and you'll see that everything holds together now, in the references I've been giving you for a while. Since the man found in Morocco, or his cousins from East Africa, or Toumaï from Chad — the differences at that level are derisory compared to what's at stake.
Hominization begins when the superfluous appears 1:19:28 These are quarrels between labs, between teams. Mine is 10 years older than yours, or 10,000 years, or 100,000 years older — what does it matter. Especially since that remarkable scholar I quoted last time, in a documentary broadcast by Arte, said very rightly that in any case the process continues, we're still discussing, still organizing ourselves. I'll come back to this with Rousseau.
1:19:59 But for now, why do I come back to prehistoric man? To what already belongs to the genus Homo in prehistory, to be more precise — that is, without going as far back as the Australopithecines, without going as far as those animals that use tools, a stone to crack a nut, but who have not yet produced tools, which is quite different.
1:20:30 Tools that presuppose a form, a type — there's the civilization of tombal axes all along the shore of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in the tumuli, where we find the same forms of axes in the tombs. Which means there is a form, a model! Ah there it is, yes, that's good, I can hear it, I can hear you thinking, I can hear in the heads of a few of you who remember the Marx passage. What immediately distinguishes the most unskilled architect from the most expert bee is that the bee — the architect — has his house in his head before producing it in reality, which already proves that there is a thought, which has this typical form.
1:21:09 I refer you again to our comrade, our Tran Duc Thao, admirable Marxist, who wrote — published by Éditions Sociales, hard to find, but I recommend it — on the origins of consciousness and language. And who also goes back to prehistory. Yes, what is there from the very first manifestations in the genus homo, not in the animal genus?
1:21:41 Burials. When we find a burial with clearly determined funerary rites, then we no longer ask whether it's an animal or a man. The cave paintings, as they're called. That's not extra food. It's of no use, a consistent pragmatist would say. A relentless positivist, pragmatism — it's of no use. It's a waste of time, painting on cave walls.
1:22:20 I won't even mention the music they must have made inside the cave, since we know about it. What I'm saying is that this process of hominization begins — I've already said it, and I know some of you will have noticed — man begins when the superfluous appears. So it's scandalous to talk about a subsistence minimum, to come back to current social matters. It's scandalous that we keep wanting to ensure a minimum of dignity, as they say with a tartuffe-like tone — what dignity? When Cro-Magnon man was already going beyond the subsistence minimum by painting on cave walls.
1:23:11 And Cro-Magnon's wife wore ornaments, jewels made of bone, of ivory. You can't see it here, but ornaments. When he sculpted callipygian women, fertility figurines, already in the so-called Mousterian period, if you want a bit more precision. That means that behind these apparently artistic concerns, there is confirmation of what Pascal says.
1:23:44 If man is nothingness — and here I'm finally finishing with Pascal, coming back to the heart of what Hölderlin was saying — then man must make himself another nature. His previous nature, his natural nature, the animal, is annihilated by his knowledge. It is annihilated as a power of enjoyment, as what gives interest to life, if you will. It's still there, I'm alive biologically, but it's unbearable.
1:24:18 And Verlaine who says: "There is no worse pain than knowing it, without love and without hate, why my heart aches so." You know, "It weeps in my heart as it rains on the town." "It is indeed the worst pain not to know why, without love and without hate, my heart aches so." "The desolate heart of man, God split it in a fragment." But yes, good news! I'm not trying to give you some pan-tragism and make you pity and feel sorry for the wretched fate we have — it's the opposite.
Custom is a second nature; the echo changes 1:24:48 The good news is that man has known this for more than 50,000 years, and has devised stratagems to create another life, another world, which makes us understand the very common saying "custom is a second nature." But no, we don't take popular expressions seriously. And we're right, because as a system they all contradict each other. One tells you "a rolling stone gathers no moss," and the other tells you "travel broadens the young."
1:25:22 One tells you not to travel too much, and the other tells you traveling can improve you a great deal. No, no, but if you take them one by one, each is a movement of depth. Custom, a second nature — custom. There is no human society without custom, none that isn't determined by a specific culture, where here you eat with chopsticks, here with forks, here with three fingers of the left hand — right, sorry, you see my slip, which one should never make. None of these things are useful, none are necessary from a vital point of view, but they are indispensable to a human life.
1:26:08 Thank you. Thank you. Well, so I'm being told from the control room that we've reached an hour and a half, so this time I'm glad to have reached that famous hour and a half, since there had always been questions raised at that point, but apparently there's no rush for questions. So I'll conclude by returning to Hegel, and to memory and anamnesis. No, no, not artificially — we now understand better why the echo, the echo changes. Because from the moment…
1:26:43 The moment when knowledge constitutes itself — don't think that just before this knowledge, a few instants before, I was an animal and then suddenly, that's it, I'm definitively a man. It's a constant back-and-forth, and now you understand also why there is always this effort of anamnesis, and on the contrary, this effort not to know, not to go back up, because it ruins one's life. We're beginning to understand better. So I'll conclude with a text I've often quoted for other reasons, but which is chapter 8 of the first book of The Social Contract, whose title is — this chapter 8 of the first book — on the civil state, on the fact of living in society, isn't that right?
Rousseau, The Social Contract: On the civil state 1:27:42 Let me very briefly recall the essential passage. This passage from the state of nature to the civil state, which I told you earlier didn't happen in a quarter of an hour, produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had previously lacked. Good grief, that's not the Rousseau we were taught — I was told he's a naturalist, and that all evil comes from society.
1:28:16 It is only then, when the voice of duty succeeds that of appetite, that man, who until then had looked only to himself, who until then was only an individual, finds himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages he holds from nature, on the left, on the right — so I'm not devoured by a predator after all, I don't recommend to you the fate of little sea turtles, you know, which barely hatched are forced to rush quickly to the water, while there are 2,000 birds that, like fighter jets, are strafing them, tearing them apart.
1:29:03 Well, natural freedom quickly becomes an idea. Although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in return. His faculties are exercised and developed — I won't elaborate, I've done so enough — thought becomes language. His passions are ennobled, sexuality becomes love. His whole soul rises to such a point that — this is where Rousseau's grave sentence comes — it's the first theory of modern evil and of the horrors that will come in modernity.
1:29:38 If the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the state he came from, below bestiality, he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy instant. Here he contradicts Rousseau. He speaks as if it were an instant when, all at once, thanks to consciousness of death, man passed from animal to man. The happy instant which tore him forever — from what? From the state of nature. Forever! It is irreversible.
Krasucki and production at the service of desire 1:30:10 And which turned a stupid and limited animal into an intelligent being and a man. What word did I begin with, from Rousseau? This passage — that's what he's talking about. This passage from the state of nature to the civil state — let's stop having the illusion the scholar spoke of last time, the illusion of believing it happened long ago and that now we simply benefit from the result. Wait — this passage never stops continuing. In other words, every time I say to my neighbor, "Here, please, help yourself first," I am in the process of passing from the state of nature to the civil state.
1:30:43 Let me take a trivial example — there are far more serious ones that I'll spare myself, aren't there? It's not like... well, since we're commemorating the death of Krasucki, Henri Krasucki, you know, of the CGT, the former head of the CGT, who succeeded Georges Séguy and about whom our late friend Christian Riocher wrote an admirable biography that no one mentions among all those commemorating Krasucki's life.
1:31:13 Let it be said in passing, I take this opportunity to pay tribute to our friend Philippe Moreau, thanks to whom you have these broadcasts and their editing, who filmed an interview with Christian Riocher before his death, during which Christian talked about this biography of Krasucki. Why am I talking about Krasucki? Because he coughed up his lungs in a major Nazi concentration camp, this Polish Jewish communist. Three reasons to be tortured. Polish, Jewish, communist.
1:31:57 And little wealthy brats wallowing in abundance who called him a Stalinist at the time. And who came out of it — he thought of himself as being to the left of the left, and he was to the right of De Gaulle, who is now introducing France's integration into Atlanticism, you know them. Because now they drag us into wars every chance they get, to go after, for instance, the Arab country that got rid of religious fundamentalism and is becoming dangerous.
1:32:29 I close the parenthesis. Now, this Krasucki, a great lover of opera, cultivated — whereas in the caricatures made of him, including in the puppet shows, he was portrayed as an idiot, since he's a communist, a dolt, so necessarily someone primitive. That's why what is said about material improvement — and I'd like to conclude on this idea — doesn't consist in having enough to eat, drink and reproduce, because frankly that could even do without the anthropological moment altogether.
1:33:10 The dragonfly manages that, even if it's ephemeral. Production and the economy are at the service of desire, not of need — that is, of an infinitude. There is no reason to assign it a limit, whether from the employers and the reactionaries or from the Church, to console people for their misery — blessed are the poor in spirit.
1:33:40 While this — I'm not talking about Saint Francis of Assisi, who genuinely struggled alongside poverty, but about the upper clergy, as in Latin America, complicit with the powers and the dictatorships. If material and economic production is put at the service of desire, it no longer has any assignable limit, whatever the reactionaries may say — and I repeat, whether it's the employers who don't want to give up anything, or the religious, or the ecologists, they all sing the same refrain. That there shouldn't be too much growth.
1:34:12 If you go back to a certain threshold, apparently — I don't know when — we'll have to set the cursor at the point where we've had too much. Really! No, that's not my case. I don't know about you. As for me, I don't walk into a supermarket without looking at the prices, taking whatever interests me, walking out and having someone else pay, I don't know who. If they do that, good for them. That's my conclusion. Thank you. So I'll take the floor again to announce a great piece of news, which Philippe reminds me of, but it will be presented to you in more detail by the main actor of this news, so to speak — namely that we will once again be able to access a new website where you'll find all our sessions, all our talks. This had already been admirably prepared, with a referencing system that required a lot of work, for which I'm very grateful.
1:35:18 Then the lockdown and all that, the suspensions, the distancing between one another — it had been put on hold, and now the new site, made by Pierre-Alain Giraud — I'll give you his name — he'll present it to you in detail and how it works next time. It now has many more entries, because there have been new elements added since then, many more documents. And of course, he's extended the excellent referencing system that had been started. So that if you want to find what I say about Pascal, Pagani — that sounds important, on diversion — you can find all the passages.
1:36:01 Going back years, in a few clicks, and sometimes in just one, on this new site. So I'll see you again in the company of Pierre-Alain, who is kind enough to present it to us. I should mention he lives in Iceland, though thoroughly French, and it's from there that he'll present to you — you see, technology does have its uses after all — the workings and instructions for this new tool that's now available to you.
1:36:40 Right now, just write Dominique Pagani dot net — not hard to remember. Dot fr, sorry, I'm being corrected. Dominique Pagani dot fr, that's important, I'm always a step behind. I was on AOL dot net before being on AOL dot fr. So there you go, Dominique Pagani dot fr. Already you'll have plenty to explore, but on top of that, if you run into trouble figuring out how to use it, Pierre-Alain will be there to explain much more next time. Thank you for your attention.
1:37:15 I would so love to see Syracuse, Easter Island and Kairouan, and the great birds that amuse themselves gliding their wings beneath the wind, to see the gardens of Babylon, and the Palace of the Great Lama, to dream of the lovers of Verona, atop Mount Fuji.
