English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Plan of the session: three texts by three madmen 0:00 Hello dear friends, I'm increasingly happy to be with you again as this beautiful spring blossoms. I don't know how it is depending on the place, the region, or even the country, since, to quote a famous line, light comes to us from the North more than ever. We've already seen that our Norwegian friends follow these live sessions faithfully, and I thank them for it.
0:30 And last night I had the pleasure of learning that our friend Pierre-Alain Giraud would be joining us, but he's watching from Iceland. You see, that's even further north than Bergen, quite something. Pierre-Alain Giraud, yes, is a great figure of cinema — I'm making him blush here, and I apologize to him for that — because he is someone extremely, not modest but humble, which is far more important, given the excellence of what he does.
1:06 You know him without knowing it, all of you who have watched Aliosha Allard's excellent short film, La fausse note — I won't say it's excellent because I'm its one and only star, so to speak, as an actor, but because of the quality of the direction, the lighting, the sound recording. Well, we owe the editing and the assistance to Pierre-Alain, who took part in the shoot, with all the talents for which I am extremely grateful to him.
1:45 There we are. So, I'm very happy to be back with you this spring — I don't know, today the weather is downright dappled, with the beautiful light we have. So, right away, without wasting time, I'll give you the outline of today's session, which includes the one from last time, which was cut a bit short. So last time we had three texts on the program, so the plan is simple: it's the progression of these three texts.
2:22 We had time to present and develop Nietzsche's text last time. I was about to say Nietzsche, in German, last time. So I can sum up our plan like this, incorporating Nietzsche's text from last time. First, a position, that of Nietzsche, who says that the search for truth is doubtless mistaken about value, for it is not obvious, he says.
2:54 The implication being, he is even certain that truth is not a value and that untruth, for him, may be superior. We developed this well last time, so I won't go back to it for now, in any case. Next we'll move on to the text of a second author, but who is a second madman. That's the continuity with Nietzsche. I'm thinking of Gérard de Nerval, who — I'll announce the plan in advance — will show that we have no choice anyway.
3:24 That is to say, once we have tipped over into truth, once reality has forced us to take truth into account, if you prefer — I'll come back to all these distinctions — we no longer have the choice of opting for untruth; it's implied that it's too late. And finally, third, the viewpoint of a third madman, Hölderlin, of whom I'll give only one quotation for now, before tackling the magnificent excerpt of the poem we'll be working on afterward, entitled 'Bread and Wine.'
4:04 You have all this posted on the site. I'll sum up his viewpoint with just this quotation, which isn't even in the poem by the way, but which I'll tell you now — it's very short, you can note it down: Fear before the truth arising from the pleasure of contact with it. So here's a new determination this time, that as with Nietzsche, there is a fear of truth, there can be a refusal of truth, but not at all because it is fearsome or harmful, but because it is too beneficial.
4:43 I repeat: fear before the truth arising from the pleasure of contact with it. This brings us very close to much more recent developments — I'm of course thinking here of psychoanalysis, almost two centuries after Hölderlin wrote this astonishing aside. I repeat: fear before the truth arising from the pleasure of contact with it. So there we are, I won't go back to Nietzsche's text for now and I'll move straight on to Nerval's text.
5:18 So, an excerpt from Aurélia. We need to put it back up here, there we go. Thank you, Philippe. Wonderful. Exactly, thank you. So, the previous thesis, I'll repeat it one last time for now, is Nietzsche saying that all philosophers up to now have sought truth — so let me now summarize it in a somewhat more detailed way.
6:04 They argue over how to define it, how to give it a status, whatever you like, but where they all agree is in saying that for them truth is the value, that's what must be found, isn't it? And this is where we can give Nietzsche double credit — first for the originality of his viewpoint, and second for its coherence, which is what I want to emphasize a bit more now, before moving on to Nerval — if we reason as he does, if truth is fearsome, then we understand that it need not necessarily be a value.
6:44 That it's better to remain ignorant of it — you know that maxim in French, which must have equivalents in plenty of other cultures, which says that not all truths are good to tell. To give a very simple example — this isn't at all what Nietzsche has in mind, of course, but still, a simple example, to show that it can apply in everyday life — I remember an oncologist who once told me, they all want to know the truth. The patients.
7:15 But the problem is that when you tell them, they collapse like a stone. And it becomes hard to cure them. You see, for example. So today, we're going to move on — not to the antithesis, it's not someone saying, no, truth is a value — but to someone who no longer poses the problem in terms of value, I'm thinking of Gérard de Nerval, but who will go one step further by saying: my poor Frédéric, I don't know if we have a choice. That's the problem. So, I won't say any more, I'll go straight to his text.
Aurélia, Doctor Blanche and melancholy 7:45 I'll still put it in context. It's an excerpt from Aurélia. This is not at all, then, the Nerval we worked on two years ago, when we did an almost line-by-line reading of Angélique, his short story that opens the collection Les filles du feu. What they have in common is that it's his prose, not the Nerval of the poems. His prose is always very clear, except that there it's clear and transparent and often humorous, in the journalistic verve that unfolded in Angélique, whereas here it's exactly the opposite.
8:19 There is great tragic intensity. Aurélia — I recall that we owe the text of Aurélia to the doctor, the psychiatrist at the time, who was treating Nerval and who had told him, 'if you can put your visions in writing, if that can do you good' — which was astonishingly appropriate for the period, wasn't it, when generally the mad were either given electroshock or made to alternate between boiling-hot baths and ice-cold baths, so that you weren't mad going into the clinic, but you were sure to be by the time you left.
8:51 Well, but this doctor, who deserved to have his name on Paris streets, since there is the Rue du Docteur Émile Blanche in the 16th arrondissement, and there's still the Clinique du Docteur Blanche in Montmartre, right near the Place du Tertre, where Nerval was treated at one time — so, he had told Gérard, if it can do you good, put your visions in writing, that is, your waking dreams. It's in Aurélia precisely, at the beginning, that Nerval says: here began what I would call, for myself, the overflowing of dream into real life.
9:25 There was this clarity, this precision of expression — it's rare to have both, that someone be clear, transparent, a simple prose that everyone understands, and at the same time have every word be remarkably precise. The overflowing — you know, like an effusion of synovial fluid in the knee, an effusion is always a liquid. The overflowing of dream into real life. So this is an excerpt from one of the darkest passages of Aurélia, during a depressive episode — and this isn't just a case of the blues, it's real depression, and even chronic, one of the hardest things to treat, as all psychoanalysts will tell you, what's called melancholia in the clinical sense, which has nothing to do with melancholy in the pleasant, almost pleasant sense it has in the tradition of the French Romantics, for instance.
10:13 I'll take this opportunity to point out the first occurrence, chronologically, as far as I know, that goes so far as to express, to openly admit, a certain pleasure in feeling melancholy. I find this first occurrence in the third letter to Malesherbes by the first of the moderns — for that's what defines modernity, isn't it, as we saw last time — this sickness of the century, this sickness that produces a good, as we're going to see; this text is the third letter to Malesherbes by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
10:51 I recommend it to you, especially since some publishers issue the letters to Malesherbes as a separate booklet, costing you two or three euros at most — it's really worth it, it's a fundamental and admirable text. Now, at a certain point, after describing all his days of ecstasy in the forest or in nature, Rousseau says: sometimes the nothingness of my reveries — since all of it, all his exaltation, feeds only on realities that he merely imagines — the nothingness of my reveries, he's speaking of his soul here, would suddenly come to sadden it.
11:33 He suddenly realizes that all of it is make-believe. The nothingness of my reveries would suddenly come to sadden it. Well, sir, that very thing was enjoyment — there's the first occurrence I'm talking about — for I was filled with a sadness that I would not have wished not to have. He expressed in an admirable way this first appearance of the voluptuousness of melancholy in a text. This was written in the 1760s: well, sir, I was filled with a sadness that I would not have wished not to have.
12:04 There, I'm attached to my sadness. So, well, that's not that melancholy, there it's clinical melancholy with — I skipped, I didn't include for you in the excerpt we're going to read, terrible passages where Nerval walks on the Place de la Concorde. He sees this bloody, defiled moon in the sky. He pities the people passing by, who don't know that soon there will be a flood that will come down on humanity and they'll all be drowned. You see, there are passages exalted to the point of euphoria in Aurélia and there are desperate passages like the one I'm going to quote now, and this proves that Nerval suffers partly from what we call today bipolarity, right, swinging like that, or what used to be called manic depression or cyclothymia.
Reading of Aurélia: the soul floats uncertain 12:52 You know, we can multiply technical terms when the fullness of words comes to fill the emptiness of the thing, when we're a bit uncertain about how to treat it. So there, it's a depressive episode and he steps back a little from himself, and so, I'm starting the text now. When the soul floats uncertain between life and dream — I'll read it to the end — between the disorder of the mind and the return of cold reflection, it is in religious thought that one must seek help.
13:23 I have never been able to find any in this philosophy which offers us only maxims of egoism or, at most, of reciprocity, a vain experience and bitter doubts. It, philosophy, fights against moral pain by annihilating sensitivity. Like surgery, it only knows how to remove the organ that causes suffering. But for us, born in days of revolution and storm when all beliefs were shattered, raised at most in that vague faith which contents itself with a few external practices, and whose indifferent adherence is perhaps more culpable than impiety and heresy, it is very difficult, as soon as we feel the need, to rebuild the mystical edifice whose clearly traced outline the innocent and the simple admit into their hearts.
14:14 The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. Yet can we reject from our minds what so many intelligent generations have poured into it, whether beneficial or fatal? Ignorance cannot be learned. I have better hope in the goodness of God. Perhaps we are touching the predicted age when science, having completed its full circle of synthesis and analysis, of beliefs and negations, will be able to purify itself and bring forth from disorder and ruins the marvelous city of the future.
14:50 A powerful text, once again, beautiful. The tone is completely different from Nietzsche's. Nietzsche mocks, ironizes about philosophers who claim to seek truth and don't know that at best they're heading for disaster, and at worst they're people pretending to seek it who are bad seducers, as he says in a passage I reminded you of last time, where he says: supposing truth were a woman, philosophers are pretty bad seducers. Well, so here the tone is on the contrary one of near despair trying to hold onto something, you see, and no — I'll take up the text again this time, but interrupting myself to point out things that will feed our discussion.
15:34 Let's remember that all this is to illustrate, in connection with my seminar this year on the notion of the subject and how it constitutes a fundamental reference point so as not to sink into the reconstitution of Nazism that is happening before our eyes, particularly in Europe and in the richest countries — I repeat it, I'm hammering the point home — our topic was, we had reached the point of absolute knowledge, regarding which I formulated this hypothesis: that absolute knowledge, at the moment it appears, induces in consciousness a tendency to be repressed as such, as absolute knowledge, and to be replaced with the same force that absolute knowledge should have, by an absolute non-knowledge, which I compared to repression in the Freudian sense or to denial in the quasi-legal sense of the term, right?
16:37 So at least with Nietzsche what was interesting is that this denial is explicit, it's not unconscious — he says it very clearly, yes, yes, indeed, yes yes, I prefer the untrue to the true, there. So here I take up the text again: when the soul floats uncertain between life and dream — I'll stop there already, you see, because the subject — I'm not playing on the word, but the subject in the more restricted sense this time of modernity, which has been my subject since the beginning of these livestreams, with Baudelaire's cracked bell, right?
17:16 — of these live sessions, the subject of modernity, of which Romanticism is the first expression. I'm quickly reviewing the essentials of what we've seen. One of the characteristics by which we recognize it — I'm telling you so you note it on your tablets — this modernity, ours, is precisely this uncertainty which I liken to indetermination. Indetermination is what is not terminated — word for word. When you're in doubt, instead of trying to read between the lines or grab a dictionary, let the word speak for itself, it's written right in it — it's negative, right?
17:58 Unbreakable means what cannot be broken. Well, indetermination is what is not terminated, what doesn't have a very clear outline — an outline, that's exactly it, that's what allows something to be completed, right? There, I see my computer screen, there, it's a rectangle beyond which it's no longer my computer screen, right? And so things are quite distinct. Here, the soul floats, you see, that picks up the uncertainty — the soul floats, it's not on solid ground, uncertain between life and dream. The soul, that's psyche, we're in the psychic field, not far from psychiatry. When the soul floats — but it's not because Nerval is mad that I'm led to allude to psychiatry, it's because modernity, of which he is characteristic, is precisely not, as in antiquity, the unity of character. Here I have to go back, make a little retrospective, right?
Classicism, romanticism, symbolism: three figures of the self 18:58 Remember, I alluded to this some time ago, the three stages in the way the self expresses itself in literature, for example in the three stages: classicism, romanticism, symbolism — symbolism in the sense it has starting from Baudelaire, well, starting from what critics have called, starting with Baudelaire, symbolism. Let me remind you that Baudelaire himself doesn't use the word — he doesn't use the word symbol, and certainly not symbolism. So I told you I preferred the term impressionism, which lets you place it in the late 19th century, at least the second half of the 19th century if you prefer, in connection with the paintings you know which are associated with this designation, characterized precisely by a dissolving of outline, by blurriness, right?
19:47 Which mean that if you take a Monet painting, where does the water end, where does the land begin, where does the sky begin — sometimes we're quite unable to say with certainty, right? It's obvious this isn't an aesthetic value judgment — on the contrary, that's exactly what makes it interesting, just as, conversely, what makes a painting by Ingres interesting — to take an immense draftsman somewhat earlier — is the perfection of the drawing and the sharpness of the outlines. So, three successive representations of the self depending on whether we move from the grand siècle, classicism, to practically today, from the second half of the 19th century onward, passing through romanticism. The self — the self is hateful, that's the classical author's viewpoint. Literature isn't made to talk about oneself, that's not done, it's not proper, it's not gentlemanly — the gentleman, as Pascal says somewhere, wishes to discuss what was being discussed in the salon he has just entered, out of courtesy — it's not up to him to suddenly impose these topics of interest on others.
20:57 — on himself, who would then become the center of the debate. So, the self is hateful, I won't dwell on it for now, I move to the next stage: exactly the opposite, romanticism — and I had used Hugo, not Pascal, right, who said, when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves — in other words, I speak of myself, but it's not out of narcissism, because I think myself the navel of the world, but because the poet is the one who is there to express the truth of every single person. There, that's exactly the opposite — we must speak all the more of the self, if not of the me, of the self, you see, it's the self raised to the universal, the self. And finally, why not say Rimbaud, third stage, after Baudelaire, so within the impressionist-symbolist current, whatever you want to call it, very modern in any case — and Rimbaud goes so far as to say, yes, fine, let's talk about the self, but on condition of remembering — and here I quote this extremely famous formula — I is another, with that deliberate grammatical mistake Rimbaud made — what was most brilliant in his statement wasn't 'I am another,' it was 'I is,' to show the strangeness
22:08 to oneself of the subject — precisely, the subject suddenly finds itself split. Well, you see all this, and Romanticism, Nerval's generation, is indeed the beginning of this uncertainty, of this indetermination which took hold within the subject. I'll keep going back, and I return to my three classic stages, classical, romantic, symbolist. I go back to the classical: what makes for the unforgettable character of the great characters, as they used to say in the era of classical theater, since it's the height of our theater, as it happens, in the 17th century, whether it's Corneille, Racine, or Molière in the comic genre — each time, what's striking is the unity of the characters. A character like Harpagon, who is entirely, you see, concentrated in one trait of character, which is avarice, right? A character like Hermione in Andromaque, who is entirely concentrated in jealousy, the abandoned woman
23:18 abandoned by Pyrrhus, who prefers his captive to the noblest blood of Greece and of the gods, since Hermione is the daughter of Agamemnon, whom he neglects to attend to his beautiful captive, as we saw, right? Racine's heroes are possessed by the very beings who are in their possession — it's a magnificent dialectic, and each time there is a trait of character that powerfully unifies the character and makes them unforgettable, right? And Orestes — melancholy in the psychiatric sense — Orestes goes mad at the end of Andromaque, right, when he has that vision made famous by one of the most famous alliterations in our literature: 'For whom are these serpents that hiss above your heads? Well, daughters of hell, are your hands ready?' He sees the infernal deities appear to him in a hallucination at the end — 'well, daughters of hell, are your hands ready, for whom are these serpents that hiss above your heads.' So, you see, each one is enclosed within a character trait, in other words unity is achieved
24:28 at the expense of totality. The self is not painted in its totality — totality is set aside in order to highlight one part. That part is the character, and the character of antiquity has great importance in morality, and is entirely contained within that character. Verres, right, that man — sorry, yes, Verres, that extremely corrupt man who had been propraetor of Sicily and whom Cicero had condemned through his great pleadings, the Verrine Orations — Verres had the inspector, we'd say today, to put it quickly — the Romans who had come to demand accounts from him on behalf of the central government — Verres had him crucified. It was never done to crucify a Roman — one crucified slaves or foreigners — and Verres died on the cross, crucified — no, not Verres, his victim — so, the inspector, saying to the very end of his agony, 'I am a Roman citizen.' You see, one character trait
25:38 that outweighs everything else — one does not crucify a Roman citizen, full stop. That's classical unity, you see — there's a tension between unity and totality. I set aside the totality of my character in order to better express its powerful unity. Starting with Romanticism, totality comes into play — but at the cost of a risk of imbalance, of a loss of unity. You see how it all holds together — now we can reread Nerval's sentence, which regains a lot of density, and above all by avoiding believing that it's just poor Nerval that Pagani is bothering you with, tossing you three madmen, these three cases, these three sick people — that doesn't concern me, no, no — on the contrary, the advantage is precisely that each of them illustrates in a striking way what is typical of our modernity. When the soul floats uncertain between red and brown — I'm joking, I'm doing it on purpose — in politics, you know, sometimes we don't know whether we're on the far right or the far left — between red and brown — that's modern. When we don't know, in antiquity, in the wars of religion, or in the Ancien Régime
Recourse to religion and the irreversibility of knowledge 26:49 where it targeted Protestants or Catholics, one wasn't in between the two — one had every interest in choosing one's camp. Whereas here, we're always straddling a boundary — am I in the field or the forest, I'm a bit between the two. When the soul floats uncertain between life and dream — one could have said between reality and dream — between the disorder of the mind, there, for madness, and the return of cold reflection, it is in religious thought that we must seek help. Well, I'll come back later to the development he devotes to religion, but from the start I wanted to show the danger there is for us moderns in not having that powerful unity which the ancients achieved by giving up totality — even if Plato says in the Theaetetus that it is with one's whole soul that one must approach philosophy. Still, you see, the expression of totality only fills the pages of our corpus starting with modernity, especially starting with Romanticism. So I continue.
27:59 Now: it is in religious thought — well, he's trying to hold on, since, as I told you last time, being modern, attaining absolute knowledge, means making our certainties collapse so that truth can take hold — the opposition of truth to certainty. And so, to compensate for this loss of certainties, consciousness tries to return to those earlier certainties. So, it is in religious thought that one must seek help. I have never been able to find any in this philosophy which offers us only maxims of egoism or, at most, of reciprocity, a vain experience, bitter doubts — often when we read philosophers we get the impression we're being led into a maze where we lose ourselves rather than finding ourselves, right? It fights against moral pain by annihilating sensitivity — a very clear allusion here to very common philosophies like Stoicism, right, where one must achieve what the Stoics called ataraxia, right, the renunciation of all sensitivity could be
29:09 to rely entirely on one's reason. But for us — well, here we return to modernity, you see, that 'but' — the 'but' is already a sign of the hesitation of the soul floating between two extremes — but for us, born in days of revolution and storm when all beliefs were shattered — shattered, ah well, there you go — I'm quite willing to turn toward religion, but good grief, for us moderns it's a bit hard — we've been raised, we have a Age of Enlightenment behind us where religion took quite a hit through Voltaire and Diderot and La Mettrie — hard to do, as you understand why this whole paragraph is going to end with this extraordinary quotation, which sounds so simple but which refutes Nietzsche: ignorance cannot be learned — no, Mr. Nietzsche, it might perhaps be better not to know the truth, but once we know it, we can't act as if we didn't. No — in fact, the earth is cubic, it's not round — we can't convince ourselves not to know what we know. There is an irreversibility for Nerval, an irreversibility as soon as one reflects for three seconds, unless one drowns
30:19 what one knows in drugs, in whatever one likes — that's another matter, we'll get to it, but for now, from the moment one reflects, I repeat, this whole passage: but for us, born in days of revolution and storm when all beliefs were shattered — you see, when I spoke of collapsed certainties — where all beliefs were shattered, raised at most in that vague faith which contents itself with a few external practices — that's, well, that's the religion of the practicing believer, but a practicing believer who really isn't inhabited by faith. Well, raised at most in that vague faith which contents itself with a few external practices, and whose indifferent adherence is perhaps more culpable than impiety and heresy — it is therefore very difficult for us moderns, as soon as we feel the need, to rebuild the mystical edifice whose clearly traced outline is admitted into their hearts — not by the intellectuals that we are, but by the innocent and the simple. In other words, I would love to have
31:29 what we call in French "la foi du charbonnier" [the charcoal-burner's faith] — let me remind you that the charcoal-burners were half-wild people who lived in the forests to make the charcoal wood that was needed in the towns, and who were on the border between anthropology and zoology — well, in the eyes of others; they were full human beings, don't worry about that — but you see, all black like charcoal, that's it. So the charcoal-burner's faith is the faith of the crudest man there is. So he, the one who has simple faith, the faith of traditional man, of country man if you prefer — for him the quarrels between dogmatists, sceptics, rationalists, empiricists, idealists, materialists go completely over his head, and in a way Nerval is quite right. It's no accident that in Christianity — which is not the Greek world, which even brought antinomy — if you look closely, it's no accident that it says blessed are the simple in spirit, the kingdom of heaven — sorry, the poor in spirit, the kingdom of heaven belongs to them, not the simple in spirit — and especially the value placed on childhood.
32:39 it's "suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" — now is it the child who most embodies the accomplished intellectual? It's not the scribe. Whereas in the Greek world, right, there's an inseparability of value and knowledge — when Plato marks at the entrance of his school "let none enter who is not a geometer," that means here it's rationality, it's knowledge, it's gnosis, it's episteme, whatever you like, philosophy — but certainly not ignorance or the simplicity of the charcoal-burner's faith. So once we've tipped over into that, it's irreversible; as soon as we feel the need for it, right after having pulled it down, it's very hard to rebuild the mystical edifice which the innocent and the simple admit into their hearts along an already-traced line. I'll stop again on this same passage, because I'm a bit tired, because today, precisely, to react in this world — apparently we are all abominable consumerists and materialists, which is a strange conception of materialism, to reduce it to the fact that we consume — that's really incredible.
Return of mysticism and the city of the future 33:49 as if those who despise this materialism weren't the ones who consume the most on this planet, by the way — but what I want to insist on here is that a return of this mysticism Nerval speaks of — I'm thinking for instance of the return of authors we thought forgotten, like Guénon; that's coming back into fashion, especially on the far right, which is curious, you see. Guénon did — Guénon is not himself a man of the far right, but his return, yes. I already told you last time that it's not classicism that is reactionary, it's the return of classicism after romanticism, right. So Guénon is a specialist in the world of the initiatic, if you like, of tradition, of gnosis — I don't mean the symbolic order that was built up over the centuries — but anyway, I mean, Nerval is a champion in this field. I already told you, I think — I told you, I'm not sure it was with you — that someone once challenged him at a social gathering.
34:59 saying, what kind of author is this who mocks everything and doesn't even have a religion? And Nerval had said, with great humor, "You exaggerate, sir, I have at least twelve." There you go. Nerval juggled with the whole mysticism of ancient Egypt, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the rituals of Eleusis in Greece — I sound like I'm speaking of this with weariness because it always recounts more or less the same things; that's not where you'll find real diversity. There's more diversity in the life of a saleswoman — sorry, a cashier at Franprix — there's more richness and diversity in a day of a girl like that, right, or a boy — and we're increasingly seeing boys at the checkouts too — than in the repetition of the same symbols. Freud himself said: I'm accused of always putting sex at the center of your dreams or your slips, but it's not my fault; what's tedious is the repetition of the same things on my couch, I can't help it, it's the patients who are monotonous. All right, let's go back — it is indeed very hard, as soon as we feel the need
36:09 for it, we moderns, to rebuild the mystical edifice which the innocent — and God knows Nerval did everything for that — which the innocent and the simple admit into their hearts along an already-traced line. The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life — here of course there's an allusion to the tree of knowledge in Eden, right, in Genesis, in the Old Testament: one was not supposed to taste of the tree of knowledge, but once one has tasted it, one cannot go back to the earthly paradise. That's what Nerval is saying, that's what Nietzsche didn't understand: there's an angel with a fiery sword guarding the way back to the garden. There you go, better ignorance — ignorance cannot be learned. And here Nerval continues on — you see the hesitation of this text — one must seek help in religion, but yes, but it's not obvious, we know too much to return to religion as if nothing had happened. So I go on to this return to rationalism: I have better hope in the goodness of God; perhaps we are touching the predicted age when science — so God himself, if he made man a rational animal, it's not so that man would sell his reason cheap, implied —
37:19 perhaps we are touching the predicted age when science — so rationality par excellence — having completed its full circle of synthesis and analysis, of belief and negation, you see, the positive and the negative, will be able to purify itself and bring forth, out of disorder and ruins, salvation, and collectively, the marvelous city of the future, such as it is promised at the end of the New Testament by the descent to earth of the heavenly Jerusalem at the end of the Apocalypse, right?
37:53 So that's it for the Nerval text; there would be much more to say, but for me what matters is the thread we're following, like Theseus, right, not letting go of Ariadne's thread so as not to get lost in the labyrinth. Our thread is: truth or no truth, absolute knowledge or is it better to have absolute non-knowledge — you see, with Nerval we've said we have no choice. Third stage, I move on to Hölderlin's text, so here we go — thank you, thank you Philippe, thank you to the control room — here's the text, I presume the audience can see it too, so that's fine. It's a long extract from a long poem which is — I'll say — magnificent, but that won't help you move forward in elucidating it; still, it's so beautiful that one can't help but start there. It's titled Bread and Wine — Brot is bread in English, right, Brot und Wein — you'll tell me
Christ or Dionysus: the title of the poem and Brentano's letter 39:05 well, here there's no hesitation, we're in the Christian reference — "take and eat, this is my body," that's for the bread; "take and drink, this is my blood," that's for the wine, and so on. What this text will show is that we don't really know whether we're talking about Jesus or Dionysus — ah well yes, Dionysus and Bacchus, and wine too, and in the Greek world — I'm telling you this to anticipate the text we're going to read — in the Greek world, and Hölderlin's students of that time were steeped in all this, they knew all this by heart, right, the Greek world and its mythology — there was, right, in what were called the mysteries, whoever was initiated into the mystery — and Hegel makes a humorous allusion to this in the Phenomenology — was first initiated into the mystery of Ceres and Bacchus. Ceres, divinity of agriculture — that's where 'cereals' comes from, well yes, right, without Ceres we wouldn't have wheat, bread, and thus food. Bread and wine, so it's not only Christ's last supper at the Last Supper, right, with his apostles — it could just as well, you see, already the wavering between Christianity and paganism, right, between modernity
40:15 and antiquity — it could just as well be the reference to Ceres, there for bread, and Dionysus, Bacchus, there for wine. Good, and we'll see that this opposition — which you must hold onto if you want to understand what follows — between antiquity and modernity on the religious plane, between paganism and Christianity, is the same thing but seen with different facets; it's the same polyhedron, if you like, on which we lean each time on different facets. We're now going to see that it doubles, and this is the last determination I bring before reading the text, into an opposition between night and day — that's new — night corresponding here to Christianity, we'll see why, and day, of course, to the world of Apollo irradiated by the sun, the Greek world, the Mediterranean world. So, before reading it, allow me — to show that I'm not the only one who finds it beautiful, after all — to read you a very short commentary before reading the text, a very short commentary by another poet of the time,
41:25 known in German literature but very little known in France, a German romantic fairly close to Baudelaire for his time, with a guilty sensualism and eroticism that makes him rather close to Baudelaire — well, a sinner's eroticism — I'm thinking of Brentano. And Brentano says this, B-R-E-N-T-A-N-O, he says this in a letter to a painter — you can forget that — in a letter to Runge, Brentano says this, at a time when Hölderlin was not known — he hadn't been known for very long: "But if I must say what kind of manifestations of this sort, between heaven and earth, have always touched me most deeply — not so much as a man in general as an individual" — so here he says these are his very personal tastes — "I would say the old chivalric poem of Tristan and Isolde" — there, that's what touched me most — "the Fiammetta of Boccaccio," the great Italian medieval author, "the Constant Prince of Calderón," the Spaniard,
42:35 "and a few odes of Hölderlin, a Württemberg poet who has gone mad" — there, you see how little known he was, since it had to be specified at the time that Hölderlin — you mustn't put a period there — you have to say "Württemberg poet" because Germany was not yet unified, from Württemberg, the region across from Alsace — "gone mad," you see, it has to be specified, it's not obvious to everyone. So he's speaking here of someone virtually unknown at the time: "and a few odes of Hölderlin, a Württemberg poet who has gone mad, for example his elegy to the night" — that's Bread and Wine, which I'm going to read to you — "his autumn festival, his Rhine, Patmos, and others still that you will find forgotten or unrecognized in the almanacs of the muses. Never perhaps has high, meditative sadness been so magnificently expressed" — it's clear, you'll see, that this isn't as luminous and transparent as Nerval — "at times this genius becomes dark and somber; in the bitterest depths of his heart his apocalyptic melancholy star shines wonderfully touching above the vast sea of his emotions. If you find these volumes" — agreed, they're not found everywhere — "read then
43:45 these songs, the night in particular is limpid, lit with stars, solitary; a bell of ancient memory rings out both for the past and for the future. I hold it to be one of the most accomplished poems there is in the world." You see, I wanted to introduce it that way to tell you I would gladly have quoted the whole poem, but well, we don't have all the time we need at our disposal — I refer you to it. Bread and Wine, so I'll read it for now, as I did for Nerval, without commenting first, and I'll come back to it afterward. Ah yes, so — yes, still, one last thing before moving to the reading: it's exceptional in Hölderlin for there to be a question of night, whereas the German romantics for the most part bathe in the nocturnal — the best-known work of German romanticism is doubtless the Hymns to the Night by Novalis — night, so dream, so the imaginary, so everything that springs forth against a background of darkness, right, intoxication, the irrational, whatever you like, the nocturnal world opposed to clarity, to reason, right, which are diurnal —
Reading of the first three stanzas 44:55 exactly as Antigone says to Creon: "It's your Zeus who made you enact this law, whereas my Zeus is the world below, the underground world, the nocturnal world," right, the invisible world, the world of the dead. Well, so, in Hölderlin, he himself complains, in a letter to a friend, he complains that his poetry is too encumbered with light, that it doesn't have enough dark corners — you see, when I tell you that it's exceptional for him to do what's called, as a genre, a nocturne, so the achievement is all the more remarkable. I'll move directly to the text: "The town around us falls asleep, the lit-up street welcomes silence, and the noise of the carriages" — it's carriages drawn by horses, of course — "and the noise of the carriages with the glow of torches recedes and dies away, sated with the pleasures of the day, men go off toward rest, and satisfied, pensive, a bent brow weighs up losses and gains" — a little world of German merchants in a small town, as there are plenty of in Germany, I'm thinking here
46:07 of the great Holbein painting, right, where we see the moneychanger with his wife beside him, in the process of — how does he put it — weighing losses and gains — "and satisfied, pensive, a bent brow weighs up losses and gains. Stripped of its flowers, stripped of its grapes" — there, from the labor of a thousand hands — "deserted, the market of gold; but at the heart of the gardens there awaken and tremble a distant music. Over there someone plays, a lover who knows" — or perhaps a man seized with solitude who remembers his lost friends of his youth — "and in the fragrance of the flowering beds sing the fresh fountains, tireless; the voice of the bells vibrates in the calm twilight, and the watchman, guardian of the hours, cries out a number at the top of his voice. Oh, see the breeze being born and quivering at the outermost leaves of the grove; behold the ghost of our universe, the moon, mysteriously appear, and the fervent Night comes, peopled
47:17 with stars, and altogether indifferent to our life, the giver of wonder, the stranger among men, at the summit of the worlds there spreads out and shines in her melancholy magnificence." I now move on to the second stanza, right, I'll go straight on — unless, I'll perhaps take Philippe's opinion, because wouldn't it be better if we commented on the first stanza first, given the richness of the content? I don't know where — we go on, all right, very well, good, I'd rather read the whole thing: "O miracle, o favor of the sublime night" — there the hymn to the night truly begins, up to now he was describing it, now — "none knows the source, the greatness of the gifts a being receives from her; it is thus that she moves the world and the soul of men laden with hope; the wise themselves have no understanding of her designs, for such is the will of the supreme God who loves you with a great love, and that is why, more than her still, the day is dear to you where your thought reigns. But sometimes
48:27 the limpid gaze itself tastes the shadow, and, anticipating the hour, seeks sleep as a voluptuous pleasure, and man of faithful heart loves to plunge his eyes into the pure night dedicated to him, as befits, with songs and garlands, for she is the night of sacred treasures, of the mad and of the dead, and endures herself, eternal spirit free of constraint — but let her also, for it must be, so that in our slow sojourn in this shadow something may be kept for us that comforts us — let her also give us forgetfulness, let her also give us sacred intoxication and the springing forth of the word, and thus, like lovers with eyes never closed, a cup filled to the brim, boldness to live and holy remembrance, may we cross the night at the height of wakefulness." So now, third stanza: "But we come too late, friends. Yes, the gods live,
49:38 but up there above our heads and at the heart of another world, that is their song of eternal action, and the care they take for our lives seems light, so delicately do these guests of heaven deal with us, for a fragile vessel cannot always contain their power. At times only, man sustains the weight of divine fullness. A dream of them, such is then life; but error brings help, like sleep, and necessity; night gives courage until the hour when, in the bronze cradle, heroes grow, drawing from their hearts that strength which once made them like unto God; then, in a crash of thunder, they will arise. But until the day of their coming, sleep often seems to me less heavy than this companionless vigil, this feverish waiting. Ah, what more can I say, what can I do, I no longer know, and why
The sleeping city and the distant music 50:48 in this time of wretched darkness — poets — but they are, we are told, like the holy priests of the god of vines, wandering from land to land through the holy night." We're now going to go back to the beginning of this splendor which seems obscure, I grant you, but I don't guarantee I'm going to clear everything up — but there's much more logic than one might think, so let's start again from the beginning. So the night itself with its magic — I was about to say daily, I should say nightly and not daily. "The town around us falls asleep, the lit-up street welcomes silence, and the noise of the carriages with the glow of torches recedes and dies away" — night, the withdrawal of all activity — "sated with the pleasures of the day, men go off toward rest, and satisfied, pensive, a bent brow weighs up losses and gains" — that is, there are still some who stay up, those who do their accounts —
51:58 "stripped of its flowers, stripped of its grapes" — you have a fine example here of apophantic — apophatic, sorry, thank you Rahim who corrected me, apophatic — that is, one makes a thing present through its absence, right, to show what the market is like, he shows what is no longer there — "stripped of its flowers, stripped of its grapes, weary of the labor of a thousand hands" — those thousand hands now buried in bed asleep — "stripped of its flowers, stripped of its grapes, weary of the labor of a thousand hands, deserted, the market sleeps" — and behold, all of a sudden, everything that was visual here, insofar as one can see at night, suddenly shifts to the auditory: "but at the heart of the gardens there awaken and tremble a distant music" — I remind you I said last time that the common point between music, the sonic universe in general, music in particular, and smells and tastes, is that they can be savored with eyes closed — I'd even say
53:08 one can savor them all the better, right, or appreciate them, when one's eyes are closed — flavors, smells, and sounds — "but at the heart of the gardens there awaken and tremble a distant music" — so music is more nocturnal than painting and/or sculpture. Now you see what day and night mean here — they are metaphors. Day is the sensible world, the one offered to us when we open our eyes, but for that the light must illuminate it — that is truly the world of Apollo, that's truly the Greek world, with clear distinctions and right angles — I told you about the Parthenon last time, or the Temple of Poseidon — with its determinations, we find again the determinate, the opposite of indetermination and vagueness, its clear determinabilities, right, faced with these three indeterminates that are wind, air, and light, and the sea — that's four, sorry, I always forget one, a fourth, right, at Cape Sounion near Athens. So here, night is precisely the return to the indeterminate, to infinitude, since if it is not finished, it is not finite — one must make words speak, that's much surer to hold onto, right, than trying to think between the lines —
54:18 lines speak — "but at the heart of the gardens there awaken and tremble a distant music" — here we are then in the nocturnal, since it suffices to close one's eyes and this music resounds all the better. "Over there someone plays, a lover who knows" — so that could be a serenade — "or perhaps a man seized with solitude who remembers his lost friends" — as if there were expression only of absence — you see, I'm opening a small parenthesis here on the somewhat melancholy side of this music, right, which speaks only of a man seized with solitude, of a lover, right, who sings of his beloved — but if he sings of her, it's because she's not there — "and who remembers his lost friends," or of his youth, to return to the text. I noticed, and my stay in Niger confirmed this fully — Niger is a country with an agro-pastoral tradition, where it's too dry, being on the edge of the desert, for there to really be agriculture, but there's a lot of herding — so I noticed
55:29 that in all countries where the essential activity is pastoral — whether it's Ireland, very well-watered, on the contrary, right, Ireland, Corsica, Castile, right, or the Sahel, Mali, Niger, Chad, etc. — the shepherd we always associate with a very particular musical instrument, a wind instrument — the shepherd's crook, as they say in the traditional image, his pipe, his flute, his oboe, his bagpipe. I note that it's most often a wind instrument that resounds in the distance and is always fairly melancholy — and for good reason, for the shepherd is the one who is far, far from everything, far from his friends, but also, by function, from his beloved — so there's always, it's no accident, something melancholy in the shepherd's song. There's a magnificent passage in Chateaubriand where, in the midst of Brittany, he hears the distant song of a shepherd, and he says — and I immediately realized that everywhere on earth, man's song is sad. So this music from afar gave me the occasion
Fountains, bells, watchman: temporality and images 56:39 to speak to you of pastoral music, right — "but at the heart of the gardens," I resume and continue, "there awaken and tremble a distant music. Over there someone plays, a lover who knows, or perhaps a man seized with solitude who remembers his lost friends of his youth, and in the fragrance of the flowering beds sing the fresh fountains" — look, that's a masterpiece, you see, one has to be precise, now stop indulging in superlatives — you see the flowing of the melody there, the song of this distant music — one says a melody flows, and well, all of a sudden it flows literally, he's speaking of fountains, you see the analogy, you see the symbolic order — there's nothing more musical than the fountain, the murmur of the brook, of the fountain — and God knows Schubert is a genius at making us perceive the murmur of the brook; for those who don't know it, I recommend they listen to the lied called Wohin — where to, with a grave accent, right — which is the second lied of a magnificent cycle
57:49 of lieder called Die schöne Müllerin [The Fair Maid of the Mill] — the mills are on the banks of streams, as you know, right, which turn the mill wheels, and there's one entirely accompanied from beginning to end by the piano, by the murmur of the brook. So it's no accident, you see, there's a logic — I'll never repeat enough that the only difference between poetry and mathematics is that poetry is more exact — and that's not at all a reproach made to mathematics, which certainly needs rigor, but not to freeze itself in exactness. So it's no accident that we go on from the flow of the melody, the flux — moreover, rappers themselves speak of "flow" — to the flowing, this time literally, of the water of the fountains — so "of the flowering beds sing the fresh fountains, tireless; the voice of the bells vibrates in the calm twilight" — I'll take the opportunity
58:59 to show you the logic of things and of images that echo one another here, as Baudelaire says in Correspondances, I quote, "like long echoes that merge from afar." I'll take the opportunity to point out that in Nerval, the most tragic moment, the toponym, the name of a place, of a village that exists in the Oise and that was his mother's village, and that still exists — look it up in the Larousse, if there it says "Mortefontaine, commune in the Oise," etc., colon, "the most beautiful English-style garden in Europe," which apparently now belongs to an emir — well, it's no accident that in Nerval it's a toponym that's often avoided because it's the most tragic, because how can a fountain be dead? Here Hölderlin says the fountains are tireless — how can the source suddenly dry up, how can, at the origin, the source, the fountain — how can there be, at the origin, the end, death — dead fountain [Mortefontaine]. There, I close this Nervalian parenthesis, I come back to our third fool. So, "of a flowering bed sing the fresh fountains, tireless; the voice of the bells vibrates in the calm twilight" —
1:00:09 see this exchange that becomes chronic between sound and flowing water — now it's again the sound of bells — it's not that it reminds us of the cracked bell, but this time it's the uncracked bell — "the voice of the bells vibrates" — if it vibrates, it's because it's not cracked — "in the calm twilight" — and all this, of course, are images of what? Of temporality, it's time passing, which made Ronsard say this remarkable thing: "Time goes away, time wearies not, madam, but we go away" — there's someone who was conscious of death, since we find the Greek world again in the Renaissance, I don't know, with its determination, its memento mori as they said then. So here, I tell you, it's temporality that is the invariant of all these metaphors of the fountain, of the music, of the sound that awakens over there at the heart of the market and at the heart of the night, of the sonic flowing, of the flowing of water — and behold, now, this relation to time is made explicit, and the watchman
1:01:19 guardian of the hours, cries out a number at the top of his voice. I already told you that in German romanticism, the night watchman is someone who walked through the little streets at night, who was paid to do so, and who sounded the hours — it wasn't bells that struck the hour at night, it was with a kind of horn, right, he sounded the hours — he's a mythical figure in German romanticism, and we find him one of the last times, one of the most superb, right, much later than this poem, in the extraordinary second act of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, right, in a more comic context, still making the magic of the Midsummer's Night — June 21st — resound. So "and the watchman, guardian of the hours, cries out a number" — it's 4 o'clock, it's 6 o'clock — "at the top of his voice. Oh, see the breeze being born and quivering" — see the homogeneity, the breeze flows over the leaves as the fountains flow over the flowering bed and as sound flows over our eardrum, all of it flows — "see the breeze being born and quivering
1:02:29 at the outermost leaves of the grove; behold the ghost of our universe, the moon, mysteriously appear, and the fervent" — Night with a capital N — "comes, peopled with stars" — the gaze begins to rise upward, right — "and the night peopled with stars, altogether indifferent to our life, the giver of wonder, the stranger among men" — you see, three determinations — it's what's foreign among men, so it's not the world of rational reason, of our daily activity, so it's the giver of wonder — wonder in the sense of what astonishes, what's unusual — in dreams things happen to us that are absolutely implausible, that could never happen in the day, right?
1:03:18 and so altogether indifferent to our life, as if it existed in an entirely different world, as if the self — that part of our self that appears to us in our dreams — were a self that is totally foreign to us, and which so proves Rimbaud right when he says "I is an other," which dream expresses very well — don't forget Freud said that the dream is the royal road to the study of the unconscious, and the dream is something that is the expression of night — let's not forget, then, that night is not darkness, is not nothingness, is not black night, nothingness, no, no, no — it's a night, on the contrary, that is like a screen onto which many images are projected — the world of images belongs to night, the field of the imaginary in general is not — it's not sensations, it's images — it's not sensations, it's us who are passive, they come to us — I don't know, myself, there's the warmth of the sun that comes onto my skin, there's a car that passes and its sound reaches — the eardrum is mounted — it's the object that is active and the subject that receives it passively, whereas images, it's us who project them, it's the reverse, that comes from our inside
The non-knowledge of night and fidelity to the most ancient 1:04:28 and it expresses itself outward, it's a projection as on a cinema screen, that's the dream. So "the ghost of our universe, the moon, mysteriously appear, the fervent night comes peopled with stars, and altogether indifferent to our life, the giver of wonder" — there for the fountain of images — "the stranger among men, at the summit of the mountains there spreads out and shines in her melancholy magnificence." We're going to move on to the second stanza — needless to say it's of such richness that I won't give an exhaustive commentary, I comment as a priority only on what brings us back always to the problematic of knowledge and non-knowledge. "O miracle, o favor of the sublime night, none knows the source, the greatness of the gifts a being receives from her" — so it starts there, we're on Nietzsche's side, it's not the domain of knowledge — night, knowledge is day, light, clarity, the concept, what is clear and neat and determinate — this is a window, this is a door, that's knowledge, that's the world of day — whereas there, none knows, non-knowledge, the source
1:05:38 the greatness of the gifts a being receives from her; it is thus that she moves the world and the soul of men laden with hope; the wise" — now we move on to the intellectuals — "the wise themselves have no understanding of her designs" — so there we're on Nietzsche's side, up to that point — "for such is the will of the supreme God who loves you with a great love" — that you don't know everything, implied, right, that you need night to access non-knowledge — and here there's this sentence where Hölderlin escapes from Nietzsche, and this is why — "and that is why, more than her still" — after having made this hymn to the night, how can there be more than night — "more than her still, the day is dear to you" — he's speaking to himself, of course — "where your thought reigns." Here Hölderlin remains a son of the Enlightenment, a companion of Hegel and a fellow student, right, of the seminary in Tübingen, after all, and that's why, I repeat these capitals turning, "more than her still, the day is dear to you, where your thought reigns." So then we no longer understand — we've just — are we in day or in night? But then I'll stop on this "but" because you'll have noticed
1:06:48 it's the nth "but" since the beginning of the poem — I did it on purpose to stop at the previous one so as not to interrupt too much, but now we're obliged to. This "but" is the sign of what Nerval says when the soul floats uncertain between dream and reality — you see the wavering, as soon as we reach a certainty there's a "but" that comes to counterbalance it. We've just condemned the night, reminded ourselves not to indulge too much in nocturnes, in the Dionysian world — we'll come back to that later, I made an allusion with the wine earlier — but in fact the whole poem is under this sign, we'll come back to it. He has just taken his distance from night, so he takes the side of day — not so simple. That's what the "but" says — dearer, "more than her still, the day is dear to you" — because your thought reigns there — and I'm not a barbarian, I don't want to go back to Nazism, we'll see that later, I mean it's not the last thing — I mean, he knows very well into what monstrosity the neglect of reason can lead us — he's a contemporary of Goethe, and Goethe has it said, right, in the prologue of Faust, if you despise
1:07:58 reason and science, the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost. There's someone who warned the Germans, Goethe. "More than her still" — last time — "the day is dear to you, where your thought reigns. But sometimes" — not always, he doesn't make it a rule, we're not in morality, we're in poetry, in meditation, in hesitation — "but sometimes the limpid gaze itself" — that is, even the gaze of the clear-eyed man, the limpid gaze of the man attached to light — "but sometimes the limpid gaze itself tastes the shadow, and, anticipating the hour" — that is, before it's time to sleep — "seeks sleep as a voluptuous pleasure" — you understand that sleep is again a metaphor, it's not sleep in the literal sense, it's sleep in the sense of putting the certainties of day in parentheses — it could be intoxication, when you're a bit tipsy, you're in this night Hölderlin speaks of — for instance that makes me think of another magnificent poem, much shorter, called Souvenir, which is fairly often translated
1:09:08 you'll find it on Wikisource for sure — which I prefer to call Evocation — where images from the fatal journey to Bordeaux, where madness declared itself, return in a haunting way, and in which he says: "it is not good to have in the soul no perishable thought" — that sounds a bit complicated, it's not good to have only immortal thoughts in one's head, from time to time one has to be a bit tipsy, light, with friends, talk about this and that, in a manner that is neither science nor philosophy but simply exchange, in whatever order things come or don't come. "It is not good to have in the soul no perishable thought" — it's about that night here. "But sometimes the limpid gaze itself tastes the shadow, and, anticipating the hour, seeks sleep as a voluptuous pleasure, and man of faithful heart" — there I have to stop — faithfulness is a relation to time, the faithful one — I'm making the word speak, that's true to my method, the only one that pays off when one is lost or risks getting lost — the faithful one is he who has not forgotten — no, that's it exactly, first in the literal sense — so there's a relation to time, but to past time, which doesn't skip over it as Nietzsche does, which doesn't practice amnesia. Nietzsche often says
1:10:18 that it's not good — he's consistent, Nietzsche — if it's better to have non-knowledge than knowledge, it's better to go through a fit of amnesia, it does us good not to remember everything that would spoil the landscape for us if we remembered it — the opposite of the work the psychoanalyst demands, right, of digging until finding memories one had buried so deep one would think they'd never resurface — the opposite of anamnesis, amnesia, the opposite of anamnesis — faithfulness goes in the direction of anamnesis, of fighting against amnesia, of returning to the past. Now what is the oldest thing for each of us — go on, I'm asking you the question, but you're not here to answer me — but what is the oldest thing? Night — the night of the maternal womb. So the faithful one par excellence is the one whose unconscious memory returns all the way to the prenatal state, precisely of sleep — it's interesting, the state in which Rimbaud — Rousseau, of the Fifth Walk, accesses semantically without even knowing it
1:11:28 when he says: "but soon these light impressions themselves" — he's speaking of the waters of the lake — "faded away in the uniformity of the continuous movement that rocked me" — what can rock us, for heaven's sake — "in the uniformity of the continuous movement that rocked me, and which, without any active involvement of my soul, did not fail to attach me to it, to the point that, called by the hour and the appointed signal, I could not tear myself away from it without effort" — you have the whole prenatal state, you have the eyes closing, reverie, right, we're between waking and sleep, but we're going from waking toward sleep, you have the loss of the sense of time — "I could not tear myself away from it without effort when I was called by the hour and the signal" — someone called him for dinner — and you have these light impressions themselves fading away, the annihilation of everything that ties us to the outside world faded away in the uniformity of movement, nothing remains but a movement, a regular music, that of lullabies, "of a continuous movement that rocked me" — that's the faithful one, he goes back — "and man of faithful heart loves to plunge his eyes into the pure night dedicated to him, as befits, with songs and garlands." Here the latter
The sacred night of the mad: intoxication, eros, Dionysus 1:12:38 reconnects with the rituals of antiquity — that means, I just spoke ill of the night by saying that light is important for reason, for rationality, for man's salvation, but he who seeks a recourse — and we'll see later that it's on the mode of "meanwhile," while awaiting the triumph of light — he who is devoted to night must also not be cursed, on the contrary songs and garlands must be dedicated to him — for, and here's the answer, she is the treasure — "the night sacred" — the word is there — "of the mad" — madness — "and of the dead" — so night is indeed the divinity common to the three madmen I'm bringing you through these three texts — "for she is the sacred treasure" — you understand why I ended with the last one, the most complete — "of the mad and of the dead, and endures herself, eternal spirit free of constraint — but let her also, for it must be, so that in our slow sojourn in this shadow something may be kept for us that comforts us — let her also" — the night — "give us forgetfulness" — you see, the opposite of anamnesis — "let her give us amnesia — let her also
1:13:48 give us intoxication" — he said earlier, sometimes sacred — "and the springing forth of the word, and thus, like lovers" — for eros, like intoxication, is part of the nocturnal, we do say "a night of love," it's no accident that the greatest erotic hymn in the history of music, the second act of Wagner's Tristan, which lasts about an hour and a half, it's no accident that it unfolds entirely at night, and that it begins when Isolde extinguishes the torch that was the sign of their nocturnal rendezvous, while the husband, King Marke, is off on a phantom-like nocturnal hunt. So "let her also, night, give us forgetfulness, let her also give us the sacred, Dionysian intoxication" — so it's not just any intoxication, this time it's not just tipsiness, now it's sacred intoxication, the one celebrated by the priests of Dionysus once a year, for one night, best not to linger too long — "let her also give us forgetfulness, let her also give us sacred intoxication and the springing forth of the word" — culture of Hölderlin, who knows his Greek world by heart, poetry in particular, dramatic poetry, and the theater have their origin in the cult of Dionysus
1:14:59 in the Greek world, theater, dramatic art, this mysterious culmination of Greek art, has its origin in the cult of the most nocturnal god, Dionysus. I'll linger a bit now that you see this figure returning to the center of this whole long text by Hölderlin, Bread and Wine — I'll linger a bit to remind those who have a more pictorial than musical culture, and others, and a fortiori if they have a pictorial culture superior to mine, which is not — which I wish were more extensive, mine — of the representations of Dionysus, of Bacchus, whether on ancient vases or on the magnificent paintings at Pompeii — you'll notice he always has attributes by which he's recognized: his forehead ringed with vine leaves, with ivy, for ivy has an imperishable greenness and thus belongs to the world of Dionysus, his ever-young sensuality; the pine, the tree, the pine, for the same reasons, insofar as it's precisely always green; third field
1:16:11 the myrtle, the Mediterranean plant, the myrtle from which an excellent liquor is made, an excellent eau-de-vie in Corsica which I recommend to you — you see, we come back to Dionysus, the myrtle — and also he appears in a chariot drawn by wild beasts according to the paintings, either tigers, most often rather spotted ones, leopards, which is there to remind us that Dionysus is at the edge of our rationality, at the edge of the Western world, that he's a god who came late into the Greek pantheon, as a return of the Orient which we thought we had overcome and forgotten in Greek rationality, and which will take a definitive revenge with Christianity, to the point of almost annihilating the traces of Greco-Roman antiquity, which will not return until the Renaissance — you see how coherent all this is — all of a sudden Dionysus is the one who comes from an extra-Europeanness, they say he originally comes from the Indus, land of tigers. So there, a world that is prior to the omnipotence of rationality.
1:17:21 I won't say a world devoid of rationality — the Mesopotamian and Egyptian mathematicians didn't wait for the Greeks — but it's not yet the supreme value, but that too, night gives us oblivion, that too, the night gives us sacred intoxication and the surge of the word — so you've understood why the word, because this is historical, isn't it, Greek poetic literature emerges from the cult of Dionysus — and thus, like lovers whose eyes are never closed, so it's a night in which one doesn't sleep, a cup filled to the brim, the daring to live and holy remembrance, like lovers crossing the night at the height of wakefulness, you see, so it's a sleep of reason, but it's not an absolute sleep, things happen, we are in wakefulness — if it isn't the wakefulness of reason, then it is the wakefulness of the senses, isn't it — I skipped a stanza for you, and now we move on to today's world — but we have come too late, friends — here we are moving into the modern world — you see, I didn't stay there earlier, but it's much clearer now — we are Christians, we belong to a religion
The fragile vessel: fear of truth from excess of happiness 1:18:32 which says my kingdom is not of this world — yes, the gods are alive, but up there, we are no longer within, in immanence, we are in transcendence — you see how one revises with texts like this, but it's better than lining up abstract ideas, to make a poem like this — but we have come too late, friends, the gods are alive but up there, above our brows, at the heart of another world, it is their song of eternal action, and the care they take of our lives — it's a bit bitter, the last line — we don't often encounter God since we know he isn't there — and the care they take of our lives seems light, so delicately do these guests of heaven deal with us — you see, he still speaks of them in the plural, because — and there suddenly, you see, a hesitation — he was in the process, I tell you, of being a bit bitter, of almost reproaching the Christian God for being too absent, and suddenly he justifies it, because a fragile vase — that's us, a fragile vase — cannot always contain their power, you understand why I began this poem with the mysterious fragment I read you earlier, taken from Pindar's Odes, on the fear of truth
1:19:42 because of the pleasure in contact with it — there is the determination that was missing both in Nietzsche and in Nerval, and the most profound step forward that we take with Hölderlin's text is that, yes, one must fear the truth — yes, Mr. Nietzsche, you are right, Mr. Nietzsche, to say that it's not because we fear it that we should forget that it is inevitable — but now we must realize that if we fear it, it's not because it teaches us bad news, it's that it brings such enjoyment, truth, that it hurts at least as much as misfortune does — and here I am not interpreting, you'll say, you say he doesn't like interpretation, you're far from the text — not at all, I'm within intertextuality, I refer those who have time to the hymn called 'The Rhine' — there are many hymns at the end of his work embodied in rivers — in the hymn to the Rhine he says, for it is heavy to bear, misfortune, but happiness so much more so — and his admiration for and dread of the Greek world, in Hölderlin, comes from the fact that a culture was able to bear joy and happiness like that for generations
1:20:52 that's what is unforgettable — well, that's the Greek miracle, you see — for a fragile vase cannot always contain their power — look, this illustrates what I'm saying about the fact that it is so good that one cannot keep it long in consciousness, it's unbearable — at moments only, by intermittence, man sustains the weight of divine plenitude — sustaining the divine when one is human is a form of hubris, isn't it, which cannot last long — here again, an extraordinary echo of what Rousseau says in the fifth walk — Rousseau, for whom Hölderlin and his whole generation had a cult, but he even more than any other, a point in common with Nerval — and indeed, what does Rousseau say in the fifth walk, perhaps the boldest moment of his text, when he described his ecstasy of being wholly present in the instant, in the feeling of existence, as he says, the feeling — it's not even a form of reasoning — stripped of every other affection, I have nothing in my head other than the fact that I exist, that's all — he adds, as long as this state lasts
1:22:04 you see the connection with what Hölderlin says — we are self-sufficient like God, it's an extraordinary audacity, of course, as long as this state lasts — that's the difference with God — so at moments only man sustains the weight of divine plenitude, and when it goes away, a dream of them is life ever after — for someone who has known divine ecstasy, for someone who has known it, the rest of life is nothing but a dream — after which this would be an explanation of modern madness — don't forget that all of German Romanticism is a slaughter that often ends in madness, in suicide, or in both — I'm thinking of Nerval — at moments only man sustains the weight of divine plenitude, a dream of them is life ever after — but another 'but,' more 'buts' following one another, we always come back from one to the other and from the other to the one — but error brings help again, one must speak well of sleep and of night, as sleep, and necessity, night gives valor, we rest, we recover our strength — until the hour when — and now we understand why he defends the night, because it's not night forever, it's not the definitive answer as it is in Nietzsche — until the hour
Awaiting heroes: the Greece where no one was alone 1:23:14 when, in the bronze cradle — in the brazen cradle — he's alluding to Heracles, to Hercules — heroes draw from their hearts this strength of old that made them equal to the gods — then in a crash of thunder they will arise soon, there will no longer be night, there will be the classless society — I'm the one adding that, but I know my Hölderlin — they will arise, but until the day of their coming — in the meantime, that's the key — in the meantime, sleep often — you see, another 'but' — but until the day of their coming, sleep often seems to me less heavy than this vigil without a companion, this feverish waiting — ah, there we have a new determination: solitude — that's what's missing, what we lack compared to the Greeks — and here I read you a passage from 'Bread and Wine' that I quoted for you because otherwise it would be too long, that I — sorry, that I skipped because it would be too long, isn't it, because the nocturnal doesn't last very long in the poem, very quickly we return to Greece — so, I tell you the sequence, you see — uh, come, uh, come then
1:24:24 we shall turn our eyes toward the expanse — you see, leaving the German world of night, the little market falling asleep — toward Greece in imagination — come then, and we shall turn our eyes toward the expanse to seek there, however far it be, a good that will be ours — one thing remains firm, whether noon strikes or time stretches out in the heart of night, a measure — that's Greek, measure, metron — there, ever common to all, each one goes, each one comes to the place he can reach — come then — and who could scorn scorn, except this triumphant delirium — Dionysus again — which suddenly seizes the singers in the holy night — come to the shores, the shores of the Isthmus — that's the Isthmus of Corinth, when one knows — I'm not interpreting, you'll see, proper names are going to multiply — come to the shores, the shores of the Isthmus — we had started from the heart of the German night, and here we are right in the light of Apollo — come there, where the immense roar of the sea rises toward Parnassus, where the snow glitters like a diadem on the Delphic rock, you see — Delphi, Parnassus, the mountain of the Muses — there, in the land of Olympus, at the summit of Cithaeron, there, there among the pines — that sums up everything I've said — among the vine-branches, from whence, here is Thebes
1:25:35 and the river Ismenus roaring, and the fountain of Dirce — you see, the place-names multiply — it is there, that is what in turn the near god designates — so it is indeed the proof, I wasn't interpreting, that it is indeed Dionysus — and he says this, I'm not stopping, I'll only stop — don't forget my parenthesis right now is about solitude compared to the Greek collective — O blessed Greece, thou dwelling given to all the gods, is it then true, what in our youth one day we heard — it's quite overwhelming, we see the student remembering, we see the three friends, Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, students in seminary looking at maps of Greece, their Latin or Greek dictionary, isn't it, while they were being taught the exact opposite, a puritanical religion — is it then true, what in our youth one day we heard — hall of feasts, thy ground — but it's the sea — thy tables, the mountains — once built truly the sole woman — but the thrones, where are they now — and we return to the modern world — the temples, everything that gathers together, you see, everything that means one is not alone, the places of gathering, the opposite of each one confined
1:26:45 in his solitude, you see how relevant this is — the temples where the urns of nectar, the song meant to gladden the hearts of the gods — where does it shine now? — where the oracles striking from afar like lightning — Delphi sleeps today, Delphi sleeps, whereas before it rendered oracles — and the voice of great destiny, where does it resound? — where the swift god, heavy with universal happiness, from what skies does he strike our gazes with his turning splendor, Father Ether — thus may the cry rise through a thousand and a thousand multiplied lips — and there is the key phrase, when I speak to you of a classless society it wasn't very far off — for none was alone in bearing life — there, it's not the nostalgia for beautiful sculptures and the Greek world, it's not aestheticism, it's a nostalgia for the world where each person is not locked in his own bubble like modern bourgeois society, which Romanticism is the first to see appear along with urbanization — you see how it all fits together — now we are each locked in the night, we need to dream about it and distract ourselves because we have been distracted, we have been torn away
1:27:56 from our common belonging — but not from community, look — none was alone in bearing life, for such a good, it is through exchange and sharing with strangers that it gives joy — it's the complete opposite of communitarianism, where one only associates with those one already knows too well — it's not — it's not the celebration, I have nothing against it, it's nice after all — of an American football team celebrating its victory because the bulls of some city crushed the eagles of another — that's not what's at stake, it's not communitarian, it's humanity — here, everything that is being fought today is progress, the universal, and humanity, not speciesism — antispeciesism, sorry — so, such a good, this Greek good, it is through exchange and sharing with strangers that it gives joy, a rejoicing bursts forth — there, I wanted to read that passage as well, isn't it, and now I tell you, I can now come back
1:29:07 to what follows the stanza with which I concluded the excerpt you have, because it's still very important, where we're going to arrive at the hesitation — but error brings help, as sleep is necessity, night gives valor — until the hour when — so now we've understood that night is the mode of waiting for the great day, not the great evening [i.e. revolution] — until the hour when, in the brazen cradle, heroes draw from their hearts this strength of old that made them equal to the gods — then, in a crash of thunder they will arise — let's not forget this is the generation of Hölderlin, born the same year as Hegel and Beethoven, those who were twenty at the storming of the Bastille — the heroes — until the hour when, in the brazen cradle, heroes draw from their hearts this strength of old that made them equal to the gods, then in a crash of thunder they will arise — but again a 'but,' until the day of their coming — so, I repeat, until the classless society — sleep often seems to me less heavy than this vigil without a companion, this feverish waiting — so this is that whole celebration of intoxication and irrationality
1:30:17 and all of it is provisional, and it is indeed, nonetheless, misfortune — it is indeed what Hegel calls unhappy consciousness — it's in the meantime, at least these joys and these happinesses, do they come to console us for the overall misfortune, which is that each of us is locked in our individual, particular solitude — the bourgeois particular, isn't it, which is being cultivated at present by the reign of relativism — well, that's valid for you, but among the Bantu it's different — anyway, you see what I mean, there is no humanity, there are only Hutus, Tutsis, Corsicans, French people, men, women, young, old, homosexuals, heterosexuals — I won't repeat my whole refrain — anything as long as it's not humanity — sleep often seems to me, in the meantime, less heavy than this vigil without a companion, this feverish waiting — so he ended up falling asleep, but because at the outset there was the waiting, isn't it, for the end of the night — ah, what more to say, what to do — it's admirable in its modesty, there is no answer, I no longer know — and why then — this has been commented on, this very famous passage — and why in this destitute time of poets
1:31:27 what use are poets today, for heaven's sake, in this widespread rationality which is not a rationality of reason but only of the understanding, of mercantile intelligence, isn't it, where the scholar is at the service of the shareholder, isn't it, and not at the service of knowledge shareable by all humanity — and why in this destitute time, poets? — well, here's the answer — but they are, you say, like the holy priest — missing a letter there — of the god of wine, wandering from land to land through the holy night — there, I think I can hand it over to you now, the material is rich enough, I think it's much clearer now anyway, even if it concerns the night, isn't it — before these connections, these connections to these three texts, I had another text to read you, but I'd rather we start with the answers to questions — I have a text by Hegel that stands as if answering Nietzsche's in advance, because Hegel comes well before, more than a generation before Nietzsche, and I'm saving it for afterward — so, are there any questions? I'll address the control room
Hegel: thought disturbs the inertia of the absence of thought 1:32:38 good, good, very well, because in that case I can move on to the questions — last time, because we never finish, we never finish doing justice to the interest of the questions we were asked — well then, if there are no questions, let me read you — and I would like to conclude with this — I'd like to read you a text you'll find on page 71 of the first volume of the Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Hyppolite, published by Aubier-Montaigne — a text taken not from the preface, as I told you earlier, but from the introduction, where Hegel alludes — showing that it's not so modern in Nietzsche, it's not so new, all this, this modernity — he alludes to this attempt of modern consciousness to want to flee from truth, thought, anything at all, provided it renounces knowledge, isn't it — here it is
1:33:48 but consciousness is, for itself, its own concept — it is thus immediately the act of overstepping the limited — consciousness overstepping the limited — we come back to the indeterminate, to the limitless, to the infinite — of overstepping the limited, and when this limited belongs to it, the act of overstepping itself — we'll see a commentary on what Pascal says about diversion, isn't it — consciousness thus undergoes this violence coming from itself — knowledge, truth, is a violence that comes to us from within, it's not a violence imposed on us from outside, isn't it — consciousness thus undergoes this violence coming from itself, violence by which it spoils for itself any limited satisfaction — it is only insofar as it is limited that this satisfaction does not last long — that's what is characteristic of man, and especially of modern man, always to look beyond the limit that seemed to have been imposed — consciousness thus undergoes this violence
1:34:58 coming from itself, violence by which it spoils for itself any limited satisfaction — in the feeling — not the knowledge, in the feeling — of this violence, anguish may — this is what Nietzsche does — anguish may well recoil before the truth, you see how we're drawn to it — aspire and strive to preserve that very thing whose loss threatens it — that is to say, my former certainties, my illusions, of which Nietzsche says it's better to have those illusions than the truth, if you can keep them, good for you — so anguish may well recoil, in the feeling of this violence, before the truth, aspire and strive to preserve that very thing whose loss threatens it — that can work, that can succeed for a while — but this anguish cannot come to rest in vain, it wants to fix itself in an inertia without thought — thought then comes to disturb this absence of thought, and its restlessness disturbs this inertia — there, I wanted to end with this text to show you that it's a lost cause at that point, and that it's a far too precarious solution — and poor Nietzsche, isn't it
1:36:08 will learn something of this when he collapses at the foot of that mistreated horse in Turin, thereby confessing, isn't it, that the feeling he had fought the most, pity, which he had wanted to forget, isn't it, which he had wanted to erase from memory and to extirpate from deep within himself in order to make himself into those cruel men he longed for in his wishes — remember that cruel music he called for in his wishes, in the magnificent text I read you last time — and that in fact it was all a pretense, in fact he cannot bear to see a horse mistreated — there — well, I'll see you again very soon, we will quickly fix, next week, the day of our next session, but it will most likely be in this same time slot, unless through your letters or your comments you express some reservation about the time that doesn't suit you, or if you suggest another time, don't hesitate — we've tried the evening, we've tried the afternoon as today — the main thing is that you be available enough to take part in our 'attelages' [team sessions]
1:37:19 on confinitude — thank you for taking part, and I'll see you next time, and thank you to the control room and thank you to Philippe Moreau, whom I thank once more, more than, what am I thanking him for, more than
