English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The history of music postponed to later 0:00 Thank you very much, Romain. Thank you all who have come in such numbers for this autumn return. Hello, Wilfried. These are the finest hours, the finest days of the year. You want to go into the darkness with me, that's nice of you. I confess I'm dragging my feet a bit to get to the subject.
0:31 So I'm going to circle around the subject. I don't know what it is I have with the subject, but frankly, with a subject like this, we're never off subject. Since it's a matter of putting the subject into question, or rather of expressing its logic, according to the title that was handed out to you and distributed. I confess I'm dragging my feet a bit, all the more so to talk about the reconstitution of Nazism.
1:07 Because between us, it's not very fun, there are more pleasant things to talk about. It's not very sexy, as our young friends would say. But well, I had to give in. I came under enormous pressure, the most friendly kind, the best intentioned, from my most faithful listeners, and even from more recent listeners as well, for this year's subject, back when it was still under discussion, to be that famous history of music that everyone expects from me and that you'll never get.
1:44 You need a whole team for that, you have to be serious about it. If you want to do a history — because there are histories of music, they clutter up the bookstores. There are even a few that aren't bad. Though almost all of them are really geographies of music. Geographies centered on Europe in general. I notice that, in general, in the history of music, people don't dwell much on the mouth organs of Laos. You don't know the mouth organs? It's like a harmonica, but you play it with breath, with the mouth — that's why it's called that — it makes a sound.
2:22 But instead of little reeds inside, it has bamboo pipes, it's extraordinary. It's very beautiful to see, very widespread in Southeast Asia. All right, let's not stray. Yes, I have trouble coming back to the subject. I would have preferred to do a history of music, frankly. I would have preferred to pay tribute to the passing of Jessye Norman, you know, last week. An immense singer — how do you say it in politically correct terms — African-American.
2:53 A great lady. The only one who ever sang Isolde's death respecting the 17 pianissimos that Wagner wrote in the score. But pianissimos you can hear all the way to the back of a hall of 3000 people — extraordinary. Even though she also knew how to cover the orchestra when needed. I won't be crude and say she had the lungs for it, but frankly, she was one of the greatest voices of the century and one of the most scrupulous artists.
3:25 It's a discipline, quite rare, because divas play at being divas. She was a diva, but a scrupulous one with the musicians, with the orchestra, with the conductor. That's not always the case. I think I told you once how Toscanini, who had a dreadful temper, who was one of the greatest conductors of all time, in recording history, was actually accompanying Caruso, the great Caruso, the tenor, next to whom the Pavarottis and so on — whom I like, but they're dwarfs, vocally speaking.
4:00 When you listen to the recordings — and yet the recordings aren't flattering for that era — well, it so happened that, during a concert, soloists always have to overdo it a bit, you see, compared to what's written. To draw applause, to draw out a note a little. It was precisely in Brussels. We have friends here today who've come from Brussels, and I greet them. They draw out the note a bit. And Toscanini, who didn't like that, who was very strict about the beat—
4:30 Watch out, the Queen of Belgium was there, there was high society. It's a gala concert. Toscanini stops the orchestra. The other one, oh! Surprised to hear his own voice suddenly in silence. And he sees Toscanini saying to him, 'So, Signor Caruso, is this little exhibition almost over?' You see, in front of the whole hall. And Jessye Norman was not... Well, that's what I would have liked to talk to you about. About the love of Isolde overwhelmed by the Irish sea. And instead, I have to talk about this.
The resolution of the European Parliament and Thomas Mann 5:00 About this infamy. That people are currently repainting in who knows what sauce. If there's such a thing as a green sauce these days. So I've been caught up in it. All right, what made me not hesitate to get my hands dirty and to ask you to roll up your sleeves with me is the betrayal that has just been carried out in the European Parliament, didn't it? On the 19th, I believe, the 19th of September last.
5:37 The European Parliament, up until now, was rather known for its members being caught with their fingers in the jam, you know, there were reports of them receiving enormous bribes from lobbies that have special offices in Brussels. I did it myself. I worked for big corporations. I can tell you, we rented an apartment in Brussels. It can be said. It's well known. If you don't have a serious company, if you don't have the means to put pressure somewhere in front of the Commission, it's the Commission that holds the purse strings. Anyway. They're rather known for that.
6:08 No, I never gave money to any MEPs, but we had an office to be on the ground, to go see the people in charge at the Commission. I used to go see the Commission office dealing with Niger. Very modest. So there you go. But Nigeria — there's none of it left. And this parliament of crooks dared to adopt a resolution putting Nazism and communism on the same footing.
6:41 I know there are young people among you who were born after Hannah Arendt and for whom this all goes without saying. All of that is the same thing. It's totalitarianism. The war is far away. So, all right, first quotation. You don't have it in front of you. So I'll tell it to you. It's just one sentence. I'll say it to you out loud. I allowed myself to post it on Facebook. Some of you may already have seen it. It's not from a communist. Not even from a Marxist. It's Thomas Mann, quite simply, who wrote this in 1942.
7:13 In 1942. Heidegger's groupie, as she's called, Hannah Arendt, hadn't even started babbling yet at that time. In 1942. In 1942. He's a German. Not a Marxist. He belongs, broadly speaking, to a sociologically reactionary milieu. The great families of Hamburg. Hamburg, there's money there, mind you. Hamburg is coffee, cocoa. In Germany, there are no colonies, mind you.
7:47 Brahms, Mendelssohn, for those who love music. Mendelssohn was born into money. That's why his music is so joyful. And that's why he's often judged superficial. A happy romantic isn't serious, apparently. Here, for once, I pay tribute to Nietzsche. But musically, Nietzsche is fantastic. He speaks of the Alcyonian master. Alcyon is the south wind. You see, it's he who comes to bring a bit of happiness into German music. But Brahms, with his incurable melancholy, is from Hamburg too.
8:19 Hamburg is very special. And Thomas Mann was born into that milieu. You see, great families. As you can read in Buddenbrooks. All of that is very well expressed there. I won't linger on it. Thomas Mann saved the honor of the German intelligentsia. He had a name. Because some people, sometimes, have nothing to lose. But he already had considerable social standing in literature and in German culture before the war.
German political misery and Thomas Mann's verdict 8:53 And he left very early, leaving... No, not that gang of thugs. That's too simplistic an analysis, to say Nazism was just a gang of thugs. I knew a German — I'll say it, it was my father-in-law. No, but he was a decent man. Like most Germans who voted for the Third Reich. I mean... No, no, but I tell you, he was a decent man. All right, I'll tell you the story because we're right in the subject. The subject, yes, the subject. In the logic of the subject. He was a gym teacher, PE as we'd say today, before the war.
9:28 And specialized — it was his passion — in gliding, in sailplanes. So, quite naturally, he served in the Luftwaffe during the war. Which means, word for word, the air force, Waffe of the air. Luft. It's beautiful, Luft. And he went back to gliders at the end of the war because so many planes, so many German planes, had been shot down that by the end they were only training on gliders. That's another story we'll tell another time. Anyway, in 1936 there were the Olympic Games in Berlin.
10:02 You know, those famous Olympic Games where that monkey, Jesse Owens, a black man, a negro, I'm speaking as the Nazis of the time did, swept up all the medals in front of the general staff of blond dolichocephalics. That just isn't done. That just isn't done, as the street kids would say. That just isn't done. Great moment. Well, my father-in-law had to make his selection. Each region was asked to select the athletes it would send to Berlin. He sends in his selection.
10:32 Reply from Berlin. '36. I'm giving you a scoop here, I've never told this story. It comes back to me because I'm talking about Thomas Mann. He tells me — Tommy, Dominique, Tommy — they tell him, well, this is fine, him, 10 seconds, 5, the 100m, that's fine, he passes, etc. But tell us, the Blums, the Birnbaums there, you take them out, right. But — Jews. So I wrote back to them saying I don't understand the mixing of sport and politics. In '36.
11:02 You see what Hegel calls the political misery of Germany. A decent man! All right? But the last line of his reply letter — and I'm sure that if the Führer ever learned of such a thing, he would not be at all pleased. Because power can never be wrong. That's exactly what this political misery is. Whereas in France, we complain about the opposite, we're always griping against those in power. Well, I did see Germans grumble, though. That was my great discovery in East Germany.
11:34 Yes, yes, I spent vacations there. I discovered — Jean, we were on vacation together, he was less... Well, we saw Germans, contrary to the idea of eternal mentalities, you know, Heidegger and all that. Blood, race — that passes quickly. Saying, yeah, here we export everything except the potholes in our roads. That's a quote from East Germany. All right, I'll stop there. I'm not off subject. So, all right. Thomas Mann saved the honor.
12:04 Nothing predisposed him to it. He started off fairly reactionary. He made a magnificent journey. He's the one who said — I think I quoted it once — that the problem of Germany would never be solved until Marx and Hölderlin were reunited. That's a beautiful formula, you know. But here he says this. In 1942, in a series of radio broadcasts called Deutsche Hörer, 'Germany, Listen,' on the BBC. Placed on the same moral plane, Russian communism — he's a German, he doesn't yet say Soviet, Russian communism, der Ivan, as they say over there.
12:44 Just as we say 'the Fritzes,' they say 'der Ivan.' Placed on the same moral plane, Russian communism and Nazi-fascism, on the grounds that both would be totalitarian — and in the best case this reflects superficiality, which dulls the mind, in the worst case it's fascism itself. Those who thereby, on the strength of this equivalence, can claim to be democrats — you know his target audience there — in truth, and deep in their hearts, are already fascists.
Plato forced into philosophy by a political misfortune 13:15 And they will certainly fight fascism only in appearance, and insincerely, while reserving all their hatred for communism. Thomas Mann. You see, Plato — I am not Plato, I would love to be, can you imagine. The weight on his shoulders, especially since his shoulders were so broad that he was nicknamed Plato because of it, his real name was Aristocles. Aristocles, isn't it? But at the stadium, you know, the javelins, watch out.
13:46 So, Plato — I am not Plato. And even less so for the breadth of his thought, and his talent as a filmmaker and director. Fantastic, when you see his prologues, his epilogues. What a director. Probably the greatest artist in the history of thought. All right. If I bring up Plato, the only thing I have in common with him tonight is that he too had originally set out for a career as a political playboy. He was the son of the Athenian establishment, of an aristocrat.
14:19 He had a career all mapped out, with connections — connections that got him out of prison when he was condemned to work in the stone quarries at Latomiai, when he dared to criticize the political conduct of Dionysius. Are you waiting for me in the back there, Pierre? Exactly, right. Thank you. So, I'll use it afterward, I'll raise my voice. So, what made it — as he says so well in the Seventh Letter, you know, correspondence from antiquity is rare.
14:58 So much has been lost, we've lost all of Aristotle's dialogues. We only have his lecture courses; Plato — we only have his dialogues, we've lost his lecture courses; Aristotle — we have his lecture courses, we've lost his dialogues, that's how it is. So one comes across as literary, poetic, and the other as alpha, beta, gamma. There you go. But in antiquity, Aristotle's dialogues were highly prized. Back to Plato. What turned him away from that political career? Yes, that career as a politician.
15:30 A political misfortune: the condemnation of his teacher Socrates. How can the most just man in the city be condemned by the city? You see, it's a political trauma. And as he says in the Seventh Letter, admirably, 'and thus, while my eyes were still turned toward politics, I found myself, as it were, compelled to devote myself to philosophy.' And I repeat it — too bad for those who've already heard it, because not only are there newcomers, but it deserves repeating. When he says 'compelled,' there is the Greek term anankē, which...
16:00 All of you who've studied Greek know that means almost a religious damnation. So I'm sorry not to talk about Isolde's death sung by Jessye Norman, nor about mouth organs. Oh, I'll come back to them from time to time because I'm dragging my feet, but I've found a device, you'll see, to get from one thing to the other, to make a transition. So there, this betrayal by the European Parliament forced me to think...
Fallen resistance fighters, Bruno Müller and the logic of Nazi delirium 16:34 You know all those little plaques you often see around Paris. 'Here fell the resistance fighter So-and-so, may the earth rest lightly on him,' as they say in Africa — that's a way of saying he's your man. And these are often kids of 19, 20 years old — look at the ages. We did this together, we were in Weimar, in East Germany. No, I don't think it was in Weimar — no you weren't... Yes, you were there in Weimar. Do you remember the Soviet cemetery?
17:07 Thousands of graves, to liberate Weimar. That's the Weimar that has the Buchenwald camp, 3 kilometers away, you know. There are 160,000 Soviets who fell in the Weimar region. 160,000, just for the little town of Weimar. All right? And we looked at the ages. 19, 20 years old, someone falls, it's terrible. So, when I look at these plaques, ever since the vote on September 19th, I say to myself, but we're now saying that these young people who fell were...
17:47 It's the same as saying they were Nazis. That's what's being said. Because nine-tenths of them were communists. Communists don't have a monopoly on the Resistance. They are by far the majority on the left, just as the Gaullists are the majority on the right. But there's a bit of everything, even royalists — one has to be fair at the individual level, even as an organization. The Communist Party is the only one that refused to vote full powers to Pétain, just before the war.
18:18 And it's those who voted full powers who invented totalitarianism, because it allowed them to whitewash themselves a little, you see. Thanks to the notion of the totalitarian, Hitler is no longer alone in his grave, isn't he? He's in good company. That's not the only advantage of the concept of totalitarianism, but it's already a considerable one. And he's right. I find Thomas Mann remarkably perceptive when he says that they will reserve all their hatred for communism, even while claiming in appearance to be anti-fascist.
18:55 I note, statistically speaking — I'm no longer just talking opinion, this can be measured, verify it, don't take my word for it — in the classrooms, the textbooks, the curricula. When an anti-totalitarian stance is discussed, it's almost always the Soviet example that's used. There's a quick slide — people say there are the two totalitarianisms, but in fact only one of them is actually dealt with. There you go. That's already quite a lot. So, we're now saying that these young people are on the same level as Bruno Müller.
19:29 Has anyone here heard of Bruno Müller? You'll tell me there must be a whole bunch of Bruno Müllers in the Stuttgart phone book. Müller, meaning 'the miller,' you know that, Mühle is the mill. Mühle — that's a Germanic word, like French is a Latin one. A European, as my colleague Apnumpen would say. So, Bruno Müller is a jurist who joined the Nazi Party very early and who found himself in 1941 in Tighina, in Moldavia, north of the Balkans.
20:16 So, between Bessarabia — well, all these regions still disputed even now, between Romania, Greece, Russia, Ukraine, etc. He found himself there during the occupation, and he runs a little training session with the SS, the young SS men around him. There weren't yet mass massacres in that region. Poland — that had already begun. And since they're young, he tells them, 'Now we have new instructions, we mustn't only massacre...'
20:47 So, you'll tell me, yes, the Jews, the communists — no, don't say that. They didn't massacre 'the Jews, the communists' — logic of the subject, grammatical logic of the subject. Either you say 'the Jews and the communists,' or 'the Jews or the communists' — you have to be precise, you know there's an exclusive 'or' and an inclusive 'or,' since we're doing logic here. If I say 'the Jews or the communists,' that means sometimes they massacred the Jews, or else the communists. No, no, that's not what happened.
21:18 Or else, worse, one says 'the Jews and the communists.' Read the literature of the time. I know it takes some effort, Nazi literature. It's obsessional. But well before the war, the enemy is... I have nothing to teach you here. Judeo-Bolshevism. It's not 'and' or 'or,' it's fusion. Here I'm entering into the logic of the subject. Because there is a logic in what the Nazis say.
21:48 It's that communism comes to us from that Jew Marx, doesn't it? Yes or no? There is a logic of the subject. Don't think of it as causal or biological logic, it's... Delusion is logical. That's what I'm trying to show. Besides, in psychiatry, there are delusions that appear completely incoherent. But there are also very coherent delusions, always the same things. 'My upstairs neighbor is in league with the Pope and she's reporting that I smoke joints.' Always the same things. They say, 'No, but it's true, I heard that, I do internships myself.'
22:20 There was an old woman who changed apartments three times, poor thing. Because she said, above her, there were dykes smoking joints. It's obsessional. I'm not inventing anything. It's always the same things. As Freud says, it's not me who puts sexuality everywhere. It's always the same things. All these sick people with their sickness, as the other one says in a film. I think it's Guy Bedos. We shall all go to paradise. And all these sick people with their sickness who have a pied-noir accent.
22:50 I'm fed up. This Bruno Müller sees he's dealing with young people who are well motivated, but who can still be motivated further. Abstractly, they don't yet have field experience. So he has a woman prisoner with a baby brought in, and he fires a pistol shot at the baby and the mother in front of them, saying, that's what you'll need to do now. You see. And these are the ones being compared to those who fell at the Jardin des Plantes.
Aragon in hiding at Dieulefit: reading of the poem on Paris 23:22 So, because of that, I'm having trouble getting into my subject, as you notice. So, I'm right in the middle of it. But I'm going to satisfy both urges to get rid of the first, which was to talk to you about the death of Iseult or Mozart. I'm going to recite a poem by a great communist.
23:52 You guess it's Aragon. It's a poem written when Aragon was being hunted. And at that time, he's in the Drôme, he's underground, he's hidden in a place I know well since my son was born there. My son was born in Dieulefit, quite simply. And... it's a village that was declared a village of the righteous in Israel. Because that's fairly rare. It has to be said all the same. They managed to save three thousand Jews by hiding them, including even a mayor who was rather Pétainist in his views.
24:24 But there's a strong Protestant minority in Dieulefit. And there's a kind of solidarity, you see, among populations who had suffered repression. You know, the Dragonnades, not far away, the Cévennes. Anyway. So he's holed up there with Pierre-Emmanuel. There was everything. The Beauvallon school, for those interested, there's a very fine documentary on YouTube called Dieulefit, village des justes, where this story is told. Since I taught in a school next to Beauvallon, I know this story well.
25:01 And so then, of course, what does Aragon lack? He's not an ecologist, what he lacks is Paris. The region is very beautiful, the Drôme, it's magnificent. There are already the cicadas, but not yet the olive tree. It's these regions. You know, we said that what was magnificent about Nerval was that he was someone for whom borders were not lines but spaces. Do you remember that? The Drôme is a space like that. It's neither the north nor the south. It's less lush, a bit more dried out than the south. I'm not racist, I'm Corsican after all.
25:32 It's magnificent. And it's less of a chamber pot than Normandy. It's magnificent. It's a gentleness. There are already the cicadas, but not yet the olive tree. The olive tree starts at Nyons, the little olives of Nyons, without which Niçoise salad doesn't deserve that name. So he's there and Paris is missing him. I'm telling you this to give context to the first stanza. As one leaves a child, to keep him quiet, worthless objects lying on the floor?
26:06 Perhaps guessing which drink I was missing, chance threw me photos of my city. The trees of Paris, these boulevards, these quays. I'm saying that to him, doing a voice-over. Because it's so beautiful you have to take your time, as with everything that's beautiful. Otherwise you go too fast. It's September and the September light on the quays of Paris when the weather is fine, it's not — it's worth it. He has the brow, Paris, he has the brow burdened like an actor being made up. He has that haggard eye of people who got up too early.
26:36 Yet it's my Paris in these old photos, but they are the rifles of the guard's soldiers. It's like these days, the street is without cars. The air that a passerby whistles toward sixty years ago. Under the horses' shoes, the cobblestones are polished. A building moves me that I saw demolished. These are photos lying on the floor, as he says. That man walking away, isn't that Baudelaire? This brand-new blazing luxury, the Rue de Rivoli. I like to imagine the time of crinolines.
27:09 He does like me. He feels like talking about the Occupation and all that, you see. He talks about Paris before all its misfortunes. He does it better than me. I like to imagine the time of crinolines. The Louvre was closed on the Tuileries side. By a castle singing in the evening of silks, the chandeliers prayed too much at midnight for the spleen. Spleen the color of printer's ink blue. A silence falls at the end of the quadrilles.
27:41 Paris dreams. And who knows what dreams are its own? I'm not losing my thread. My thread is the plaques with those who fell. You'll see. Paris dreams. And it is never more formidable, never more stormy than when mute yet dreaming. Of this dream of bridges on their arches of wind, of this dream with white eyes such as we see in the gods of fables, of this dream stirring in the eyes of the living. Paris dreams. And what does it dream of at this hour?
28:12 What shadow does it drag over its haunted light? Paris awakens and it's the people of dawn descending from the depths of the outskirts with misty steps. They seem unaware of what already moves them. The air has washed... Sorry, the rain has already washed their great colorless brows. Dreams badly combed and pale like them. Who has not seen the day break over the Seine. Excuse me, there are glitches.
28:43 Ignore what this tearing is when caught in the act the night that denies itself, defends itself, undoes itself, obscene red eyes, and Notre-Dame rises from the waters like a lover. It's a bridge I see. Well, excuse me, Paris awakens and I, to find again these myths that burned our blood in our darkness, I will put my irritated face in my hands so that the song reborn is the one the birds imitate and which answers Paris when one cries liberty.
29:18 If you listen to the sparrows of Paris, they truly say. It's a bridge I see if I close my eyelids. A king of black bronze on horseback surmounts it. You guess from where he's speaking? The old Parisians. Yes, bravo. It's unmistakable. I have to hang on. Square du Vert-Galant. Yes, I say it for those who don't yet know this marvelous place, isn't that right, as you arrive in the middle of the Pont Neuf, so at the point of the Île de la Cité, at the prow, the forward tip of the Île de la Cité, prow facing the current.
30:01 You have to look at what Aragon says there, on the side of the Pont des Arts. Stand on the Pont des Arts, look at the Pont Neuf, and you understand what he means. The Pont Neuf has alcoves, you know, half-moons there that were the paradise of street vendors. That's where the founder of La Belle Jardinière started, you know. And so it looks like an enormous harp, you see, with these half-moons. And so opposite you can make out the opening leading to the Place Dauphine, isn't that right, with the two pink houses — you'll see how close I stay to the text — and the green space behind.
30:36 So now, I'm deliberately speaking poorly to leave him the monopoly of truth. A king of black bronze on horseback surmounts it, and the island it spans has a double bloom, greenery for a garden, roses for the houses. It looks like a boat on its cast-iron anchor made to tremble by delivery vans.
31:07 It's a beauty. The harp of the Pont-Neuf shivers like an orchestra where I hear the wind of my twenty years prelude. You see how he escapes his present? He tries. The harp of the Pont-Neuf shivers like an orchestra where I hear the wind of my twenty years prelude. A wind blows here that comes from twenty years to die in the hair of the equestrian statue. The city like a heart opens there with two swinging doors. He's right, Rimbaud, poets are seers. If you look, that's exactly it when you look at the Pont-Neuf.
Continuation of the poem: the war of 1914 and Paris at heart 31:38 There really are two swinging doors. A heart beats down. The city like a heart opens there with two swinging doors. Knowing they had to perish, the boys my age deceived themselves with a life in gray skies. We, last-born of a century and these last conscripts, feet stuck in the mud and head in the clouds, we awaited their axe while talking of Paris. When the song said 'You'll see Paname again,' those whom a carnation of blood delights on a bullet, those whom a carnation of blood would soon bloom somewhere in front of Saint-Mihiel or Neufchâteau — I say this because Aragon never speaks of it, but it's attested by his superiors, he was heroic during the war.
32:22 He knows well what he's talking about here. This isn't the poet who comes, like Pindar, to glorify — I adore Pindar, that's not the point — to glorify those who went to fight the Greeks, Socrates among them. But there it is, when he speaks of Saint-Mihiel, he was there, he was stationed there. 'O Neufchâteau, surrounding the singer like hands the flame, felt in them the point of the knife tremble. Since then, I have always found in what I love a reflection of my life, a shadow of its streets, forgotten monuments, vanished passages.'
32:57 'I have written more of you, O Paris, than of myself, and more, as of a sun, in you, O Paris, I believed. City made a torch that only love consumes, city made of tears that laughs at having wept.' We've all known people who illustrate that line. That lightness, that Parisian coquetry, wanting to speak of everything with lightness and always ending up giggling with laughter. City made of tears that laughs at having wept.
33:28 'Hell with silver eyes, paradise gilded no more, forge of the future where crime is the anvil, trap of memory where glory is walled in.' In the squares rumbled the — no, sorry — in the squares rumbled the popular storm. Arms crossed fell the unknown heroes. Outside the black processions, along the avenues, an oath of anger seemed to be written. O Paris, you cradled the winds in your bare arms.
34:04 'To find there again the photo of my dreams' — if I rub my eyes, then imagine — farewell the thread of trying to overcome the lack of Paris — if I rub my eyes so that the past turns blue, as I used to do as a schoolboy at midnight, as if it were a child at midnight, a spring still blooms there and lingers on, and this dancing ghost has aged less than I. That's Paris, this shadow theater that I carry within me.
34:36 'My Paris, which cannot entirely be taken from me, any more than one can take from lips their cries. What would it have taken?' Excuse me, it's... 'What would it have taken to throw me out the door? Tear out my heart. You will see Paris there.' It's from that Paris that I made my poems. My words have the strange color of these roofs. You know, the slate or zinc roofs. It makes you think of jewels, you're right.
35:06 I know very well that many people hate jewels. It's disgusting. Me, I said that because I knew someone who was allergic. That's low! Alright. So, it's from that Paris that I made my poems. My words have the strange color of these roofs. The pigeons' throat coos there the castles. 'I have written more of you, Paris, than of myself. And suffered more from aging than from being without you. The more time passes, the less easy it will be to speak of Paris and of myself separated.'
35:40 'The clouds will flee from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. A day will come like a tear between the eyelashes, like a Pont Alexandre III, pale and gilded.' That day — reassure yourselves, it's the fall — a song that speaks of an incurable ill, sadder than midnight at the Place d'Italie. Like the break of day for melancholy. No more dream at hand than the sandman announcing pleasure like a merchant of oblivion.
36:10 A vulgar and sweet song where the voice drops like a one-night love doubting the morrow. A song that takes women by the hand. A song sung beneath the Barbès métro and that changes at Étoile and gets off at Jasmin. The wind will murmur it, but toward the waste ground, and will brush past benches where no one has sat. It will be heard weeping on the Passy quay, and the bridges, repeating the promise of rings, will go off engaged to the rhymes you've just heard.
36:40 And it ends as the first stanza did: as one leaves a child, to keep him quiet, worthless objects lying on the floor. Perhaps guessing which drink I was missing, chance threw me the photos of my city, the trees of Paris and these dry boulevards. That's how, with Aragon, I try to stay on subject, like a Janus with one face turned backward and one turned forward.
The subject finally in question: the spotlight and the mirror 37:13 So, of the subject finally in question. Does that mean anything to you, 'of the subject finally in question'? Victor, you disappoint me — no wait, you reassure me. In Lacan's Écrits there's a chapter titled 'Of the subject finally in question.' No, I say this because I'm often asked where to start in psychoanalysis, if you're determined to get into it, particularly into Lacan, if there's one chapter to read, if the rest falls out of your hands like watered-down Mallarmé, which is often the case stylistically.
37:56 He would have dreamed of being Mallarmé. Just as Nietzsche would have dreamed of being La Bruyère. It's true. Nietzsche, his ideal was the French moralists. No, but there's a masterpiece, it's the Rome Discourse of 1956. You know that Lacan's Écrits is a compilation, as we'd say today. A series of articles written at different times, different dates, and one is called the Rome Discourse, subtitled 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language.'
38:33 If you read it, it will help with the seminar we're doing this year on the logic of the subject. It won't exhaust it, far from it, but I was going to talk to my journalists by saying it's unavoidable, there you go. And at one point he says 'of the subject finally in question' — what is the subject for him, it's that we finally get to talk about language and speech, you see, there I begin to problematize this notion of subject — which I could have used as the title this year: 'the subject is on the run.' Ah no, try catching a train like that — take a floodlight to light up the garden at night — your friend has lost her ball, ladies — your friend has lost his phone, as always — so taking a floodlight, you have to search every last bush — if that image isn't mine, I haven't found one, that's why—
39:43 one could find better, but the floodlight can light up everything, the more you increase its power, the more clearly you see even the smallest pebble, but not itself, not itself. That's the subject. The subject is the floodlight that is conscious of everything before it, but as Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, put it very well, you cannot be on the balcony and watch yourself passing in the street at the same time. He said that against the fashion of introspective philosophy at the time, when the philosopher had to go inward — I'm exaggerating a bit — Théodule Ribot, people like that, well forgotten now, you see. You didn't correct me when I told him the floodlight can light up everything except itself. You could have given me a counter-argument — yes, bravo — unless it's placed in front of a mirror, and there you see that the subject presupposes reflection already at this elementary stage — I take reflection in the literal sense, that is, in the sense that comes to us not from philosophy but from optics.
40:53 Incident ray, reflected ray — who worked out the theorem? The first one — yes, it's Descartes, you know quite a lot — yes, again, at the time one could be at once a Nobel laureate, so to speak, in philosophy, in dioptrics as it was called then, in mathematics, physics, biology — Descartes, no, not that — well, you mustn't be anachronistic, biology wasn't yet a science at that time. I'm trying to get into the notion of the subject, it's difficult all the same. If you want the best entry point, well, it's the simplest — you know everything there is to know about the subject if you simply have a bit of memory from your school days, as they say now, primary school, communal school — I like 'communal' because I learned it late, since I'm archaic, I learned in sub-Saharan Africa with an African teacher, they're very attached to traditions, primary school.
The subject answers "who"; the romantic cult of autumn 42:03 and then afterward I like putting 'communal,' it gave a bit of roots I never had, since I've knocked about — what is the subject in primary school, if you were properly instructed? Yes, yes, yes, but what is it — it's what answers the question 'who is it' — ah, there we go, there we go, people well trained — no, we're not doing rhetoric, logic, metaphysics here, the subject is what answers the question 'who is it' — it's not 'what there is' — I'm being deliberately barbaric — but 'who,' not 'what,' not 'which,' not 'what' — that's important, what we're looking at. Yes, I was alluding to Lacan earlier, you know the formula of his that I repeat most often because it's not specific to psychoanalysis, it's extendable elsewhere and it's very important, that before signifying something, every speech signifies for someone, and someone is who?
43:15 So maybe the best entry is that, it's the answer to the question 'who is it,' and well, there we go, we can drop the subject, we've said it all, and go back to music. No, I'd like that, but it doesn't work, because if that's the grammatical definition — thanks to our teachers — how do we understand the sentence 'The wind shakes the trees'? Especially since we're in autumn — 'I entered with delight into the season of storms' — you who know everything, since you're starting to annoy me, I tried to trip you up — who said that? Yes, who said that? Yes, Chateaubriand — careful, it's beautiful, the enchanter — 'I entered with delight into the season of storms.' No, no, don't think I'm wandering off, it's not a detour: how can one be delighted to enter the season of death? Modernity began at that moment, the immediate posterity of Rousseau, with a cult of autumn, and it's not an isolated case.
44:25 That sentence, 'Rise up, desired storms,' in René, 'rise up, storms' — Clouscard liked to repeat that sentence, oh yes, when he'd had enough in Corsica after the 15th of August, you see, the island summer, he couldn't take it anymore, Calvi packed with tourists, he didn't have his countryside to himself, Clouscard, moody, he used to quarrel with the birds — you know, you've read his biography — with Clouscard you've seen his spat, it's the case to say so, with the blackbird that whistled while he was working on writing Being and the Code, you see, closed off like that — read it, it's worth its weight in gold — yes, so once the 15th of August has passed, the summer storms are missed, after the 15th of August there's a change of season, we'll go mushroom hunting afterward, and he says 'rise up, desired storms' with his Toulouse accent, he loved quoting that phrase of Chateaubriand's — and as for us, who knew the Sahel — Jean Jean is my African partner — we knew the dry seasons that never end, can you imagine, being in September, looking at the sky and telling yourself there won't be a drop of rain until early June.
45:35 You can't imagine what that's like, it's the Siberian winter starting in reverse, if you will, but it's the equivalent — it's not temperate zones — and I tell you, in the neighborhoods of Niamey, of Bamako, when it's the end of the dry season, when the clouds start to gather but still without bursting, it's dreadful, it's the worst time of the year — do you know it? No, you don't know it — and the children bang on saucepans everywhere so the clouds will burst, we can't take it anymore, and the first rains don't come before late May, early June — so it wasn't a joke when I quoted Chateaubriand, how can one be delighted to enter the season of storms — there it's not a question of drought, that the kids of Bamako are delighted there's finally water, there's no need to draw you a picture — Aman iman, as they say in Tamazight, Tamashek, Kabyle, Berber, it's all the same, all that is the same language, the Libyco-Berber languages, linguists say, or Numidian.
46:47 isn't it, as they say in antiquity, 'Aman iman' — I must be mispronouncing it, but it means 'water is life' — in places like that, of course — it's not the case for a Breton like Chateaubriand, one can't say the surroundings of Combourg lack water, no, no — it's that a whole generation, it's not a cult of autumn, it's a cult of the moment when the leaves die — 'Hail, wood crowned with a remnant of greenery, scattered foliage on the lawns' — Lamartine, a bit more mawkish, but what fluidity, careful, he was rehabilitated under the Symbolists, under Verlaine, I'm not giving a literature course, but because it flows, it's fluid — it's Rousseau first, read for example the grape harvest festival, La Nouvelle Héloïse, it speaks for itself, isn't it, and read above all — you know my favorite is Senancour, less well known, but he's the one who best expressed what we'll soon call the mal du siècle, it's an ailment.
47:58 How can one love the season when everything rots, when everything returns underground — it's no accident, if that's enough there, that it's in this season that the feast of the dead was placed — you remember my text by Nerval, when he writes to the editor of the newspaper, 'It is on the day of the dead that I write to you,' forgive his melancholy thoughts, when he arrives in his mother's homeland, he doesn't tell us, he acts as if he were a journalist writing a column, his mother, he never saw her grave which is there, far away — 'It is on the day of the dead that I write to you, forgive my thoughts' — one thinks of the dead moreover, Chateaubriand speaks of the birds that leave, the migratory birds in autumn, we see the birds leaving, and you know, the language — for you, the language we speak, the language where 'to leave' means 'to die a little' — there's a logic of the subject, you see, what I call the logic of the subject, we begin to see it — Hegel says, on the first page of the preface to the second edition of the Great Logic, he says it's language that we must least forget in logic, it's an extremely modern passage, well, modern compared
Hegel: language infiltrated into logic 49:08 to schools, to currents of thought like structuralism in the sixties, all those schools that say it's the sign that determines meaning — I'll say — you know that better than me, almost — I won't get carried away either — there's a long development, I recommend it, this preface, it's the second edition of the Great Logic — there's a better translation, Victor, I was going to give a translation but I'd like your opinion — the best translation of the Great Logic — well, there we go — I was citing the one by Bourgeois, Bernard — thanks, since he was my research supervisor, I'm afraid of pushing my own wares — yes — where he says that in all these activities, the spirit, that it senses, that it thinks, that it even feels, even when we are in the world that we believe to be the immediate world of sensations that has no need of the logical element, all it takes is having eyes, senses, as if we were animals — he says language is infiltrated in such a way that we think and we feel according to logic — extraordinary passage — that is, according to the logos — it's not formal logic in the sense of, what's his name,
50:19 whom our women adore, Wittgenstein — it's true, in his photo he's not bad, one always has to take little swipes at potential rivals — yes, no, it's not at all logic in that sense, in the sense of the Tractatus, in the sense of formal logic, in the logistic sense, there have been several names for it, in the sense of the analytic school, I'll spare you the Anglo-Saxon school — you know I gave a lecture in Norway not long ago, I had never been so far north, and fortunately those who invited me told me, watch out, when you go to talk philosophy here, know that everyone understands you're talking about the analytic school and nothing else, the rest is, it's the backward ones we are, us continentals, we're metaphysicians, move along, nothing to see here, there's no logic of the subject there, the only logic is the one that reigns for objects, the one used by the astronomer — well then, I have nothing to say, because there he knows more about it than I do, the astronomer.
51:29 To speak of the sun, of a star, of a magnitude, of a magnetic field — you see why I call it the logic of the subject; I would like you to understand today that this is a logic that can only exist for, by, and in a subject. That's what needs to be noted well this evening, because there are things within the subject that we believe to be logical, like the fact that, for example, tomorrow I'll be hungry if I don't eat — of course, that's y equals f of x, that's the logic of the object, because whatever I say and whatever culture and history bring, until the end of my life I will have to eat in order to live. So there's an animal part that is unrelenting, that stays there, but you have to dig to find it because there are 10,000 years of history separating us from it — from the moment we struck flint stones, we moved away from that history, from that nature, sorry. So you see, we're getting to it little by little. When I speak of the logic of the subject this year, I'm trying to unfold it with you.
"The wind shakes the trees": the grammatical subject is not the subject 52:41 a bit haphazardly this evening because this is a presentation — I'm trying to present a logic that is immanent to every subject as subject, and exclusively for subjects, so that — I come back to it when I say — you see that I've lost my thread, the wind is shaking the trees, we're in autumn, hence my slip of the tongue, or rather my imposition — who is shaking the trees?
53:11 The wind. The wind is subject, so — Pagani, that doesn't work anymore. We now know — we, who come after Galileo, after Descartes, after the principle of inertia, after Christianity too, it's the same thing. Why is it the same thing? Did Christianity condemn Galileo? No, no, no — the Catholic Church condemned Galileo. Galileo is the only Christian in the bunch at the time; afterward Descartes joins him. What is Christian is to say: there is no divinity down here, my kingdom is not of this world — that's Christianity. Maybe it's false, maybe it's idealistic, whatever you like, but in the meantime, thanks to Christianity, for the first time we were able to have a modern relationship with springs — that is, it's H2O, springs, they're not nymphs. Too bad for poetry — although, if speech only exists through absence, it's even better that the nymphs have disappeared, and fortunately the history of poetry didn't end with antiquity.
54:23 You see, the wind shakes the trees — an object shakes an object. Grammatically the wind is subject, I won't argue that, but it's not the subject as we'll talk about it this year. There is no logic of that subject — it's a logic that belongs to physics: low pressure, high pressure, cold air, warm air — I'll stop there because otherwise physicists will start censoring me here. It's a bit clearer with this counter-example, isn't it, when I presented this example to you earlier for something else. If, in language, one feels the need to personify the wind, to make it more of a someone, and the trees, a something — you agree, except that nowadays trees think, they feel, you know, there are books about that. They lecture us morally; soon we should put them in power — actually we should vote for the trees, that way Greta can die in peace.
55:33 I'm joking — that poor kid, I don't hold it against her, I have a follower — that's what it's called, a follower — who wrote me something, made a very intelligent comment on a post about Greta that I had put up without any hostility toward her, poor kid, frankly. He rightly says she was robbed of her youth, but I'm afraid it's much worse: we're robbing her of her maturity. Can you imagine, this poor kid, when people stop talking about her, when another gadget has been found — which is already happening, with what's it called, Extinction — yes, that's sad. Me, I didn't believe it, I'm still naive, I still give credit — I see Extinction Rebellion, why not, I saw their questionnaire up close, it's extraordinary, I won't dwell on it today. But if language personifies, it's because language is ancient. We say
56:44 'it's raining' — we call these impersonal moods in grammar, because at one time people said it's Jupiter who makes it rain, it's Zeus who hurls the thunderbolt, it's Dongo — you don't know Dongo? That's in Niger, he's the god of storms. Rain — it's Thor, it's the Scandinavian Thor, which translates as Donner, who gives — Tonner, in Wagner's Rheingold, after Scandinavian mythology, Donner, Wetter, 'dog weather,' that's what Wetter means, it's meteorology — not Wetter, all this holds together in language. Language knows things — language knows more about us than we know about it. You know the famous line of Horatio in Hamlet — 'there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy' — no, no, sorry, it's Hamlet who says it to his friend Horatio: 'there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' my poor Horatio. He was probably right, but I don't know if you can say that of language — I don't know if there are more things on earth and in heaven than there are in language. There you go.
57:55 I'm trying to be precise — I'm not even talking about speech or about language in general, I'm talking about la langue, which without our knowing it makes us personify things that are somethings and not someones. That's what I've been hammering home this whole time, and so it's not there that we'll find our subject — not in the causes that make trees move when the wind blows, but in what makes them personified. You'll find it again, quite late, look at Botticelli's Primavera — I'm deliberately choosing references I think almost everyone knows — this magnificent painting, you see these springtime divinities, these nymphs with veils swelled by the May breezes; but the May breezes are being blown by guys behind them, you see them puffing — that's Aeolus, Zephyr, Aquilo, depending on whether the wind comes from the north. I spoke earlier of Halcyon, the gentle south wind, which made Nietzsche say that Mendelssohn, the only Jew among the German Romantic composers, was the Halcyonic master. So,
Steffens attends a lecture by Fichte 59:06 I'll leave it there for today because I see it's already 9:30 — 8:20, I got scared, that's what I meant to say — yes, 8:20, almost 8:30. Why does it keep switching off? Right — yes, in the texts we handed out, I spoke to you earlier about the projector as an image — and then, in you, another one that lights up everything except itself. That's the subject. So it's interesting — all the diversity, the plurality, everything is in the object; the subject itself is what stands opposite, which is a bit troubling, as if the subject were the void facing the fullness. Now, you have a text that puts us on the path of problematizing — I'm in the process of problematizing the concept of subject, I haven't finished, but you see, there's a text, a testimony about Fichte. You must have that, no?
1:00:14 And so, Henrich Steffens — he's a Norwegian who traveled fairly extensively, who crossed Germany at a time when there was this unprecedented flowering — it's been noted, I'll go quickly, that at the moment when France was upending European and soon world history starting from July 14th, '89 — and even before that there was the Enlightenment century — nothing like it had happened in Germany. You know that the only region in France where there's no separation of church and state in education is Alsace, because of its proximity to Germany. And my father, whom I once guided because I knew Germany better than he did, went to Wolfsburg because his Opel needed repairs — that's the only reason he went that far north, he lived in Nice, being an old colonial, Nice still has palm trees on the ice cream and the great north, well, he was very happy, he was a good traveler, and he says to me: what's going on, I open the nightstand of my hotel — the nightstand of absurdity, what's it called, nightstand, thank you — I open the drawer of my nightstand, there's the Bible. Discover Germany, well, come on.
1:01:25 You know, I'm a Germanophile — I repress it, I'm a Germanophile — and so he travels around and gives an account of almost all the thinkers he met, and here he attends one of Fichte's lectures — so let's take advantage of it, we've got a scoop here, we're not at the Sorbonne, there was no faculty of philosophy at the time, it was brand new, brand new. When Hegel had 30 listeners, that was a lot, and Schopenhauer grumbled because he had 3 — later he got his revenge, he became the darling of the bourgeoisie, in order to root out everything Marxist. So there you go, and moreover there was no ministry of national education — I say this because we have anachronistic reflexes. Even the old Hegel, much later than Steffens's period, in the 1820s-30s, he dies in Berlin in '31, is not employed by the ministry of national education — that doesn't exist, it's frightfully
1:02:36 secular and French — no, it was the ministry of religious affairs that employed him, his employer, you see, that's important, and it's an admirable thing, mind you. So I went from Schelling to Fichte, who was just beginning his lectures on the vocation of man. This stocky little man, with his sharp and authoritarian features, impressed me considerably, I admit, when I saw him for the first time. His very conversation was as if sharp and honed — we recognize Fichte there — already familiar with the weaknesses of his listeners, he strove by every means to make himself understood. It must be said that the gibberish of German idealism is a rather difficult period, I mean, to get into the texts — you complain about Hegel, but when you read Schelling, it's no picnic either, and the young Hegel is more difficult than the old one who gives lectures and deals with beginners. The Aesthetics is less difficult to read than the Phenomenology of Spirit, and a fortiori than the earlier texts. Well, so he took every pain to prove what he was putting forward, which didn't prevent his exposition from keeping a
1:03:46 abrupt, authoritative character, as if he wanted, by an order that had to be obeyed, to dispel a few doubts. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'understand, return into yourselves — here it is a question of nothing external' — you see, the projector, it's starting — it is a question here of nothing external, only of ourselves. There I open a parenthesis: what is the important word there? Well, bravo, yes — 'ourselves' — because when I say logic of the subject, after all, I'm taking up the Socratic torch again: know thyself. Good grief, that's what philosophy is, I'm not off topic — so I reassure myself now and then. Diogenes Laërtius, you know, the one who made this compilation with a bit of everything in it — Lives, Doctrines and Sayings of Eminent Philosophers — which is quite precious for us because there are testimonies from the period, a few fragments about people of whom we have nothing, we've lost everything. You know, we talk about Heraclitus, Parmenides — we have his poem, which is a bit longer — Anaximander, Anaximenes, I'm only mentioning the best-known ones, of course. Democritus — we have almost nothing, or rather, we have one sentence, Democritus:
Know thyself: the same, identity and change 1:04:56 'Nothing exists but the atom and the void,' and all the rest is commentary. You had to dare — can you imagine, that means paper, gold, love, God, all of that is combinations of atoms, can you imagine? Or Pythagoras: everything is number. You know, artificial intelligence is working on that, you can digitize everything — I have my doubts, we'll see who lives will see. So that's the pre-Socratics — we're not yet in philosophy, they were called the physicists, if you know a bit of the history of thought, those people, because they all wrote a book titled Peri physeôs, On Nature. Some said that at the origin of the cosmos there was water, others said it was fire, some said the earth was a cylinder — there are admirable things, but even so, you never know whether you're in meteorology or metaphysics, you see, that's normal, it's all still undifferentiated — the further back you go toward the origins, the more you approach
1:06:06 chaos. You know, in mythology, in Chaos there is neither up nor down, neither right nor left, everything is still undifferentiated. Let me open a parenthesis — Plato, starting from the great crisis of Platonism that he himself administers, which is rare — such courage, you know, to ruin everything that had been said until then, or to call it back into question — the entire theory of Forms is called relentlessly, mercilessly into question starting with the Parmenides, and that inaugurates the series of so-called metaphysical dialogues: the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Statesman, the Philebus — the Philebus, the Statesman, in that order. Now, in the Parmenides, he uses this method called apophantic — I won't bore you with technical words, apophantic, with a ph — but it's very simple, which consists in not saying what the thing is, but what it is not — roughly, being is neither at rest nor in motion, it is neither open nor closed — that's the apophantic method. Why am I talking about this?
1:07:18 Because in the Buddha's teaching — I mean the historical Buddha, not — we'll come back to this with Nazism, those Germanic delusions that are always Hinduist-Buddhist-bono-bo-bo-bo-bo-bourgeois-Buddhist-bono-bo, that's a very un-Hegelian me, I say that because I was a bit of a Buddhist when I was 16, to be fair — I was a little Nazi at that age.
1:07:48 I know a good deal about it, about the logic of subjects. As Callicles says to Socrates in the Gorgias — you remember that passage? — when you're young you can devote yourself to philosophy, but when you have a beard like yours, it's a scandal, and if you're not that old, you'd deserve a beating. That's in Plato — violence. So, the physicists, who speak of the external world.
1:08:24 Now, Diogenes Laërtius says that his contemporaries said that Socrates had brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth. You'll say, Pagani, sometimes it's interesting, but there — what is that? He's pushing at open doors, those are hollow phrases. No, it's very precise. It means that he stopped doing astronomy and posed the moral question. And the moral question addresses only someones.
1:08:57 It's not to stars that you'd say 'do this, don't do that, put your hand in front of your mouth when you yawn, and close your mouth when you eat' — because we must never show our organicity openly, that's courtesy. Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth. So, at his trial, in the Apology of Socrates, that's where we learn, from Plato's pen — because he had — Socrates's stroke of genius was to have found a brilliant errand-boy like Plato.
1:09:30 He says that when he — when one comes to consult the oracle at Delphi, at Delphi, the most sacred place for the Greeks — for them, Delphi was the navel of the world. The navel of the world. Hölderlin says in a poem that Frankfurt is the navel of the world. Interesting. You laugh, but in Frankfurt there's the European Central Bank.
1:10:04 The middle, the center, the navel. Back to Delphi. When you arrive, there's the entrance to the sanctuary: Gnôthi seauton — know thyself. Thank you, Romain. The most important word, because we say, yes, it means — that's it, moreover Pagani was explaining it to us — it means that we've moved from knowledge of the external world to the self. There's something more precise still: know in yourself what remains the same. Know yourself as identity.
1:10:37 Because 'same' is the syntagm of identity par excellence. It's the opposite of the other. It's in the Sophist, the great dialogue — I won't dwell on it, it's very complicated — it's in the Sophist that, through a truly heroic act, philosophically speaking, Plato consents — he who had started out as somewhat of a reactionary rich boy, privileging everything that is identity, everything on the side of eternity, that denies death, in short, that denies change, that is on the side of Parmenides: what is, is; what is not, is not.
1:11:07 And not of Heraclitus, everything flows. Yes, we'll get there. Because the subject — there's all of that inside it. There's what remains and what flows. The oracle says: know in yourself what remains. Sometimes students in their final year are given this topic that looks quite simple: 'I have changed' — does that express a contradiction? What do you think?
1:11:39 The statement: 'I have changed.' Well, that's not a metaphysical statement. Yesterday I was sick, today I'm well, for example. I am no longer the same. There's no contradiction. Yes, I see one. In the statement, yes. Bravo. There's a part that states change — sick, healthy, sickness, health — and then there's the 'I' that says, yes, yesterday the 'I' was sick, today the 'I' is still there. I am still the same one who at one time is sick, at another time is in good health.
1:12:11 There's nothing mysterious about it, we're allowed to change. And it's complicated, this business, the subject, all the same. You've just discovered that the subject is eminently dialectical. So it doesn't belong to the natural sciences, the subject — fortunately, otherwise I couldn't talk about it, that's not my area of competence. I try, I try, because you have to keep up. You can't live in the world we're in — we don't try, we can no longer do as in Descartes's or Leibniz's time, when one could be, as I've told you, the greatest philosopher of his time, the greatest mathematician of his time, the greatest jurist, Leibniz, the greatest linguist — you have, in the chapter on words, on language, on words, W-O-R-D-S, in the New Essays on Human Understanding, by Leibniz, a passage that is simply stunning, that I'd recommend for anyone who wants to be dazzled by his erudition.
Leibniz: order within a multitude; measure within chaos 1:13:09 The number of languages, including extra-European ones, Chinese, Persian, that he cites to show origins — extraordinary, but truly extraordinary. Have you just come from Rue Mouffetard? Well, beneath Rue Mouffetard flows the Bièvre — I don't know if some of you know that — which empties into the Seine near the Jardin des Plantes. Now, 'bièvre,' in English, 'beaver,' in German, 'Biber' — what is it? Castor. Castor, thank you, there you go.
1:13:41 And even now, the Essonne — since the Bièvre rises in the Essonne — is infested with beavers, when you go a little further up toward the sources of the Bièvre. And I'm talking about European beavers here, not the ones that have been reintroduced from the United States, there are some in the Rhône valley. You see, you have to read it to believe it, it's stunning. Sometimes he knows Corsica better than I do. And he didn't travel much, but he wrote to the whole of Europe.
1:14:13 I admire these people who used to write, especially since I don't write, can you imagine. But letters to Locke, in London, you see, with storms, it would take months to arrive. And he manages, in a little sentence, to say perhaps the most beautiful thing ever said about Baroque art. He's not thinking of Baroque art at all, he's doing philosophy, and he says to Locke: there is order to the extent that one can find something countable within a multitude. When you hear that sentence, you understand Bach's music.
1:14:45 It's exactly contemporary. There is order to the extent — never immediate — that one can find something countable within a multitude. I dwelled on this a bit because we've had a visit precisely from friends who came from Bordeaux and who asked me, by letter, to go back over the mysterious fall of that Rimbaud poem that I read to you two years ago, I believe, isn't that right — Conte, you know, a prince, was vexed — which we'll come back to for the logic of the subject, it's quite relevant.
1:15:17 And which ends, after the hero's death — it's tiny, half a page, it's in Illuminations — which ends with this strange fall that has no relation to the rest of the text. Thank you. 'La musique savante manque à notre désir' — learned music is lacking to our desire. Learned music is lacking to our desire. It's not rock, techno, pop, folk.
1:15:47 Learned music, I'm quoting it to you, he's a rebel, and Rimbaud, mind you — learned music is lacking to our desire. There is order to the extent that one can find something countable within a multitude. The multitude is a permanent challenge that defies my attempt to try to put order into this mess that is the real. Scientists understand what I mean. What a mess! And then man arrives and establishes what the Greeks called metron, measure — meaning that this table measures, I don't know, two meters.
1:16:25 It's incredible! To bring the table — which is chaos! If you look at it under a microscope, it's frightening when you look closely, it's chaos! I'm not even talking about the electron microscope where you'll see electrons — well, you won't actually see them, there are collisions, photographs of clashes between particles — and in that mess, it comes out as two meters! Good grief! We decided there was a fixed length, which suits us fine for carpentry, that's enough, no need to go down to a billionth of a millimeter, that's not necessary.
1:16:55 So there, I won't go much further, especially since it's already the half-hour for questions that I've just started, but I wanted to remind you, and try to circle around, drawing closer like a spiral toward the center — you see, I don't just use the spiral to be eccentric, but from time to time I come back to the center to try to make you at least intuit, and I hope more and more conceptualize, since intuition has value only when it is sublated into the concept, and conversely, the concept has no interest unless it began with the rich matter of intuition — regarding what I'm trying to call the logic of what is properly subject.
Questions from the audience; Ulysses and the repetition of carnage 1:17:47 I'll hand it over to you, and don't hesitate as well if it concerns the future of our theme — are we going to talk about this, that, or go back? It's your turn to speak. Romain — I have a question about what you just said, about putting things in order, and that quote from Leibniz that I didn't know, so I don't remember exactly, but roughly that...
1:18:19 'There is order to the extent that one can find something countable within a multitude.' There you go — and what that reminds me of is the title of a workshop cycle from a few years back, 'Ulysses, on repetition and liberation.' Is there a link between the two? Since you seem to be saying that it took time and repetition for order to emerge. What is the link with the repetition you were talking about back then with Ulysses? Thank you.
1:18:49 We can group questions if there are others, perhaps? Is it the qualitative leap? Is it a qualitative leap? I didn't hear. Does it have a connection to the qualitative leap? Leibniz's sentence? Yes, well, the fact that from the multitude, order appears — isn't that the qualitative leap that Marx talks about? No? I thought you were alluding to the quantum leap, but it could well be either. Yes, of course, the notion of threshold.
1:19:21 Yes, it's the same thing, discontinuity within continuity. Exactly. Léo, I'll pass it to Léo if the cable reaches that far. I just wanted to know whether nature is dialectical, or whether dialectic is something reserved for the subject. Very good question.
1:19:56 Tarek — he was talking about language, and my question will now be about language. Now, regarding the logic of the subject, is it, to answer it, a matter of going back to language rather than to the richness of la langue? The richness of language rather than the richness of la langue, is that what you're saying? That is to say, doesn't ordinary language exist more — I can't hear you well. Ordinary language rather than... Ah yes! Alright, alright.
1:20:26 Thank you very much. The so-called natural language, as linguists call it. Right, let's go on. I forgot your question, Romain. It's about age — repetition and liberation. Yes, that's it. I understand why I'd forgotten it, because there's a whole — since you're pushing me into a corner, with no malice, I don't think, though I don't know if you suspect it — but actually, I always deal with the same theme.
1:20:56 Because this year, in which I initiated a cycle titled 'From Ulysses to Daedalus,' subtitled 'On repetition' — Ulysses, who endlessly repeats the carnage — there I am, in my subject: the reconstitution of Nazism. I always deal with the same thing. But that theme was itself already taking over from another one titled 'Between crisis and war, to philosophize.'
1:21:30 I'm stubborn. But I only realize it after the fact. I think I'm going to change subjects. Actually, I realize that I always deal with the same thing. Obviously, since it remains pending. The dangers of war haven't moved further away since I started six years ago. I'm afraid they've drawn closer. So, first element of an answer: yes, there is a link between the two problematics.
1:22:04 I don't want to complicate things. I'll save the complicated part for later in the seminar. But roughly speaking, I'll remind those who know all this but don't know that they know it. Everyone here more or less knows the story of Ulysses. And everyone knows that it was he who had the idea of the horse, yes or no? The Trojan horse. The ingenious Ulysses. He's a sly one, Ulysses. Very sly. For the sirens, he was a very sly one.
1:22:34 I put myself in the heads of the sirens, or rather in their hearts. Ulysses alone escaped them. She no longer wanted to see anything but Ulysses's great eyes. That's not from me, it's from Kafka, in an admirable text called The Silence of the Sirens. If you want to know more, I quote Kafka's text in an excellent book called Femininity and Community in Hegel, 120 pages, published by Éditions Delga. This is indeed the first time I've advertised for this book. No, what I love in that book is everything that isn't by me.
1:23:06 Everything that isn't by me. My quotations, Kafka. It's a very beautiful text, The Silence of the Sirens. Where he says, well, we can imagine that someone might have been able to resist the sirens' song. It never happened. But still, we can try to imagine it. But then, silence—never. That's terrible. Ulysses is perhaps the only one who heard the silence. Let's not get sidetracked. Ulysses had the idea of the horse.
1:23:36 Thanks to which—it's a dreadful story. Look closely, it's a nightmare. You're resisting on the ramparts. There are already atrocities, pouring boiling oil on them. I imagine a bunch of rather medieval things. I trust them for that. It's fine. The bladed weapon is terrible. But there, we're at ease. We're sleeping. We're at home, in our own house, and the enemy is there, in the city center, hidden in that horse. Right?
1:24:07 While we're in our beds with our wives and children—it's dreadful. Racine alludes to it briefly, quickly, as he has the secret of doing so admirably. In Andromache: "I have made unfortunate ones, certainly"—yes indeed, that's Pyrrhus, the one who carried out the carnage, Achilles's son, Pyrrhus. "I have made unfortunate ones, certainly, and a hundred times Phrygia has seen my hand reddened with your blood."
1:24:37 "But may your eyes have been well exercised on me, may they have sold dearly the tears they shed." He's a monster, he's a Racinian hero, therefore a monster. He's basically saying: I'm in love with you, you're more cruel to me because I belong to her—Hector's widow, who obviously isn't going to sleep with the one who massacred her family, if I may use that barbarism. "May they have sold dearly the tears they shed, was I ever as cruel as you are?" He's a monster, comparing them like that, can you imagine.
1:25:07 No, that's not it—historically, the Greeks come on an embassy to Pyrrhus to tell him they've had enough of him keeping this captive and especially her son—her son is Hector's son, Hector being the one who caused a great many deaths in our ranks—he must be eliminated, period, that's it, it's rather political, we're not in... Corneille would have developed that; Racine, no, that's the political pretext. Racine is the story of the skirt, you know, or the trousers, as you like, let's not be sexist.
1:25:37 So they come to eliminate him, and he refuses because he's in love with his captive, like a good Racinian hero—that is, he's only able to fall in love with, he can only be possessed by, someone he himself possesses. Beautiful, the language, isn't it? A figure of speech, I've forgotten which one. When you repeat the same word twice but with a different meaning—well, I've forgotten nine-tenths of my figures of speech. Anyway.
1:26:08 Yes, it's time to get to it. And so, you see, Racinian heroes are all possessed by their own possession. Look at Nero in Britannicus, he has Junie abducted in the middle of the night, and bang, he's immediately in love with seeing her like that, a captive. "And the fierce look of her proud abductors brought out the timid sweetness in her eyes." Sadistic. No, I'm not joking—sadistic and masochistic in the same line, well, in two lines—"I employed sighs and even threats."
1:26:41 Sadistic. "Sometimes, but too late, I begged her for mercy"—the following line. Frankly, these aren't proper morals, that's how it is. So, I was at Pyrrhus. So the Greeks come to make their embassy and he answers refusing, saying it's not right to demand the death of a child. All that is hypocrisy. He acts as if it were for the child's sake. It's because he's afraid the mother will no longer want him. He's already being refused; if on top of that this monster kills her child, it's over. He uses pity as a pretext and says this.
1:27:11 "I think of what this city once was, so proud in its ramparts, so rich in heroes, mistress of Asia. And I look at last at what became of Troy's fate and what is its destiny. I see nothing but towers covered in ash"—so they burned everything—"a river dyed with blood, deserted countryside, a child in chains. And I cannot imagine that Troy, in such a state, would aspire to revenge." You'd think it was Macron talking about the victims. You know, when he pinned the Legion of Honor cross on someone.
1:27:41 I have never seen—I'm old—a political leader lie so badly. It's terrible, he couldn't care less. He's waiting for his next orgy—excuse me, I won't get into gossip magazine talk. So he says, it should have been asked before. Everything was fair then. Old age—look at the carnage. Old age and childhood—that's my theme—"in vain relied on their weakness for their defense."
1:28:12 "Victory and the night, crueler than we were, urged us on to murder and confused our blows." It wasn't a pleasure trip, the sack of Troy. Now, it's because of Ulysses—it's his cunning that allowed this carnage to happen. And here we are, ten years later, ten years of detours, and at every detour he made a stopover, as travel agencies say. Ah, an island. There's always an island, a woman, delighted to see him arrive.
1:28:42 Why yes, Nausicaa, Circe, etc. And Calypso. And then, it turns dreadful again. As soon as he stops sailing, and as soon as he sets foot on land again, the carnage resumes. Circe devours his companions—well, not her herself, but the giant Polyphemus wipes out quite a few by throwing giant rocks. And when he comes back home—"happy is he who, like Ulysses..."
Freud beyond the pleasure principle 1:29:14 Now that's the happy ending, right? Come on, Penelope, let's go to bed, it's over, I promise. He's been gone twenty years. Ten years of war, and ten years of wandering. Well no, that's false. It's a legend, as we'd say in psychoanalysis, which comes to take the place of the real history here. Read Homer's text, it's a dreadful carnage, Ulysses's return. Read the massacre of the suitors in detail, it's dreadful—there's brain matter on the ground, blood on the walls, an arrow going through an eye.
1:29:47 For having touched Penelope. This is exactly, you see, Ulysses is exactly what Freud calls the repetition principle, the death drive—which Freud, at the end of his career, realizes is taking an ever-growing place and is ruining his whole theory. Earlier I said that Plato had the courage to submit early Platonism to the scrutiny of his own lucidity. And now Freud says: but wait, for years I've been saying it's the pleasure principle that underlies everything, the libido.
1:30:24 And now my clientele changes. I no longer have the little neurotics of Vienna—there was no shortage of them. Mahler, Klimt—no, they're geniuses, I'm not saying anything bad aesthetically, look, I'm even mixing things up... But still, from the point of view of psychic balance, I'm as crazy as Nerval, who was even more ill than they were, so this isn't a criticism. But anyway, that's who paraded across his couch. And that woman, what a disaster—what did she do with Berg?
1:30:54 Well, it's about twenty of them. And so it's bourgeois neurosis. That's what makes his fortune. And then suddenly the war of 1914 parades across his couch—war-traumatized patients, a change of clientele. And what do they say on the couch? Always the same story. They absolutely want to return to the trauma, to the incident that plunged them into neurosis. The incident—the war of 1914—there was no shortage of opportunities.
1:31:25 That's a euphemism when I say incident. With beads of sweat, you know, like road accident victims, they try the same thing—they try to relive the last seconds before the trauma, before the shock, before the grenade exploded, the bomb. You see? They say, but this doesn't fit. I thought the pleasure principle was at the basis of the unconscious, and here they are wanting to relive the most painful moment, the opposite of pleasure, of their life. That's how it began to germinate, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
1:31:56 They want to repeat, you see, the carnage. There, I don't want to... My point is, there's such rich material that if I keep going, I'll unfold the logic of the subject in shorthand and you'll be a bit fed up, so I'd rather do it chapter by chapter. Next was Léo's question, or was it Tarek's first? As you like.
Dialectic of nature: scientific discourse and natural language 1:32:27 Yes, the dialectic of nature. That's not it, no? That too, I don't want to answer. It's an enormous file. No, no, but it's good because it's a very good question, but a classic one. The famous dossier that periodically resurfaces. Is there a dialectic of nature? Right? It's a problem of... because this can only really be said in German, they called it so much Naturphilosophie. We understand it in French. It's the whole dossier of the philosophy of nature, beyond even the problem of dialectics. Right? There.
1:33:02 So what do you think, Léo? No, no, but quickly. I started out as a positivist, like any physicist. So denying that there's a dialectic of nature. But even of the subject, at the beginning. Then I came across Engels's Anti-Dühring, and, well, I'll go fast, but I thought everything was dialectical. That's good, that's a good progression. And now, I told him that ultimately, I don't get the impression there's a need for dialectics to talk about nature.
1:33:36 But maybe I'm wrong... But Victor, don't you agree? No. Now I'm not so sure anymore, because... because if nature isn't dialectical, how can the subject emerge? I have trouble talking about it without my favorite physicists. No, I'm saying it's because Hérouane is in Toulouse right now. Well, we have excellent physicists, that's not the question. No, first of all. She was more of a mathematician, physicist—I never really knew, you neither, it's not clear. There.
1:34:06 Theoretical physics, is that it? That is, algebra. Roughly, I can't answer at the purely physical level. On the other hand, I must specify how the problems are posed. How they're stated in language. That's the crux of it. There, I've now said something, because I do want to address your question, seriously, something that holds beyond the problem of dialectics, that holds generally for any philosophical discourse on the world of the so-called hard sciences.
1:34:43 I'm being deliberately expansive—not to be vague, on the contrary, it's in order to be precise, what I'm about to do now. I understand absolutely nothing of the language at work in a theoretical physics textbook. Without even going as far as quantum mechanics. Even before that, I'm lost. Like anyone not in the field. Fine. Except that I know that inside it, there is never any language.
1:35:14 So little that it's not even worth talking about. Or else it's metalanguage. I'm trying to answer your question as seriously as possible, let's say the essential, philosophically. I mean that when you take a physics manual by Descartes, you find it in the Pléiade edition, in the Descartes volume, they had the good idea of keeping these physics works—on the vacuum, on optics, of course. Now, you see, there's still a lot of everyday language there, at the time.
1:35:47 Even the mathematicians of the time say "if we compare the two triangles"—you see, that's still everyday language. Now, instead you have, you see, "belongs to A in the set." Everything is far more formalized. I mean there's another language besides natural language. So here I'm deliberately conflating your two questions... of natural language, as you put it very well. Do you remember that quotation from Aristotle I like to repeat: mathematics unites men, politics divides them.
1:36:19 We can't say it's become outdated. There's no Chadian concept of electron velocity opposed to a Bolivian concept. There's an anthropological unity of the language at work in the so-called hard sciences. A lexicological unity in which mathematical discourse plays a central role, mathematical formalization, if you prefer.
1:36:53 That's why I say, don't confuse things. So, we're allowed, when speaking quickly like this, to say "the language of advertising," "the language of mathematics" in the common sense. But if we look closely, it's precisely not a language. It's discursive, it's a discourse—if... then, well, I mean, avoiding "if" and "then," there are signs for that now. There's an "implies," I don't know. So what am I actually saying? And here I get political. You're pricking up your ears, and you're right to.
1:37:24 The con starts when we pass illegitimately from one to the other. And that happens every day. And nowhere more than in discourses on ecology. What does Greta say? Listen to the science. Listen to the scientists. This is the first time in history—well, what characterizes the history of science is precisely the breaking of consensus. Galileo breaks a consensus, Newton breaks a consensus, Einstein breaks the Newtonian consensus. Yes or no?
1:37:55 And Max Planck continues. After Einstein. There. That's what interests me as a philosopher. I know nothing about quantum mechanics, but I know—or relativistic mechanics just as little. But I know that in relativistic mechanics there is no longer any ether. And that the speed of light propagates in all directions at the same speed. Right? Because that, we can translate into everyday language. So it looks like I'm contradicting myself. You say the con starts when we go from Y equals F of X.
The con of the passage to natural language; Einstein and idealism 1:38:28 Anyway. Let me be precise. From the algorithm to the concept, to the word. For me, that's where the con starts. But careful, I need to clarify now. Because when I say all bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and inverse proportion to the square of their distance—Newton—I'm not delirious. But the great difference is that, unlike Deleuze—no, Foucault, let's be more precise here—who says, you know, that all men desire power.
1:39:01 For example. What underlies everything isn't the economy, it's the pursuit of power. Power in every sense—the husband's over his wife, the parents' over the children, the guard's over the prisoners. Foucault. Which means power is all of us, by the way. The Medef can rest easy—I say that in passing. But that's not what interests me. What's the unit of power? What is it? Do you know? Is it the angstrom?
1:39:31 Is it the becquerel? The centimeter? The second? What's the unit of power? My point is that in Newton's sentence, everything is expressed in terms that lend themselves to measurement. Bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass. Mass can be measured. It can even be measured in newtons, as my old physics teacher used to say, isn't that right? Or in kilograms of mass, as you like. And in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. Distance can be measured. If we bring in this thing that exists nowhere, nowhere before man, called the unit...
1:40:06 Arbitrarily, as I said about the table earlier. Just as the Bible says God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures—you are a table, you are a camera, you are a donkey, you are an ox—and thereby man secured his mastery over the world, so too man arrogated to himself this privilege of establishing measurement, as I said earlier, in a world that is not made for it, a world that is chaos. You know, in the explosion of a supernova, to introduce measurement into that, you really have to have nerve.
1:40:40 It's extraordinary. The odyssey of science. Right? So there, the con starts when we move from the discourse—sorry—from the discourse of the hard sciences, from discourse whose element is the algorithmic lexicon, to natural language, without bringing in notions capable of lending themselves to measurement.
1:41:15 I think that with my counter-example of power in Foucault, you understand what I mean—power isn't like mass or distance. There, how do I... I'm laying out the problem. There are the problems that arise if one wants to talk about a dialectic of nature. Right? Now, I don't want to be dishonest, I'm finishing, I'll go as far as I can answer for tonight. I don't understand, is this clock running fast or slow?
1:41:46 It's not on time. Ah, but that's it, I was telling myself, but that's what's been throwing me off since earlier. It's 9 o'clock, no? Ah, there we go, very good, then I'll finish on this. When Einstein states his most famous formula, the so-called equivalence of mass and energy—correct me if I'm getting it wrong, but roughly, I believe it's E equals MC squared—some said at the time that it was a posthumous triumph of German idealism.
1:42:22 Ah yes, yes, yes. Of course. I read it under the pen of—what's his name, the fellow who was a friend of Einstein's and did a lot of popularization. You don't know him because you're great physicists, but ignoramuses like me know the popularizers. Not German ones, but American. Anyway. So he says, well yes, because Schelling and Hegel had seen that matter is a dynamic and not an inertia, in the Galilean sense. That's interesting.
1:42:52 There's a chapter in the Phenomenology called "Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World," or "the play of forces," the phenomenon, or the thing and illusion. I don't know if you follow, for those who know this difficult text a little, I mean where the unity of the thing is sometimes concentrated within itself, sometimes unfolds into what he calls its properties. You know Musil's book, The Man Without Qualities—the German term he uses for "quality" is Eigenschaften.
1:43:26 It's the same word in German for quality and property. When we say lead, among other things, melting property, I think it's 380, something like that, no? Lead, 400 degrees, I don't know. The text, tungsten has nearly 3000, I think. That's a property, a quality, all that, it's the same thing, if you look closely, a determination proper to lead, a property. So there you go.
1:43:56 Some have said, who knows, that it was inertia that reigned until then, and now mass is a potential for everything except inertia starting with Einstein. With a mass of uranium like that, I supply electric current to New York, plus Tokyo, plus Paris, I add a bit more. There you go. I won't go any further for this evening. In any case, I remind those present that we have a habit of comforting ourselves after the terrible effort I've made for you, which is nothing compared to the effort you've made to come and to put up with me, at a restaurant that you booked?
1:44:41 Yes. Oh dear, you didn't forget? Pfff, I forgot on your behalf. I booked it when we were there last week. There you go. There you go, it's a Chinese place with a pretty good quality-price ratio, so, if that suits you. In any case, I'll be delighted to meet you there. There you go. Thank you.
