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 "re" of reconstitution: Bolivia and Latin America 0:36 So, second session of our cycle on the logic of the subject faced with, literally, faced with the reconstitution of Nazism. I insist on the "re" of reconstitution, because what decided me to tackle this subject is not to give you the history of the Third Reich, even if we're going to have to recall some things, because everything is done so that we forget.
1:41 by the political aspect, not the philosophical one, if you will, insofar as things aren't getting better — last time it was elsewhere, now it's Bolivia. No, no, because there are some who underestimate it, who thought it was just political rivalries — no, we know very well who the people involved are, it's the classic far right of the pronunciamentos, as they're called, you know, in the region, supported, of course, by Uncle America, as they say, and moreover — this is rarely mentioned — there is an institute, a school, a training center, call it what you like, in Maryland, whose specialty is, how with a little spoon you remove the eyes of... your interrogations, you see, guerrilla fighters — well yes, that's the story of Latin America over the last 60 years.
2:35 It was already bloody a bit before that, it wasn't pretty with the Portuguese in Brazil, or the Spanish elsewhere — quite something, you should look at the sack of Mexico City, if you know your history a bit, it's a massacre, in the time of Cortés, Catherine, it's a massacre. But then, let me make a confession, which won't make me any younger: there was a great era when all the heads of state of Latin America had Iberian names. Who was running Brazil when I was your age? It was Geisel. Who was running Paraguay? Stroessner — you remember, Alfredo Stroessner, yes. And in Bolivia, who was it?
The social frameworks of memory 3:26 Hugo Banzer, I'm not joking, and you know, some don't know this — I'll come back to the fact that amnesia is kept up, because people would be more wary if they knew how things really happened. You know, I'll continue my detour, my parenthesis, my imposition — you know the famous poll that was done at the end of 1944, the very first IFOP polls, where they ask which country played the essential role in crushing Nazism: 65% say the Soviet Union, the Americans 25%, and then almost the rest argue over the British, and so on.
4:09 The same poll is done 40 years later, and it has reversed — everyone now says it's the Americans, the longest day, Hollywood, the legend taking the place of history. Good film? I don't know. It's cinematically good, yes — you know it was filmed in Corsica, the landing, yes, on the beach of Saleccia, in the Désert des Agriates, excuse me, I had to fit that in. And so you see, memory being what it is — this is to give you a title I recommend, which appeared in the 1950s, by a sociologist of the time, Maurice Halbwachs — the one who's half asleep, Halbwachs, word for word — who wrote the significant title "The Social Frameworks of Memory." There's someone quite forgotten, and for good reason, when we talk about memory — the social frameworks of memory — because you could reduce memory to the psychological field, the psych field, rather than the sociological field, you see, whereas without the social supports, we don't have the same things at all, in fact, it's completely unconscious.
5:21 the relays — when I say supports, the collective relays — and nowadays, and here I come back to the reconstitution of Nazism, of which this is one of the factors — careful, none of these factors taken alone suffices for an accusation of Nazism, it's all of them together that converge. I used the image last time of a watershed basin in geography, you see — you can't say that such a little stream is the Amazon, but still, I mean, by all flowing in the same direction, it ends up making a great river. So when I'm sometimes a bit harsh about certain ecologist distortions and so on, you have to understand that too — but we're not there yet. This Halbwachs shows to what extent, without these relays, I mean, yes, memory — so for him there are sociological factors that are decisive in our anamnesis, the opposite of amnesia. But today, it's not only that the sociological has been reduced to the psychological, it continues now, it's even reduced to...
6:30 Yes, well, to the biological, that's it, to cognitive science, etc., stimulus, reflexes, enzymes — memory, that's it, you see, and the trick is done, and we'll never know that all of Foucault's and Deleuze's themes are already found in the propaganda of the Nazi philosophers. I didn't say Foucault and Deleuze are Nazis. I'd rather spend an evening with Foucault than with Goebbels, that's not the question. It's more serious than that. I never speak against people physically.
7:01 I'm not going to please everyone, but it's one of the things that also distinguishes me from a certain Stalinism, because there's a Stalin I defend and another against whom I defend the victim. But I mean, you can liquidate an entire social class without touching a single physical person. That's hard. Sometimes you have to lend a hand a little, but not too much.
The rise of the far right in Europe 7:31 But you can eliminate — I don't know — you eliminate the trading profession, for example, I mean, that can be done without... you can eliminate... There you go. So, I make this preamble because the subject I'm addressing with you, I chose it because there is urgency and there is topicality. What's happening in Bolivia is appalling. You saw the woman who proclaimed herself president, even though a quorum of Parliament is required, etc.
8:07 Parliament was two-thirds empty, nobody appointed her, she wasn't elected. So, I have some good news in all this nightmare: today there are several tens of thousands of people in the streets in the center of La Paz demanding Morales's return and protesting against the illegality of this self-proclamation. So you see it's not settled either. And while I'm on this chapter, let me say — it doesn't look like we're doing philosophy here. And yet read everything Marx says about primitive accumulation, you'll see we're not far off.
8:40 We shouldn't think Latin America is turning toward fascism — I'm not saying that. Look at Argentina, the opposite just happened. It's a certain left — not a dream. I'll always remember that our friend Jean told me — Jean-Hermé was responsible for the Communist Party at one time for Latin America. He had the honor of getting into Congress in the United States with a petition against the embargo on Cuba, you see, for example.
9:12 And so, at the time, I questioned him about Lula because the name was starting to emerge — he was a union leader, but we didn't really know, he wasn't president yet, you see. We said, he's the Brazilian Mitterrand — my poor fellow. There you go, that's to tell you — I'm glad he's free, that's to say, we shouldn't dream too much either, but still, it's not Bolsonaro. You see, we're really — there, there's fascism, listen, Bolsonaro, yes, there are the evangelicals behind him, with the American budget, it's terrifying, it's supremacist. You know that the coup in Bolivia has a racist, anti-indigenous background, you know, you keep up with things, that's good.
9:49 There you go, well, anyway. So, once again, we must never forget it during all the detours I might take. And you know, I like to say that these detours are meant to stay at the center of the matter — it's the topicality of the danger that requires us to think about it more closely. And let's go now to do an anamnesis, so I'll be led to speak nonetheless about the Third Reich, even though that's not my subject — my subject is today's fascism.
10:22 There you go, that's what I wanted to clarify in this preamble. And it never repeats in the same way, that's why I was a bit long. It doesn't take, it doesn't take the same forms. But anyway, what's making headlines today? Because so far, I've been saying, okay, fine, it's the third world, in Latin America there have always been coups to pronounce a meter, that's it, yes — and in Germany, what's happening? Huh? Never has a far-right party in Germany reached such numbers since the end of the war. What just happened in the elections in Spain?
10:56 Not long ago I was saying, my God, France is appalling, all countries are more democratic than France, with this Le Pen approaching 30%, but now it's everywhere. No favoritism, huh? So there you go, I mean, and then, we never talk about it either — we talk about it favorably — the Scandinavian countries, you know, for a long time it's been democracy, the Swedish model. There is not a single current government, in any of the Scandinavian countries, Finland included, that would keep power if there weren't, in the government, the participation of open neo-Nazis.
11:31 So there, without embarrassment, there you go, I'm telling you, check it, don't just take my word for it — whether in Norway, Sweden, Denmark or Finland, it's through the participation of the far right that the governments have a majority. Last chapter of what I'm doing in this vein, one last subsection: France and Germany, an old debate. You know Macron dreams of getting Germany into the UN Security Council, you know, he's pushing for that — he's not pushing in the right direction, I've noticed, I've been accused of being a Germanophile, still, more musically than politically, but still.
12:16 so, not only that — given the numbers the far right is getting in Germany, imagine that right on cue, Germany manages to get a Security Council seat with a far-right government. That would be quite something, the circle closing like that. There, I'll end on that, I don't wish for it, of course. So you'll tell me, yes, but on that we agree, it's good that we agree on the substance, but what does it have to do with the subject?
Structuralism against the subject: Lévi-Strauss and Althusser 12:49 We're talking about it, moreover, since Pauline had asked me the question. What does this have to do with the subject? Good question. Because it's not obvious, precisely. So, I'll tell you right away, we mustn't muddy the waters, we mustn't forget afterward in my meanderings, my mixing things up and all that. The common point between those who deny the importance of the subject in philosophy — I no longer have it in politics — structuralism, you know? Lévi-Strauss, in an interview, said — he's the founding father after all, and I always pay him homage, a great culture, especially musical, a very great literary, philosophical culture — at the time, there was no such thing as a sociology degree, a sociology teaching agrégation, you had to have a philosophy degree, then you specialized afterward in sociology, you see, these are all people who had a culture, who received their humanities education.
13:38 Even now in Germany, the high schools where Latin is taught are called "humanistische Schule," Schule. So, Lévi-Strauss used to say: my system is a Kantianism without a transcendental subject. I approve — it was Ricoeur who coined the formula, but he says, I approve of Mr. Ricoeur's formula to designate my system, it's a Kantianism without a transcendental subject. The subject, Althusser, you see — I'm shifting the movement — right-wing structuralism, let's say conservative, Lévi-Strauss, and then, at the forefront of the Communist Party of the time, to the misfortune of the possessor, and Althusser, who published a book to decouple Marx and Hegel — that was his great project.
14:29 But that's not the subject today. But I bring this up to recall that he did a self-critique, it's noteworthy, because at the end of his life, in his confessions, he says he had not read Hegel — this after he had strangled his wife. So, who was a great communist, a great Resistance fighter, who must have told him from time to time, in fits of anger, "stop your nonsense, Louis." In my opinion it's an explanation of the family drama, but let's not get into that. It's a hypothesis, for what it's worth, I won't hide it.
14:59 And, "Elementary Structures of Kinship," you fool. Althusser says, I'm exaggerating, in, in, in his homage to Jean Hyppolite in the NRF. There's a bit of a compilation of articles like that after Hyppolite's death, Hegel, you know, an article — I'm exaggerating when I say Marx owes nothing to Hegel, I admit he owes him a trifle: the notion of a process without a subject.
15:29 You see how we land back on our feet. What Althusser admires in Hegel is that he managed to produce — it's not wrong — the notion of a process without a subject, except that, Althusser specifies, because after all, he's doing his self-critique, so he goes a bit further than usual, otherwise the process itself in Hegel is the process, the historical process, for example, the odyssey of spirit, from prehistory to our day, which is the subject.
15:59 A process without a subject — there's no providence behind it saying things like that, everything can fail, anything at all. It is indeed the subject that concerns us, because barbarism can make history fail, believe me. And so, the process without a subject, on the other hand, Kantianism without a transcendental subject. There you go, so the notion of subject became disturbing in the 60s and even more so in the 70s.
The who and the what: the dedivinization of nature 16:29 You see? And you're starting to understand why, since last time — I'm picking it up now — because we saw that the subject is the one who — let me sum up, since some of you weren't there — the subject is the one who answers the question "who." We started by giving the definition our schoolteachers gave, and we were right, because they never misled us on that point. But we noted that the problem was just beginning. You're right to say that the subject is what answers the question "who."
17:00 But in language, there are often "whats" that pass themselves off as "whos." I gave the example of the wind that shakes the trees. Who shakes the trees? The wind. Well, the wind is not a "who," it's a "what." So you see the problems — I'm picking up where we left off, from a strictly philosophical point of view. How do we manage here? How do we find our bearings? Since we always think we're dealing with someone, but it's only a something. I believe in nymphs behind the springs, and I'm told it's H2O since Galileo and Descartes — that's annoying.
17:32 We can no longer call it H2O later. Well, the inertness, the de-divinization of nature dates from the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the 17th century, doesn't it? To arrive at the principle of inertia, as it's called in physics. So, de-animation — I'm doing this on purpose, I'm risking barbarisms — de-divinization, de-fetishization, call it what you like — the fact that, if you remove man, there are only things left in the universe, with an intermediate status that I won't settle regarding the living.
18:06 And in particular, I was about to say, of our animal brothers — I'm starting to be influenced by the dominant ideology. Last time I already said there are those who will soon call for voting for trees. Well, trees think better than we do, actually. There you go. No, but still, living things — and statistically, it's remarkable. In the strictly statistical sense, it's remarkable, because it's exceptional in the entire universe as we know it scientifically.
18:37 I recall — I already mentioned it last time, but I'll dwell on it a bit here — I recall that the equation natural equals bio equals green is a scam. In nature, green and bio are hyper exceptional. We only know it in our little terrestrial suburb. I'm not deciding the question, there is certainly life elsewhere, statistically it would be... well, for now, I mean, it's more the exception than the rule. Statistically, you see.
19:08 So, a religious man like Pascal, a Christian if ever there was one, mystical rather than religious actually, heretical in the eyes of the Holy Apostolic, Catholic and Roman Church — he's still a Jansenist. Pascal, nonetheless, who was an immense scholar himself, and who didn't ignore the ruptures represented by Galileo, Descartes, you see, in our vision of the universe surrounding us. Pascal used to say — you can guess the sentence I'm going to quote, please, go ahead.
19:39 "The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." Say it again for me, it's too beautiful. "The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." You forgot the epithet. Ah. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." You see. That's not the ecological relationship to nature, it's the scientific relationship. Pascal, who is a religious man, doesn't fall into that. You see how masses and masses of people get fascized. That's what frightens me. Once again, we can never repeat this enough.
Heidegger, cover for the masses; impersonal turns of phrase 20:11 People who say "the Jews, the fags, the communists, the freemasons" — that's equally distributed. You'll find that, you'll look for it in Nazi Germany, you'll find it in the bars of France and Navarre at 2am, you agree. There are decent people around, there's you and me, there's — okay, Arthur, go to bed. It's not serious when it's one marginal guy. You see, statistically I'm speaking, I wouldn't allow myself to make a value judgment — when there are suddenly 75% of Germans voting for them, there's something else going on.
20:42 Don't be fooled by the accusation of populism, and that fascism is good for the poor, badly informed, badly educated, badly instructed. Mr. Heidegger was very well educated. He's the one who said we have a duty of Eros toward the Führer. That's one of his best ones actually, if you like — making orgies with the Führer. Well, anyway. And when he said that the creation of the Panzer Divisions was the greatest invention of Western metaphysics.
21:20 Well, but that doesn't stop all of Paris from arguing to say, no, no, he's not a Nazi, you don't understand, his thought is profound, it's complicated. I'll let you judge. Look into it. If there weren't Heideggers giving green lights, giving guarantees, you see, of culture, of respectability, we go from "Arthur, go to bed" to suddenly, enormous masses of populations. That's why I'm making this development. So, yes, the subject — how do we distinguish the subject-what from the subject-who?
22:01 I recall that when I gave my example of the wind shaking the trees, since I'm on the subject of weather, I recall that expressions in the language like "it's raining," "it's snowing" — you remember these are called impersonal moods in grammar — were formerly personal. There is a great temporal sedimentation in language. That is to say, formerly, if a personal pronoun is used for something that has nothing to do with the cause, has nothing to do with persons — it's a matter of temperature, of pressure — ask Erwan.
22:37 and another — there are plenty of excellent physicists here. If a personal pronoun is put in place of these things and these somethings, it's because at one time it was believed that there were deities who made it rain, who made the wind blow — Aeolus. There, the storm was Poseidon, and so on, you see. I've seen this still actualized in sub-Saharan Africa, where it's — I told you — it's Dongo, I've just named him, Dongo, the god of storms in the Songhai and Zarma sub-desert countries.
The substantial, alienation, and Baudelaire's Correspondances 23:22 So, if you're a Teuton, there's Chakamak, he's the sun god. These were all persons, all of that. So, today I'm going to introduce a new concept — from there, I have to make these reminders before bringing it in. It gets blurred between subject and object, we were there, weren't we? Between someone, a subject, and something, an object. And now I'm bringing in a third term that's going to help us — it's not to confuse you, on the contrary, it's to see things more clearly. I'm going to talk about these objects that are taken for subjects.
23:53 That's called alienation, by the way — it's an alienation. The subject, what is proper to it, is going to be someone who pursues ends, which is not the case with that, that can't do that on its own. No purpose. The fall, that's all there is. There's a term for this, it's "substantial." That's what I'm introducing today. A substantial relation. So, I specify that it's particularly in Hegel that it has this meaning.
24:24 Okay? It's not quite the substance, it's the substantial. Even if sometimes he takes one for the other. The substantial relation to the world is the relation to the world as being personalized, divinized, etc. — everything we've seen so far. But attributed and imputed to things that are governed by inertia. And you see there isn't much left to do in terms of thought.
24:55 I trust you to make the connection between this definition of "substantial" that I just gave and the symbolic order, which is so important. We've done developments on Freud and Lacan. We'll be led to do more outside the workshop. The symbolic order — that's what the symbolic is. It's an object that passes itself off as a subject. You see, in Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil — a work that had enormous importance in literary history because it's said to inaugurate poetic, literary modernity, etc.
25:32 You see, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, first of the seers, king of poets, a true god, etc. I can't help adding what follows: but the form, so vaunted in him, is petty. He lived in too artistic a milieu. Baudelaire, in his sonnet, which is practically the manifesto of this new aesthetic — the correspondences, the famous "Correspondances." We don't even have the same symbol anymore. The first stanza says this: Nature is a temple — already, you see, the sacralization — Nature is a temple where living pillars — another image — sometimes let confused words escape.
26:15 man passes there through forests of symbols, thank you, of symbols, well done, that observe him, careful, the apostrophe, that observe, it's the symbols that observe man, that's unsettling. Man passes there through forests of symbols that observe him with familiar looks. The symbols look at man with familiar looks. That means that man, he is bewildered by symbols, they are enigmas for him, what ancient Egypt discovered, the sphinx, the figure of the enigma, being a sphinx is posing enigmas, isn't it?
26:51 For man, symbols are an enigma, but for the symbols, man is familiar — that's extraordinary, strong stuff Baudelaire, man passes there through forests of symbols that observe him with familiar looks. It's this relation to symbolic being that gives marvels in aesthetics, in poetry, in whatever you like. Right? We're not in physics. And even less in politics. But if we don't take it into account, if we don't take the symbolic order into account, then we're condemned to interpret everything like cognitive science does, through universal mechanism.
Cause and effect, sign and meaning: signal and sign 27:29 That's why my subject — this year it's not "the subject." It's the logic of the subject. I'm trying to justify a formulation that I'm trying to push toward precision, despite all the eternal ambiguities of so-called natural language, right, the language we all use. So why do I insist on the logic of the subject? To propose — if by the end of our cycle of talks and discussions on the logic of the subject, we could have progressed to this result which I'd like to anticipate right now — that by bringing in the notion of subject, and that's why I hold to it, in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism.
28:11 There's the connection. The notion of subject can allow us to create a scientificity distinct from the one at work in what are called today the hard sciences, natural sciences, exact sciences — it depends on the period and the place. Physics, chemistry, biology, etc. I have the greatest respect, as is known, I'm not talking about mathematics, without which none of this discipline would be possible, so as much rigor, but not the same kind.
28:44 So I'll go back over this for those who weren't here in previous years: the big difference is that in the so-called hard sciences, the decisive pair is that of... excuse me, I'm doing an oral quiz. What is it? Cause and effect. Ah, that's pleasing. Good grief. You don't piss in a double bass. Sorry, that's jazz musicians' slang. Whereas in the human sciences there should be the pair meaning, sign — well done — sign, meaning.
29:16 And there we're not far from the symbol, as you see. There are nuances to make between sign and symbol, because the sign is often conventional. We'll take one more step, a second step further today, you'll see, whereas the symbol is a bit more ambivalent. The sign — well, you see, when you learn the highway code, it's clear, it's conscious, you'd better not make a mistake in the wording, otherwise you have to retake the test, you know what that's like, it's really drilled into your head. That's it. I failed it the first time because of a slip of the tongue.
29:50 Because the "no right turn" sign isn't easy. I said "no left turn." Right, he corrected me. I said, yes, you see, it's clearly a slip. You say that, and then you end up in the hospital. There you go. That's the sign. What's common to all signs, whatever they are, is that the link between signifier and signified is not natural. It's not of the causal order. When it is the case, when it is natural and causal, we use the term signal.
30:21 That's a little reminder I'll give in passing, which helps make things clear. Smoke signals fire to animals, in the bush. Smoke signals fire to the animal. That's not something man decided, it's not a convention that creates a link between smoke and fire. It's a law. Right? And moreover, there is consecution each time in the empirical, in sense experience, in the here and now, there is consecution of fire and smoke.
30:52 Whereas when I say to you "fumée," that has nothing to do, to the ear, with "smoke." There, we've fallen into the sign. You see? We've risen to the sign. I say "fallen," I don't know why — let's go back up. We've risen to the sign. That is, you'll ask me why "risen," I was wondering that myself just now. Yes, yes, there's an enormous liberation. It's that we're no longer bound to the here and now. There's nothing in the here and now that forces us to say "smoke" rather than "fumée." That happens between men.
31:23 It's language. See? That's the sign. So the signal is natural. Let's take the classic oppositions. The sign is conventional. That's how it goes. There, we really follow. The symbol is a bit more complicated. And to make it understood, I'll go back to convention, to the conventional. Those who work in companies know what a convention is.
Convention, contract, and pact: the middle term 31:56 Do you benefit from the framework agreement, my friend? Yes. Ask Friot. You know these stories well, the convention. It's important. So from convention, it's not far to — what's the stronger term? Yes, thank you. The contract. Hey, but you're a professional, eh? That intimidates me, I have the African accent. That's how it is. Yes, the contract, in which you always find, as in convention, the same prefix, from the Latin cum, meaning "with."
32:26 Which supposes a relation between subjects, I remind you in passing. There, for now, we're in convention, in contract. Well, between the natural and the conventional, I ask you to imagine a middle term. Do you remember that between the raw and the cooked there is the...? The rotten. Yes, the rotten, the fermented, that is, the best. Roquefort, you don't like it? Well then, you're going too far.
32:56 I come across someone who doesn't like Roquefort. Unbelievable. Yes. And if it doesn't have the little green veins, it's spoiled. Moldy, no? And wine, if it weren't fermented, it would be grape juice. That's not bad either. It's not the same. I don't play poker with matchsticks. A boar marinade, if you go on about it still, it's good. A marinade, yes, that's chemically cooked. There's a bit of vinegar, there are things, there are herbs.
33:27 Tahitian-style fish, there's lemon overnight. It's good. Do you know it? But how? That's really something. Someone asked me for the checkbook at the front desk, eh, Mr. Treasurer. So there's an intermediary between the raw and the cooked. You see, I'm paying homage to Lévi-Strauss, after having attacked him nonetheless. I try to be fair. It's a great discovery of his. Well, everything that is deep in the human order is in that middle ground.
34:00 If we completely separate the natural and the conventional, we fall into idealism. Where does it come from, then? The conventional, the contract, falls from the sky, from God. Well, that's what we're told in the sacred books. You go up Sinai and there, you're given the law. Agreed? In nature, in the balance of power among men, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not so-and-so, but that supposes God. Not good for the demonstration, that, something's missing. Whereas Tahitian-style fish can't really be said to be raw.
34:33 It's cooked chemically, without flames. You see? That's interesting. Where am I going with this? You'll find me in language, there's a word, in every language, but in French too, a word that is neither contract nor natural, between the two. More obscure than contract and yet still supposing subjects. Well done. And pacts, you see, that's a bit darker. Pacts. We made a pact.
35:04 That means you shouldn't talk about it too much. You can't — whereas contract, convention, can be consulted, it's in the official gazette. Pact. We always say "the pact," there are secret clauses, but all pacts are secret, aren't they. Now, the language we speak every day belongs much more to the pact than to the convention. You didn't learn to speak the way you learned the highway code. Let's be clear, that's where I'm getting to. Your parents never told you, here's the signifier, here's the signified.
35:35 That's the highway code. I had a nice father, because once I asked him what communism was. I did, you see, we talked about it all the time, it was the Indochina war, communism, we were being driven out of our earthly paradise, I was born over there. If it weren't for those bastard communists I'd still be there. Well, I owe them for getting to know France, my father converted, so to speak. So he answered me, quite honestly, but it means everything in common.
36:06 He takes refuge in etymology, that's nice. Then I said, that's great then. So he tells me, yes, but that supposes controls, a bureaucracy. There you go, yes, in language it's not clear, it's a cute example. There, we never learned — we speak without a license. Which necessitates the sooner-or-later emergence of a Socrates here, a Descartes there, a Kant, we speak without a license.
36:36 Until the poet or the philosopher comes to try to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe, to quote Mallarmé. That's what I'm recalling. You see, it all holds together. I know some are tired of my reminders, but some are important. It's that the philosopher always has this companionship, you see, he's flanked on the left by the mathematician, on the right — I might reverse it, it's the same — and on the right, by the poet.
37:07 That's it, the philosopher wants the mathematician's rigor. That's why I was telling you we'd need to arrive at a logic of the subject, not an intuition, not a feeling of the subject — that's important too — but we must go beyond, overcome intuition in the concept, and at the same time take into account the fact that we speak natural language, in which everything remains to be done, everything to be elucidated, because nothing is entirely made explicit in natural language.
Lacan, Chapoutot, and the Nazi cultural revolution 37:38 That's it, it needs to be understood. If it has arisen — and I come back to it, because some don't understand why I devoted so much time to Lacan, sorry to look at you — to Lacan, it's true, I allowed myself, to those who were a bit surprised that I develop Lacan while claiming Clouscard as my reference, who is a fierce opponent, as you know, of "Lacanism" more than of Lacan himself — it's not snobbery, the era, you can't even imagine what it was like, Lacan was the prince of Paris, of cultural Paris, of intellectual Paris.
38:23 A young woman who was studying and who hadn't gone to Lacan's seminar wasn't marriageable, I remind you. And a guy who hadn't gone couldn't be a suitor either. A great pretender. It's true that Lacan, the man himself, is a conservative who never hid the fact, he at least has that honesty, he wouldn't have passed for being to the left of the Communist Party, him. Unlike those who are now to the right of De Gaulle, you know, the ex-Jospinists, and the other one.
39:02 It's true that Freud was a conservative of Austria, of bourgeois Vienna, rather conservative in values, plural — that doesn't mean, my dear, never confuse it, cultured people, I've told you, the right has worked over the last 30 years, never confuse it. I recommend a book to you, I don't know if I thought to bring it, it's called — no — The Nazi Cultural Revolution.
39:33 Who's the author? It's a historian named Chapoutot. He's not a Marxist, he's not on the good side politically, but he's perhaps among the ten best-informed people in the world, at the archival, event level, about what happened in the Third Reich. You know me, Catherine, I even borrowed the book from you. I've only seen what he says about it on YouTube. He spends his time insisting on this, he says above all forget the phrase attributed to Goebbels which is apocryphal, "when I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol."
40:11 They did an enormous amount of cultural work, the Nazis. They rebuilt everything, they made a history, a new history. The Greeks — they reclaim all the Greeks, Plato of course. Why? Because the Greeks are Germans, that, you didn't know. Listen, it's in the documents. Yes, the Scandinavians came down because up there you freeze, caricaturing a bit, but they came down, etc. They gave this geographical, historical exception, this miracle, because they were Germans.
40:42 That was about races. First they build up the notion of race — what's common between the logic of the subject and the return of Nazism, I repeat, so it's not forgotten, is naturalism. Let me be clear before you get lost in details. Not nature, nature, nothing political. Naturalism. The tendency to attribute to nature what actually stems from something other than nature — from culture, from history, from artifice, from tools, from praxis.
41:16 There. I'll have other occasions to clarify, I hope. So, nature is the supreme value of Nazi culture, on which they found all these new disciplines. The new biology, the new history, the new sociology, the new law, Schmitt. You see? Schmitt likewise. And of course with the notion of race, which is decisive. You'll tell me I'm not teaching you anything. Be careful though, because, you know, there's — how does Macron put it?
41:49 There are the progressives like me, like him, Macron. And then, I admit, the populists, the regressives, the rednecks, so to speak. Because, you know, when you criticize Europe and say that the nation-state is still a resource we no longer have with this super nation-state that is Europe. Let me mention in passing that when there were the Yugoslav wars, right, those who were for bombing Serbia — and it was a massacre, think of that train.
42:25 Look it up. It wasn't a picnic for the civilian populations either. They said, "you're defending the nation-state, they have the right, the Croats, the whatnots, the Corsicans, the Bretons" — what didn't I say? Result: seven new nation-states were created. Interesting — those who claimed to be against the nation-state, they created seven nation-states where there had been only one, they got your Corsicans.
42:57 What didn't I say? There, I'll go back to the parenthesis. We never say it, yet it's simple. So, I come back — why am I talking about this? Because Hitler says at one point to — what's his name — that engineer, Speer, the one in charge of buildings, of the Reich's logistics — he says to Albert Speer, who reports it in his memoirs, for me, the nation, well, it's important, the German nation and all that, but it's not the essential thing, it's the race, you see? The nation, we can annex Denmark, Ukraine, Russia, we don't care, what matters is the race.
43:33 It was planned that they would liquidate all these subhumans, the Slavs, the cabin — sorry, the population — in those regions, which are unspoiled, or that they'd only keep those capable of working, in slavery, and they'd repopulate — you know there were entire trains planned with schools that taught Germans how to live in Ukraine, how to speak with the people, but it was like that, it was programmed, they were set on the famous thousand-year Reich, it's Göring who said, we've got it for a thousand years, they've worked it out, there's a culture, and in that culture — it's odd to say — what is at the center of the culture is nature, you see?
44:11 Oh dear, but I'm not joking anymore, because currently there are dominant ideologies that say, but it's old-fashioned, the nature-culture separation, don't you hear that? Here and there? From philosophers who claim to be avant-garde? Yes or no? We never speak by chance. The common point, I insist, between reflection on the subject — what makes something a subject — and the essentially philosophical problem, and the political problem of the reconstitution before your eyes, especially yours, of Nazism, the link, is naturalism.
Popper and Kant: legislation by nature, legislation by freedom 44:55 We didn't mention cognitive science earlier — I'm thinking of a Karl Popper, who has enormous influence among the Anglo-Saxons, who invented this extraordinary discovery which is falsi... I feel like saying "salsify." How's that? That is, falsifiability, meaning that falsifiability of a theory is how its scientific value is measured, right?
45:26 Granted, there are things you can't prove are false, like a college kid, so. You came too late, I already paid tribute to you. And so, this Popper, for him there's nothing — the scientific things, his model, are precisely the hard sciences I mentioned earlier, against which you will never hear me say a word. I am against their extension into a domain governed by a different set of laws.
45:59 I recall here that two years ago I read an excerpt from a difficult text — no, it's not only in Hegel — it's the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, practically Kant's testament, his last major work, since he wrote some short pieces afterward, Kant's Critique of the Faculty of Judgment or of Judgment, translations vary. The most important passage, where Kant sums up his whole critical work — the critique of pure reason, the theoretical work, which measures itself against Newton especially and Hume, and of practical reason, that's morality.
46:37 The first is: what can I know; the second: what must I do — all that, let me remind you, I'll go quickly — and the result which meant a third critique was needed is that what was unsatisfying is that between the domain where science is indubitable, physics for example, and the question of what must I do, well, one doesn't help the other. That's Kant's great conclusion up to the Critique of Judgment. Everything I can know in mathematics, in physics, is of no use to me in knowing what is strictly of the moral, human order, etc.
47:12 We were talking earlier about whether we should end the lives of our loved ones when they're sick, when they have an incurable disease, or whether we should let them live — in my opinion, in 500 years we'll still be discussing it, and it's not a question that depends — it's not up to the doctor, moreover the doctor calls the family in these cases. What do we do? It's not his place to decide, he's right, it's not for him to decide, that would be serious. So we've been there when there's what's demonstrable, scientific, etc., science, which would set for us the process of nature in Descartes' light, and then there's the domain of values.
47:51 You know, I don't much like that word. I don't know if you remember, but I pointed it out once. Because we have political leaders — I'm not saying, we're in France, we are in France — where when they say "that's not in keeping with our values," our values are the bombings. When they start talking about values, some people are going to suffer. So I don't much like that word. Well, let's say, to use somewhat nobler words, everything that is axiological — there's an axis, there's a privileged direction, an axis, in any case a direction in space, a woman, the point.
48:26 Well, I prefer Kant's term, practical philosophy, the one where it's no longer a matter of knowing what is, but of changing, of acting — it's not just about knowing. So this wasn't satisfying, because he says there's an unbridgeable abyss between the two, and then all of a sudden he says to himself, there may be a frail bridge we could throw across between them. And this bridge, its construction, is the object of this masterpiece that is the Critique of Judgment, the critique of the faculty of judging.
48:59 So, I'm bringing out again this excerpt from the introduction, which is long, where after he's made all his preliminary points, he says, the whole of our faculty of knowledge can be divided in two if we grasp their manner of legislating. There are two ways of legislating, in the sense of laws. The law of falling bodies, heat dilates bodies, that's a law.
49:29 There is legislation by nature, I've just given two examples of it. And there is legislation by freedom. I must eat because I need to in order to live—that's legislation by nature. But instead of eating, I say, please, go ahead, madam, after you, even though I'm starving—but I don't want to show that I'm a glutton. So there, that's legislation by freedom, meaning that if I were an animal I wouldn't hold back. But because the relation to the other seems to me here to take priority over the relation to the thing.
Need and desire: Saint-Exupéry in the desert 50:07 Not for too long. There have been scenes of cannibalism, I told you about this. You know, in the Andes, the plane that crashed, that was... You haven't heard about that? They crashed, they were left without help in the snow at thousands of meters of altitude. Like that, you remember, that's our generation. Luckily we weren't on that plane, they would have eaten us. With me, they wouldn't have gotten much. And it takes extreme cases for it really to be the relation to the thing that becomes decisive. That's interesting, what I'm saying here.
50:37 As for the relation between need and desire. There's a very beautiful text, Saint-Exupéry, I almost never quote him. Because he said too many good things about Pétain. Anyway, there are some magnificent things regardless. So, in Pilote de guerre, which is an admirable book, he... I'll come back to Night Flight, excuse me. In Night Flight, he talks about an experience where his little plane broke down in the desert. And he was never so close to death.
51:10 One of the most horrific deaths there is, which I wouldn't wish on you, is death by thirst. Whereas death by cold is paradisiacal, death by... Yes, yes, indeed. Cold is unpleasant, but death by cold... And yes, that's because... You know, when your hair gets like that, frozen, my German father-in-law used to say he could snap his mustache like that on the Russian front, in the morning. Snap! Like glass. It's because it numbs you. You don't feel cold anymore. You don't feel anything anymore.
51:40 It's the coma setting in. That... there's no more pain, nothing left. On the other hand, death by thirst is terrible. They've found—I don't want to be a voyeur, but they've found cars where you can see the victims were thirsty, had opened the radiator to drink the water from it. You see, when you've... Anyway. So he comes very close to dying of thirst and he wakes up. He passes out, and when he wakes up, he's in the arms of a Tuareg who is moistening his lips.
52:14 With water, of course. And he says, for the first time in my life, I felt the need to drink. Until then, I had had desire. You see, when you're thirsty, you have a representation. A representation that presupposes culture, I don't know, a coke with condensation on it, whatever you like, a mojito, I don't know, whatever your taste. It's not just "cool water" as we still say, it's simply cool water. Spring water is very nice. We have representations.
52:45 But there, what was no longer of the order of desire accompanied by representations, was the need for water. Yes, sorry. The need for water. There you go. It really takes extreme situations for it to be nature that determines us entirely, I mean, that carries the decision. That's it. That's why I made that reminder. So, let's sum up.
Abstract will in Hegel; understanding and reason 53:16 The subject is what stands opposed to all objects. Remember my projector. It illuminates everything except itself. Unless there's a mirror in front of it. But if we stop there, it risks being abstract. So, a subject that is defined only negatively—I am everything that... I am no object—then what do we do with the body, for instance? Because we'll say, sure, the subject is the self, it's someone. It's me, it's you, it's him, it's a self.
53:47 I don't know. Here, let me read you an excerpt from Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Here. To show where this somewhat abstract vision of the self can lead. No doubt, the aspect of the will here is defined as this absolute possibility of abstracting from every determination in which I find myself or in which I have placed myself. You see, he's rigorous. This flight from all content—I spoke of objects—from all content, as from a restriction.
54:24 And just as when one fasts at Easter, during Lent, sorry, Ramadan, the Hindu fast, yoga practices, one can fast for a very long period. It's a way of taking distance from the natural determination it demonstrates. It's a good reflex from a strictly anthropological point of view. Because otherwise, I repeat, this flight from all content—the end, for example—as from a restriction, no doubt, that is what the will determines itself against; these are understood at first sight.
55:03 That's what representation—in Hegel, this always means the poorly educated common sense—that's what representation, the force of the Enlightenment [lumières], posits for itself as freedom, and it is thus only, listen carefully, negative freedom or the freedom of the understanding. It is not the freedom of reason. These are the great Kantian distinctions. It's the freedom of the understanding. The understanding is what makes us say if A equals B, B equals A. Which is inevitable. But that's not reason.
55:33 That doesn't apply to values, to ends. You see? So when I speak of a logic of the subject, you can guess that what I'm calling for, as we're trying to glimpse it together, is a logic that is not merely intellectual—I'm translating literally, intellectus, the understanding—but a rational logic, ratio, reason. I'm making important reminders—I don't often do the history of philosophy, the authors—but still, you see, someone like Kant humiliated reason throughout his work, perhaps his best-known one, the Critique of Pure Reason.
56:16 He humiliated reason by showing that it only gives birth to fantasies, to chimeras, that it absolutely wants to do metaphysics. I'm exaggerating a bit, Victor. I'm exaggerating a bit, but what is at work meanwhile in the sciences is the understanding. Reason must not push the understanding to claim to know more than it can know in its collaboration with experience—I'm summarizing the essence of Kantianism.
56:46 But the reason that Kant humiliates in the cognitive domain, he rehabilitates in the moral domain, because that was it, it should never have left its own domain, which is to answer the question "What must I do?" and not the question "What can I know?" When I speak of a rational logic, I take ratio, reason in Latin, in that sense, in the sense of what Kant calls the faculty of ends. It's the word "end" here that interests me; the word "faculty" we can set aside, it's a bit of a weak point in Kant.
57:18 How does it happen that we have understanding and reason? Because our reason is so made that we have the faculty of... There's a nice passage in Nietzsche on this point, you know, when he criticizes Kant's notion of faculty, he says it's a bit reminiscent of Molière. Molière mocked the doctors of his time, and he was right. Today we should be respectful, but in his time they were a bit like charlatans. They'd bleed you fourteen times when you had a headache. Well.
57:48 When they were asked why opium makes you sleep, what do they answer? Good evening. What do they answer? Its dormitive virtues. You know it well, good, yes. Because there is... No, no, no. You answer in French. They, being ignoramuses, need the fullness of words to replace the emptiness of the thing. So they answer in Latin. Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva. Because there is in it, in the opium, a dormitive virtue.
58:19 We could spare ourselves all the subtleties of rational mechanics, as it's called in physics, by saying: why does the car move? Because there is in it a motive faculty. That means there's something that made it move. What is that called in logic? Tautology. Right, a tautology. Why does the car move? Because there's something in it that made it move. Ah, well yes. We've just asked the question in a different way. You see? So I'm a bit wary of faculties. Let me close this little parenthesis, which is still worth making, since there's a lot to say about Kant.
Kant's limit and the prohibition of incest 58:55 That's because here we see the limit of Kant. His limit is history. Kant is someone who wants to know nothing of geneses. Where does it come from? How was it generated? Our reason is so made—you're not to seek to find out. Afterward, he draws the conclusions very rigorously. But as for genesis, he wants to know nothing about it. You know, there's a little quip from Goussard that I like to cite: Kant saw everything, but he drew the curtain. He saw everything, but he drew the curtain right away.
59:25 Strange, isn't it? There you go. Still, he did see well that where reason had its raison d'être was the faculty of ends. Except that he sends us back to the unknowable, to the thing-in-itself. You see? Whereas I'm trying, with you, to transgress this Kantian prohibition—I'll come back to his introduction, I don't know, to the essential point, of saying it's unknowable, freedom, all that. I, on the contrary, would like us to build a logic of the subject. So, I return to these great distinctions from the introduction to the Critique of Judgment. There is legislation by nature and legislation by freedom.
1:00:05 Very good. These two domains—I'm using his vocabulary, which is extremely precise—Kant. This is the era, you know, when Bougainville, Cook, were discovering the South Seas, Australia, the southern land, Australia. And so there are a lot of geographical metaphors in Kant. Domain. It's as if he's saying, the two have nothing to do with each other. They're even opposed. I illustrated this with my helicopter.
1:00:37 I don't know if any of you remember. Take a helicopter. You hold it in your hand, fine, get in it. We fly over the Amazon. Everything we see there, the treetops, what's called the canopy, can be explained by physics, chemistry, biology. By legislation by nature. You see that Kant works there. And then suddenly, a clearing, a village, a Bororo village, the men's house, the women's house, initiation rite, prohibition of incest.
1:01:10 That's not nature. Put rabbits in Australia, and ten years later there are a million of them. All that inbreeding. Incestuous, well yes. I insist. Lévi-Strauss saw this. Laws are general in nature. The law of falling bodies is the same on the planet Neptune as it is here. Whereas here, there's polygamy, there, there's monogamy.
1:01:40 Those are rules. We've clearly distinguished the two. You see? Rules happen between subjects—that's the logic of the subject. Now, the exception is the prohibition of incest, as universal in all human societies as a physical law, even though it is not natural. That's a bit less immediately easy to understand. It's very easy, very easy to demonstrate. The proof is that animals practice incest all the time.
1:02:11 If you look closely—it's like the maternal bond in animals—yes, as long as a certain hormone is present; afterward, the female rabbit will devour, that's it, once the hormonal period is over after giving birth. I didn't say "childbirth"—there's no bed involved. So, there you have an exception. You see, again something like a pact between nature and culture, the prohibition of incest. That's why I'm dwelling on it a bit—as universal as nature.
1:02:44 So here, it touches on the domain of nature, and at the same time, it's intersubjective. So here, it touches on history, on culture. Exactly what Kant calls something homogeneous between two things that oppose each other: a schema. It's a schema, if you look closely, between nature and culture. There you go. It's the rotten between the raw and the cooked. The fermented.
1:03:16 Up to this point we're more or less following Kant. And now comes the most important part. These two legislations, which you can clearly see are not only distinct but even opposed. When I say "go ahead, you first," I'm acting against the end that drives me, which would otherwise shorten the time between need and satisfaction. These two opposed legislations dispute one and the same territory.
1:03:46 Another geographical metaphor, but an agrarian one this time. One and the same territory. Of course, for there to be a village, huts, and a clearing, trees had to be cut down. Nature and freedom, that's the Kantian division. He doesn't say nature-culture, he doesn't say nature-spirit like Hegel, he doesn't say nature-praxis like Marx, he says nature-freedom. Which works, in a way, potentially.
1:04:20 I'll come back to this for those who are bothered by it, to make a connection between freedom and praxis. But, for now, let's note that the notion of territory is crucial. Because there is only one territory, which Kant defines very well, as the set of objects of all possible experience, that is, what he calls the phenomenon. Nature and freedom dispute the territory of the phenomenon—except that nature doesn't need to act in order to occupy the territory.
1:04:55 Whereas if man wants to make a place for himself there, he has to push back by that much whatever was already there. First, for there to be a field for agriculture, you either have to cut down part of the forest or drain a marsh, if you're in Holland. I say this because there are some who want to have their cake and eat it too. There is also a tragic side to dialectic, to contradiction.
The body, from instinct to institution 1:05:26 For this to be, something else must not be. So, I'll now go back over what Hegel says about the abstract will. It is the freedom of the void. The one that says: the deep self is everything that is not object. It's not even my body. The proof is that I fast to show that my body is not me. You see, for example, when I macerate it, when I get scarifications, diamonds.
1:06:01 It's coming back very much into fashion, marking the body. Those who do it with, in my subjective opinion, the greatest aesthetic value in the world—I won't insist—are the Papuans. I don't know if you've tried searching "Papuan ritual painting" on Google Images. Body painting, it's extraordinary. Extraordinary. As creativity. Parenthetically—man likes not to leave the body as it is.
1:06:34 And contrary to a preconceived idea that we have, in developed countries in the economic sense—not that there's more value in it—the more societies are called "primitive," the more sophisticated the work on the body is. I'm not even talking about the African women of the plateaus, with their necks, you know, giraffe necks, from putting on rings, which would be dangerous because when you take the rings off, the neck, everything breaks.
1:07:04 Yes. Come on, let's be clear. The body is the place of natural determination. I'm hungry, right? I'm thirsty. I must reproduce. I must have descendants. All of that goes through the body. I'm talking about the main instincts. Breathe. Why do you envy me the air you breathe? That's from Racine's Bérénice. It has to be brought out, that one. Why do you envy me the air you breathe?
1:07:36 Now, to leave the body as it is, is to let natural determination invade you. So, in order to take some distance and assert one's freedom, and above all, in order to be recognized by the other as a human being, I must show that I can take distance—you understand, "go ahead, you first"—I can take distance from the first instinctive impulse.
1:08:07 and it is thus that from instinct we pass to institution. You see how words play in language. It's not at all the same thing. It's even the opposite. Sexuality is a reproductive instinct. Marriage is an institution. The prohibition of incest is an institution that we're made to believe is instinctive. Oh yes, there's an instinctive horror of incest. Not at all.
1:08:37 Put them together—there are plenty of novels, plays, where it's a brother and sister who were separated at birth by shipwrecks or something. If you don't know, anything can happen. There's no such thing as the voice of blood, whatever the neo-Nazis may say. The voice of blood. So, I'm explaining here in a more concrete way than usual why there is this insistence in every human society. Here, I'm speaking of the universal.
1:09:08 Another outdated word. Made outdated by the formidable ideologies that are now coming back. Yes, I'll say it, the Nazisms attacked universalism. The Nazis, sorry, not the Nazis [correcting himself]. Attacked universalism. This is very important to know, but they did so relentlessly. Universalism is a creation of the Jews and of the French Revolution. It's written in black and white across thousands of pages. It's the same fight. Yes, because I told you earlier about the Germanic race that supposedly founded Athens and Sparta.
1:09:38 I'm in delirium here, but it's not me [saying this]. How does it happen that we didn't go in a straight line from fourth-century-BC Athens to the Third Reich? It's because in between, there was Christianity. Another trick played by the Jews. Listen, historically, Marx, Freud—the two greatest advances in the logic of the subject are Marxism and psychoanalysis.
1:10:12 That must be found in every case. It's no accident that these are the two most fiercely attacked schools of thought in today's dominant ideology. So much so that in the school curriculum, they're removing from philosophy the topic of labor—that's for Marx—and the unconscious. Listen, I'm not inventing anything. I'm sticking to current events. Marx and Freud aren't the same. But they have this in common. Damned Jew, he works—this was the era when Jews weren't yet Zionist.
1:10:45 This is the April version. Not the slower one, you can barely hear it. Work and the unconscious had been submitted, that was the April version. And in the final July version, I'll be right in the middle of the good topics, culture has disappeared, it's been replaced by nature. No. Politics has disappeared, it's been replaced by the State. And morality has disappeared, it's been replaced by duty. Thank you very much for that update. I'm trying to keep up, but I'm already turned around. Thank you very much. There we go.
1:11:15 Yeah, well that's not reassuring at all. So, I'm being a bit more concrete today about all the reasons that make me a man insofar as I am recognized by another man as being a man. That's the dialectic of recognition. That's what's at the basis of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, which was going to inspire so much—from Hegel to Marx, you know, class struggle modeled on the master-slave relation. But it doesn't start with Hegel, it starts with...
Recognition, master and slave: The Servant 1:11:51 Go back a bit further. Yes, thank you, Rousseau. Who said? Thanks to him. And to us. Yes. Rousseau. If there are slaves by nature, if there are servile mentalities, if there are people, lackey mentalities, it's because originally there were slaves against nature. Yes, Rousseau. And when Rousseau says that freedom consists less in doing what one wants, doing what pleases you, than in not depending on the labor of another.
1:12:24 You know, sentences like that are heavy with future implications. All it takes is a garbage collectors' strike, and you understand what he means. The unhappiest person is the one who has never... who has never dealt with his own garbage. Do you know a film based on that? On garbage. To make the bad guys pass. The garbage inside the apartment, the doors emptied out. About garbage. A masterpiece. It's an English one. Ah! Ah, you're talking about...
1:12:55 Ah yes, Joseph Losey, the... Yes, The Servant. If that film comes back around, go see it. Now, if you feel like breaking down, you shouldn't... It's being recorded. And all that. It's... It's a masterpiece. Plus, in terms of the image, the quality of the photography. And it's pure Freud-Marx, for once. Ah, it's both. Servant, as the name suggests, is a manservant working for a young Englishman, a young lion, as they say in England. He's from the establishment, never worked... He's The Servant. The houseboy, so to speak.
1:13:25 But the boy in livery, you know, with the yellow stripes, the butler, played by Dirk Bogarde—he's the one who plays in Death in Venice. And he lives with his young master, who is single, who brings girlfriends over from time to time, who has a castle, a manor in Scotland, all that. Anyway. And an apartment in London, of course. And he has a hold over him because he's practical, this guy, he knows how life works, the servant. He knows where to get this, that. And the other one keeps pushing his advantage like that until he exasperates the master at a certain point.
1:14:09 And the servant goes on strike. That's the turning point of the film. The master begs him to come back. Because after a few days, there's ash on the carpet. He threw a party the night before. The poor master is overwhelmed. He's never tidied up any of it. He begs him to come back. He's less free. You see, that's Hegel's master-slave dialectic. You see it clearly right there. It's when production stops that you realize how much it determines you.
1:14:40 Look at this word 'foot'—no wait, this word. Everything that runs through pipes, through subway lines, RER trains, gas lines, water, electrical conduits. Everything that... I'm not losing my thread. The logic of the subject, this is to prepare you for a rather unsettling image. No, but judge for yourselves. I'm on a train. I see the horizon. I admire the Alps.
1:15:13 The Vercors, in front of me, I'm heading down, going southeast. Gare de Lyon. And little by little, I bring my gaze closer. Until I'm looking, no longer horizontally, toward the mountains, which are almost motionless, but almost vertically. I see a terrifying speed. That's the subject. That's the truth of the subject, right there. I thought I was over there. No. That's the subject. You see?
1:15:43 It's... Everything we consume without noticing, everything that works for us, that's all of it. Right? It's not a problem. It's not a problem if all that happens under good conditions, in a contractual way, isn't it? By paying fairly, right, for what determines us. There you go. So, I had to make that... It's 8pm. Thank you. I had to make this long parenthesis. Let me just finish Hegel's text. Thanks for letting me know.
The freedom of the void and the fury of destruction 1:16:14 This freedom, the one that says: 'I am everything that is not me.' 'I am everything that rejects what is not me.' I can't quite see it. I'm forced to. Show that the subject isn't that either. We'll get there. It's the freedom of the void. It can manifest itself—I'll continue here—in a real form, no longer just a theoretical one, in my head, and become a passion. Now, we've all done this as teenagers. What I am is what no one else is. You see, we have to go through that too.
1:16:44 You have to go through revolt to become a revolutionary. You mustn't stay there. But there you go. So, it can manifest itself in a real form and become a passion. Now, if it remains merely theoretical, it's the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation. Go ahead, you can play at being Hindus here. You know, it's the affirmation of the absolute as me, in philosophy, in Hinduism. You know, you didn't experience the sixties, the hippies who would sit for hours saying 'Om, Om,' the sacred syllable in Sanskrit.
1:17:16 I'm not joking. Well, I'm joking a little. Still. I dabbled in that a bit, but I was 15. Okay. So, if it remains merely theoretical, it's the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation. If it turns toward action, because there we were in contemplation—that's fine, it doesn't hurt anyone. If it turns toward action, that's—listen carefully—that's the first time I see a theory of genocide, like the Khmer Rouge.
1:17:47 Buddhist culture. Down below there. So, if it turns toward action, it is, in politics as in religion, the fanaticism of destroying every existing social order, and the excommunication of any individual suspected of wanting an order, and the annihilation of any organization trying to come into being. That's anarchism pushed to its limit. I'm not targeting anyone in particular. No one is truly an anarchist. No one is truly a statist.
1:18:20 Even in the United States, you know, without state contracts, the economy would collapse. Roughly speaking. I'm talking about NASA, I'm talking especially about defense, of course. They may claim to be pro-private-sector, but thank goodness for the Pentagon—thank goodness for the American economy, because there wouldn't be much left of it otherwise. Every time they tell you, there, they've created 200,000 jobs again, yes, that's one guy who had a week's work washing dishes in a restaurant, that's it, I'm barely exaggerating. And conversely, in the most collectivist societies, no one asks me to share my wife with everyone—I'm being a bit Platonic here—nor to hand over my toothbrush, I mean, it hasn't been nationalized yet.
1:19:08 There you go, so these are limits, these are concepts, I'm not attacking anyone, but anarchism in the strict sense—an-arche, no principle at all, arche, that's a principle. As in ancient societies, it's the elders who know the principles, archaic, arche, that's what it means. Archaic, the principles. You find it in archaeology too, so it's linked to the past. Taken literally, it's a hyper-individualism, if you will, that's what I mean.
1:19:38 And I would even say a singularism, one should say, because the individual is a complicated notion. In Hegel, the individual is the synthesis of the particular and the universal, of the collective and what we'd today call the individual. But let's take 'individual' in the ordinary sense so as not to complicate things. This antithetical position is rigorously anarchist—the excommunication of any order, you see, trying to come into being. You'll see, it's explicit.
1:20:08 It is only by destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its existence—not the demonstration, not the knowledge, the feeling, it's terrible. Remember Rimbaud's prince, that's exactly it. He had to destroy in order to feel that he existed. So, it is only by destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its existence; it thinks that it wants a positive state. For example, the state of universal equality, the Khmer Rouge, or of universal religious life, mystical communities like that, gurus.
1:20:43 But in fact it doesn't want that, because the positive reality—given in the real—immediately introduces a singular determination. Who's going to do the dishes, for example, in the communities in the Ardèche back in the day, the hippies. It was always the same girls doing the dishes, constantly. While the gentlemen said 'Oh!' It's true, I saw it, you can laugh. I'm not joking, I think that's the truth of it.
1:21:15 In fact it doesn't want positive reality, because that immediately introduces some kind of order, a singular determination, both of institutions and of individuals, whereas it is precisely by negating this specification and this objective determination that negative freedom becomes conscious of itself. Thus, I'll finish, what it believes it wants—this is interesting, there are sanctions between the conscious and the unconscious, even in good faith—what it believes it wants may be for itself only an abstract representation, and its realization may be nothing but a fury of destruction.
Why is the body more worked upon in societies without writing? 1:21:51 There remain questions, I've eaten into two minutes. There you go. Yes, Léo? It's just a question about a specific point in the presentation, I didn't quite understand, well it's true... Why are there so many unclear points? I'm teasing you. No, no, there are plenty, but there's one I didn't understand. That's exactly the right question to ask.
1:22:23 It's true that empirically, we observe that in primitive societies, the more primitive the societies, the less developed they are, the more the body is... Worked on. Aestheticized, let's say. And actually, I don't understand why it goes in that direction and not the opposite, because you'd think that the further we get from nature, the further we'd move our body away from its determination.
1:22:57 And yes, so, that seems paradoxical to you. I don't see the contradiction—try to formulate it. Yes, Pauline. Me, I don't know, I would have said it's because we've become so... so visibly distanced from nature, in so many areas, including clothing and so on, that it's less concentrated on the body. But actually, it's more diluted throughout everything. That's pretty much it. We no longer need it. The tools. Ah, I see. We no longer need them. Okay. Right. It's so obvious, more visible.
1:23:28 Whereas there, these are societies I admire enormously, precisely because of everything they carry on their shoulders. If we are what we are, it's thanks to those societies, since we all passed through that stage. Let's not forget—societies that I refer to as being without writing. That's how it is. It's the most objective way to talk about it. If you call them primitive, you never know if you're making a value judgment. They can be technologically primitive and be far superior to us aesthetically. Look, even the cave paintings, the masterpieces that can come out of that.
1:24:03 No need to demonstrate the importance African sculpture had on Cubism, on the avant-garde arts at the beginning of the 20th century, for example. Modigliani or Picasso, of course. So, it is a value judgment. But what's certain is that the material production—now I'm going to answer your question, and Pauline opened the way for us, exactly—is so weak that, coming back fully to Marx here, I don't have thirty-six ways to assert my freedom other than through what's called—an important word in Freud—magic.
1:24:40 The magical use of language. The weaker one is—this answers your question, this is in Freud, what I'm saying now—the more one believes in magic. The child adores fairy tales. Because the child doesn't have, at the psychomotor level, the means to satisfy his desires and needs the way you and I do. Though, we'd like to satisfy a bit more ourselves, but you see, the child is somewhat in distress at that level. So, the magical use of language—it's simple, and I'll take it from a fairy tale—'Open Sesame,' and the door opens, that's the magical use of language.
1:25:14 All you have to do is speak and reality obeys you. Well, that would be the dream. I think I'll say, there, we're there. So, the importance of the symbolic order stands out precisely in these societies, and that's their superiority over us—there, I'm speaking from a philosophical point of view—it's that they don't hide it. They show at every moment the importance of the symbolic order. For example, if I talk to you about the Oedipus complex, that's a construction by Freud—me, I've read my Freud and all that—it's nonsense, it's rubbish.
1:25:47 Freud is a guy who cheated on his wife with mistresses, he's a guy who drank. I can guarantee you—pardon me—I can guarantee you that in sub-Saharan Africa, I was about to say in traditional society, but never mind, excuse me.
1:26:19 That's yet another way to answer your question. A child whose mother has told him, go ask your father because I'm going to the market, he won't look his father in the eye and say, Mom is asking you for a thousand francs, he looks at the ground. Mom is asking you for a thousand francs. Because looking a father in the eyes is a challenge. At that age, you see, that answers your question, everything I'm saying here.
1:26:49 We clearly see the symbolic order at work. It's that if, if a certain order isn't introduced, right, then it's rebellion—I don't know if you've read Totem and Taboo, or Moses, no, or Moses and Monotheism—it's the revolt of the young males against the dominant male, against the alpha baboon. That's perhaps what made Heidegger say, 'We have a duty of Eros toward the Führer.' The Führer is basically the top baboon. No, no, but I've often thought about that, in Heidegger's completely unconscious mind.
Greece and Christianity: water and symbolic charge 1:27:19 These are old resurgences. It's true. Yes, you wanted to say something, sorry. Does that mean that, tendentially, symbols are going to disappear? Does that mean that the more we develop the productive forces, the more we're going to move away from symbols? No, the very language we're speaking right now—I keep telling you—is of a symbolic order. Yes, but it's probably less than, I don't know, is it that the more we push the productive forces, the less the symbolic importance... No, the symbol changes register. Right. Oh no, it's something that doesn't disappear, that on the contrary gets enriched. It's as if you told me that starting from the Renaissance, we no longer need music.
1:27:54 The history of music begins. But yes, that's interesting. I had... I had contrasted, well, it's not just me, it's not... Always this Greece-Christianity opposition, I dwell on this opposition often because it's ours, especially for us Europeans.
1:28:24 I'm speaking about civilization here, Europeans. Remember, when there was the referendum on the draft European constitution, the liberal right, in particular Giscard, who was the mastermind behind the operation—don't forget—behind the drafting of that constitution, wanted to introduce a reference to Christianity into the European constitution, if you recall correctly. I find that scandalous. Not because—I'm not saying this out of anti-clericalism, that's not what I mean. But at that point, we should add the Greek dimension too.
1:28:55 Go visit Versailles, right, and try to forget Greece—it's impossible. It jumps out at you every ten meters. The sculpture, the architecture, the statuary, everything is Greek. Literature too—I mean Racine: the scene takes place in Troezen, a city in the Peloponnese. That's what Racine says for all five acts of Phèdre. I'll grant you that in later literature—that is, 19th-century Romantic theater and then modern theater—you get two pages of stage directions, as they're called in literature, to say here there's a side table on the left, there's a staircase going up, and then he speaks with a slightly strangled voice—whereas in Racine, for the five acts.
1:29:38 'The scene takes place in Troezen, a city in the Peloponnese.' Period. Go put up a curtained column. It wasn't the age of stage directors back then. There, I'm getting back from the parenthesis. It's a small opera-lover's grudge. So, there you go, that answers the question. This Greece-and-Christianity opposition means that we have de-divinized nature. We de-substantialized it in order to arrive at regular tabular knowledge. So one might say, that's it, now we know it's H2O.
1:30:08 Not at all. Because taking a shower, washing up, tasting the first sea swims after a winter of longing for them—that has a different quality than the merely mechanical, undeniable effects of water cleaning the pores, breathing, whatever you like. There's still, well, let me quote Rimbaud, 'in the ocean, which I loved as though it were to wash me of a stain.' Well, that's not biological, that.
1:30:41 That purifies—seawater, you see. And baptism, what does it consist of, sprinkling with water. Poof, all sins are... You see, there's always a symbolic function that accompanies it. So, advertising for paid vacations or for beaches will pick up the symbolic order again, right, Léo? It doesn't end with the Hellenic world. 'Drink Coca-Cola, it's good for you,' with the ice cubes, the whole thing, the sunglasses.
Why this detour: Plato and the rational actual 1:31:19 There was also an era—it was Hollywood, Hollywood chewing gum, you see. There's always a bunch of young people in gorgeous places with motorcycles, rivers, you see. All that for a piece of chewing gum, right? That's a bit reductive. I'm not against it, it's harder, let me quote myself, but there you go. Question. If I understood correctly, the logic of the subject is meant to confront the reconstitution of Nazism. Of course. It's about rediscovering, in a sense, articulated arguments the way scientists easily do, but doing it in the domain of freedom, well, in the domain of...
1:32:02 In the domain... You're speaking in an old-fashioned way, that's good. The field that Hegel and the others held onto. But why don't you express it... So, okay, a detour, I know, but why don't you express it directly from the start? That doesn't work anymore. We need to reconstruct, to build, well, to build the logic of the subject in order to denounce this reconstitution of Nazism that's happening before our eyes. Well, you can't just say that, for fear of...
1:32:33 You need convincing arguments. Well, all those who were convinced to think like him, that's quite a number, isn't it. Right? Let me remind you that I gave a lecture not long ago in Norway. And I was told there, watch out, when you say 'philosophy' over there, everyone thinks of neopositivism, analytic philosophy, logical positivism, in short, predicate calculus, all that, I mean... But Popper, otherwise, he is still, all the same, a very important thinker, not only...
1:33:03 Well, I know, there is, for example, indeed, it's him who says that for science to be science it must be refutable, right? I was telling you earlier, I should have said HV. But we've known that since Aristotle. How? Since Aristotle and Euclid, we know very well... Well, still! Yes... Actually, Plato, that's it, what Hegel calls the world revolution produced by Plato, is that it is no longer the balance of force, or the field, or sophistry, or seduction, rhetorical flourishes as we say about it, that must carry assent, it's cold, rational demonstration and non-contradiction.
1:33:42 But that's... that's the ABC of science, it's always been that way! Except that, in Plato's time, science had not yet entered the physical domain, let alone chemistry, let alone biology, but it was already present in mathematics. This allowed Plato to establish a rationality when Hegel says in the preface to the Philosophy of Right, from which I read you an excerpt that I call the excerpt on the Khmer Rouge, that's a personal name for it, he says that famous quote: "The real is rational, the rational is real," that famous line which is better translated as "actual."
1:34:21 I believe that's what we say now. Yes, "actual," what is actual, because real — some people believe that the real is what I see, what I touch, what is sensible; because, you know, remember Descartes, I can touch this in a dream, I tell you, afterward it's real, I see it, yes, but I see it in a dream, I see, I see my grandmother, I don't know how many years it's been since she died, but I do want grandmothers to die. And in fact, she is not there, she is not present, it's a long-forged thing, a representation.
1:34:51 So, let's be clear, when Hegel says "what is rational is actual," it's better rendered as effective reality. Precisely, that comes back a bit to your question, we can indeed prove it. "Effective," where the translator, in this case here, might say, for example, try to translate "Wirklichkeit." Now, you're English-speaking — if you're not German-speaking, these are Germanic languages, all that — let's say it for English.
1:35:21 "Work," "Wirk," it's the same word, there's an "i" instead of the "o," which means there's labor involved. It's the reality that presupposes not simply opening one's eyes — that's not a labor, because I open my eyes, I see the ground isn't moving, whereas it is moving, it's moving at a frightful speed around the sun, it's frightful, I'll add. There, I'm doing like Pascal. And so, effective reality is the reality one arrives at after a long detour through scientific abstraction, I suppose, which leads Leibniz to say that magnificent line, epistemologically, "There is nothing concrete except through the abstract," and which leads Marx to say that if the essence and the appearance of things were identical, all science would be useless, that it would suffice to understand reality by scooping it up from the gutter — it would be known by now — or from the TV set, the gutter is better.
1:36:17 So, it's at that point that he cites Plato, it's no coincidence. When he speaks of Plato, he was reactionary — he doesn't say it like that, he says he sensed a new world coming, the world that Hegel will call in his code the modern, Christian world, etc., where it is infinite freedom that nothing can stop anymore, and once it had appeared, Plato tried in the Republic to rein that in, when Plato says for example that no one should leave the ideal city before the age of fifty, lest they get new ideas elsewhere, that would cause change — that won't do, will it?
1:36:55 For example, a substantial society, you see, precisely, a bit archaic. Well. Hegel says, however, he proved he was a great mind because the idea around which his reform revolves is — and here I quote word for word — the pivot around which the world revolution then being prepared turned, colon: the actual is rational and the rational is actual. Nothing should be considered true, considered real, except what has passed through a rational detour, that is, through falsifiability and all that, of course, through the demonstration that began in mathematics and that Plato took up after Pythagoras and Thales in philosophy.
1:37:41 There. All while trying to apply it, and this is what's complicated, to everyday language, whereas Euclid started by abandoning it. Progressively. That's an interesting question. Not a physicist's question, that surprises me. Yes, Romain? Yes, I have a question because... An engineer, all the same.
The body shown or hidden: whiteness, Kafka, Zadig 1:38:11 In this case, that's not what my question is about. It seems to me that one element of an answer also lies in the question of why, ultimately, we shouldn't hide the body more when it determines us more. I'll interrupt you. I'm delighted that you're answering the questions in my place. For me, that's ideal. I'll arbitrate if need be. Isn't one element of the answer, as in "The Purloined Letter," that in order to hide it, when you don't really have the means to soothe the body, since you don't yet have the means to treat it, the best way to hide it is precisely to aestheticize it, to make it ostentatious, to show it, but in a way that transforms it, and that it's precisely — there have also been centuries where, afterward, the body was hidden, and it's only very recently, ultimately, that at the beach, etc., one can show it, but it's because exactly, it's been a very short time that...
1:39:13 in its nudity, if I may say so, even literally, to the point of reversing values — we agree, I'm very pleased with your comment — to the point of reversing values: a pretty girl, at the time, under the Ancien Régime, before sea bathing, was a girl with white skin, meaning she didn't work — working meant working in the sun, because it wasn't industry, not production, it was agriculture — she was the dark-skinned one, the shepherdess, who smelled bad, I'm telling you a story, but it's true, let me tell it beforehand — Victor Emmanuel the First, the king of Piedmont, you know, it's his son who achieved Italian unification, but he was a womanizer, he was a sovereign, and so he often went to the Gran Paradiso too, you know it a bit, in northern Italy, it's a magnificent reserve, a high mountain forest, the Alps, and his advisors would warn a farm beforehand to prepare a shepherdess, there you go, that's how it was, it's the droit du seigneur often, and so the parents, well, since there wasn't...
1:40:23 well, whatnot, eau de Cologne, I don't know what ointment they used, etc., and Victor Emmanuel — it's an authentic story — he came close, he smelled her, he said, "Me l'hanno guastata," do you understand Italian? "They've spoiled her for me" — he, he would have preferred the smell of goat, he's a country type, he only has that, pasta, I love this story — but okay, let's get back to the body, we're right in it — why is white like a pill, whiteness, which is the color of seduction and beauty par excellence, roses and lilies, the girl who is white and who blushes with emotion, the ideal, medieval poetry, red on a white background, which gives pink — why does it suddenly reverse, and we say, the girl who tells her friend, "but you're white as an aspirin tablet, my girl" — suddenly it's a counter-value, because it used to be a luxury, they were the first, at Deauville, at sea bathing, at the start, etc., and suddenly it reverses, and you go to the three S's, sex, the basis of the X-rated film, with plastic palm trees, with an electric sun,
1:41:35 for the migrant worker, one needs to tire oneself out. So yes, it's important to see the symbolic order, how it inscribes itself in each generation in the body through roundabout, changing, and varying paths, but the meaning doesn't change. The meaning is to get oneself recognized as free, rightly or wrongly; whoever has money finds it easier to appear free, detached. There's a short story by Kafka that I recommend to you, called "A Visit to a Mine."
1:42:07 I believe it's four pages, not even. It's a miner speaking, he says today we saw the engineers' visit, but you'd think he was talking about gods. Right? In any case, at the end, there's a line, this visit troubled us so much, a routine visit, a technical one, that we became incapable of working for an hour. He describes the engineers, one gets the impression it's another species.
1:42:38 They have different skin, they have — you see, they're gods, in the Greek sense. I presume it wasn't shepherds the Greeks had in mind when they spoke of Apollo, even if Apollo gets bored on Olympus and does nothing but chase after shepherds. That's mythology. But there it is, the symbolic order matters. One must get oneself recognized as being free, as being released from constraint. And since, as I've been repeating for a while now, constraint is first of all natural — eating, drinking, reproducing — the more I take my distance, or give the impression of taking my distance,
1:43:16 in fact, I make others work for that, most of the time. But it's the other's labor that allows me to take my distance from nature. It can be servants, it can be master-slave, whatever you like. Class struggle, quite simply. So the modalities change, but the underlying thing is always the same. It's freedom. Last example, Voltaire's Zadig, you see? At one point, you know, Zadig is the counselor, and at one point they say, well, he's unbearable, he's vain, one must constantly praise him, etc.
1:43:48 If you can chime in, because it's terrible, one always feels one is offending him. And Zadig says, let me handle it. Do you remember the tale, no? The first morning, he pays an orchestra with the best musician to play music and sing at the waking of the king, the prince, whatever, smiling, the satrap in question, because it's an oriental tale. And the other is delighted, because — praise, who is the greatest, who is the most beautiful, so the pharaohs were nothing compared to this.
1:44:21 There, I'm not very good at praise so I'll stop. And the prince's retinue. And second day, third day, it was the same, a bit less. Your favorite dish, if I make you eat it every day, in the end it sickens you, if you eat only that day after day, week after week. And it becomes a nightmare. And he asks for the musicians to be dismissed. See, see the formula. It's that when it becomes routine ritual, it no longer works permanently, one must constantly renew the symbolic charge.
Adam and Eve: the symbolic truth of Genesis 1:44:57 All right? And I'll finish, regarding the symbol — yes, it's exactly the time — very quickly, with a reference that has the advantage that you all know it. It's the first garden, Adam and Eve. All right? You know, roughly, let me remind you anyway. Before the fall, after the fall — that's what interests me. All right? Before the fall, or rather, let's place ourselves right after the fall. At the start, nothing belongs to the order of causality — the only kind Popper knows.
1:45:31 Snakes don't talk to women, in principle. Nor to men. Does it even talk? How to put it. People. So this whole story, for a mediocre atheist — that is, all this is nonsense, Voltaire-style, if you like, excuse me, but Voltaire, he never had... for him religion is nonsense, an error. He never understood the truth of error the way Marx did, you see, alienation. So, after the fall, what happens?
1:46:02 What are the changes? They realize they are naked. Good. Creation of clothing. We're right in the body there. Yes or no? God calls Adam. Adam! As every day. Why did you... I'm hiding because I'm all naked. Ah, wait, you ate the fruit. Passage from animality to anthropology. And then, second difference, up to then, everything hung from the trees, one just had to bend down.
1:46:38 You shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. Creation of praxis. And you shall give birth in pain. Because it's true, religion isn't stupid. Right? Rimbaud — I always quote — theology is serious. Right? It's true that in the human species, and this has nothing to do with conventions, it's true that childbirth is much more problematic and difficult than in almost all other animal species. Many explain it by the transition to bipedal stance, which caused a narrowing of the pelvic bones.
1:47:14 In short, I mean, but it's a catastrophe that has produced catastrophes, and which means that the human infant takes an insanely long time to stand on its two legs, whereas a young antelope, within a few hours, manages to flee danger by following its mother across the savanna. So all these changes, if you don't bring in the symbolic order, people say, but this is nonsense, that never existed, a garden, an earthly paradise. No, it's true, it didn't exist in the phenomenal sense, there's no such prior existence as that.
1:47:45 But it's true that paradise is surrounded by water. It starts like that, it's surrounded by water. Yes, there are many rivers surrounding paradise, aren't there? First of all, it's in desert countries that this was invented. Paradise is greenery and water. Believe me, when you see what the short Arab spring is like, the first rains, this land that is never cultivated, so it's actually very fertile, if there were water. It explodes, there are thousands of flowers all at once, it doesn't last long, but it's magnificent.
1:48:16 We know, the symbolic order, that's what it is. What does "surrounded by water" mean? I was never as much in paradise as in my mother's womb. It's a collective game, it's a restaurant or a woman. Ideal temperature? Yes, if you like, I tell you, the moment you have a desire, it's satisfied, well, no distance, no temporality, eternity, since I don't wait for food.
1:48:47 It's there. But you can't go back. Well, what does it say? Come on, one last detail. You can't return to earthly paradise because an angel with a sword of fire now guards the entrance. You shouldn't have committed the fault. Well, there it is. I'm sorry, gentlemen, for this bad news, but — which is also good news — is that we have to produce, don't we, something better than what we left behind. There.
1:49:17 I hope the logic of the subject is progressing among us. There. Thank you all. (Applause)
