English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Philosophy is not a science 0:00 So we are live, and I'm very glad of it, and all the more glad because I get to see you again, dear friends, dear comrades, dear confined men and confined women, I'm delighted to see you again. Since we have an hour and a half for this talk, I won't waste too much time, and I'll pick up on the problems from last time, but nourished by three new texts, still fairly faithful to my usual approach, since we began these live sessions by always digging into the same problem, that of modernity, but moving forward each time by adding new determinations that help us refine the portrait of this identity that is ours.
1:09 I can even be more synthetic still, you see, if I think of those who have been following us for a long time, and at the same time of those who are discovering us. To put it all together, I can summarize very synthetically, as I was just saying, the last six years, you see, of the monthly talks I've given, which lasted on average two hours, from the very first ones, which fit into a cycle titled "Between Sciences and Philosophical Wars"
1:47 up to the one I'm developing this year, before we were interrupted by the suspended lockdown. That is, the logic of the subject, a typically philosophical problem. And to sum myself up, it's very simple: it's an introduction, after all, to this discipline that is philosophy.
2:21 You see, I'm trying to use my words a bit more precisely now already. It's not a science, one mustn't have that pretension, and above all that confusion. Because generally, when we think of the sciences, we think of the hard sciences, and in that case it would be inaccurate to say that philosophy is part of them. On the other hand, it has a demand for rigor, and it has a curriculum, a past, which means it's also not the corner café where everyone's opinion runs wild, free for each to express themselves as they wish—but in that case one is not within the properly philosophical field, which consists in submitting one's opinions to questioning, in particular questioning the words used to express those opinions, and taking distance from those words.
3:16 In short, this discipline began with the imperative that Socrates could read, could decipher on the pediment of the temple at Delphi: "Know thyself." I immediately point out that we're not far from what I'm dealing with this year. You see, I'm skipping over six years already, I told you it would be synthetic. It means: attend to the subject, and leave to the hard sciences the research on objects, galaxies, stars, neutrinos, the Big Bang.
3:54 These are not the things I theorize about. That's fundamental. And fortunately for me, for us, for everyone, it's not that scientific discourse hasn't developed up to our day with regard to those objects. But here we're dealing with objects. That's why there would be confusion in putting philosophy among them, because it turns the question back toward the questioner. You see, know thyself.
4:25 There you have it. And since the same, myself, is you, is us as subject, and since we live—here I'm alluding to modernity, you see how quickly we fall back onto our subject, from Socrates now—obeying the philosophical imperative means asking the question: what is modernity? And since this modernity, I continue my little implicit syllogistic, and since modernity's first expression is historically called romanticism, we are still there, hence the texts, you see, that I've been bringing you since the start of these live sessions, taking the opportunity, before taking a new step forward, to recall that we clearly distinguished romanticism in the strict sense, which I leave here to literary studies, in which, especially when it's an exam syllabus, we can always come back to it ourselves—I mean, those interested in it can—and the romanticism I'm talking about is romanticism in a much broader sense,
Nothing more romantic than anti-romanticism 5:37 which expresses modernity in general, that is, not only the romanticism that ended roughly, as we've often said among ourselves, in the mid-19th century, with the failure of Hugo's Les Burgraves, which is generally taken as the marker, in 1853, for the end of French romanticism—in any case, what I'm talking about is what comes after it and up to us, including and especially the reactions against romanticism that occur after it, reminding you—I'm sure I'm taking the words right out of the mouths of those who follow me most attentively—that nothing is more modern, you see, than the refusal of modernity, and nothing is more romantic than the critique of romanticism.
6:23 Well, before getting to our texts, let me give you an illustration, if you will, of the fact that there is nothing more romantic than anti-romanticism that wants to seem trendy—incidentally, I'm thinking here, for example, in the musical field, of the fashionable return of the baroque repertoire in music, because some of you have written to me saying, "What do you have against baroque music?" I have never uttered a breath, a letter of a word, of a sentence against the baroque repertoire.
6:55 I venerate Bach, more than ever in fact, and I would die before having exhausted, before having exhausted everything that has—all the learned music with which he has fed our desire, to paraphrase a saying. I have never said, and I will never say a word against, when it's an admirable trait—by the way, it is a word, if the word is idiotic, the word "baroque music"—but let's say early music, that of the Ancien Régime, to be more precise, which runs roughly from Monteverdi—here I set aside for the moment medieval music, a sample of which, one of the most beautiful that exists, I recently posted on Facebook, an excerpt from the Mass of Tournai, a magnificent example of the transition between Gregorian medieval music and Renaissance polyphony, so-called Franco-Flemish polyphony.
7:51 But those are specialized matters. So, the baroque repertoire—not only do I not say a word against it, but I am against the discourse that accompanies the fashionable return of baroque music after romanticism, which is not at all the same thing. I have not one word to say against Telemann, against Vivaldi, against Corelli, against Handel, against Bach, etc. Of course not. But why am I talking about this now? To illustrate that there is nothing more romantic than the anti-romanticism of those who champion the baroque.
8:25 Because if you read the theorists of the fashionable return of baroque music today—I'm not talking about people from Bach's own time, who were less pretentious and less ideological—their main musical anti-value is romanticism. In interpretations, they always say that romantic interpretations of Bach's works, well, of the period they call baroque, are bloated, stiff, tired, I don't know, that they need to be stripped down, that we must... Fine.
8:56 Here, yes, I'm not making an aesthetic critique, I'm not saying they're wrong. Well, it's far more serious than that—I'm saying they don't even hear themselves speak. Because, as Hegel says, just try to put two thoughts together, when we struggle to find even one, I mean one that isn't contradictory. It is precisely the romantics who initiated the return to favor of baroque music. There you have it. If I take one of the absolute peaks of this music—it's not I who decrees it, it's fairly consensual—I'm thinking of that monument that is Bach's St Matthew Passion: it had fallen into disuse after Bach's death, when his sons, who were Johann Christian and Carl Philipp Emanuel, who practically created the sonata form, when his sons were shining—and by the way, they often affectionately called their father among themselves "the old wig," to show that learned Jean-Sébastien-style music had become a bit old-fashioned in their time—well, it took the romantics to bring it back into fashion,
10:07 and the St Matthew Passion, which had not been performed since Bach created it at St Thomas Church, was solemnly revived before a moved audience, and it was one of the great events, thanks to Mendelssohn, the romantic Mendelssohn, who moreover founded one of the finest musical institutions in Europe, which still exists, the Leipzig Gewandhaus. There you go. As for Beethoven, he always kept Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on his piano, and I'll finish with this example because we don't have all day, but Chopin, you see, who is really the most emblematic musician of romanticism, including for those who know of him only, I don't know, the Tristesse or the Revolutionary Étude—which is already not bad, one might say—but Tristesse, who is such a fabulous composer that I sometimes find myself saying "beautiful as Chopin"—Chopin, the romantic composer par excellence, spent his time saying that his favorite musicians were Bach and Mozart.
11:13 What can I do about it? Or Scarlatti, that is, musicians of the Ancien Régime. There you have it. So the fashion for this music—there is nothing more romantic, as I've just illustrated, than escaping recent music, the music our parents listen to, to immerse oneself in much older music. There you go. Let me come back to the three texts.
Mallarmé and Nerval: white, red, and pink 11:43 I'm going to step back right away in relation to the whole they form as a triptych. There's one by Mallarmé and two by Nerval, which is why I speak of a triptych. To explain to you why I've brought them together and why I'll also draw on other texts that you don't have in front of you, but from which I'll quote a few extracts orally so as not to confuse anything, and what unites them is—if you consider the first one displayed before you, the Mallarmé—everything in it is white.
12:27 Isn't that so, everything in it is white. The virginal, right from the first word, you see, virginity, frost, by the third line already you have frost, this hard lake forgotten that haunts beneath the frost—I'm not explaining it for now, we'll come back to it in detail. You see, the transparent glacier, fourth line, all of this is dazzling whiteness, a swan, what could be more immaculate and white, isn't that so, among all the winged tribe than the swan, whether winged, swimming, or river-dwelling, when from sterile winter the tedium has shone forth, you see, winter, snow, ice, sterile—sterility is not very red, sterility is on the contrary the blank page, especially when it's a poet writing, who was haunted, as his whole era was and as modernity often is—we'll be able to come back to that, what is more modern than the dread, isn't that so, of inspiration that is no longer there, that is leaving,
13:37 isn't that so, look, texts by Baudelaire like "The Sick Muse"—in short, so in this poem everything is white, there's much more to say about this poem than that, but I'll come back to it—I move on now, you see, to the second text, that is, to the first of the two extracts from Aurélia. Let me remind you that Aurélia is a clinical document in which Nerval sets down in writing the visions—I'm deliberately using a word that is neither dream nor real sight, but vision, you see, that is, waking dream—and here, it's exactly the opposite, everything is red. Well, everything is red—take the second paragraph: little by little, a bluish light penetrated the kiosk, and made bizarre images appear. I then believed I found myself in the midst of a vast charnel house—it's starting—where universal history had been written in lines of blood. I'm inventing nothing, I told you I hated interpretation—why interpret when it's so clear?
14:47 There, everything was white; now, everything is red. The body of a gigantic woman was painted facing me, only its various parts were sliced as if by a sword; other women of diverse races, whose bodies loomed larger and larger, presented on the other walls a bloody jumble of limbs and heads, etc. Fine, I'll move on—we'll come back to this, you see? So, two extremes: a first text that is extreme, immaculate whiteness, and here, on the contrary, the most aggressive staining, isn't that so, to the point of being bloody, the word is repeated several times.
15:28 And, since I'd like to get you used to having reflexes of organization, of formalizing discourse, you see, instead of always looking for a meaning as if it were hidden, letting the form organize itself—I note that these two extremes immediately bring to mind a syllogism. In a syllogism, the extremes are called the premises and the conclusion.
15:59 All men are mortal—premise; conclusion, Socrates is mortal; middle term, Socrates is a man. Yes, the middle term, allowing one to pass from the premise to the conclusion, which is why it's called, in logic, the "bridge of asses"—you can forget that, but I know those interested in the question won't forget it. Well, here we have two extremes, that of white and that of red.
16:34 And instead of starting to lose ourselves—what does red signify, it signifies so many things that we'd get lost in it, or else we'd keep repeating the same platitudes about the purity of white and the aggressiveness of red. Let's set that aside for now. Let's stay quasi-mathematical. The middle term, you guess it, is pink. Take a middle term between white and red, you get pink. Take a yogurt, add a little raspberry coulis, nice and red, and you have an excellent all-pink dessert.
17:10 Well then, let's move on to the third text. You'll understand why they're put in this order, won't you? Let me quickly tell you the context. Nerval—it's a vision in which he follows a rather mysterious guide who leads him to a people living on a mountain. And I'll go straight to the third line: braving still the encroaching flood of accumulations of new races, they, the people of this nation, they lived there, simple in their ways, loving and just, skillful, steadfast and ingenious, and peacefully victorious—that's beautiful—peacefully victorious over the blind masses that had so many times invaded their heritage.
17:54 And what? Neither corrupted, nor destroyed, nor enslaved. Pure, though having conquered ignorance. Preserving in comfort the virtues of poverty. A child was amusing himself on the ground with crystals, shells, engraved stones, making a study into a game, no doubt. An older woman, but still beautiful, was busy with household chores. At that moment, several young people came in noisily, as if returning from their work. I was surprised to see them all dressed in white. It seems we're back to the first text.
18:25 But it seems it was an illusion of my sight. You see how we stay within optical problems. To make my illusion perceptible, my guide began to draw their costumes, which he tinted with vivid colors, making me understand that this was how they really were. The whiteness that had surprised me perhaps came from a particular gleam, a play of light in which the ordinary hues of the prism blended together.
18:56 How I would love for a filmmaker to stage this scene, to stage this passage. Isn't that so? Because perhaps only modern means of filming and lighting could show this extraordinary metamorphosis that Nerval imagines here. Isn't that so? So, watch closely, we're not quite in the pink yet, but it won't be long. The whiteness that had surprised me perhaps came from a particular gleam, a play of light in which the ordinary hues of the prism blended together. I left the room and found myself on a terrace laid out like a flower bed.
19:28 There, young girls and children were walking about and playing. There were young men—now there are young girls and children. Their clothes appeared white to me like the others, but were adorned with pink embroidery. What rigor! When I tell you that the only difference between mathematics and poetic creation in the general artistic sense is that poetry is more exact—you see, still, what rigor! White, red, the two extremes, and the middle term.
Blood on snow in the Conte du Graal 20:02 Well, there you have it. I'll come back to the details of these texts, but to stay for now with this clue that makes them a set—the polarity of white and red—and to show you that this isn't an isolated case, I'm going to step back further, even further, by leaving this era and going much further back into the past, since I'm going to go to the one who is at the origin.
20:34 No doubt one of the greatest poets of our language, at a time when it was barely still French, I'm thinking here of Chrétien de Troyes, but who was the greatest author of his time—he had that prestige—of what is conventionally called the matter of Britain—Britain here [meaning Brittany/Britain]—he lived in Champagne and belongs to Franco-Champenoise literature, well anyway, but who is illustrated in the adventures of King Arthur's Round Table, which is why it's called the matter of Britain. There's a poem where François Villon, later, says, "But where has the old Duke of Brittany gone," speaking of course of Arthur, as he says, as in another poem he says, "But where are the snows of yesteryear"—there you go, more white—he says, "But where is Arthur, the old Duke of Brittany," well there, I go back to Chrétien de Troyes and his most fascinating work—you should be pleased since he says right from the introduction that I'm going to talk to you about it, since he says right from the introduction that he's going to begin,
21:45 I quote: "the most beautiful story that is told in a royal court, this is the tale of the Grail"—no one talks about anything but the Grail, everyone's been talking about it since, I don't know, including the most far-fetched theories, often the most monotonous too, but well before the Grail became something Christian-Catholicized, where it becomes the vessel that collected Christ's blood—pretty much everyone knows that—the word Grail exists before it was such an unambiguous religious symbol, and the very first to use it is Chrétien de Troyes. So don't look for where he got that from—he himself says he got it from a certain Kyot, K-Y-O-T, thought to be a Guillaume of the time, but well, research has been fruitless to this day. Some even say it might be an Arabic word going back to the Crusades, isn't that so, that would have come back from the Orient, "Kral," from the Crusades; others say it's related to "grailler," as they say in slang, meaning to eat, since the Grail nourishes—we do say something "smells of grailon" (of fried fat), isn't that so, and yes, all of that has the same origin.
22:54 So, I'll simply read to you, without any commentary, this excerpt from his most famous work, which is unfinished—mysteriously unfinished—and which had, from that very era, from the 13th century, a host of continuations by different authors who didn't want to leave it unfinished. So I'll tell you this passage, or excerpt, then, from Perceval the Welshman, or the Quest for the Grail.
23:24 This passage in which Perceval is in search of adventure—a good knight, it's been a long time since he left his mother's domain in the forest, he was raised like a wild child, I'll be blunt. And here, one winter morning, not far from where Arthur's court is camping in the snow, arrives—it's time to stop for the night—but he hasn't seen them.
23:56 Without knowing it, he approaches the royal camp because he's out hunting. And I'll quote the text now, and it says this—I'm talking about the text. There's a short summary, let me give it to you: it's winter, King Arthur and his knights have just left the castle of Carlion, and when night falls, they stop and pitch their camp in a meadow near the forest. Perceval, who is nearby, watches a flock of wild geese.
24:27 One of them is attacked by an injured falcon; it lies on the ground. This is the second white bird—we already had Mallarmé's swan, I point out in passing. One of them is attacked by an injured falcon; it lies on the ground. Perceval is captivated by the sight of the blood on the snow, and here again we find white and red. But here we must go into detail because it's an admirable text. So, let me read it to you: in the morning, snow had fallen heavily, for the land was very cold. It's a modernized French, otherwise it would be incomprehensible, Chrétien de Troyes' French.
24:59 Perceval, at daybreak, had risen as was his habit, for he was in quest and in expectation of adventure and exploit. He rode straight to the frozen, snow-covered meadow—so there, everything is white as far as the horizon, you see—where the king's army was camped. But before he reached the tents, there came a flock of wild geese, dazzled by the snow. He saw and heard them, for they were fleeing noisily before a falcon that swooped down on them in a single stroke. It caught up at full speed with one of them that had strayed from the others. It, the falcon, struck and hit it so hard that it brought it down to the ground.
25:30 But it was too early [in the day for hunting], and the falcon flew off again without deigning to join or attach itself to her. Perceval, however, spurs his horse toward the place where he had seen the flock. The bird was wounded in the neck. She bled three drops of blood that spread over the white. One would have taken it for a natural color. And look now how this is one of the great passages of our literature—it will bear fruit. Here begins Perceval's fascination with this sight that becomes a vision.
26:04 The bird had so much pain and hurt that it had to stay on the ground. By the time he reached the spot, it had already flown away. You see, he no longer pays attention to the bird. When Perceval saw the snow that was trampled where the bird had lain, and the blood that showed around it, he leaned on his lance to gaze at this resemblance. For the blood and the snow together resemble the fresh color that is on the face of his beloved.
26:34 A few dozen lines earlier, we saw him finally find the woman of his life, who is called, as it happens, Blanchefleur, "of the face of his beloved." This drop of vermilion set upon the white was like those three drops of blood that appeared on the white snow. You see, it repeats itself insistently. He was nothing but gaze. It seemed to him, so much pleasure did he take in it, that what he saw was the wholly new color of his beloved's face, so beautiful.
27:06 There you have it. There you have it, you see, why I took a step back to show you that Mallarmé's all-white and the all-bloody text of Aurélia—this polarity of red and white—has a great temporal depth in our imagination. And our imagination is not something entrusted to physics or astronomy to express. They have things at least as important to do in a wholly different domain.
Coleridge's albatross and Parsifal's swan 27:37 No, it is precisely to the creation that I called poetic earlier, as a generic term—it can be painting, music, literature. And still, then, orally, let me remind those of you who know English literature a little that one of the greatest poets, perfectly contemporary with Hölderlin and with that period which I said was intermediate, between the old and the new regime.
28:11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem, no doubt the most famous, in any case the most often translated, is the tale of the ancient mariner, the said 'deité', that is, the rime, in the original English title, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, often also translated as the ballad of the ancient mariner. And I'll skip over this too, it's a very long poem, it's a sea piece, as is often the case, isn't it, in this great maritime power that is England, it's one of literature's many sea pieces, and it tells the story of a sailing ship, of course, that sails away from England, then is driven by the storm toward new lands, then approaches the south — at the time the South Pole hadn't been discovered, no one had any idea of Antarctica — and is driven so hard by the storm that it arrives in the southern lands and becomes surrounded by ice and becomes a prisoner of the ice.
29:13 And so, one morning, an albatross suddenly appears, a third white bird, Mallarmé's swan, the wounded wild geese of Chrétien de Troyes, and now an albatross. Besides, the white color, alba, is in the very name of the albatross, which is white as alabaster, isn't it? And an albatross appears one morning, and it's almost a bird sent by God — I'm quoting the poem here — because when it appears, suddenly a breeze begins to blow, guiding the ship out of the ice.
30:00 And so everything seems settled, the crew is overjoyed, and every morning, as it's said, the bird came either to play or to eat, at the mariner's call. And at that moment, of course, the narrator's face changes, terrified, and he says, 'with my crossbow I shot the albatross.' There. A great friend of Coleridge's, Wordsworth, a very well-known poet among English schoolchildren, who wrote many poems in the style of Lamartine — he's a bit the English Lamartine, a sensitive, delicate, very balanced poet, unlike that opium-eater Coleridge — Wordsworth, but they were very close friends, when Coleridge read him this poem, said to him: but why all this business of guilt, after all, for a bird that was killed?
30:51 And Coleridge was hard put to answer him, you see. So here again, a bird of immaculate whiteness, splattered with the blood of a crossbow bolt. I'll conclude, for now — you can see the series is almost unlimited if you look closely, but I'm taking the most famous examples. I return to Perceval, but this time almost seven centuries later, isn't it, whose name has since been Germanized, he became Parsifal — of course this is Wagner's testament, his most mysterious work, no longer devoted to Germanic myths but returning to the matter of Britain, the Arthurian material, centered around the theme of the Grail, of course.
31:38 And indeed, in the first act, Parsifal bursts onto the stage, right in the domain of the Grail, at the moment when an old knight is giving something like catechism to the new recruits, the young squires, and how does he burst in? He's dragged in by the wrists and handed over to the old knight with the words: here is the one who has just killed the swan, Parsifal.
32:08 He bursts into the story, we don't even know where he comes from, like a wild child, having shot an arrow and killed the swan of the Grail, in a domain, the domain of the Grail, the domain of the Grail castle, where everything is sacred, where you mustn't even touch the smallest blade of grass. You see? And here, I'll skip over it — for those interested, look at the libretto text, it must exist on Wikisource — it's frightening how much guilt is heaped on him in the text. The knight looks and looks and looks at this animal dying, looks at its glassy eyes, looks at the blood clotting the feathers on its wings.
32:41 You see? So red and white, there, plenty of it. There, so that's what unifies our theme. Now, as for the content, well, we need to go back to the detail of the text. Let's return to Mallarmé. Let's return to the first term of our vast syllogism, that of whiteness. So, the virgin — I won't dwell on it — the virgin, so the immaculate, the vivacious and the beautiful, today, will it tear for us with a drunken wingbeat, this hard, forgotten lake haunted beneath the frost by the transparent glacier of flights that never fled.
Translating Mallarmé into French 33:24 I'll stop here, since it's a rather dense text — I'll stop at this quatrain before the obscurities pile up, not, mind you, to interpret it, you know I don't like that, but simply to translate it. Yes, indeed, we have to translate French into French, because I'm not sure Mallarmé's French is immediately accessible to those who have gotten used, you know, to the French of text messages and emails. And it's a bit lacking in LOL and OMG and all that, isn't it — not Mallarmé.
34:03 So, come on, let's translate. Especially since there can be confusion. 'The virgin, the vivacious and the beautiful today, will it, us, us, tear us?' Will it tear us apart? 'Us' as direct object of 'tear'? Certainly not. You see, you have to be used to reading Mallarmé. Will it tear what? This hard lake? For us — 'us' here is an indirect object. Will it help break the ice? You see, the virgin, the vivacious and the beautiful today which was not coming, isn't it, suddenly, in the state of oppression we're in, in the frozen present, in confinement?
34:41 That's exactly where we are, isn't it? We're confined. We can't move. Like the swan in question. And so we dream, especially in the middle of spring, like this, the virgin, the vivacious — spring is each time a renewal of purity, of origins, of beginnings. The virgin, the vivacious, more vivacious than a spring. And the beautiful today — look how beautiful this month of May is — will it tear us with a drunken wingbeat? Will it tear what — now that we know it's not 'us' that's the object — this hard lake.
35:13 Forgotten — there's the ice. Haunted beneath the frost — so what is haunting? This hard lake, the transparent glacier of flights that never fled. I won't interpret 'the flights that never fled,' that will happen on its own in the text. A swan — so we have the setting, the ice, it's not a frozen lake, we're missing a character, here it is. A swan of long ago remembers that it is he. There's a rather complex relation to time here, let's leave that aside. A swan of long ago — there's the past — remembers — there's the present — that it is he.
35:48 Magnificent, but who, without hope, frees itself. So why does it free itself? Trying to escape the ice. In other words, the swan was evidently caught off guard, wasn't it, by the arrival of winter which trapped its beautiful plumage — it can no longer fly away. Ah, a swan can't just fly away, can it? Nor swim, since this isn't water, it's ice. A swan of long ago remembers that it is he, magnificent, but who, without hope, frees itself? And what is trapping it? Well, we're finally going to find out — for not having sung of the region where to live.
36:23 When the boredom of sterile winter had shone resplendent. Good grief, we had the time. We had the whole winter, before the lockdown. Yes or no? After all, the lockdown came in March. Did we take advantage of it to create, to sing? No. Isn't that right? So now we're stuck. You see? All right, I'm pushing it a little, I don't mean the text is about the present, but still, admit it fits well. In any case, what's certain is that Mallarmé clearly says that what traps the swan is that it doesn't sing.
36:57 So there we find, I don't know, the obsession of modern poetry, especially of a Mallarmé who dreamed his whole life of making a single book that would be the great work, to borrow an alchemist's term. You see? The great work. He almost achieves it in that famous poem, you know, with its very particular typography, called 'A Throw of the Dice.' 'A throw of the dice will never abolish chance,' etc. But Mallarmé's complete works fit into a very slim volume.
37:28 Even counting, you know, all his bread-and-butter works, if I may say so, which he did with great care — menus for restaurants, reports on fashion shows. He did all that, like Proust did society-column pieces, isn't it, never omitting any of the personalities who appeared in the Figaro of the time — I mention in passing that he always signed with pseudonyms, one of which happened to be Dominique. So, Mallarmé, haunted by the problem of literary creation, of writing — that's me, there, all right, let's now, I told you we shouldn't interpret, let's be mathematical, not the risky side of interpretation, let's be rigorous.
The narcissistic swan and the dilemma of the blank page 38:15 If I write, the blank page is finished. So one has to choose: either it's purity, but then it's sterile — I write nothing. You see, there's a tragedy of narcissism here. It's all very nice, a swan — already a swan is white, you see it, you the swan on the ice, I already have trouble with it. It's true, everything is white in this. What do you want to distinguish? I wanted to quote you an excerpt, I refer you to the text, this excerpt from Water and Dreams — sorry, Water and Dreams, of course, one of the most-read works of Gaston Bachelard, who generally deals rather with reflection on modern physics, since he was a contemporary of the emergence of relativity theory and quanta.
39:06 He's one of those who has thought most intelligently about the question and about how scientific knowledge progresses. But he had an extraordinary path. Read his biography, we don't have time to go through it, but paths like this are rather rare. He was a minor postal employee, I don't know, son of a mother who had no profession, then he had a small tobacco shop with newspapers in a small village lost between Champagne and Lorraine, and he had a wife who died prematurely, and he raised, with enormous care, taking on the whole domestic side, his daughter, who became a great philosopher and epistemologist, Suzanne Bachelard, whom I had the honor of having as a professor, among others, during my philosophy degree, and who, after being a schoolteacher, earned degrees in physics, in chemistry, then an agrégation in philosophy — a path such as one rarely sees.
40:12 And Bachelard, in Water and Dreams, analyzes precisely the symbolic functions of water and in particular the figure of the swan in literary creation, which recurs often, showing extraordinary erudition — I wonder when he found the time to read all that — in a passage of Goethe's in particular, on the swan, and he shows that the image of the swan — there's a text I can't quite find, but I'll get there. Ah, wait, wait.
40:42 There, there, there, there, I think that's it. No, that's not it, but never mind — where he shows that the swan is the very image of narcissism, for we cannot help but associate it with an aquatic animal gliding on the mirror, you see, Narcissus, on the mirror of the waters, and which seems, with its curved neck, always to be contemplating, contemplating its immaculate whiteness in the mirror of the waters, and he shows that this immaculateness is nakedness, it's the very image of nakedness which is a completely repressed eroticism in the whiteness of the swan.
41:36 But only, since he doesn't present it as an abstract idea, which would be arbitrary, but illustrates it among thousands of literary examples — I wanted to find it for you, maybe let's clear that, there. I'll find it another time.
42:12 So there, that's to say the examples could be multiplied, but this swan contemplates itself. I return now to the text, to Mallarmé's text, isn't it, when he says 'a swan of long ago remembers that it is he,' we already see here the narcissistic contemplation, magnificent, isn't it — Narcissus admires himself in his reflection — 'but who, without hope, frees itself, for not having sung of the region where to live' — this may be the key to the whole poem, and I remind you here that when a swan sings, it means it's going to die.
42:54 You know, when we say 'the swan song,' when we say Beethoven's last sonata or Billie Holiday's last concert was 'their swan song,' it's because a legend has it that swans, which have a harsh and uninteresting cry, nothing melodious like that of songbirds, would, according to legend, produce sounds of an ineffable musicality shortly before dying.
43:27 There. So why does the text — ah, there it is, excuse me, the text has moved. Let's look at what follows, you see: 'its whole neck will shake off this white agony' — so again, you see, death in the cold, the ice, and we now know the literary sterility — but not a sterility like that which would be hereditary or in the chromosomes, let's leave naturalism aside — but sterility because there's an internal reason, because if I write, I stain what Mallarmé calls, in our poem, as it happens, 'the empty paper that whiteness defends.'
44:18 It's in 'Sea Breeze,' you see: 'the empty paper that whiteness defends.' Defends against what? When one defends, there's an attack, but the attack is the pen, the sharp, pointed pen of the poet, isn't it, which threatens to stain the blank page. 'The empty paper that whiteness defends,' in order not to yield to this staining, we see a dilemma here. Either I write, but then I renounce purity, or I keep purity, but then I'm in sterility, and right after we have 'for not having sung of the vivid region, when of sterile winter, for it's splendid, whiteness, but it's sterile.'
45:00 'had shone resplendent the boredom.' You know, in the Mediterranean and Eastern world there's still a custom whereby, at the end of the wedding night, the family comes to see whether the white of the sheets has indeed become red. Because at the time, it wasn't only a marriage of love, but there were reasons — one had to see whether there would be lineage and offspring. Well, 'its whole neck will shake off this white agony' — in other words, the swan tries to escape upward, it pulls, you see, through the space inflicted on the bird that denies it.
45:32 Here, I'll say it, for those interested — Mallarmé is one of the rare writers, especially of that period, and poets, who has a philosophical culture and knows Hegel well. Which is extremely rare at the time. Now, one cannot help but think of Hegel here, because movement, movement in space, is a way of negating space in Hegel, isn't it? At every instant, movement is the negation of the place where one was. So, 'its whole neck will shake off this white agony through the space inflicted on the bird that denies it' — that denies space, or at least, in any case, tries, with its neck, to break free.
46:10 So there, the top can move, but not the horror of the ground — there's the bottom, where the plumage is caught. A ghost, again a whiteness — a ghost, a ghost that its pure brightness assigns to this place. Well yes, it is white, it has a dazzling whiteness, the swan, so it is confined to the ice, whatever you like. You see, there's a symbolic rigor here, not a real one. 'A ghost that its pure brightness assigns to this place' — so it is condemned to cold and whiteness and thus to sterility.
46:43 It becomes still, there's a resignation at the end, 'in the cold dream of scorn' — the somewhat aristocratic side, I don't know, the disdain of the world — 'which the useless exile clothes, the Swan.' And on top of that you have the theme of exile, at the end. You see all the themes: literary sterility, the song that frees, exile. I'll take this opportunity, before moving to the antithesis, to the redness of Nerval's vision, I'll take the opportunity to make a rather brief model.
The lost paradise, exile, and escape 47:18 You see? But imagine all this poetry that Baudelaire initiates and that develops right up to the Surrealists, practically. Stopping there — we could go on afterward, but I'm tracing here a fairly homogeneous and marked arc, especially in the period running from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, through Verlaine, Rimbaud, etc., to name only the main ones, marked by an extremely homogeneous thematic logic in which, so as not to lose you, it's enough to think of one theme from which all the others derive.
47:57 If you grasp it, all the others follow like beads on a rosary. This theme is the lost paradise. I think of it because of the last line which puts us on the trail, exile. What does it mean to be exiled? Let's not interpret. Let's listen to what the word says. To be exiled is not to be at home. It's to live far from where one should be, from where one was used to being, isn't it? Now, for the mystique inaugurated by Baudelaire, isn't it?
48:30 The world in which we live, from birth, we undergo a fall from the lost paradise into, as Mallarmé puts it, 'the litter where the happy cattle of humans lie,' you see? Or conversely, when Mallarmé thinks of the world before the fall, he speaks of 'the former sky where beauty flourished.' You see, instead of interpreting, I prefer to explain the poet by the poet.
49:00 It's much safer, after all. 'The former sky where beauty flourished.' Well, if you take as a starting axiom the lost paradise before birth, at birth, the fall, you have spleen, and now you understand the mal du siècle. I'm not at home, I'm a stranger in the world. And you understand, the first reaction when one is exiled is to seek to escape, to return home.
49:30 So you have all the themes of escape. Take Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, all the chapters are avatars of escape. Artificial paradises, opium, alcohol, wine — that's a chapter of Flowers of Evil, wine. Artificial paradises is a chapter of Flowers of Evil. Roving, distant places, geographical distances — you see, 'Invitation to the Voyage,' for example — historical distances, up to that very memory, timeless and metaphysical — not psychological memory where I remember the day I met Madeleine, no, I mean a memory that would go back before birth, it's not a Platonic memory, as we find in that Baudelaire poem called 'The Previous Life.'
50:19 'I long lived under vast porticoes which the marine suns tinged with a thousand fires, and whose great pillars, straight and majestic, made them look, in the evening, like basalt caves.' Now, he who lived in a poor, wretched garret in Paris — 'it is there that I lived in calm voluptuousness, amid splendors and naked slaves' — excuse me, amid splendors and naked slaves, all steeped in scents that refreshed my brow with their palm fronds — you see, they dream themselves as sovereigns, but sovereigns who were already unhappy and whose sole care was to deepen the painful secret that made me languish.
50:56 So already in the previous life, there was already boredom. You see. So, once you grasp the lost paradise, then comes the fall, the fall means I'm now in exile, so I escape, and the various escapes make up more or less all the chapters of the works we read. I now move on, after this digression prompted by the term 'exile' used by Mallarmé — I'm speaking, clinical text, I remind you that Aurélia is once again the account of the visions attributed to the doctors of Nerval, I won't repeat it thirty-six times — and so among these visions, here is one: 'One night I was speaking and singing in a sort of ecstasy.'
The bloody vision of Aurélia and the dismembered body in Bosch 51:44 There are testimonies saying that he sang at the top of his lungs when he was at Dr. Blanche's clinic, in every language including Arabic and Hebrew after his trip to the Orient, you see. So of course, it didn't take much for the nurses of the time to throw him in solitary confinement. 'One night I was speaking and singing in a sort of ecstasy. One of the servants of the house' — in short, a member of the nursing staff — 'came to fetch me in my cell and took me down to a room on the ground floor where he locked me in.' It's clear that this was a cell for someone who had crossed the line.
52:17 'A divan ran around the walls.' It's likely that this was actually a padded cell to keep the patient from banging his head against the walls. 'A divan ran around the walls, and it seemed to me' — you see, we go from sight to vision — 'that these were made of thick glass.' You see how homogeneous all this is. Just now I went the opposite way — we were in all-white, now we're going into all-red. But there's an invariant, it's the reflection.
52:49 The swan was a bird that mirrored itself in the azure mirror of the lake or the river, and here, you see, 'it seemed to me' — the walls were made of thick glass. All clinicians know very well, all those who've dealt with psychotics, especially schizophrenics but above all paranoiacs, know how much the mirror as an object is fraught. The mirror in the bathroom or the living room is a permanent source of hallucinations, which is one of the heaviest symptoms of psychosis.
53:26 Don't think you're having hallucinations when you've been bent over a little too long lacing your shoes and when you stand up you see little yellow dots. That's nothing. We all get that. Those are optical illusions or distortions of the psychosensory sphere, to speak like the textbooks. But hallucination is serious, it's thematized, that's the difference. It's when I suddenly see one of my relatives appear who has been dead a long time, and he speaks to me and I speak to him as if he were alive. Well, that happened fairly often to Nerval.
53:57 Now, the mirror object is often the ground against which the hallucinatory figure emerges. 'A divan ran around the walls, and it seemed to me that these were made of thick glass, beyond which I saw shining treasures, shawls and tapestries.' The vision begins on this mirrored ground. 'Little by little, a bluish light penetrated into the kiosk' — that's what he calls the cell where he's locked up — 'and made strange images appear.'
54:31 I then thought I found myself in the midst of a vast charnel house where universal history - well, one couldn't get more opposite to Mallarme's text, that is, in Mallarme, isn't that so, everything is fixed, motionless. Here, there is an unleashing. And above all, everything was solitary. The only figure was that poor swan, isolated in a nature, in a setting, where one has the impression that it is the only being. It's not all around. Here, where universal history, that is, the history of humanity, was written in streaks of blood.
55:02 I remind you that I began all my talks between crisis and war, philosophizing, question mark, by citing the figure of Ulysses, whose characteristic is to depart from a carnage, the sack of Troy, to arrive at the end of the Odyssey. After the initial carnage, the sack of Troy, a final carnage, the massacre of the suitors. So you see, I have the impression of always telling the same story.
55:35 But here it is Nerval who tells it: the body of a gigantic woman was painted before me. You see? So it's not only humanity that is there, fragmented, cut into pieces, literally. But here it is the body of a gigantic woman. Only, its various parts were sliced as if by a saber. Here I'm going to ask the control room, Philippe Moureau, if he would kindly try to illustrate Nerval's words with a painter, one often cited by Lacan, moreover.
56:12 I'm thinking of course of Hieronymus Bosch, here, because no one has expressed this fantasy that we all have in the unconscious, of the fragmented body, such as it can return in nightmares - a sixteenth-century painter who never read a single line of Freud, but who shows the fruitfulness of the latter's thought. Listen, you can't believe your eyes. And then you look in detail, and the more appalling it is, isn't it? He's a painter situated at the threshold between the waning Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which is still struggling to establish itself in Flanders, since he's a Flemish painter, of course.
56:50 But you see that a whole set of themes that will later be central in the analytic field, in the Freudian field - I'm thinking of castration. When you look here - we should remove the caption on the slides that hides it - you see the blade of a knife coming out of two ears, isn't that so? So an image that, of course, makes you think of the phallic theme, but where precisely the phallus is replaced by its principal dread, that of castration, where the cutting blade, isn't that so, occupies here the place of the phallus itself.
57:30 But it's those fools Deleuze and Onfray who speak of Freud as a charlatan. We see here a fruitfulness that cannot be doubted, because it's not for the needs of a cause - it's not a painter who read Freud and tries to paint ideas, which never makes for very great art, painting ideas. But it's a painter who is totally, isn't that so, a thousand leagues away from Freud's thought and discourse, and who is thinking of the scourge of humanity in his own time.
58:05 There, second painting, still somewhat in the same vein, where we will see, you see, the poor human body, what it undergoes. Once again we see here the knife blade, where there are bodies pierced, split, sliced, impaled, burned, grilled, whatever you like. Isn't that so? So, there - why did I insist on these images, which date from nearly five centuries before Nerval?
Between normal and pathological, a difference of degree 58:38 To show you that this is not a whim of the sick Nerval. Because someone could say to me, why should we bother with a poor psychotic? We started from 'know thyself' - I'm not like that. I'm showing you what is universal in these visions. Here I'm opening a small parenthesis to illustrate how the relationship between two extremes, the normal and the pathological, has been modified since the analytic field, the Freudian field. The normal - when you say 'how are you?'
59:10 'I'm fine, thanks, I'm in good health.' The normal of the body and this abnormality that is supposed to be pathology - until Freud, these are two opposed essences, differences of nature. Look at how Descartes speaks of madmen. In the First Meditation, when he says: I still can't doubt that I am here speaking with you and writing on this paper, unless I compare myself - if I doubt that, it's because I compare myself, I quote, to those minds whose brains are so clouded by the black vapors of bile - he's thinking of course of madmen, etc.
59:57 But what, these are madmen, and I would be no less mad if I regulated myself by their example. Which makes Foucault say that Descartes, with a backhand sweep, dismissed madness in order to affirm totalitarian reason - you know the rest better than I do. Which is an extremely reduced reading of Descartes, since it's enough - which Foucault certainly did. So here I speak of blindness [in the sense of ideological blindness] and not of sightlessness.
1:00:28 The blind man is not one who is blinded. Ideological blindness, since Descartes puts a full stop and says, with immense humility, a self-humiliation: 'However, I must consider here that I am a man, and that consequently I am accustomed to sleep and to represent to myself in my dreams things just as extravagant, and sometimes even more so, as these madmen do when they are awake.' There. But still, at the start, he began by saying, like a good musketeer: 'As for me, I'm someone normal, a warrior - those are the sick ones, those are the madmen.'
1:01:02 Now, what the analytic revolution showed, among other things - I'll retain only this so as not to stray, since it's what interests us here for the text - is that the difference between the madman and us is a difference of degree, quantitative if you prefer, and not a difference of nature, that is, qualitative. These are not ontological differences. Thus, when we make slips of action, when we spend three hours looking for our keys for the tenth time in the day or the week, when I forget a word - slips - and let's not even speak of dreaming, when I have a dream, I am following exactly the same process as that of the neuroses, except that there it's a normal process, they are normal neuroses, if I may say so, which do not disturb the balance, which do not make the subject suffer to the point that psychic illness does.
1:01:57 Without forgetting, either, what happens at the other extreme, saying that it's very fine to be mad, as was somewhat fashionable at the time Anti-Oedipus came out, isn't that so, where it was almost as if the schizophrenic were the true value. So, you know, between the sadistic doctor and the patient abandoned to his suffering - it's Clouscard who develops fine analyses on this. Let's return here to rationality.
1:02:29 There is then a difference of degree between the normal and the pathological. In other words, the amplifications that the psychotic Nerval undergoes make us better understand our own reality. Sometimes a single event is enough to tip us from the normal into the pathological, isn't that so, to cross that difference of degree. Let's not forget the importance of the fact that Freud had to deal with war trauma victims, since he was a contemporary of the outbreak of the first great world carnage, the war of 1914, when he saw filing past on his couch no longer the neurotics of the intellectual world of the Viennese bourgeoisie, but what in France were called 'the broken faces' - patients suffering from trauma due to the war, appalling things that alter one's character sometimes irreversibly.
1:03:29 So let's not be too proud of our normality - it doesn't take much, a lived event, heartbreak, mourning, both at once, job loss, loss of the loved one, all three at once - which is not rare - can make us pass from the merely quantitative to the greater, and thus from the normal to the pathological. So I continue this text: the body of a gigantic woman was painted before me, only its various parts were sliced as if by a saber - that's why I wanted to go through these images of the soul in Bosch, to show you how much the imaginary is, each time, of an extraordinarily reiterative and recurring semantic precision - other women of diverse races whose bodies dominated more and more, presented on the other walls a bloody jumble of limbs and heads.
1:04:28 So you see, this insists indeed on what Lacan calls the fantasy of the fragmented body. There's an insistence on parts, limbs and heads, implicitly separated from the body. From empresses and queens down to the humblest peasant women, it was the history of every crime, and it was enough to fix one's eyes on this or that point - implicitly, of his vision - to see a tragic representation take shape there.
The biographical mother and the structural mother 1:04:59 There, quite an extraordinary and striking text, but one that is striking in that here it is not the carnage of humanity in general, but specifically of the female figure. When one knows Nerval's maternal complex, and when one knows that birth, for each of us, has always been something bloody - for the mother's body, not for the child's, which was a suffering - here, allow me to refer, I'm thinking of literature teachers who want a change of pace when giving texts for the oral exam to their students, whether the anticipated French exam in the first year of the baccalaureate - for exchanges, I have a few excellent texts that they use, which I find inexhaustible, but to diversify the repertoire, a Senegalese author whom schoolchildren of French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa know well, even those who aren't Senegalese - I'm thinking here of...
1:06:05 good grief, I... Cheikh Anta Diop, a historian - no, it's not him I have in mind - it's Cheikh Hamidou Kane, excuse me, K-A-N-E, Kane, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, who is an immense writer, who wrote a work that you can find in paperback, I think it's in the '10/18' or 'Folio' collection, I don't remember, but in any case you can easily find it, called Ambiguous Adventure.
1:06:37 I mention it because his novel is set at the moment when the whites arrive in Senegal. The central character, young Samba Diallo, from a princely family in the traditional hierarchy - the whole plot of the novel turns on: 'Should we or should we not send our children, as the newcomers prescribe, to the new school?'
1:07:12 And there's this text: 'The first morning of the whites in black Africa was strewn with smiles, glass beads, and cannon fire.' You see, it's a beautiful ellipsis. Smiles - it begins that way, to give the illusion; glass beads - one buys, one doesn't know, slaves for nothing, nothing, with fake wealth; and cannon fire - so that it goes faster.
1:07:42 'The known world was giving birth to a new world.' 'It was a morning of Genesis that took place in mud and in blood.' You see, we find again - that's why I want to say - this universality; it's not only because there is a maternal complex that we all have, I refer here to the video of the third year, fourth episode, fourth lecture, fourth workshop, where I answered a question from Erwan Sturm, who said to me: 'After all, you're talking to us about Nerval' - I had given a long seminar on the reading of Angelique, the first of the Daughters of Fire - and he had said: 'Does everything you're telling us here relate to Nerval's own person, to his life, to his maternal complex?
1:08:41 'What interest is there for us in that?' He had been perfectly right to play devil's advocate, because it allowed me to recall that there is Nerval's mother, whom he never knew - I remind you that she followed his father in the Napoleonic campaigns, so much in love was she, and left the newborn child - which is quite rare - in the hands of nurses, of country nurses, so cousins, aunts, etc. The father and she being thus in eastern Europe amid the carnage, or rather passing through it, from which she never returned, since she is still buried in Poland to this day - and so you see, the woman's body cut up and fragmented does not come from nowhere - but that, apparently, concerns only Nerval himself.
1:09:28 That is Nerval's own mother, but it remains that there is Nerval's mother, and yours, and mine - the singular mother, the biographical mother, and the structural mother, which is also at stake here. This is what great writers do: their particular experience has allowed them to express better than the average of us what is valid for each of us, that is, the fact that the mother is also the one who carries us, who keeps us from falling, who delivers us from the law, from gravity, from the fall.
1:10:02 That's why in all sacred representations of the mother - not of Mahad, or of Tha, or of his mother, of the Virgin Mary, for example, throughout the whole history of Western painting - it is a mother carrying a child. And it's the same with Isis, going back well beyond the Christian tradition, back to the most ancient historical cultures, without going as far back as prehistory. Isis, who is embodied by the water of the Nile, in Egyptian mythology.
1:10:36 And Isis gathers from the water of the Nile the fourteen pieces - you see how we find carnage again - the fourteen pieces of the fragmented phallus of Osiris. This is not something I'm inventing, it's in the lore of ancient Egypt. The sacred couple Isis and Osiris. And yes, Isis is at once the mother and the lover - that would have been Nerval's dream. The mother, the lover, the sister, the mistress, the lover and the mother. In a magnificent poem, Nerval says: 'The thirteenth returns, she is still the first, and she is always the only one' - it's the one and only moment.
1:11:08 'For are you queen, o you, the first or the last' - you see, the first, the mother, or the last, because once you know, it's over. Because once you know it's the twentieth, it's over, she is dead. And the phantom can no longer function, isn't that so? 'For are you queen, o you, the first or the last' - you see the anxiety of the question - 'Are you king, you, the only or the last love? Love who loved you from the cradle to the grave' - pardon - 'She whom I alone loved still loves me tenderly: it is death, or the dead woman - oh delight, oh torment.'
1:11:44 That is universal, isn't that so? It is universal. I've traced it back to Isis, passing through all the Eastern religions, all the maternal goddesses. The mother is what nourishes, what carries, and what forgives. I'll finish just by insisting on the universal mother, on the fact that she forgives. Why is it the mother who is the privileged object of prayer in the Catholic world, since in the Protestant world, of course, the Virgin is not recognized as a central figure.
1:12:22 It's a Corsican speaking to you here, but well, it's true of the whole Mediterranean, for Italy and for Spain too. Why is it the Madonna one prays to? Why is the feast of feasts in Corsica the 15th of August, Saint Mary's Day? And why does the island's anthem also derive from Marian worship? Because, you see, the Trinity is all very well, but the bearded one, God the Father, doesn't look like much fun.
1:12:53 So if I'm pregnant, and I'm an unmarried mother, and I can't tell anyone - I mean, in the Church - I'm not going to turn to that bearded God who doesn't look very indulgent and whose anger is fearsome. I'm not going to turn to his son either. Poor thing, he looks so unhappy that I'm not going to bother him further with my problems. There remains the Madonna - there is someone who listens to you and who understands women.
The people of the mountain and the virtue that has conquered ignorance 1:13:25 So you see, here you have - I won't dwell on it, where are we now, Philippe Moureau? Thank you. So I now come to the third text, because we've seen our two extremes, white and red, isn't that so, of narcissistic purity that dreads the ordeal of blood, that dreads eros, and everything it would imply.
1:13:59 And the other extreme, isn't that so, which goes well beyond eros, all the way to the carnage of the fragmented body - and now I come, isn't that so, to this extraordinary compromise of white and pink in one of the most beautiful dreams in Aurelia. So I move on to the last text, isn't that so? You see, it already begins as a very happy dream, he is in a kind of political solution, historical solution, the opposite of carnage - you see: 'Without asking anything of my guide, I understood by intuition that these heights' - because his guide had led him, made him climb, climb, up to a people who live in the mountains - 'and at the same time its depths were the retreat of the primitive inhabitants of the mountain, still braving the invading flood of the accumulations of new races, they lived there, simple in their ways, loving and just' - you see, it's a kind of political paradise lost - 'skillful, firm and ingenious, and peacefully victorious'
1:15:09 'over the blind masses that had so often invaded their heritage' - they did not let themselves be destroyed, what does that mean? - 'neither corrupted, nor destroyed, nor enslaved, pure, though having conquered ignorance' - because it's easy to be pure when you come out of your mother's womb, when you're white as the newborn lamb, as they say in French - obviously, that kind of purity has no moral merit whatsoever, which is what makes Baudelaire say, in the epigraph to Flowers of Evil, as if he had sensed, had anticipated that one day he would be put on unjust trial, because he said things one is supposedly not allowed to say, and above all that people attributed to him, as he put it: 'They reproach me for the crimes I merely express.'
1:15:54 He quotes this magnificent passage from a poet he greatly admired, and whom I recommend to you, a great Renaissance poet, Agrippa d'Aubigne, who says this - you'll find it, then, as the epigraph of the first edition of Flowers of Evil: 'They say that one must' - meaning the puritans - 'sink these execrable things into the well of oblivion enclosed in darkness.'
1:16:25 In short, that's the partisan of censorship. 'They say that one must sink these execrable things into the well of oblivion enclosed in darkness. But vice has not science for its mother' - and here we're right in the midst of what Nerval says - 'But vice has not science for its mother, and virtue is not the daughter of ignorance.' Because if I were virtuous only because I hadn't yet begun to live, that's not much of a merit. No - the truly virtuous man is Saint Anthony, the one surrounded by monsters tempting him by every erotic means - money, wealth, whatever you like, lust, pleasure - and who resists.
1:17:08 'But vice has not science for its mother, and virtue is not the daughter of ignorance.' I'll close here - alas, interrupting the admirable prose of Agrippa d'Aubigne. 'And what, neither corrupted, nor destroyed, nor enslaved, pure, though having conquered ignorance, preserving in comfort the virtues of poverty.' Well, there you go - at least these aren't ecologists who came back, isn't that so, after years of degrowth in some poor country, 'preserving in comfort the virtues of poverty.'
1:17:44 So, not corrupted by their own wealth. And then, examples, isn't that so, first a pedagogical one: 'A child was amusing himself on the ground with crystals, shells, and engraved stones, no doubt making a game of a study.' Everything seems perfect in this society, even the pedagogy, even the school, isn't that so. 'An elderly but still beautiful woman was attending to the care of the household' - that resembles traditional society more, that it should be a woman in charge of housekeeping. 'At that moment several young people came in noisily, as if returning from their labors.'
1:18:16 'I was surprised to see them all dressed in white, but it seems' - strictly speaking - 'that this was an illusion of my sight. To make it perceptible' - so that means they don't see the things of this world as they really are - 'to make it perceptible, my guide set about sketching their costumes' - the image is extraordinary - 'which he tinted with vivid colors, making me understand that this was how they really were. The whiteness that had surprised me perhaps came from a particular glow, a play of light in which the ordinary shades of the prism blended together.'
Lilies and roses: the end of the vision 1:18:52 'I left the room and found myself on a terrace laid out as a flower bed. There, young girls and children were walking about and playing. Their clothes seemed white to me.' You notice once again a connotation between the red, that is, the blood, and the roses. I come back here to Chretien de Troyes - look at the logic of all this. When he says that the three drops of blood on the snow reminded him of his beloved's face - it was almost a poetic commonplace at the time to speak, for a young girl, of the lilies and roses that were on her cheek.
1:19:28 Lily, because the beautiful woman at that time is the one who does not work; of course, if she is beautiful, it's because she isn't bent over, she doesn't bend her back over the fields, she isn't dark, darkened by the sun, and so she has pale skin. That's what has completely changed with sea bathing - now people say 'you're as white as an aspirin tablet,' and paleness has become a counter-value. That's where we see clearly that it's not skin color that makes beauty but social class, isn't that so, let it be said in passing. So, back to the roses and the lilies. That is, there is paleness, the paleness of the Virgin, the myth, the fantasy of virginity, especially at a time when it mattered so much, given the scarcity of women.
1:20:09 'And against this background of whiteness, emotion came to color the skin with pink,' or with red - hence the roses and lilies on the beloved's cheeks. But here, as soon as we pass from the young men to the young girls, the white takes on a tinge of pink, the whiteness. 'There, young girls and children were walking about and playing. Their clothes seemed white to me like the others, but they were adorned with pink-colored embroidery' - look how the signifier works here, isn't that so?
1:20:39 It comes, with incredible docility, doesn't it? Obeying here the logic that I've tried to unfold. Now, I don't have the continuation here, well, I don't have it here, but I'm going to read it to you because I have it elsewhere. There. Apparently only the ending is missing. There. These persons were so beautiful, their features, that's the end, just a small paragraph is missing, these persons were so beautiful, their features so graceful, and the brilliance of their soul showed through so vividly through their delicate form, that they all inspired a kind of love without preference and without desire, summing up all the intoxications of the vague passions of youth.
1:21:36 One thinks of the admirable, the green paradise of childish loves by Baudelaire. I cannot render the feeling I experienced of these charming beings who were dear to me without my knowing them. It was, listen carefully, like a primitive and celestial family whose smiling eyes sought mine with gentle compassion. I began to weep hot tears as if at the memory of a lost paradise. And there, you see, before Baudelaire, Nerval is always this isolated figure between a romanticism that had gone out of fashion in the mid-nineteenth century and a literary modernity — 1857, publication of Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire, who hasn't yet appeared — the solitude of Nerval, which is indeed part of his madness.
1:22:19 I began to weep hot tears as if at the memory of a lost paradise, a term that would become commonplace from Baudelaire onward and that was explicitly stated there. There, I felt bitterly that I was a passer-by in this world, at once foreign and cherished. So he has found his true homeland and will return to exile upon waking, doesn't he? And I shuddered at the thought that I must return to life. In vain, women and children pressed close.
The health crisis, a screen for a graver crisis 1:22:49 You see, these are the last images and last seconds of his vision. In vain, women and children pressed around me to hold me back, already their ravishing forms were dissolving into confused vapor. Their beautiful faces grew pale, the red turning back to white, and their sharp features, their sparkling eyes, were fading into a shadow where the last flash of a smile still gleamed. There. I'll stop there. Malice of the three titles. I've rarely gone so far, apparently, with these three political references.
1:23:26 I haven't spoken to you about modernity, about absolute knowledge, absolute non-knowledge, counter-revolution and revolution. And yet I would like this series of texts, with the polarity of red and white, to lead us, in this time of confinement when there is time, when one can take some distance, as I have by going back as far as Chrétien de Troyes, to lead us to think that the time is not far off. I don't want to take a prophetic tone, but well, one doesn't need to be a prophet, I'm speaking of the present, not of the future.
1:24:00 We're beginning to guess, we're beginning to guess from several signs that the so-called health crisis is the screen behind which a much more serious crisis is hiding. I'm not minimizing the severity of the health crisis, all the more so since I've been affected through those close to me, I'm not minimizing it, but still, I mean, just within my own generation, I lived through the Hong Kong flu crisis, the Asian flu — these are two things that have nothing to do with each other.
1:24:31 The first was at the end of the fifties, the Asian flu was at the end of the fifties, the Hong Kong flu was about ten years later, there were 40,000 deaths in France alone. In France alone. I'm not even talking about the Spanish flu, which belongs to my grandparents' generation, which caused tens of millions of deaths — we're talking about 100 million deaths — which came originally from the United States and which, via the trenches, spread to Europe and Asia; there were 2 million deaths in China.
1:25:03 In China alone, there were 2 million deaths from the Spanish flu, which raged everywhere except in Spain. But it was called Spanish in order to attach the name of a neutral country, because Spain was not at war, so as not to discourage the poor soldiers in the trenches, right? As if it could only affect Spaniards. So I'm not minimizing the health crisis. I'm saying that having lived in countries where there is Ebola and malaria, where the death toll is incomparably higher than what we're rightly lamenting now.
1:25:33 But activity was not interrupted during crises far more serious than what we're experiencing now. And that doesn't stop leaders — who know very well what I'm saying here, that there have been far more serious crises — from lying shamelessly by saying this is the worst health crisis of all time that we have ever suffered. But the point is to use it to hide the great crisis that is coming. The virus, unfortunately, is not something they invented. It's a terrible reality for the at-risk and vulnerable populations that this virus strikes.
1:26:12 Even though more than 80% of those at great risk are people at least as old as I am, at least as old as me, and who moreover carry what they like to call comorbidities, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, so that in the end one never really knows what actually killed them. Otherwise, in any case — and here I'll be precise — in our country and in Italy, a good number were killed by the scandalous way in which the hospital system was stripped of 130,000 beds.
1:26:45 You saw how the corridors got overcrowded. 130,000 beds, how the industries that manufactured ventilators, which would have saved thousands of lives, and masks, were relocated abroad. Well, a story you already know, let's not get worked up. It's tragic enough as it is. But the real crisis, on the other hand, which the global governance of capital is using — taking advantage of the fact that health concerns everyone — is making people believe it's for our health.
1:27:17 The real crisis, which will reach a first peak in the fall, is the enormous deflationary crisis that is brewing. There are already more than 15 million people registered as unemployed within a few weeks in the United States. That has never been seen at such a speed, even during the crisis of the thirties, at such a speed. All right? So, that's not what I want to develop today, I want to tell you, the time is not far off — I'm coming back to this now — when we clearly sense that there will be an after-the-crisis period, and, this is why I won't prophesy, no one can know how it will turn out.
1:27:59 But what is certain is that if this crisis can be, for us, for all those who are tired of this abomination, of the way it's being managed, if we have the opportunity to start fresh and to produce something new politically, we will have to face this problem of what we want and what we don't want, of revolution and counter-revolution. We will have to lean between these two limits, red and white.
Human desire begins with the superfluous 1:28:30 There, I would like to arrive at this point and I'd like to conclude on it. We'll develop the political answer next time. But you see we weren't so far from it. And to guide you, I would say that I have sufficiently shown that at the root of human desire, and what makes its specificity, is that it is not merely the animal need that we also have. I myself am the first to say that one must eat to live. Well, I'm not the first. I'm neither the last nor the first. But I'm not the only one. But that's not what makes me a human being.
1:29:02 As long as I must eat to live, I am the equal of the ant or the bird. I am not yet a human being. I am not yet humanized. I have not yet painted on cave walls. I have not yet done things that are biologically useless. That is where man begins. Cave man began with the superfluous. It's scandalous to believe it's generous to grant workers in 2020 what people dare to call the minimum living wage.
1:29:35 The minimum living wage was already surpassed by our most distant ancestors, who already had jewelry, necklaces, decoration, and burial rites. Which, biologically, doesn't add much, I'd point out here, to survival. The animal subsists. Only man exists, steps outside himself. So we will need, from there — this means that our desire draws closer to Mallarmé's first text. It must not be only animal.
1:30:06 It must not be bestial. One must not devour. The mouth can not only eat but speak. I'll end just on this consideration from the agrégation de lettres syllabus. A few years ago, the figure of the folktale was on the syllabus, the theme of the tale. And an excellent professor had shown that the figure of the ogre, so recurrent in folktales, often so terrifying — it's terrible for children's ears, I'm not against telling them —
1:30:37 But still, it's a terrible figure. I think of Bluebeard, for instance, where there was so much blood on the walls that one could see one's reflection in it, like Mr. Clean, in the tale itself — that the figure of the ogre would be linked to the function of the mouth hesitating to pass to the phatic phase, as they say in linguistics, that is, to the mouth that speaks, and instead remaining stuck at the mouth that devours.
1:31:08 You see, the carnage between need, drive, what Rousseau in the Social Contract calls — you see we're not far from politics — the impulse of mere appetite, of which Rousseau says that it is not the freedom to satisfy only my needs, it's the exact opposite of freedom. What we call doing what I want is not that at all. The impulse of mere appetite is slavery, says Rousseau, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom. So if I refrain from rushing at the food to say 'serve yourselves first,' after all, it's from that moment that one becomes human.
1:31:46 This swing between these two extremes is what we will have to manage freely and without constraint, isn't it, if the occasion arises, when we get rid of the abominations, right, that for now are deciding in our place. There. I don't know if I've seen any questions appear, I don't think so at this hour of the afternoon.
An ignorance that cannot be learned 1:32:16 Ah, well, if you'd like to display them, I'd be delighted. Ah, I find a question relating to the last session and your comments on Nerval saying that ignorance cannot be learned. In discussions with people around us, for example engineer colleagues who are educated, fairly autonomous in how they run their lives, one notices a real absence in their terms. Yes, but that doesn't surprise me, it's normal, perspective on words isn't taught in engineering schools, and conversely one learns in engineering schools things I'd love to know myself.
1:32:53 As if progress and history didn't exist. Well spotted, Geoffrey. Sometimes this ignorance seems like a real ignorance one would associate more with less educated social milieus and not simply with a repression. If Ignorance with a capital I cannot be learned — I emphasize the capital I because not everyone has the text in front of them — can knowledge conceal itself to the point of taking away the desire to learn, of extracting oneself from oneself, of being a movement of liberation? Well now, there's a question rich in content.
1:33:27 First, I thank Geoffrey, because almost all the points I've tried to develop are very well synthesized here. A very fine distinction between an ignorance — the term is a bit crude, but we understand each other — almost mechanical, for those who haven't had the chance to be in contact with instruction, and yet that's never really ignorance because, I mean, intelligence, for instance, you see, intelligence is so much a value judgment in societies and not a judgment of existence, nothing scientific, that it is a function of the values of a given society at a given time.
1:34:06 In Galileo's time, a law professor was paid a thousand times better than a mathematics professor. Mathematics did not yet have the importance in society that it would later have, when science and technology had not yet undergone the prodigious development they would later achieve, and so it was not a value. And if I go back to the Pygmies — I'll say among the Pygmies — the boy said to be intelligent in Pygmy society is the one who learned faster than another how to shoot with a bow.
1:34:39 Because that is the equivalent of mathematics among the Pygmies — it's the one who will feed his family, the good hunter. And being a good hunter doesn't just mean having legs to run or knowing how to make no noise in the jungle. It requires a great deal of intelligence, a lot of cunning, knowing how to read tracks. There. So there is always a level of knowledge. But the knowledge of the collective corpus, those who haven't had the chance to be in contact with it — Geoffrey is quite right to distinguish it from a non-knowledge that would result from a refusal to want to know.
1:35:18 Knowledge, let me reread what Geoffrey says, can it conceal itself to the point of removing from the subject the desire to learn, to extract himself from himself, to become a moment of liberation? Here, it seems to me — but Geoffrey will confirm or correct me — it seems to me I sense a certain justified anxiety in Geoffrey. The fear that, by dint of repressing knowledge, there might be an irreversible point where the subject no longer feels like it. So I'm going to reassure him and worry him at the same time. I reassure him on the fundamentals.
1:35:48 Even if the subject manages to remove within himself the desire to learn — here I'll use my image of Ulysses — when Ulysses stops sailing, stops being in danger. Then, he learns things about the winds, about the dangers, about how to navigate, how to steer by the stars. Logical. But as soon as things get better, as soon as he arrives on an island, a stopover, as they say in travel agencies, there, a woman welcomes him, it's the delights of Capua, isn't it?
1:36:24 It's Circe, it's Nausicaa, it's Calypso. For a while, he catches his breath. But misfortune catches up with him again. That's where I reassure him and worry him at the same time. That's where Nerval is right to say that ignorance cannot be learned. And where Hegel, in the text I read last time, says that consciousness tries to take refuge in the absence of thought. There's the idyll. But thought comes to disturb the absence of thought. That's where I criticized Aristotle, the immense Aristotle who commits only this one fault, of beginning the Metaphysics with this clumsiness, in quotation marks, plenty of quotation marks.
1:37:04 All men by nature desire to know. I had criticized this by saying yes, all men desire to know, but not for a natural reason, but because they've received a blow to the head. One seeks to know, one seeks to leave ignorance, when circumstances have somehow forced us not to remain the happy fools we were until then. That's how I would answer Geoffrey's question. Are there other questions, Philippe? But you can read them to me too if that's quicker.
1:37:45 There, I can't hear. Yes, that's fine. Hello Mehdi, very glad to see you again.
1:38:21 Again, Mehdi's questions are usually quite rich, quite dense in content. No problem. I have Bosch's painting in front of me, but of course, you can find these images by Bosch, just type Jérôme Bosch, B-O-S-C-H, into Google. Yes, just as alienated, estranged from oneself, but this mysticism of paradise...
Lost paradise, neo-Kantianism, and the romantic night 1:38:53 Ah yes, all right, I'll pick up on today's talk. And this mysticism of the lost paradise, Lost Paradise, Milton, bravo, hasn't it been co-opted by neo-Kantian thought to lend credibility to the idea of an innocence prior to the relation of production, of a substance irreducible to history, of the ideology of restoration, as if romanticism forced us to think dialectically. Now, I'm not sure I understand the last line correctly, because if the word 'dialectically' weren't there, I'd think that Mehdi — sorry to start with the end of his question — was associating romanticism solely with reaction.
1:39:31 I've shown the extraordinary richness of romanticism, which can be the worst kind of reaction, can fuel the worst reaction, especially when it becomes post-romantic, precisely, but which can also, on the contrary, be on the side of radical change and putting an end to class alienation.
1:40:02 There, a small parenthesis. Otherwise, yes, I understand what he means about neo-Kantianism. Let me recall that this is a generic category in Clouscard's critique of contemporary philosophy, particularly in his critique of libertarian liberalism, whose original title was De la modernité, subtitled Rousseau ou Sartre, right? We had Rousseau, why go fetch Sartre? You've heard, we moderns, in the postwar period.
1:40:32 Let me also recall that our comrade Simon Verdun devoted an entire doctoral thesis, within the walls of the École Normale Supérieure — an excellent editor of Clouscard — precisely to the role that the category of the neo-Kantians plays in Clouscard's work, and on that occasion he received the congratulations of the jury; and if I mention it, it's not just to flatter him, but to thank him for the fact that, for the first time, Clouscard was recognized at the most eminent level by the holy of holies, because at Normale Sup, even a thesis defense — elsewhere, third parties are tolerated as attendees — at Normale Sup, not even that, it's held behind closed doors, you see.
1:41:24 So this is serious business, and well, this work on Clouscard, on neo-Kantianism and Clouscard, received the congratulations of the jury. So to answer the question, I mean, yes and no, the category of the lost paradise remains extremely valid — I'd even say, on the contrary, in Heidegger's case. Heidegger has a conception of historicity that breaks with the lost paradise, whereas in Baudelaire and his successors — I'm coming back to the poetic field here, and not the 'poematic,' as Heidegger would say — in Baudelaire and his successors, in the symbolist field, if you prefer, the impressionist field.
1:42:07 I told you last time, and other times before, there's a reference, very rarely made explicit, but manifest — manifest — to Platonism, that is, to a paradise lost in terms of essence, that is, as I said earlier, prior to birth. You know that essence is the truth of being, but a being that is not there, precisely. So it's not within history, it's not the Führer — I say that because Heidegger goes so far as to say that we have a duty of Eros toward the Führer, going so far as to say that the creation of the Panzer Divisionen was one of the greatest creations of Western metaphysics.
1:42:50 And everything he expected from National Socialism. So there, there's a serious taking-into-account of phenomenal reality, which is not the case with what follows from Baudelaire, which always relates to a total elsewhere. Isn't that so? Hence the title of the prose poem I quoted last time, which Baudelaire borrows from Poe, to the point of merely translating it into French — anywhere, out of the world, that's the famous 'Anywhere out of the world'
1:43:21 by Edgar Poe. I'm quite willing to escape, but where to? But anywhere, provided it's out of the world. That doesn't mean into the Third Reich. There. Pierre-Alain, whom I'm happy to greet, as long as he's not far from Mallarmé's glaciers — it's true that these glaciers are warmed by volcanoes, since they lie in that magnificent land that is Iceland.
1:43:52 And he says here, 'Can the extremes of red and white' — before reading the rest, I want to underline the sharpness of Pierre-Alain's eye, which I've seen at work with cameras and which fascinated me by the extreme meticulousness of his work on set — 'Can the extremes of red and white be related to the extremes of night and day?' Which you also often speak of, 'Where pink would be the twilight, the German Romantic night, and the French light.'
1:44:22 Metaphors that allow us to navigate between the revolutions and counter-revolutions in which we are steeped. I am delighted to see how constructed the questions I have to deal with are. Quickly, because there are other questions, but Pierre-Alain's is excellent, because, yes, I wanted to develop, moreover, I will do it another time, when I commented on Hölderlin's poem, "Bread and Wine," with that hymn to the night it exceptionally contains, whereas usually he himself complains that his poetry is cluttered with sun.
1:45:01 Yes, there is a dichotomy of night and day, but it doesn't quite overlap with that of red and white, because if you look closely, there, it's no longer black and white, it's red and white today. There's a violence that wasn't there before, because there can be a nocturnal carnage too. I mean, watch out, and among those who chose the night, they often chose carnage. I'm going a bit fast here, but very quickly, I say it for those interested, I'm thinking in particular of my Marxist listeners, there's a website called "The Friends"
1:45:41 of Georg Lukács, where there is a great documentary abundance, where there's a magnificent text by Lukács called "Hegel and German Fascism." That is, how the official philosophical thought of the Third Reich, the philosophers who were put in place by the regime, right? And precisely to counter, Pierre-Alain is right, the French Enlightenment, it's true there's a dichotomy between the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment and the German Romantic night, Novalis's Hymns to the Night.
1:46:18 And it's no coincidence that Nerval took part in both, since he was a great translator from German. And it's true that pink is the color of dusk, and it's good not to stick to that in-between. That in-between, the dusk between dog and wolf, isn't it? We need more clarity and univocity. There. I'll come back to it because the question is rich. He adds at the end, "Chekhov's The Seagull also begins with that white bird killed."
1:46:52 When I told you that our bloodied ornithology was inexhaustible, of course, how did I not think of it? Thank you, Pierre-Alain. Isn't it? That masterpiece that is Chekhov's The Seagull, I presume all this must be on Wikisource, but anyway, the translation. But when you go to the theater, the theater that specializes in Chekhov's repertoire in Moscow, there's the model of an owl drawn on the street at the theater's entrance. I'll move on to Mohamed Berkba.
The reconciliation of presence and truth 1:47:24 I'm trying to manage with the consonants, and may he forgive my pronunciation. Hello, dear Mr. Pagani. You have often quoted this line from Nerval, "To make the griffin of the sea rise and the crane of the sky descend." Does this mean that the griffin and the crane are bound to meet, to touch, or even to fuse? And if so, what name does this point of meeting, of contact, bear among philosophers, poets, or in history? Well, if I knew that, I'd be well off.
1:47:56 It remains a task for Nerval, to bring them together. Yes, indeed, the goal is to find a balance between the high and the low. As we've seen throughout today's session, we need a balance between the voracity of red and the excessive abstinence of white. This makes me think, moreover, I forgot to mention it earlier, that Rousseau says in Julie, or the New Heloise, forgive me for smiling, it's indeed the patriarchal societies of the time, and it's indeed a Swiss man speaking, that the woman eats white where the man eats red.
1:48:33 Especially the Swiss woman, she eats dairy, cream, petits suisses. Whereas the man is fond of meat, you see, of game. There. So there's an even distribution of the sexes there. So, yes, to touch, even to fuse. What is certain is that, for instance, at the end of the Old Testament, I mention this text because I know it a bit better than others, but I mean, the fact that the heavenly Jerusalem ceases to be heavenly as it descends to become earthly is an illustration of the fusion Mohamed is alluding to here.
1:49:20 It would be reconciliation, to answer his last question. What name does this point of meeting, of contact, bear among philosophers, poets, or in history? Well, it's not a proper name, it's not a place name. I told myself that's not what he expects from me, that it would be some magic name. But instead, the concept that contains this fusion would be reconciliation, and here are the two terms that remain separate and that must be reconciled: presence and truth. Either we have a presence around us but one that lacks truth, for which we must seek its reason for being, or we have a truth but one that is beyond, my kingdom is not of this world, for example, and in Islam too, God is transcendent.
1:50:04 So we lack, don't we, this reconciliation of presence and truth, and you have a magnificent conclusion to Hegel's chapter on mastery and servitude, where he develops, doesn't he, the famous theme of the unhappy consciousness. Sorry, excuse me, of the master and the slave, there, there.
1:50:48 Sorry, there. There. Look, these are exactly the two terms that must be united. Thus, for us, the concept of spirit is already present, already, because it will be developed in the second volume, it's no longer consciousness, it's already spirit, the collective. What will come later for consciousness, there's a whole program, is the experience of what spirit is, it's the complete opposite of a little wisp of smoke, this absolute substance which, in the perfect freedom and independence of its opposition, that is, of diverse self-consciousnesses, we see that spirit is the collective, it's the same thing, diverse self-consciousnesses being for themselves constitute their unity.
1:51:39 Two points: an I that is a We, I and We are underlined, an I that is a We and not a They, and a We that is an I, in self-consciousness as the concept of spirit, consciousness attains, implicitly, finally, the moment of its turning point. From there, listen carefully, this answers Mohamed's question, it makes its way, you'll see, out of the two extremes, out of the colorful appearance of the this-side, what I called presence without truth, the bling-bling, the colorful appearance of the sensible this-side, but also out of the empty night of the beyond, the empty night of the suprasensible beyond, in order to enter, listen carefully, into the spiritual day of presence.
1:52:27 There's my conclusion. And thank you for your questions. I admire the intelligent construction.
