English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The economic crisis behind the epidemic 0:00 Good evening, dear friends. Always very happy, more and more happy to be with you again. Time is long. It seems that for a lucky few of you, it's soon going to be over. I say that because, apparently, for everyone, but for example, for those who, like me and others, are in the Ile-de-France region, I won't be able to go very far. No more than a radius of 100 kilometers at the moment we have wings. All right, let's not dwell on that because we've got quite a lot on our plate.
0:37 I confess to you that I'm a bit overwhelmed this time, overwhelmed by current events which are accelerating. I have rarely seen what's happening right now. It's really unprecedented. But no, no, I'm not talking about... They keep telling you, you don't need me for that, that this is the most serious health crisis of all time. Which is completely false, I mean. Maybe I myself, on my scale — I wasn't born in the time of Vercingetorix, but even on my scale, I mean, I've known some major epidemics.
1:13 Pandemics, as we say now. The Asian flu. I was very young. Pre-teen. 40,000 deaths, in France alone. The Hong Kong flu later. Well before me, in my grandparents' time, I won't even go into it, but the Spanish flu, that was tens of millions of deaths. I mean, we're saying all sorts of nonsense. So it's not because I say there have been worse ones that I'm minimizing the danger.
1:46 No, but there is a danger, there is a danger, yes, as every year, there's a flu that kills. In particular, I have all the less reason to minimize it since I'm more concerned than you are, given my age group. But I'm talking about the crisis that's being hidden by this one, and which is much more exceptional. And personally, well, I mean, not only have I never seen it, but anyway, never mind that subjective judgment. I've heard some media outlets that talk about nothing else, that specialize in economic media.
2:21 Just this morning, one was saying that it seemed unbelievable barely two weeks ago, but it appears that in the United States we're going to break the absolute record for the peak number of unemployed reached in the 1930s, the worst depression in the history of capitalism. That is, 24.7% of the population unemployed in the United States. We're on the verge of it by September. It's not far from surpassing that.
2:51 Listen, that's something to watch. If you see it go past 24%, toward 25, you'll know you're living through history. Things are speeding up. Now, this crisis didn't just come out of nowhere all at once. Oh look, there's the coronavirus and suddenly, without time to think about it, there's the economic crisis. No, you don't need to be exceptionally clever to understand that it's the other way around. Those responsible, those who decide the rates of world currency, to put it quickly, have known for a long time that we're heading toward a crash.
3:30 In fact, many of you have heard it, haven't you? Sometimes even in the media, oh dear, we're heading toward the big one, as they say, you know, like the earthquake that's supposed to one day flatten Los Angeles and San Francisco in a few seconds. In terms of probability, I don't wish for it. People fear the economic and financial big one, which is even worse than the last one, the 2008 one — considerably worse, since to get out of 2008 they called in the firefighters who, with enormous fire hoses, have done nothing but pour, every single second since 2008, day and night, tons and tons, millions of liters of gasoline onto the fire to put it out.
Conspiracy theory, the Atlanticist camp and the crisis of the 1930s 4:16 This is not a metaphor, it's not an exaggerated hyperbole on my part. No, no. This is really what's happening. So there's a gigantic bubble that has to burst sooner or later. They know this very well. And now they have a golden opportunity. Now I'm moving into conspiracy theory territory. Well, into what our leaders call conspiracy theory. Let me restate my position on conspiracy theory. There are now only two political theories in discourse. There's the official theory. As soon as you deviate from it by a millimeter, you're into conspiracy theory. That's how I see things.
4:49 The conspiracy theory means you shouldn't believe things are being hidden from us. But this would be the first time in human history that those in power hid nothing from us. Do you think Louis XIV told the first person who came along, 'Yes, here's what I'm going to say to the King of Spain when he comes to send an embassy to me tomorrow'? Nonsense. The nature of power — the higher up you go, the more true this is — is to be diplomatic. I knew an excellent diplomat who had been a cultural attaché in Ivory Coast at one time.
5:20 He was the third-ranking official at the embassy, a cultural attaché. But very important in intelligence matters. Anyway. And his daughter, he had a little eight-year-old girl, had asked him, 'Papa, what's a diplomat?' He had answered — it made me laugh, it happened in front of me, during a business meeting, it was about a story of school textbooks that he was buying from us, from me, for the Hachette group, at that time, courtesy of your taxes. It was France offering that to Ivory Coast.
5:50 So he answered his daughter, 'A diplomat is someone who lies for the good of his country.' You see? It goes without saying. But now, apparently, that makes you a conspiracy theorist. But no. It's really extraordinary, all the same. Well, anyway. Yes, so the virus crisis — I'm not saying they caused it. That would already be falling a bit into a paranoid version. I'm not saying they created the virus in a lab. Nothing is excluded.
6:20 Well, it's very unlikely to be true, it seems. Let's stay cool-headed in our thinking. But, on the other hand, I would say, an epidemic arising — they found the right media-political use for it: to bring a population to heel as has never been done in the camp. Isn't it strange, the camp most affected by these lockdowns is, as it happens, the so-called Western camp. I prefer to say the Atlanticist camp, it's more precise.
6:50 Since there have been lockdowns in Japan too. Japan is not particularly the West. It is, however, one of the pillars of the Atlantic Alliance. It's the greatest military and economic power in Asia, apart from China, within the Atlantic — Atlanticist, sorry, not Atlantic — sphere. There, you see, it's a good concept, Atlanticist. I don't say the American camp. Of course, the United States is the flagship of the Atlanticist fleet.
7:20 But still, as I've said often, you can be, I don't know, Togolese, Polish, or Polish — there's even a good chance they're Atlanticist. Baltic, a Baltic country, they say, you have to understand them. They suffered so much from the Russians. Sorry? In the Baltic countries, it's the 300,000 Jews who were handed over by the Baltic countries when they were not yet in the Soviet Union, when they were independent, handed over to the Gestapo.
7:52 And there were 200,000 Soviets who died during the war to liberate the Baltic countries. And in Lithuania, there was a war memorial, a Soviet monument, which was torn down, and a statue was erected of a former SS man who, for his part, was second to none in matters of deportation. And afterward, they tell you, you have to understand, they suffered. Yes, there are others who suffered under their rule, under the Nazis, who have found, mind you, an audience and power again, from Ukraine to the Baltic states.
8:26 Yes, when I speak of Poland, that's the Atlanticist camp. Well, that's not my main subject. In the foreground here is the crisis — the one from the 1930s, you know how it was resolved. It wasn't really a solution, it was resolved by 50 million deaths in the Second World War. And when it began, one must never forget that the New Deal, put in place by Roosevelt, to go quickly, and which had begun to produce positive effects, was still far from having absorbed all the battalions of the unemployed.
9:03 You see, it was really the war industry and the mobilization of the arms industry that purged the crisis. Meanwhile, on the other side, the Soviet Union was setting up the five-year plans, which meant that within a few years the Soviet Union went from a medieval, rural, backward economy, not so long before the revolution, to the second-largest industrial power in the world.
9:36 At the same time, so at that time — you find it hard to imagine that now. It's so much the opposite of what we're living through now. At the time, the Western European intelligentsia had an attraction to Marxism. When I say it's the opposite, in the United States too — that's the era when, you don't know where... Look at Chaplin's Modern Times, when he picks up his red flag and becomes... he's taken for a leader because he wants to catch up with the truck that lost the red flag signaling a load in the dump truck, you see.
10:12 Remember. And remember the Cambridge network, for those of you who know a bit about espionage stories. I'm talking about espionage history and the most spectacular case in history. I'm thinking of the Philby network. Look it up. P-H-I-L-B-Y. You won't be disappointed. Because this is serious, this isn't cinema. Philby, the so-called Cambridge group. He was the main one. He was... Philby, an honorable subject of His Majesty, was in fact responsible for the Intelligence Service.
10:45 And in charge of relations between the Intelligence Service and the CIA. Well, this same Philby was the principal Soviet agent in the West. You see, there was the whole Cambridge group, favored by the disaffection with capitalism caused by the crisis. Regarding this absurd spectacle, it's an economist of the time speaking, referring to the United States, of crowds starving to death in front of overflowing granaries.
11:15 We're not there yet. But I've learned that there are 18 million unemployed in the United States. In 15 days, now. We've never seen it happen at such speed. We're at 18 million registered. Right? People apply... there's no Pôle emploi. It's not... it's the American unemployment agencies. It's 18 million. We're far from September. There you go.
Reading the postface to Capital: the general crisis 11:46 When I say that it's going... I'm a bit overwhelmed by the speed at which the news is moving. You understand? So, I was in Nerval, I was in Chrétien de Troyes, in Perceval. Because you'll say I've jumped from one thing to another, from one live session to the next. I have the right, because it's a bit informal, it's live. But no, not at all. Not at all. I'm still going to act as if I were jumping from cock to donkey, that is, talking about Marx and not about a poet. I'm going to begin, you see, I believe you've been shown some texts by Marx.
12:18 I'm going to take the last lines of Marx's text, the last paragraph of the two Marx texts you have. The one that begins with 'the contradictory movement of capitalist society.' It's a final paragraph. There, I'm going to read it, it's very quick.
12:52 But let me point out that this is late Marx, roughly speaking, from Marx's last period. Since it's taken from the afterword to Capital, to the second edition of Capital. You see? So I'm reading you this paragraph, without further ado, for now.
13:31 So, I'm going down here. The contradictory movement of capitalist society, you see, this is the last paragraph, makes itself felt by practical bourgeois in the most striking way, through the vicissitudes of the periodic cycle through which modern industry passes, the culminating point of which is the general crisis. Good grief! It's as if Marx were listening in. No, because people keep telling you, but what's he going to tell us? Marx is outdated, modern economics, Marx, he couldn't have known the Internet.
14:02 You see, that's what they tell you. He couldn't have known the shift from the industrial economy — that's all he knew, Manchester, England — he doesn't know the financial economy. Let's finish this paragraph. Already we see the return of these prodromes — that means these warning signs of the general crisis. I told you, we're not even at the September return yet, already we see the return of these prodromes, it is approaching again, meaning it wasn't the first time. I say this for those interested — check it — this was written around '67, so you'd have to look at the 1870s, the crisis Marx is announcing is going to break out, it's going to be one of the worst of the 19th century.
14:45 Already we see the return of these prodromes, it is approaching again through the universality of its field of action — that is, all sectors are affected — and the intensity of its effects, it will make dialectics enter — here he's being ironic — into the very heads of the profiteers who have sprung up like mushrooms in the new Prusso-German Holy Empire. Because at that time, Prussia is in the process of building German unity, but it hasn't yet produced what we now call Germany, that's only a few years away, under Chancellor Bismarck.
15:25 So you see, it will make dialectics enter. What is he being ironic about here? About the fact that things move, dialectics, movement, in things thought to be eternal and untouchable, right? We were told, when the Berlin Wall fell, you know, Fukuyama, the Japanese-American economist who said it, that it's the end of history, there you go. There had been an anomaly, that was the Soviet world; now we've reached perfection, liberal societies, there's no more reason for anything to evolve except quantitatively — yes, well, there you go.
15:59 That was before the twin towers, already, in the exploitation, like the coronavirus, in the political-media exploitation — I'm not saying it was Americans who brought down the towers, no, but whoever brought them down, the exploitation of the attack allowed for an invasion, one that the UN hadn't even approved, of Iraq, for weapons of mass destruction which everyone now knows didn't exist.
16:31 Yes, this is all serious, what we're talking about. Here, I'm not in conspiracy territory, this is now an established fact. So, the extremely famous image, isn't it, of the Secretary of State at the time, of Defense, who showed the little vial at the UN to demonstrate the dangers — Paul, Colin Powell, thank you — who probably would rather have done without telling that lie, well, that's another story.
17:08 He was under orders to show the danger, wasn't he, of Saddam Hussein's weapons. Now you can put the virus in there, you shake it up, of the... We'll come back to terror, but here I'm getting ahead of myself, that's when we'll look at the texts of Nietzsche and Heidegger, the importance of the tactic of stunning effect used by National Socialism. Well, let me reread this paragraph. The contradictory movement of capitalist society makes two definite things felt by the bourgeoisie — that's dialectical, two main things.
Contradiction and movement: Marx and Hegel 17:41 We're not done with dialectics, but we need to grasp at least two things when we say dialectics. That's contradiction and movement. I'd even say movement because of contradiction. The contradictory movement of capitalist society makes itself felt by practical bourgeois in the most striking way through the vicissitudes of modern industry through its periodic cycle, whose culminating point is the general crisis. Already we see the return of its prodromes. You see, I'm starting with this paragraph, with the last text of what I gave you, because it was the most relevant to today.
18:15 I'd say this is exactly the moment we're living through. It is approaching again through the universality of its field of action and the intensity of its effects. It will make dialectics enter into the very heads of the profiteers who have sprung up like mushrooms in the new Prusso-German Holy Empire. There, in NATO we'd say now. So I'll take the paragraph above to explain why he talks about dialectics. You see?
18:45 And at the same time, this is a paragraph I ask those who make the effort to think about, one of the difficult problems of theoretical philosophy. I mean the relationship between Hegel and Marx, Marx and Hegel — I've said before there are four sets of issues that form a tangle of difficulties. There are others in the history of philosophy, but this is the most difficult. There's the relationship of Aristotle to Plato.
19:15 The relationship of Descartes to his immediate successors, to Leibniz and Spinoza. The relationship of Hegel to Kant, and the relationship of Marx to Hegel. I'll go quickly. Now, if there's something — sometimes Marx criticizes Hegel, especially the very young Marx — he's never as negative toward Hegel as when he's not yet Marx, when he still has Feuerbach, who is a naturalist, libertarian. He was right. You have to have gone through revolt, been a revolutionary, otherwise it's not worth it.
19:47 But there's a long road that leads from revolt to revolution. It was Merleau-Ponty who said, 'If philosophers were merely rebels, they would shock people less.' For after all, everyone knows — I'm still quoting Merleau-Ponty, it's in In Praise of Philosophy — for everyone knows, deep down, that the world isn't as it should be, even if they forget it once they come to power, as with Socrates. You hear that? Socrates is a true revolutionary. It's more serious. So, as he advanced in his path, Marx grew closer and closer to the old man, as he familiarly called him in his correspondence with Engels.
20:35 And here he refines, as rarely before, and in the final state of his thought — as I said earlier — his relationship to Hegel. So I'm reading this passage for two reasons: first, to clarify the occurrence of the term 'dialectic' in the first paragraph I read, and second, to raise once more the problem of the Hegel-Marx relationship — we won't settle it today, but we'll pose it again along lines a bit more faithful, at least, to the text than the chatter usually heard.
21:11 I criticized the mystical side of Hegelian dialectics nearly 30 years ago. Yes, I was harsh on Hegel 30 years ago. At a time when he was still fashionable. Good politics, Marx. He criticizes Hegel when Hegel is used by those in power to justify the powers that be. Victor Cousin, who invited Hegel to Paris, which meant Hegel spent a few days in Paris, on Rue de Tournon.
21:45 He lived there. Anyway, I laugh because he dreamed of being introduced to an actress. Paris is Paris. A famous actress. Victor Cousin told him, 'Watch out for your Swabian accent.' But let's leave the anecdote aside. So, Victor Cousin used Hegel to bolster the powers of Guizot, the most reactionary powers, because 'the real is rational,' and so, one might say, well yes, if the real is rational, that's a way of justifying everything that exists.
22:16 We'll start with us, with those in power. I criticized the mystical side of the Hegelians nearly 30 years ago, and not because it was still fashionable. But, although thanks to his misunderstanding — remember that word, Hegel is a man of misunderstanding, it's interesting, that is, you have to be careful when reading Hegel — but although thanks to his misunderstanding, Hegel disfigures dialectics through mysticism, so he doesn't give up saying there's mysticism in Hegelian dialectics, even 30 years later.
22:46 it's nonetheless him who did it first, and no one before him. That's not neo-conscious, that's Marx. The first to have set out first the overall movement, a total development of the concept of dialectic. In his case, this is very famous, it's standing on its head. You just have to turn it back on its feet — implying, to be a Marxist — to find it a perfectly reasonable physiognomy.
23:19 And here he clarifies further what he has just said. You just have to turn it back on its feet, under its mystical aspect. The dialectic became a fashion in Germany. And here he clarifies — the last paragraph I started by reading. Because it seemed to glorify existing things. Nothing moves. The dialectic justifies stopping things as they are. Because what is is rational. That is its mystical aspect.
23:49 Under its rational aspect, in Hegel it's never really settled, that's the misunderstanding right there. Under its rational aspect, the dialectic is a scandal and an abomination for the ruling classes and their doctrinaire ideologues. Althusser, Deleuze — I'll come back to this, it's very precise here. I'm not talking about Deleuze offhandedly. It is a scandal for the ruling classes and their doctrinaire ideologues because in the positive conception of existing things, it includes at the same time the understanding of their negation.
24:25 there was the word positive, now we're at negation. Pay attention to this text. I repeat, under its rational aspect, it is a scandal and an abomination for the ruling classes and their doctrinaire ideologues because in the positive conception of existing things, it includes at the same time the understanding of their fatal negation. When you work through the dialectic in Hegel properly, you notice that nothing is made to last in this domain. And especially not the Holy Alliance that reigned at the time to terrorize any inclination to return to revolutionary ideas.
25:01 So, under its rational aspect, it is a scandal. I'm skipping ahead — it includes at the same time the understanding of their fatal negation, of their necessary destruction — fatal, necessary, because grasping the very movement — so you understand why he said at the end, in the last paragraph, that thanks to the crisis, everything is going to be set back in motion, and so it will bring the crisis, the dialectic, into the very heads of the swindlers, you see, it's clearer now.
25:34 So, I come back to the second-to-last paragraph: it includes at the same time the understanding of their fatal negation, of their necessary destruction because, of existing things, because grasping the very movement of which every finished form is only a transitory configuration — this is pure Marx-Hegel — what Hegel calls a moment, a door handle you're turning, you see, up to the right and down to the left, or the reverse, depending on whether you're closing or opening — the very movement of which every finished form is only a transitory configuration, nothing could impose itself on it, since it is essentially the critical and revolutionary dialectic.
Althusser and Deleuze against the dialectic 26:18 So why did I dwell on this a bit? Because after all we're supposed to be doing philosophy, even if we touch on many subjects and many fields — in which I have very uneven competence. But why? Because I come back to what he calls the ruling classes and their doctrinaire ideologues. I mentioned Althusser — I've only named two, I recall there are plenty of others. But because Althusser, who is surely the most illustrious Marxist in the intelligentsia of the last 40 years, Althusser did everything to decouple Marx and Hegel — that's his right, after all.
26:59 But one of the things he leaves to Hegel, and which he says Marx has nothing to do with, is the dialectic. Dixit Althusser. He says something that almost reverses what we just read, namely that Marx was perhaps vaguely Hegelian when he was young, whereas we've just seen it's the opposite. He was never more hostile — he just recalled it. I criticized Hegel's mystical side almost 30 years ago, when it was still fashionable. Now, what Hegel says about the dialectic — that bothers people.
27:32 Well. So, for Althusser, saying about the dialectic — it's what remained of the mystical, it must be gotten rid of. As for Deleuze, he speaks of the infamous dialectic. In general, resorting to dialectical logic means resorting to something infamous. On the other hand, we'll see Nietzsche in a moment — on the other hand, mention Nietzsche to Deleuze, and there, he already finds his smile again. And you'll see at what political cost, and the connection with the crisis we're living through.
28:04 But yes, but yes, but yes. We're not there yet. I'm still on the Deleuze-Althusser pairing, and I'll come back for a moment to Althusser. So, as I told you, for him there was something that must be abandoned if one wants to understand the real Marx, the one of Capital. Whereas we've just seen that, no doubt, Marx never praised the dialectic in such a univocal way as in his last writings, his final efforts to write Capital, since this is the afterword to its second edition.
28:45 The work I have already entirely completed. So, since we're going to find a fierce anti-Hegelianism in both Heidegger and Nietzsche, whom I don't want to deal with — I'll just allude to it — I told you I was overwhelmed by current events, they're moving so fast, and that's why I started by launching into the crisis we've entered, which is still far from having reached the peak of its effects, in order to finish with the last paragraph I read first.
Heidegger, the most Nazi of philosophers; Jünger and Céline 29:29 It's not the only one — I'm not so overwhelmed that I'm jumping from one thing to another with no connection — I'm linking up with the last live session, if you'll allow the globish, from last Sunday, and yet I feel like we've gone from one world to another — we were in Nerval, Chrétien de Troyes, the three drops of blood on the snow, the roses and the lilies, the white, the red, Mallarmé's swan, and now we're far from the crisis.
30:05 Well, listen, let's come back now to the beginning of the first of our texts, that is, Domenico Losurdo's text. If you look closely. There's the text. Sorry. I can see it there. This text is titled — it's a long article, a pamphlet called Heidegger and the Resignation of German Philosophy.
30:44 Implying, at the time of the Third Reich. One of the greatest philosophical and theoretical traditions in the history of Europe, German philosophy, resigned. We're not so far from Marx. Marx was rooted in this philosophy, German philosophy, Hegel, I don't know, from his own research. Now, here, you see, I'm starting with this text where Nietzsche reflects on...
31:31 I'm not at the beginning, this isn't the beginning. There. No. So it starts with... 'Among the intellectuals too refined to dirty their hands' with the Third Reich, that's how it starts. It's indeed Domenico Losurdo's article. That's Marx.
32:05 Yes, that's fine, that was good — Carl Schmitt, there. Because we're going to see that... All right. Oh well, it doesn't matter, I have it anyway. But if it's online, that's fine. So I'm starting right away with the paragraph that begins with 'Among the intellectuals too refined to dirty their hands with the Third Reich' — so not everyone was engaged as frantically, as extremely — let's find the word — as Heidegger was alongside the Third Reich, we'll see.
32:50 Yes, well — you know there are still people arguing about whether Heidegger was a Nazi or not. Some even find it scandalous to suspect he was a Nazi. Whereas I place myself not beyond that — I wouldn't allow myself that at all — but completely off to the side of that debate, saying it's not a matter of knowing whether he was a Nazi or not, he's the most Nazi of the philosophers. Of the great ones — there are minor figures, you'll find them in Losurdo's text — it's not already somewhat forgotten that Hitler had appointed people in the universities, I'm thinking of Baeumler, of Krieck, people like that.
33:27 No, but that's not the point, or Rothacker. He's the one who goes the furthest — not at all. Look, he resigned from his post in 1934, he resigned from his post as rector at Freiburg, which would seem to prove how much he disagreed — but it's the opposite, he resigned because he was too extremist and found there was too much compromise between the administration, between the policy the party was imposing on the university, and that he couldn't speak as freely as he wanted to, about what?
34:01 We shall see, because if there are those who doubt he's a Nazi after all this, they need only measure themselves against these texts. But here, you see, he doesn't talk about Heidegger right away, he talks about several people — Heidegger of course, but also Ernst Jünger, a great writer. Now, one must be fair — he was in favor, practically as a high-ranking officer who fought in the war of 1914. This is the tradition of the reactionary Prussian conservative, of which there were plenty in the Wehrmacht, except that there were often tensions between this conservative tradition and the Nazis, who were a modernist avant-garde for these people.
34:48 Right? So, Ernst Jünger — before reading his passage, I recommend you search Google for Jünger, J-U-N-G-E-R, with an umlaut, otherwise it's Jung — Jünger, Céline, put the two together, and you'll come across an article where Jünger, who is on a mission in Paris, is an occupier, he was assigned to some administrative service in occupied Paris, and there's a request for an audience from a Frenchman he doesn't know, who is Céline — I'm laughing, but it's appalling.
35:28 And he says, 'but who is this madman?' He sees a Frenchman arrive and says — so what were we doing? They're there, the Jews, still all over Rue de Rivoli, still in their apartments, but it's with the bayonet that they must be finished off, don't you realize, their children will be the main danger you'll have to face. He says, but who is this madman? A Wehrmacht officer on a mission, under the Third Reich.
Jünger: the voluptuousness of blood and the white peril 36:01 I say this for those who claim Céline is the greatest writer of all time. Let's calm down. We're coming out of a strange period. I do mean, we're only coming out of it thanks to the crisis — that's its only positive aspect for now — but we are coming out of this nightmare of the last 40 years. I'll read the text: Among the intellectuals too refined to dirty their hands with the Third Reich — for he broke outright with the Nazis as early as Kristallnacht, which Heidegger alludes to — was perhaps Ernst Jünger, who, even though he had contributed to their rise to power — he keeps saying 'the Third Reich' — had never adhered to Nazism.
36:43 However, Jünger too, long after the end of the war, still credited Nazism with the merit of having expressed, at first, a whole series of correct ideas. You see, he broke with it, but he had been quite close to it. Let's see what remains 'correct.' Look: to the point that he only truly distanced himself from it starting with Kristallnacht, that is, the end of 1938. During the Weimar Republic, referring to the First World War, Jünger had come to celebrate the voluptuousness of blood and the soul-state drunk on roses and blood.
37:22 Good heavens! And that's really the word for it — good heavens! I told you we weren't far from Nerval. Do you remember the carnage, Nerval's nightmare vision in his cell, where they put him because he was delirious? When he sees in the mirror the corpses of women from every era, slaughtered, the body of the eternal mother hacked to pieces with a saber, and where the red ends up invading the whole screen — whereas in Mallarmé's text, everything was white until we see a text where the two try to find a compromise in embroideries of roses on a white background.
38:00 If you remember well, you see there's a continuity — but listen, I'm not inventing anything. During the Weimar Republic, referring to the First World War — I remind you that the Weimar Republic — I always feel obliged to clarify, seeing how much your curricula have been lightened. I'm addressing the younger ones here, those still in high school. Because everything that could be compromising for today's powers has been removed, right? So, the Weimar Republic was Germany's last government before the entirely democratic accession of the Third Reich to power, before Hitler became chancellor.
38:46 '33. So, during the Weimar Republic, referring to the First World War, Jünger had come to celebrate the voluptuousness of blood and the soul-state drunk on roses and blood, in which German youth and the volunteers had welcomed the outbreak of the conflict. That seems monstrous to you, doesn't it? And here we are talking about someone who broke with Nazism, who is not an extremist like Heidegger. Ah, but Heidegger isn't a Nazi, since even Mr. Chapoutot tells you so.
39:16 I'll come back to that. I have great admiration for Chapoutot, but there are also weak points. So, 'in which German youth and the volunteers had welcomed the outbreak of the conflict.' But here is the balance sheet of the war and the massacre that Jünger draws up after 1945. Now, watch out — this is Jünger, who did indeed break away from the Nazis, but who says the following: the Greeks fighting the barbarians. This is not about Greeks fighting each other, this is not the Peloponnesian War.
39:46 The Greeks fighting the barbarians. So, it's not Athens against Sparta, it's not the Peloponnesian War. It's of course about the Persian Wars. The Medes are the Persians of that time. The barbarians, that's Asia. We'll come back to this when we see Heidegger — I'm keeping up with current events. It will tell us the enemy is the Asiatic. You hear that every day. It's China that got us into this mess with this virus. In fact, it's a close thing that they didn't just say it manufactured this virus, in Wuhan, in a laboratory. I was 8 years old when I already heard talk of the yellow peril.
40:27 Yes, we were right in the middle of the Indochina War, you'll tell me. I already heard talk of the yellow peril because China was tipping over into communism, with whatever you like. So, the yellow peril, maybe, who knows, maybe it is a peril, but it's a hypothesis. But what is not a hypothesis is the white peril. It's the white peril. Because of the opium war the English imposed on them, forcing the Chinese to take opium because they had the monopoly on it, the English.
40:58 But yes, the Boxer War, the sacking of the Imperial Palace in Beijing. Find out how the Westerners obscenely wallowed in the holy of holies of Chinese tradition. I'm not even talking about the Korean War. 3 million dead, mere trifles, after all, they're yellow.
41:28 That's always fewer, after all. 3 million dead in the Vietnam War. 17 million dead caused by the Japanese fascists allied with the Germans in China. So, I don't know if maybe the yellow peril is a hypothesis that can be defended. But what is not a hypothesis, and is a reality, is the white peril, in China and in Asia. I'm not even talking about Afghanistan, which hasn't stopped being bloodied since before most of those listening to me were even born.
41:59 Right. So, the Greeks fighting against the barbarians, that is, the Persians, so the Asiatics, and the Christians against the pagans, the Crusades, followed crueler norms. Wait, wait. That means when the Greeks fought each other, it was chivalrous and courteous, is that it? And among Christians, it's well known the Hundred Years' War must have been courteous. Yes. One really mustn't look at things too closely. But, implicitly, it's from the barbarians that cruelty was learned.
The war in the East and the hatred of the revolutionary tradition 42:31 You see? You can feel Stalingrad coming. The Greeks fighting against the barbarians and the Christians against the pagans followed crueler norms. In the course of the last war, the Germans waged a different kind of campaign on the eastern front. Here we are — the greatest human clash of all time. The confrontation between Slavs and Germans, I would say — these people — through the confrontation between the Red Army and the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, which was the most fierce, the bloodiest in civilian and military deaths, in material, in the number of cities destroyed, all of it in the Soviet Union, of course.
43:15 So, in the end, Germany took a beating. And yes, but on this occasion, the Germans encountered people, barbarians. The 'Popov' is a barbarian, isn't he. The Greeks fighting against the barbarians and the Christians against the pagans followed crueler norms. In the course of the last war, the Germans waged a different kind of campaign on the eastern front and on the western front, and not only because of the difference in terrain. You see, Losurdo, a genius of source-hunting.
43:48 He knows the texts with which one can trap and pin down those who say one thing and then say the opposite a few years later when it becomes compromising, right? He follows the trail and he pins the date. I'll skip a few lines, and he says this: So, Jünger seems to criticize Hitler mainly because, I quote, in the final months of the war, he supposedly wanted to notify the Western powers of the denunciation of the Geneva Convention.
44:23 This would have meant extending to the western front the conduct of war adopted on the eastern front. Well, one can do an Oradour-sur-Glane in France, an act of barbarism, because barbarism was learned from the Popovs. But then what is the cause of this barbarization of war that was also looming in the West? Far more than Nazism, Jünger accuses the revolutionary political tradition. Mind you — not just the Soviet communists, but the revolution stemming from the storming of the Bastille.
44:55 It's your fault for being republican. You think I'm making this up, but read on. And above all, for erasing the distinction between those who are armed and those who are not. Three great moments have led us to where we are. The Reformation, that's Luther, the French Revolution of '89, and the Russian Revolution of '17, which is still ongoing when Jünger writes these lines, of course.
45:27 There, this last theme is developed by Carl Schmitt. I won't dwell on Carl Schmitt, who is the most Nazi of the great jurists, right? He had a very close relationship with Heidegger. Well, so you see, I'll skip to the end, after the word 'West,' after the quotation marks, well at the end, a paragraph further, at the end of the line. Heidegger, Jünger, Schmitt — these three great intellectuals, you see, the resignation of German philosophy — these three great intellectuals, for they were neither fools nor uneducated men, of twentieth-century Germany, so different from one another, have one trait in common.
46:06 They regarded with sympathy — at least at first, in Jünger's case — the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the advent of Nazism. Around 1933, they took part in the furious polemic characteristic of those years, waged against democracy, socialism, and the revolutionary political tradition. For 30 years we've been steeped in a counter-revolutionary education, since the bicentennial of the French Revolution, in 1989, officiated by Mitterrand — or Mitterrand had it officiated, if you like, by Jack Lang and others.
46:54 It became a matter only of the crimes of the French Revolution. That's quite something, isn't it. You see, all of this goes back a long way. It's in this context that one must situate today's revisionist historiography. You see, Losurdo — it's no accident that precisely a disciple of Heidegger, this is today, the German historian Ernst Nolte, more openly than all the others, blames genocide and the Holocaust on Asiatic barbarism, that is, Soviet barbarism, imitated by Hitler, considering the October Revolution.
47:39 At this point, everything is clear. The West can regain and reconquer its good conscience. Towards the end of the First World War, a theme appeared that met with enormous success. The decline of the West—that's the title of a famous book by the fascistic Spengler—but the decline of the West, and this is Losurdo's conclusion, now flips over into its final, blinding transfiguration. You see, I'm not doing the history of thought here, I'm doing it objectively since I'm recalling texts from the 1930s, '40s, '45, but I'm not in the genre of history of thought, I'm talking about it because it's topical.
The Asiatic enemy in Heidegger 48:20 It's really quite worrying, all the same. We find the same economic conditions, the worst crisis capital has ever undergone—that was the 1930s—and I'm telling you we're on the verge of surpassing it, according to specialists, it's not me saying it. Follow closely. Are we going to surpass the 24.7% unemployment rate in the United States? I'm not even talking about the number of unemployed multiplying in France, we'll see in September how much that will be. The same economic conditions, the same speeches, the same enemies.
48:51 Russia, China—the enemy is the Asiatic. So now I'm moving to another series of texts, which you don't have, so this is just to skim through, that's why, so as not to take too much time. But I will still give you a few samples of Heidegger's prose. Darn, I've lost my bookmark. Ah, there it is. So, you don't have it, that's why I'm using the book.
49:27 So, excuse me a moment, there we go, so that's where I am. There. So, I won't dwell on it, I'll read while skimming, but to illustrate the theme—the enemy is the Asiatic, right—within a very topical theme.
50:06 As for the enemy, the enemy in general, because we're talking about theories of war, that's Carl Schmitt's specialty, the jurist, right? As for the enemy, Heidegger repeatedly designates him as the Asiatic. In the National Socialist language of the time, which he openly adopts here, this term unambiguously designates first of all the Jews, but not only—that's me specifying that—but I can guarantee you that in the head of a true-blue German, especially of that era, I mean, Asia begins at the Vistula, that is, at the border with Poland.
50:51 The Slavs are already subhumans. That was in Hitler's racial theory, I don't know. That's already, as we say now, Eurasia. Eurasia, which makes America tremble, right, Chinese economic power allied with Russian military power—that's the only thing that can balance the nightmare being imposed on us. Endless wars bleeding the world from Afghanistan to South America, through everything you know, alas, there's even—and I'll skip the rest.
51:23 So, as for the enemy, Heidegger repeatedly designates him as the Asiatic. In the National Socialist language of the time, which he openly adopts here, the term unambiguously designates above all the Jews. Then, the Bolsheviks, the Russians, the Soviets, that is, the communist Russians, under the communist regime. I say, I insist, I'm not commenting on the text here, but I insist on making reminders. You must be lost in your head because—no, but no, communists are one thing, but Nazism is above all antisemitism.
51:56 No, no, yes, but don't separate Hitler's anti-communism from his antisemitism. I wouldn't say I have a Soviet mandate. All the propaganda of the era—read it, don't take my word for it, these are matters too serious to rest on a single voice. Consult the documents, all the press of the time. There are translations, there are studies, but take the originals—not in German, that's for those who don't read German, but the texts, the articles—and you'll see, in history, cited with sources, and you'll see that the enemy is constantly designated by the formula 'the Judeo-Bolshevik.'
52:35 It's you, it's you, well, subjected to the propaganda of the last 40 years, who oppose antisemitism to anti-communism, right? Distinguish them, yes, but oppose them, certainly not for the Nazis, for whom it's the same fight. It was that Jew Jesus who gave us Christianity, you know, the one who says when they strike you on one cheek, turn the other. That's not Nazi at all. That's what weakened us, the elite races. There are thousands of pages of writings on this, in German.
53:06 In short, with Nietzsche too, right, Nietzsche never forgave Wagner for going from Siegfried to Perceval, to Parsifal—from the pagan hero who cuts through every problem with his sword, right, the beautiful blond beast, to the idiot Perceval, right, who dwells in the deepest feeling and compassion. And it's on this testament that Wagner's work closes. I mention, for those interested, those with some knowledge of literature, that in one of Julien Gracq's first great novels, Au château d'Argol, in the preface, Julien Gracq, to explain that his novel somewhat follows the framework of the quest for the Grail, alludes to Wagner's Parsifal by saying: 'Wagner's work closes on a testament that Nietzsche made the grave mistake of throwing rather carelessly to the Christians as prey.'
54:01 thereby taking on the grave responsibility of misleading critics toward an order of magnitude visibly too superficial. There. Let me close my parenthesis. Good. The enemy is the Judeo-Bolshevik. So you see, the Asiatic, don't think we're constantly jumping from one thing to another. It's the same thing. This isn't my doing, but the Nazi delirium's. Good. Let's continue. It can end up designating all of Germany's potential enemies insofar as they are supposed to be under the sway of what Heidegger, in his 1934 letter to Councilor Schwoerer, called 'Judaization in the broad sense.'
54:40 But he's not an antisemite, Heidegger. He's not a Nazi. There are still people who say that. He's cited as such, right? 'Judaization in the broad sense.' Now, the term is found in Heidegger as early as his 1933-1934 course, his university course, where he speaks of a power unleashing itself as something unbridled, unrestrained, bewitching, savage, furious, Asiatic. So he's picking up on what we saw earlier in Jünger's writing—the most barbaric men of all time dare to make people believe that barbarism was instilled by the Popovs, right?
55:18 Even though the war with the Russians hasn't yet begun. We're in 1933. We're far from the German-Soviet pact, which is in 1939. There are some who would have wanted the Soviets to have even more deaths. 30 million isn't enough. That Stalin not sign this pact and fall into the trap, right, that the Panzer divisions would have rushed first into the Soviet Union before invading Belgium and France and before declaring war on England.
55:48 When we already see the number of deaths they had, having had a bit of time to prepare, imagine what it would have been if Nazi forces had entered the Soviet Union as early as... before the pact, not in the 1930s. And moreover, the Soviets—we have all the telegrams, don't take my word for it, check, telegram after diplomatic telegram to France and England saying we must declare war on Hitler while there's still time.
56:24 He's not going to stop afterward, and France answered, as did England, we'd like to but the Poles don't want to let you pass through their territory since they are our allies, you understand. And it was when he saw the dilatory attitude of the Westerners at the time—I'm not digressing—the number two of the Polish government, under Colonel Beck's government, the one who led Poland just before the war began, the German invasion, had one last meeting with Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister.
56:59 We're on the eve of the war. He says to Ribbentrop, because they have a dispute over the port of Danzig at the time, the Danzig corridor, and the Pole, the regime's number two, says to Ribbentrop, well, we have disagreements over Danzig, but we are among civilized people, it's not like with the Soviets. The government—not the Poles, the Poles suffered—the Polish government, in 1939, a few weeks before the outbreak of war, says to Hitler, on Polish territory, there's nothing to laugh about, it's a nervous laugh.
Decoding the Dasein and the "Socratic press" 57:42 It's the greatest number of deaths per capita. In absolute terms, it's the Soviets; in relative terms, it's the Poles. And well, no—and just as in the soul, Heidegger speaks of a power unleashing itself as something unbridled, unrestrained, bewitching, savage, furious, Asiatic, and just as in Ludwig Clauss's 'Nordic Soul,' a novel—an essay, sorry—by a Nazi of the time, he traces the opposing powers in this combat back to what Nietzsche designates—and Heidegger cites Nietzsche—as the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
58:19 We, we the Germans, are Apollonian. We then find Heidegger's identification with the Asiatic enemy repeatedly in the lecture given on November 30, 1934—I'm skimming—where he speaks of the great decision of the Earth against the Asiatic. In the course on Hölderlin's Germania, it's a poem by Hölderlin called Germania, where we saw him make Heraclitus the name of an original power of the Western-Germanic historical Dasein. I won't ask for explanations, it's quite clear.
58:49 But Dasein means existence, but this is delirium. It's interesting to see that notions which apparently make up all of Heidegger's philosophical prestige—being, essence, the being, Dasein, being-toward-death, being-for-others—when you know how to decode them, designate sordid political realities. We'll have occasion to come back to this. Likewise with Nietzsche—I'm making a parenthesis here, you see, I'm taking the two most prized philosophers of the French philosophical school, from Sartre to Derrida.
59:24 I have nothing more to add, I'm not putting Sartre and Derrida in the same basket. But still, I mean, they're all in Heidegger's shadow from the beginning of the Cold War, which is curious all the same. What am I alluding to here? You can't accuse Nietzsche of being antisemitic. He has plenty of Nazi-like sides—the eugenicist side, being thoroughly in favor of slavery. Some will tell you these are metaphors. I really need to read the texts. 'Breeding,' a term Heidegger often uses, 'Zucht,' 'Schütz,' slavery—in short, there are plenty of Nazi themes, but not antisemitism, quite the opposite.
1:00:10 He even says, in Beyond Good and Evil, that pure Prussian blood should be crossed with Jewish maidens, which would regenerate the decadent, over-Christianized Prussian blood. And he also praises Mendelssohn, the only great composer of the Jewish Romantic era, saying he's the only one who really knew how to write beautiful music, calling him the alcyonian master—alcyon being the south wind—the very opposite of an antisemite. Yes, that's after his break with Wagner, I won't dwell on it.
1:00:41 If we go back to 1872, when he was still very close friends with the Wagner couple, when he wanted nothing more than to hurry through his courses—he did them very well—in linguistics, in philology, as it was called, in Basel, waiting for the weekend to take the train, invited to his great joy by the Wagners, whom he frequented, Wagner being 30 years older than him, and don't forget that it was to Wagner that Nietzsche's first major publication, The Birth of Tragedy, was dedicated—well, precisely, Nietzsche in '72 writes a letter to Cosima, to Madame Wagner, a letter about tragedy, in which he paints the whole state of decadence Germany is in—themes everyone knows, we've gone soft, we've become Christianized, we've, in short, and we've become urbanized, we've become democratized—there's no Bolshevik type yet at that time—and he says at the end of the letter, all of this is the fault of the Jewish press, I quote, 'Judenpresse,' not 'Zeitung,' 'press,' he says specifically, the Latin root.
1:01:51 You won't find this text, or if you do, you'll have to search for it. Here again, Losurdo showed a sorcerer's genius, right? Because Nietzsche's translators today, who absolutely want to pass him off as someone—not exactly left-wing, but close enough—have censored the end of the text and replaced 'the Jewish press' with, brace yourself, you're going to be startled—I haven't lost my thread, I was in the middle of saying how one must decode apparently abstract and philosophical terms, as is the case with Heidegger, being, the being, that was my thread.
1:02:28 'The Jewish press' is replaced by 'the Socratic press.' Now you understand what Nietzsche's anti-Platonism means. This was never, incidentally—because he was cultured, Nietzsche, I know full well that he had, as an artist, admiration for Plato's genius, the genius of the writer at least. He often says it's a shame he was spoiled by that journalist, Socrates. This Socrates, the man of the people, ugly on top of it. He says so himself, he had thick lips, bulging eyes.
1:03:01 In short, the Jews, the Socratic press—the Socratic press began with the Jewish press. You have to know how to decode. Here, I'm not dealing in conspiracy, I'm dealing in fact, in the flagrant crime of falsification. And that—this complicity with the worst ideas, I don't say the worst thinkers, Nietzsche is less despicable than Heidegger. Nietzsche is a great ego.
1:03:32 And I'm sure he would have dropped out of the Nazi ignominy even more quickly than Jünger did. But I hold it against the French philosophical school which enlisted in the Cold War, so anti-Bolshevik that it threw itself into Nietzsche's arms, right, against those of Marx and Hegel. I wonder, by the way, what they were doing in those arms. There.
1:04:03 Yes, so, three great moments have brought us to where we are: the Reformation, the French Revolution of '89. There's the kinship between Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. Let me go back to the text where I was, on the Asiatic. In the course on Hölderlin's Germania poem, we saw him make Heraclitus the name of an original power of the Western-Germanic historical Dasein.
Heidegger, adviser to Hitler, and the internal enemy 1:04:33 This means Heidegger traces things back to the first manifestation of a Germania. This is delirium. Heraclitus is a German. You know, the ancient Greeks—we saw this when we studied Chapoutot, but I'll say it for those who weren't there. Chapoutot, the contemporary historian who is by far the best expert on the archives and ideology of the period, shows very well how a delirious history had been constructed in which the Greeks were Germans who had gone a bit south, right?
1:05:07 And who had created this elite race which was later spoiled and corrupted by the emergence of Christianity coming from Jewish barbarism over there. In short, we then find Heraclitus again, the name of an original power of the Western-Germanic historical Dasein, in its first confrontation with the Asiatic. He identifies with it a bit, right? He did everything he could to truly be Hitler's philosophical advisor.
1:05:39 He wrote, sent telegrams to Hitler, we have them, Heidegger's telegrams. He would have liked to be for Hitler what Aristotle was for Alexander. Because Aristotle was Alexander's tutor. In the lecture given in Rome on April 8, 1936, entitled Europe and German Philosophy, from the very first lines, Heidegger states that the salvation of Europe depends on preserving the European peoples against the Asiatic. Good, I'll stop there.
1:06:09 I've multiplied these examples so you don't think it's an isolated accident, that I'm making false equivalences. It's obsessive. The danger for the peoples of Europe is an Asiatic peril. We're back to today. It's all the more urgent to blacken the image, right—maybe I'd be an opponent if I were in China, who knows, I'm not defending the Chinese regime here.
1:06:39 I'm showing what's monstrous in a certain way of denouncing something. One can very well denounce something from a standpoint that is not just different but opposed. I always use this example. I meet someone in a café and he says, 'We're both anti-Gaullist, it seems.' I say, 'Good, me too.' I tell him, 'I voted against De Gaulle the whole time he was in power, against his social policy, etc., you're anti-Gaullist, so am I.' Yes, because that bastard sold Algeria to the Arabs.
1:07:10 Yes, one can be against De Gaulle for reasons that are not just different but opposed. One can be against De Gaulle's social policy but have respect for the man who saved honor during the Resistance. All the same. And who maintained independence. It's the last moment when France still had an independent foreign policy, not aligned as it is today.
1:07:43 You know that while we're in lockdown, 14 French nuclear power plants have just been shut down behind our backs. Likewise, EDF went from 64% public ownership—yours and mine—at the start of the lockdown, to 34%, cut in half. This virus is quite convenient, you must admit. You see I'm not talking idly. Likewise, the nuclear plant, that was yesterday, which they privatized.
1:08:15 What the whole world envied us for. France had energy independence and the cheapest kilowatt in Western Europe, apart from Norway, which has hydroelectric dams everywhere. I've mostly talked about Heidegger's hostility toward the Asiatic; I'll finish with Heidegger, I'd like to move on to Marx, but with a text where the enemy is more worrying—it's you and me, that is, the internal enemy. I won't waste your time, but well, you can guess, since the enemy is Bolshevism, and at the time, right, when the Nazis came to power, there were clashes with the German Communist Party, the Spartacists, there were almost daily clashes in the streets, until, in the middle of the Weimar Republic, right, a Social Democratic policeman who said 'I will be the bloody dog, the Bluthund'—his name will come back to me—
1:09:26 had Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the leaders of the Spartacist party, assassinated in the streets of Berlin—it was a close call, there was still, in the 1920s, a bit before the 1930s, a force that could have thwarted the resistible rise of Hitler, to borrow the fine title from Bertolt Brecht.
1:09:59 Now, this internal danger, which we'll find again—follow my reasoning closely—which we'll find again at the start of the Cold War—I'm skipping ahead, jumping to 1945, there's no more Reich, no more Third Reich, it's nothing but ruins now—but, on the other hand, the West, which should have started doing what would have been magnificent, a great educational undertaking across the whole world, to say never again, never again these ideas which led—because they come from far back, Nietzsche, that's still quite something, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and read Lukács's The Destruction of Reason, it goes back to German Romanticism, and careful, I mean to Schelling, well, in short, it took a long road to arrive at the Third Reich, on an ideological level.
1:10:47 at the start of the Cold War, when we should have carried out this program to fight so that never again would the brown plague overrun the scene, a force was indeed put in place, but against the red plague, and that was the beginning of the Cold War. I owe to this scandal the fact, right, that I somewhat turned away from music—I preferred to end up a concert pianist, right—and I turned toward philosophy.
Reading the directive "Coronavirus and communitarian withdrawal" 1:11:19 Unfortunately, in any case, it's because of a scandal, right, a betrayal that we still haven't recovered from. So, here, to show you how topical this is, the internal enemy—I'm connecting you with a piece of news I learned this afternoon, this very afternoon. You see? So, I'm going to open this, there, it's a friend some of you know well because she's one of our members, Élise, who is a teacher, doing her remote classes, a literature teacher in the Paris region, and who tells us, help, read this, here's the directive we just received.
1:12:12 So, teachers have received a directive from their ministry. 'Coronavirus and the risk of communitarian withdrawal.' That was this afternoon. We were talking about the internal enemy under the Third Reich. Today, the violence of the pandemic—when I tell you this virus is being well managed—caused by a new virus, confronts us with uncertainty on multiple levels—medical, social, economic, cultural. The Covid-19 crisis can be used by some, I won't spell it out for you, to demonstrate the incapacity of states—here we go, how else could we have criticized the Macron government except by being called conspiracy theorists—the incapacity of states to protect the population, and to attempt to destabilize weakened individuals.
1:13:07 Eh, you see, he's starting to get scared all the same, to send out a directive like that, it's not trivial. I'm over 75 years old, I've never seen this in France. That they ask teachers to do this kind of surveillance, we'll see about that later. That means they know very well that millions of French people saw on national television Russian planes landing in Italy, tons of masks arriving from China weeks and weeks ago. Vietnamese people sent something else.
1:13:38 Bolivians who, despite the situation—they were on the edge of the abyss not so long ago, weren't they?—sent men, Cubans who sent doctors to Italy. Europe didn't move. Well, that Europe, the little Brussels Europe. They know full well that, as a magnificent Ivorian proverb from Ivory Coast says, you can't hide the sun with your finger. It's getting harder and harder for them to make certain things go down. Except, if you criticize the executive by saying it isn't really taking care of our health but is preparing something else, you're branded a conspiracy theorist.
1:14:15 So, they tell teachers, watch out, the Covid-19 crisis can be used by some to demonstrate the incapacity of states to protect the population and try to destabilize vulnerable individuals. The danger threatening France right now isn't the crisis coming down on us, which started across the Atlantic. No, I mean the economic and social crisis. No, the danger is the housing projects, the communities, the suburbs.
1:14:52 Various radical groups are exploiting this dramatic situation in order to recruit new members to their cause. I agree with that. Various radical groups are exploiting this dramatic situation in order to—up to there, I agree. Except that for me, the radical groups are in our executive branch. Exploiting this dramatic situation in order to recruit new members to their cause. So it means they're afraid it will spread like wildfire and disturb public order. You know, public order is when those who were defending the hospital before the virus, when they protested because the hospital was undergoing an unprecedented dismantling, got tear-gassed.
1:15:33 Well, I don't like hyperbole. It's not mustard gas. That's not my point. It's not... When they gave them tear gas at... what's it called... point-blank range. That can be very dangerous. These counter-projects for society... So you see, wait, their political project can be anti-democratic and anti-republican. We discover that democracy and the republic are on the side of those doing everything to destroy it.
1:16:06 all our gains from '45, from '46 and especially '47. I'm thinking of Ambroise Croizat. And they're being... it didn't start with Macron, but it has accelerated in a rather appalling way with Macron. So that 140,000 hospital beds disappeared between Sarkozy and Macron, passing through Hollande. These counter-projects for society can be communitarian, authoritarian, and inegalitarian.
1:16:41 As a result—I'm moving on to the most immediate news now. I'm discovering this today just like you. Some students' questions and reactions can be abrupt and marked by hostility, distrust, and challenging behavior. Can you imagine poor kids in class who heard their parents say—well there are deaths, well you're forbidden to go out, but I don't know, in Sweden they're walking around freely. I mean, there aren't more—if anything there are actually fewer than here. I mean, we were told masks were useless, and the same people now tell us that without a mask, no way you can take the subway to work or get on a bus.
1:17:18 There are more and more people asking questions. So I can just picture the 12-year-old kid in class with his classmates in the schoolyard, or raising his hand and saying something along those lines to the teacher. There could be an interesting discussion, a democratic debate. Or another kid would say, no, you're a conspiracy theorist—things that could be fruitful. As a result, some students' questions and reactions can be abrupt and marked by hostility and distrust.
1:17:48 Distrust toward the executive becomes an offense in France. You know, there's a woman who was taken into police custody because she'd put up a banner making a pun on Macron's name and coronavirus. But listen, I lived through the era when De Gaulle was mocked, vilified, caricatured like no head of state has been since. It never stopped. The caricatures never stopped. I even remember Sartre selling La Cause du peuple on the boulevard.
1:18:20 It was near Bonne Nouvelle, metro Bonne Nouvelle. There, she shouted—or it was L'Enragé, I don't remember, one of those ultra-leftist papers of the time—and she got arrested by the police, taken in. And a phone call from De Gaulle to the police: let the intellectuals be. Macron, that's not it. Macron, that's not it. Let me continue. As a result, some students' questions and reactions can be abrupt and marked by hostility and distrust, radical questioning of our society and republican values, mistrust of scientific discourse.
1:18:57 I remember someone—she's disappeared a bit from the screens, but she'll be back—Greta, when she said listen to the scientists. What does she know about it? People make scientists talk—I mean, in the Nazi era, they called on scientists to prove that biologically, Jews were an inferior race and a threat. More than ever, we need to build a society of trust, solidarity, one that fosters.
Social distancing and surveillance of the school 1:19:28 Solidarity, why not—I have nothing against solidarity as a value, but here, if you decode it—you have to know how to decode—if you decode it, here it means: I don't want to see more than one point of view. It means no way a student can criticize, question here, or suspect the executive of the slightest dark scheme. Now, more than ever, we will need to build a society of trust, solidarity, one that offers students paths toward positive socialization. Good grief!
1:19:58 The same people who invented the horrible expression "social distancing." Can you imagine that expression? They should have said physical distance, keep a physical distance—it's shorter, simpler, and clearer. Physical distance, you understand it right away. No, distanciation—which on top of that shows how culturally illiterate they are—it's a term that comes from Brecht, the great communist playwright, who recommended that the playwrights of his time not hypnotize the audience, as was often the case with the Romantics, to make them swallow just about any fantasy, but on the contrary, to educate the audience to take a distance from the performance itself.
1:20:43 That's what distanciation is, it has nothing to do with keeping a physical distance. But social distancing is the very opposite of the socializing we long for when we have a drink with friends at the bar of the corner café—which I've never criticized sociologically or socially—like when we're among friends, when we stroll down the street. I love strolling along the great boulevards, as the song says. There's so much and so much to see, as Yves Montand used to sing.
1:21:13 So you see, some students' questions and reactions can be abrupt, running counter to positive socialization. I'll go on a bit because I can't believe my eyes reading this text. I'm not going to read it all to you, it's four pages of recommendations and instructions for teachers. This is where it gets serious. Fight against communitarian withdrawal—third time now—yes, it's the housing projects, it's not those hiding their billions in the Bahamas who threaten France and the economy.
1:21:46 No, no. The danger comes from the poor guys we let deal drugs in the communities because we'd be embarrassed to see them left with no resources, and who'll be even more of a threat. Fight against communitarian withdrawal that undermines the values of the republican pact and against any manifestation of separatism. These are serious accusations, you know. Fight against disinformation, conspiracy theories, rumors and fake... I'm the first to warn against the dangers of separatism.
1:22:20 There is a separatism encouraged by the Germans so that Alsace would redeploy itself toward what are now called regional partnerships. But that's not the separatism being targeted here. Not at all. Fight against disinformation, conspiracy theories, rumors and fake news about Covid-19 used for mercantile and political ends. It tells me, support staff in schools facing withdrawal reactions from students.
1:22:56 That means, can you imagine? The school is the place par excellence for transmitting republican ideals. The role of the school has been reaffirmed—when you pass yourself off as Louis XIV or Jupiter, it's strange to hear talk of republican values. The role of the school has been reaffirmed in the national plan to prevent radicalization, "Prevent to protect," presented by the Prime Minister on February 23, 2018. So the mask falls off. We clearly see that all these measures—the "prevent to protect" act—were already meant to plan for bringing civil society as a whole into line.
1:23:31 That's actually you and me. So, conduct to be followed—I'll skip ahead to move faster—identify discourses, so this becomes instructions or signs of withdrawal, take into account the full spectrum of radical ideas: ethnic, religious, cultural, social, political, mystical communitarianism. I'm only reading the official note. Spot the frequent semantic slippages between community and communitarianism. Yes, they're in trouble because they're forced to draw a distinction.
1:24:03 They were the first to encourage communitarianism when it comes to taking down an enemy. Poor Uyghurs fighting against Chinese totalitarianism—there, separatism, identity and communitarianism are suddenly encouraged, an Islamist community, as it happens, that was over-armed—by the same people, I believe, who armed the Afghan rebels to drive out the Soviets—and who were over-armed and who slit the throats of 600 people with knives at Kunming station.
1:24:36 You never heard about it, but check it, don't take my word for it. So there, suddenly, communitarianism and separatism become a virtue. I say this, but it could apply—right?—when the Croats wanted to separate, or the Bosnians, from Yugoslavia. Be attentive to attacks on the Republic that must be identified and punished, mobilize everyone's vigilance—teachers in class, deans of discipline, supervisors, teaching assistants in the hallways and courtyard—to spot remarks outside the republican sphere.
Losurdo's Nietzsche and primitive accumulation in Marx 1:25:15 Can you imagine, in the schoolyard, listening to conversations in the hallways with the help of kids to spot remarks outside the republican sphere, breaking with the values of the school and undermining social cohesion. I thought we were supposed to keep a social distance! Okay, let me stop being ironic because everything happening is serious. There. I think we can... we've gone over the hour, haven't we, Philippe? So, for once I'm on time, I'd like to give the floor to questions, if there are any.
1:25:52 Otherwise, there's no shortage of reading material. Otherwise, I can grab my tablet, it's not... And then... Well, perfect.
1:26:24 I'll cut the... Ah, okay. Okay. Please, is Losurdo's book on Heidegger published by Delga? Is it the reissue of Heidegger and the Ideology of War published by PUF, or is it a different one? Thank you. Well, there's a precise question. So no, no relation—well, no relation at all. Well, actually it's the same author. So there can be... no relation. And although there's certainly a continuity of content, the difference is quantitative.
1:26:57 The Nietzsche book published by Delga weighs almost 2 kilos. It's a monument, the greatest work ever written on Nietzsche in a single volume, and with so much documented, precise information. I mean, that's Losurdo's genius—tracking things down like that, reconstructing chronologies. And there, I've only touched on the Marx texts we'll continue with next time, because we have a lot on our plate with those texts.
1:27:30 Especially since they're going to become more and more relevant with the crisis developing. But the common point between Losurdo and Marx here is—what does Marx do in that whole paragraph on primitive accumulation, of which I only quoted a short excerpt? He reconstructs the historical sequence running from the very first manufactures at the end of the 17th century, the embryo of the industrial bourgeoisie, up to his own time, passing through the various pieces of legislation on the working day, for example.
1:28:01 Well, this is actually a way for me to answer, but I know this will interest Naoufel, who's a loyal follower—if I may still use that Globish term—but I'm going to quote a short excerpt anyway, which would have been ideal to follow on from the carnage we saw in Nerval, right? But here in Marx, who is no longer in the imaginary, this time who's no longer in the nightmare but alas in reality, right?
1:28:39 Regarding this beginning of the manufacturing economy, right? The different methods of primitive accumulation, chapter 8, book 1 of Capital, primitive accumulation—the different methods of primitive accumulation that the capitalist era brings forth are divided first in a more or less chronological order—you see, he restores a sequence, that's the real demonstration—Portugal, that's the 16th century, think of the Empire, Brazil, Spain, Holland, which for a while was mistress of the seas before England took over with the extraordinary great admiral de Ruyter, right?
1:29:19 who has his statue in Amsterdam—Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and England, until the latter combined all the methods of primitive accumulation. So what is primitive accumulation? Marx sums it up in a rather ironic and humorous way with a little epitaph, just a quotation, as he likes to do—he never leaves the poets behind, even in Marx—he quotes Goethe, before primitive accumulation, well, to start his chapter, he quotes a joke told by the great Goethe: a child asks his father where his capital comes from.
1:30:06 the other says, well, from grandpa, my grandfather—but grandfather, where did it come from? From your great-grandfather. And the great-grandfather, where did it come from? And there he answers: he took it. Primitive accumulation is when you stop inheriting, it's when you create capital instead of merely passing it down—that's history, we're not leaving the carnage behind, that's the continuity of my point—the horror. So England combines them all in a systematic whole embracing at once the colonial system, public credit, modern finance, and the protectionist system. Some of these methods rely on the use of brute force, but all without exception exploit the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, in order to violently accelerate the transition from the feudal economic order, the ancien régime, to the capitalist economic order, and to shorten the transitional phases. Indeed, force is the midwife of every old society in labor. Force is an economic power. And here he quotes a Christian, an English Christian, a good man—well, a good man, there are honest Christians—a man
1:31:16 whose Christian fervor made his whole reputation, Mister Howitt speaks thus about Christian colonization—note, it's a Christian speaking about Christians—"the barbarities and abominable atrocities perpetrated by the so-called Christian races, in every region of the world and against every people they have been able to subjugate, have no parallel in any other era of universal history." Now, this Quaker in 1840—we should be even more critical now, after the Third Reich and all that—the greatest convictions in the history of humanity have twice come from old Western, Christian Europe. Well, no, today it's the opposite: we lecture the whole world and go tell Burundi, your election isn't clean, and Russia that it has no business being in Crimea, while a contemporary, a Christian—not a Bolshevik with a knife between his teeth—says the barbarities, the abominable atrocities perpetrated by the so-called Christian races in every region of the world already
1:32:26 you think it starts today with the globalization from Latin America to Asia—"and against every people they have been able to subjugate, have no parallel in any other era of universal history, among any race, however savage, however coarse, however merciless, however shameless it might have been"—and there you see what continuity there is in what I said earlier—Heidegger spoke of the horror the Germans supposedly learned from Asiatic barbarism, that is, from the Soviet steppes—it's quite extraordinary, isn't it, and here an Englishman, a contemporary of Marx—we're far from the German-Soviet pact, aren't we—says that we frankly don't need to go looking for Cossacks for that, one example, the history of the colonial administration of the Dutch—I'll stop there because I don't want to go back—the question at the center of Naoufel's question—and Holland was, in the 17th century, the capitalist nation par excellence, Holland for a brief moment unfolds a picture of murder, betrayal, corruption and baseness that will never be equaled—the optimist Englishman, Marx takes the floor again—nothing is more characteristic than their system of abduction of natives—natives is a translation of indigènes
1:33:36 of Celebes, that's the archipelago belonging to Indonesia still today—in order to procure slaves for Java, because the factories were in Java, they had a whole staff specially trained for this new kind of kidnapping, the main agents of this trade were the kidnapper, the interpreter, and the seller, and the main sellers were the native princes—the kidnapped youth were hidden away in secret dungeons of Celebes until they could be crammed onto the slave ships—the town of Makassar alone, for example—there's still the Makassar Strait today—an official report says, swarms with secret prisons, each more horrible than the last, filled with unfortunate—we're talking about the 17th century, imagine what it must have been—unfortunate victims, sorry, victims of greed and tyranny, chained in irons, violently torn from their families—to seize Malacca the Dutch bribed the Portuguese governor, a corrupt fool numbed under the palm trees, they bought him easily, the Dutch, so he would hand them the keys to the city—he let them into the city in 1641—they rushed straight to his house and assassinated him, thus sparing themselves the payment of the 21,000 pounds sterling
1:34:47 price of his betrayal—everywhere they set foot, devastation and depopulation marked their passing—and I'll end on this—a province of Java, Banyuwangi province, had more than 80,000 inhabitants in 1750; in 1811 it had no more than 8,000—80,000 down to 8,000, you can do the math—there's sweet commerce, says Marx, who always keeps his cool and his humor—so you see, there are texts where Nietzsche says slavery should be reestablished, that Greece would never have been Greece if it hadn't had the wisdom, right, to reduce other peoples to slavery—here I make a linguistic reminder, I lived through the Cold War, I keep coming back to it—that scandal of having started by hunting down the red plague at the very moment when, more than ever, the world should have been rid forever, on the smoking ruins of the Third Reich, of the brown plague—I won't be too surprised, they're the only forces rising politically in Europe today, and what I'm saying is all the more true since it's the richest countries, the northernmost, the easternmost—the only political forces
Nietzsche against Siegfried and Parsifal 1:35:58 that are rising, all the others are declining or collapsing, it's the neo-Nazis and the environmentalists—don't take my word for it, look at the numbers, that's not an opinion, it's measurable—look at the results of the latest elections in Austria, in Holland, in Germany, in the Scandinavian countries, in the Baltic countries—so this parenthesis matters, to come back a bit to the center of what I'm saying and to Naoufel's question—yes, it's an enormous volume in which Losurdo is much more nuanced than an anti-Nietzschean—or than a pro-Nietzschean—might suppose—you see, I can't quite say it right—might suppose—well, there are fools who read Nietzsche superficially—I'll give—I'll stick with—I'll stay with this case of Nietzsche, because Nietzsche and Heidegger are the two references of this contemporary ideology
1:37:08 that I'm talking about, which still reigns supreme over—over the master thinkers—look at Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida—Derrida takes up the defense of Heidegger—I didn't quote you a tenth of the horrors that go by when you read Heidegger—I didn't tell you about the passages where he says that the creation of the Panzer divisions is one of the greatest stages in the metaphysics, in the history of metaphysics, and that we Germans have a duty of Eros toward the Führer—you won't find it in these details, but no, I'm thinking for instance of Nietzsche's position toward Wagner's work that I mentioned earlier, his testament, right, Parsifal—so I told you, Nietzsche has the right, aesthetically, to rise up against this work which he finds quite disappointing after Siegfried—besides, I'll let him speak, right, I'm not talking behind his back—perhaps even
1:38:19 Wagner's most astonishing creation will always remain—and not only for the present—inaccessible, foreign, inimitable to the Latin race in decline—you see this way of speaking typical of the era, "the Latin race in decline"—it's the character of Siegfried I want to talk about—Siegfried, the very free man, and perhaps indeed too free—I come back to "free"—I lived through the Cold War when we had to defend the free world, I'm quoting, against totalitarian barbarism—the very free man, and perhaps indeed too free, too hard, too jovial, too healthy, too anti-Catholic—it's underlined, don't forget it was the Jews who brought Christianity into the Germanic world—too anti-Catholic for the taste of the old, weakened civilized peoples—in short, Siegfried is too hard, too strong, so perhaps he is even a sin against Romanticism, this Siegfried antipathetic to the Roman peoples—I won't go over Nietzsche's anti-romantic side again, you can also see what's underlying it, what soft, effeminate, as he often says, weakened Romanticism is—it's one of the effects
1:39:29 of this poison the Jews inject into us, right—don't misunderstand me—but Wagner, in his old age, has largely redeemed this sin—this sin of having created this character already too proto-Nazi for Nietzsche's taste—but Wagner, in his sad old age, that is, when he wrote Parsifal, his testament, has largely redeemed this sin, anticipating a taste that later became a policy—he set himself, if not to follow, then at least to preach, with the religious fervor characteristic of him, the road to Rome—Parsifal, the only Christian work along with Lohengrin, an early Wagner work—to avoid any ambiguity, I'll turn to a few well-crafted verses that will betray, even to the least discerning ears—so you can ignore all of Wagner's music, what I mean, what I reproach in Wagner's later years and in the music of his Parsifal—"is this still German?"—that's the poem-pamphlet he wrote—his dull moaning, because there are religious ceremonies in Parsifal—"would it come from a German heart, are these German bodies mortifying themselves here?"—German—"his blessing priest's gestures"
1:40:39 "and this lechery with its vague reek of incense"—that's not wrong, except it's meant pejoratively by him, but it mixes the erotic and the religious with a certain subtlety, in short—"and this lechery with its vague reek of incense, is it German? his sudden genuflections, his swoonings, his staggering gait and his uncertain teeterings of bells, his nun's sidelong glances, his tinklings of the Angelus, his faked ecstasies"—the charge isn't light—"whose surge claims to surpass heaven itself, is this still German? All this—think it over, you have not yet crossed the threshold, think it over"—meaning, you Germans, you have not yet crossed the threshold of what you're hearing, and it's underlined, it's Rome—and he says this to a people at a high point in German history, the Reformation, Luther against Rome, and as the last one says in a magnificent poem, the wandering pain at Canossa when the German emperor came to beg the pope's forgiveness—there have been ups and downs, well, in short, that's what Wagner says—maybe he's right, maybe, maybe it's a piece of music
1:41:50 that it's pious kitsch worth nothing, this Parsifal, that Wagner had gone senile, that he made some sort of Saint-Sulpice trinket, as they say—which isn't very kind to Saint-Sulpice, which isn't the finest example of French Christian architecture perhaps, but still—well, that's what he thinks of the music of his Parsifal—here's how he introduced it, listen carefully, Naoufel, listen everyone, since we're talking music now—Nietzsche hadn't heard a single note of Wagner's score when he wrote this—we have all the dates—but he'd come across the text, the libretto, the story—there was plenty to work with, as he says, too much blood, and he doesn't like hysterical women—well, women in general always posed a problem for Nietzsche, but hysterical women like Parsifal's Kundry, that's another matter, let's leave that aside—he hadn't heard a single note of music, but then he does hear the music a few years later, a few months before his collapse and madness in Turin—a few months, so I'm really talking about the last Nietzsche, I'm not going back to his youth when he was pro-, pro-Wagnerian, long ago, he wrote the worst things about Wagner, that the break is complete, that all of Europe knows it, well now
Nietzsche listens to the prelude to Parsifal 1:43:00 What he writes when he first hears the prelude — only the prelude — of Parsifal at the Monte Carlo festival; he was spending the winter in Mediterranean countries, and he was quite right to, since he was up there at 3000 meters altitude in the Upper Engadine. So here's what — his account of listening, so of Parsifal, he writes to his sister: I've just found a note, let's say that in my last letter I forgot to tell you a few words about the music of Parsifal — he's finally heard it, 1887 — you're surprised, well yes she's surprised because up until now he'd done nothing but spit on Parsifal, like what I just read to you. Well yes, I heard the prelude — where?
1:43:51 In Monte Carlo. Very strange, I cannot think back on it without inner turmoil, so much did I feel my soul uplifted and made whole. It's as if, finally, for the first time in years, someone were speaking to me about problems that concern me, without of course giving the answers I'd have all ready — for the French, for the Foucaults, the Deleuzes, the Nietzscheans, the Cold War, I have a lot on my chest, that's why I'm telling you — this text, people never quote it, it's not a hidden text, it's a letter to his sister that runs completely counter to all the irony people heap on Wagner. It's as if, finally, for the first time in years, someone were speaking to me about problems that concern me, without of course giving the answers I'd have all ready — but the Christian answers, yes Nietzsche, Nietzsche, which were in the end soul-answers stronger than those of our last centuries. Heidegger is truly a scoundrel, he would never have made this self-critique, this turning back on himself — truth be told, listening to this music, you set your Protestantism aside as if it were a misunderstanding, whereas there—
1:45:02 He was denouncing the return to Rome, but also — I'm not thinking of denying it — certain other very good music as well. Strange — as a child I had given myself the mission of having the holy mystery performed, do you remember my compositions? Nietzsche was a musician and he composed. The last time we found them again was the Sunday before we left for Bayreuth, and we were then very surprised to note their deep kinship — my compositions, Nietzsche's, with the music of Parsifal. That's a parallel between these two texts, read one after the other, that no one will ever show you. So there you have it, and — I've gone on a bit long, but that's because it anticipates a lot of other questions, I've just now realized. All this is to remind you nonetheless that Losurdo's book leaves nothing out of all this. Once again, it's Losurdo who taught me that the current translators of Nietzsche, who did the translation that's taken as the reference, the Italians, censored the word 'Jewish press' and replaced it with 'Socratic press.' There you go. What do you think of Georges Steiner on Heidegger? That's part of—
Heidegger, engagement and current geopolitics 1:46:12 —of Steiner. I'm going a bit fast here because I can't keep repeating the same thing. I don't even understand how people can keep giving importance to Heidegger as a philosopher when we know, well, that what draws us in is things that sound profound, like Being, beings, the Grund, the Boden, the 'Blubo' as it was abbreviated at the time — Nazi times — Blut, blood, and Boden, soil. Yes, because Heidegger spends his time reproaching the Jews for being nomads, whereas Germany has a complicity with the soil, with the land — as Pétain used to say, the land does not lie. So, I don't want to waste too much time with those who deep down know, who know these texts, and who keep acting as if Heidegger were a prophet for young people. It's a dirty operation, a dirty business I don't want to take part in. But don't take my word for it, read these texts, read precisely the book
1:47:22 by Losurdo — not in order to endorse Losurdo's theses, but simply for the documents written in Heidegger's own hand, and you'll form your own opinion. I think that's the most democratic and fairest solution. When the Holy Empire had the will — Raphaël Greniac, sorry — when the Holy Empire, I'm discovering the question, had the will to maintain a rational whole, our European Union seems to fail by maintaining austerity, even as the revolutionary impulses — alas often anecdotal — are crushed in blood. I wonder about the reconstitution of Nazism. What room do we have left to confront it? Good question. Literature is full of these lines, the philosophers hammer us with the Freudo-Marxist vulgate that Clouscard had exposed — good, someone who knows these texts. Music is the consumer's soundtrack. Can we still commit ourselves?
1:48:18 With your permission, Raphaël, I'm borrowing your phrase, and I'll allow myself, with your authorization which I ask publicly, to repeat it: music is the consumer's soundtrack. I think those who know what I've said on that subject will realize how much this doesn't fall on deaf ears. We mustn't get discouraged — well, I sense, I know quite well that you don't seem discouraged, but you seem gloomy — there's reason to be — and pessimistic. But let me be clear: I'm talking about the Russians and the Chinese, whom I seem to be defending against the attacks made on them in the camp you rightly denounce. I'm not in the other camp either. I'm not like our top French policeman who dares answer a woman — isn't that right — who points out to him that he's carrying out savage repression, and who answers her: 'We are not in the same camp, madam,' as if a police officer of the Republic could be in a political camp. He has the right, personally, but if he could officially justify his action, we'd clearly be in a political camp. Yes, so you're quite right to be worried, but if I were in Russia—
1:49:34 Now let me be clear, first, so there's no misunderstanding afterward — and if I keep multiplying the 'ifs,' as we go along we obviously move away from reality, but still, for the clarity of the reasoning — and if Russia weren't flanked by missiles on every side, from Asia to the Baltic states, by way of Norway, a founding country of NATO, let it be said in passing — there you go — after having been brought to its knees in Brezhnev's time by the Star Wars program, which it couldn't keep up with, financially or otherwise — in short, if Russia weren't threatened, if NATO had honored its commitment at the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was not brought about by NATO tanks rolling into the Soviet Union — it was the Soviet Union itself that dissolved itself, as a result of what process, in our records? But that's internal, it's not armies that forced it to do that, it's not like the Third Reich, isn't that right, where the Red Army was needed to bring it down — if it weren't threatened—
1:50:46 if there weren't the sanctions — since the spectacular economic recoveries that explain Putin's popularity drop back down to almost nothing with the sanctions, although, thanks to that, it very cleverly pushed him to reorient his production and trade toward China just when China was booming, and that actually strengthens Eurasia — in short, if it weren't for all that, nothing guarantees that I'd be for the current regime in Russia. Maybe I'd be in the opposition, I'd certainly be closer to the Russian Communist Party than to Putin's United Russia party. I can't be clearer than that. I'm not defending a regime — but hope comes from knowing what we've got, and the only recourse I see against the barbarism setting in, because I was talking earlier about Afghanistan — it's been almost two generations, more than two generations actually, that Afghanistan has been ablaze, all because a regime, that of Prince Daoud, had asked the Soviets to come help it
1:51:57 crush the Islamist guerrilla, to which the Americans gave the famous Stinger missiles, where a 14-year-old kid can bring down a helicopter or a plane — something they had never given to any country — because afterward people tell you they were heroes with slingshots against the Red Army. And when those bearded men took power and the Soviets left, the schoolteachers who, during the too-brief era of communist Afghanistan, had dared to send girls to school — I say this to those who now love to gush over bourgeois feminism — they had an opportunity to celebrate: it's thanks to Soviet help that an Afghan regime was finally able to send girls to school. Look at photos of Kabul from those years, you see girls in miniskirts in the street. Well, the teachers who schooled the girls were tortured and thrown into pits of excrement.
1:53:07 So I can't be clearer, Raphaël, to give — not hope in the hollow sense of the word, but to be realistic — the most negative act I've known, my generation having seen the height of the Cold War and its end — well, the end of the battle anyway, which consisted of pitting NATO forces against those of the Warsaw Pact, because as you know, as a famous saying goes, a battle can end without the war being over — the proof is it continues more fiercely than ever, through Syria, Yemen, and so on, by proxy, always the same people bearing the brunt of the carnage — the carnage that took place at that time was made possible by a tragedy, in my view the greatest tragedy, which is the greatest success of Atlanticist diplomacy — yes, I avoid saying American
1:54:17 I don't like bashing America — there are plenty of right-wingers who bash America and Atlanticism, the dark face of America — well, it seems well established over there, but still, there are admirable Americans who are against that too — their greatest success under the diplomacy of Mr. Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, in conjunction with, isn't that right, Nixon — that scoundrel who talked about Allende by saying, well then, you shot him, that bastard — but we have the recorded tape, you can listen to it online — that bastard, you got him — was, when they managed — sorry for this metaphor — to decouple Peking and Moscow. At the time those were the two pillars, sorry, of communism. From that moment it was the beginning of the end, which now gives some breathing room to today's situation, and shows that we mustn't be too Western-centric
1:55:27 seeing everything through the narrow end of the cape where we stand. The fact is that for several years now I've been watching Moscow and Peking vote the same way at the UN, blocking the same American resolutions against intervention in Syria, against condemning I don't know what chemical attacks blamed on the Syrian rebels. I mean, again, I repeat, I said it earlier, maybe it hasn't gone unnoticed, but I'm telling you — I'll end on this, my answer to your question — I won't close it, it's a magnificent question, too vast for me to close today, but still, to open up a path: with China's economic striking power and the military strength and the famous new weapons of Russia — again, I'm not defending the regime, but I'm certainly not attacking it on the same grounds it's attacked on in the West, quite the opposite in fact — there are already
1:56:37 good results that have been achieved, and attempts that have failed — there you go, so, to be continued. Alright, let's stop there for now. You see, the material is very rich today, current events move very fast, find out for yourselves, try to follow what's happening through specialized media — but it's serious, what's currently happening at the economic and social level throughout the capitalist world as a whole, Atlanticist capitalism in particular, I come back to it — find out, it's serious. So I can't exhaust today the rich material and texts we had, I've barely scratched the surface of the Marxian corpus, we'll continue with him next time, and I thank you for taking part in this live session and for asking me such fascinating questions. Thank you.
