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Two themes put to a vote for the second semester 1:30 Good evening everyone, I think you can hear me. Good evening, dear friends, answers to questions, continued. Which means that I'm objectively taking a break from our series on memory and anamnesis and amnesia. Although I'm sure that in my answers to questions—since some of you are kind enough to ask me questions related to the theme we were dealing with. And since we're talking about theme, sorry, I'm starting a huge digression, but I don't want to waste too much time, since there were many questions and I'd like to try to satisfy as many as possible of those who are kind enough to get actively involved.
2:25 And in the association and on the site, since I see the site has had quite a lot of success, I'd even say a great deal. And that pleases me very much, it's made for that, for us to use it, for its invitation to interactivity. And so, speaking of theme, I'll take the opportunity to announce a solemn piece of news. Let me explain. You know we conducted a little consultation among ourselves, among you, among us, to decide on which theme—to involve you in answering the question of which theme—I'm going to continue my talks starting next January.
3:09 Of the first quarter of 2021. And of course, being democratic, but not laxist, I limit the choice to two options. It was either, at the insistent request—I say this—of certain people, including our dear head stage manager Philippe Monroe, to lay out once and for all at least the full pitch of the Ring.
3:48 At least the full pitch, plus of course its philosophical treatment with musical illustrations. It's really a huge piece and an extremely rich one. Because, quite rightly, he told me, you give it to us piece by piece, each time presupposing that we know the ins and outs, or putting it off till later, rather than putting it off indefinitely. Why not lay out this story which deserves—a bit like the quest for the Grail in Chrétien de Troyes, in the thirteenth century—which deserves to be, or I'd say the Epic of Gilgamesh, right, or any great Greek tragic cycle.
4:30 So we had done, a whole year of workshops on Racine's Phèdre, if some of you remember. So you see we're not confined to a single repertoire. So this would be the occasion to make use of the immense potential of this work, which moreover—Wagner died the very same year as Marx, in 1883. It's really the era in which our modernity is being played out. And so, so as not to waste too much time, I'll get back a bit to the usual pace, but the other theme was—and this has been close to my heart for a long time, because I've dealt with it partly, but not enough, and it seems to me that the importance of what's at stake isn't sufficiently perceived, and yet for me it's the most topical thing philosophically, politically—I do mean philosophically and politically, without sacrificing one to the other, keeping all the specificities of both philosophy and politics, of the political,
5:40 call it what you will, and even from a civilizational point of view, I'm referring to putting an end to running into an impassable abyss when one wants to move from the so-called hard sciences to the human sciences or vice versa, when one wants to establish in the human sciences a rigor at all comparable to that which is not disputed in the hard sciences, even if this rigor is much more subtle, more complex and less mechanical than one thinks, of course.
6:21 I'm not going to comment too precisely on something that's not my field. So, we conducted a little consultation, and as of the latest news—I haven't yet made my announcement about the year—as of the latest news, Pierre-Alain, very kindly, from Reykjavik, you know, where he receives your mail, and lets us know very quickly, thanks to technology, gives us a bit of a tally of the results each time, and he tells us, as of today, so here's where we stand, as of today, in this great referendum, there's a slight lead for those who would like to deal with the second subject, but overall it's close, it's almost 50-50 between the scientific subject—let's say, to simplify, whether it's the natural sciences or the human sciences—and the Ring, or Ring of the Nibelung, or Tetralogy, etc.
Treating both: Nerval, Lévi-Strauss, and the Kantian abyss 7:26 Well, the solemn announcement, I'm making it now: I'm going to do both. I don't know, that's a scoop, because nobody knows it—not just for the fun of it, right, even though I understand some might find that whimsical, but no, quite seriously, because it may be the ideal way to treat the second theme, the articulation of the natural sciences and the human sciences, their respective domains and their shared requirement of rigor, even if it's not the same rigor—but I won't pursue this so as not to get ahead of the treatment of this theme—cannot be better understood than by being illustrated and embodied through an example, as I had already done, but on a much smaller scale than the colossal Ring of the Nibelung and its four days, with the two passages from Nerval, one taken from a dream in Aurélia, the other from a chapter
8:38 of his wanderings in the Valois, a journalistic wandering in the strict sense, since he was sending his walking reports to the newspaper Le National, and that's how we got the news of Angélique, and I showed that the relation of text 1 to text 2, or of text 2 to text 1 for that matter—you'll see why it's reversible, and here we enter the hard sciences—consisted in multiplying one of the two texts by minus 1 and you got the other.
9:11 For those to whom this seems enigmatic or arbitrary, they need only go back to these texts and it will hit them in the face, so to speak. Very quickly: the first text takes place in autumn, at sunset, the narrator comes out of the church at Senlis which he visits while describing it to us, he gives a little account of his walk, of his journey, a sort of little tourist guide, still in quest of his book, and he sees little girls singing under the direction of a young woman on the steps of the church.
9:50 We are on the Day of the Dead—everything we learned from the context, so a November 1st, this season and all that—and under a ray of setting sun, 'I was able to admire the old Roman towers, demolished, covered in ivy'—there, I won't dwell on it, but that means the buildings are in ruins, the old Roman towers, the day is declining, under a ray of setting sun, we're in autumn, the year is declining, and one of the little girls starts to sing, I quote, 'with a faint but well-pitched voice,' and very quickly—I won't dwell on it, they need only go back to the videos where I dealt with this, now that they have the good fortune, thanks to Pierre-Alain, of having an index, they can find the exact passage of the videos relating to it with a single click, in our series on Nerval's Angélique, to give a reference point for the research—and in the second text, we are not in autumn but in spring, which is not a different season from autumn, but exactly its opposite, as I say, you multiply by minus one, we are,
11:00 the light is not declining but, I quote, 'a light three times brighter than natural daylight entered through the windows and lit up the rooms'; secondly, thirdly—yes, I didn't tell you in the first text, the vegetation was deciduous, and yes, we were in autumn, the fickle nature of our cold countries—whereas in the second text, he speaks of trees needing props underneath because the branches are bending under the weight of the fruit, so on the contrary, extremely vigorous vegetation, a biology anything but declining, and there is no longer the narrator, that is, an adult, a grown man surrounded by little girls, but instead there is the narrator as a child in the dream, surrounded by three great ladies.
11:50 You see, it's incredible, but it happens: the two texts don't refer to each other at all, there's no allusion to the other text in the first one, and vice versa, right? So to speak, Wagner and Nerval didn't coordinate with each other. So, I'd like to say, if we could do this with two pages of Nerval—it's an exceptionally rich work in Nerval's symbolic field.
12:21 So, you can imagine that in Wagner's Ring, which stages an entire century of Germanic mythology by mixing it with all of Greek, Greco-Mediterranean mythology that most of you know in broad outline—and with the endorsement of a Lévi-Strauss, for those who think I'm joking—in Lévi-Strauss, who is known, to my knowledge, for having introduced mathematical models into the combinatorial analysis of myths, and which works in kinship studies.
13:01 I recall that Lévi-Strauss said, in the preface he calls 'Overture, under the sign of music,' to his book The Raw and the Cooked, that Wagner was the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths. So why not show that there can be rigor in the human sciences, predictability, determination? So, for the Anglo-Saxonists—I have nothing against Anglo-Saxons, I've never been a racist—but I'm talking about the dominant Anglo-Saxonist ideology which makes them defend empiricism, pragmatism, neo-positivism, and so on.
13:37 Analytic philosophies, even of Anglo-Saxonist origin—let's move on to the Nordic, Protestant and puritanical dominant strand of contemporary ideology on the planet. I return to falsifiability—falsicability, you can coin whatever neologism you want—that a theory, to be scientific, must be falsifiable.
14:09 Well, even Popper, who is a fierce anti-Marxist—that's why he has this success, because otherwise he never advanced a single concept, as far as I know, neither that of substance, nor of subject, nor of predicate in philosophy. Philosophy—I don't concern myself with scientific disciplines, that's not my field. But since he claims to be relevant, and above all his devotees make him an authority in philosophy, I recall that even his own requirement—that a discourse be able to be falsifiable—is satisfied here.
14:39 So, I mean, this is the occasion, if ever there was one, perhaps to force the Northwest Passage, the famous Northwest Passage, if you want a metaphor—or, if you want another one, it's the occasion to throw a frail bridge over what Kant called the impassable abyss separating theoretical reason, Newton, from practical reason, Rousseau—physics from politics, for example.
15:11 There, I'm announcing the program, in broad outline, I'm not dealing with it yet. But I'll take the opportunity, because there's already material to answer some questions in what I've just announced somewhat at large. Here again, I'll be quick on the questions that are barely questions, or that are, very kindly, just greetings or things like that. Still, yes, there's one of our friends who is very, very, very faithful and very assiduous and very…
Buddhism, Tibet, and the Third Reich 15:50 I'm thinking of Marielle Euglue—I'm giving her pseudonym here, of course—who lives in the provinces, and who tells me… Well, I read the question in full when it's not too long. 'Good morning Dominique, I'm informing myself and wondering about the links between theosophy, Krishnamurti, anthroposophy, Steiner, fascism, Nazism, eco-fascism, New Age, esotericism, alternative medicine, and certain other so-called ecologist currents of deep ecology.'
16:21 'And this reminds me of you, obviously.' I see that Marielle isn't misreading my thinking too much. Thank you. 'I remember one of your workshops during which you mentioned a quote from Goethe, I think, at the entrance to a concentration camp.' Yes, Marielle, I'll come back to that. 'Which one is it? My memory is failing me. Many thanks to you. Have a good Sunday. See you soon. Marielle. PS, bravo again.' So, allow me to say—not to bask in happiness, though flattered vanity is never unpleasant—that it's not to me but above all to the whole team that credit is due for this new site, richer than a goldmine.
17:04 So I'm very pleased—again, I'm never as pleased as when I see someone addressing us as a collective, especially to say it's effective. So there. So I'll answer very quickly, yes, yes. But before saying yes—no, I'm not saying that I'm a Nazi because I'm a Buddhist, don't put words in my mouth that I didn't say. I know the Buddha's teaching well, I was deep into it when I was 16. You see, I mean, there it is.
17:35 It's true I was a bit reactionary at the time—well, that's a euphemism, but that age is merciless, as the popular saying goes. But one can very well—the Buddha's own teaching has nothing Nazi about it, as you know from his texts, it's rather the opposite, a stripping-away, well, in short, and an immense compassion for the misery of this world. Very quickly, if I didn't stay there, it's because salvation or liberation—there are all sorts of words for that in Sanskrit—are, in Buddhism, negative, so to speak, not at all in the moral sense, but in the sense somewhat like what's called apophatic in philosophy.
18:31 For example, when the monks ask him what Nirvana is, the bhikkhus, as they're called, he answers: one is neither lying down nor standing, there is neither left nor right, it has neither top nor bottom—he speaks of it only by negation. It's an approach that Plato used in the Parmenides to speak of being, so speaking of it only negatively, it is neither this nor that. It's as if one said, what is God—he is neither visible, nor mortal, nor representable, I don't know, in short, neither in space nor in time, and so on.
19:06 So, I'm not saying that all this is Nazi, that would be… On the other hand, historically, there are links between the Tibetan political institution—yes, the one led by the Dalai Lama historically, during the 1930s—and the Third Reich, very close links. So if Marielle wants to know more, I'll send her to an excellent site, in my opinion one of the most complete—there are multi-volume works on this, it's very well documented, and you can't hide the sun with your finger, as the African proverb says—but I'll refer her to a site, it's very well developed there, called simply Tibetdoc, it's very—wait, let me not say anything wrong—there, that's it, so it's a site that gives you
20:17 a very precise history, almost day by day, of the expeditions that took place right in the Third Reich, especially at the end of the 1930s, with the blessing of Himmler, the founder and grand chief of the SS, to go and do, supposedly, archaeology, but above all to identify racial brothers, because there's all this business of the Indo-Europeans—all this delirium built up by the Germans—it's August Wilhelm Schlegel, at the time of Hegel, in the era of German Romanticism, who produced the notion of Indo-European, which is not in itself delirious, because he's a great scholar, August Wilhelm Schlegel, from a strictly linguistic point of view, fine—but watch out, the official language of Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal is French, that doesn't mean it defines a race, right, you can be Francophone and Senegalese, right, I'd even say that if all our TV presenters in France spoke French as excellently as my Senegalese friends, right, I'd be quite pleased about it, among other things.
21:26 So I refer her to this title called Tibetdoc, in one word, capital T, then tibetdoc in lowercase and doc with capital D, there. You won't believe your eyes or your ears when you look at the site, which is also very rich in iconography, in period photographs.
Buchenwald at the gates of Weimar 21:56 So, there—as for the concentration camp, Goethe's phrase, it's quite simple, well I need to look it up, there. She merged two different memories, but it is indeed connected. It's when I visited the Buchenwald camp, which literally means, the beech forest. Buchenwald is the concentration camp.
22:26 it's either a book or beeches, in German. Buchenwald is a wood, a forest, that's where 'wild' in English comes from, wild, savage, in short, Wald in German. When we visited the Buchenwald camp, which is three kilometers from Weimar—I insist, why? Because Weimar, historically and culturally, is the summit of the opposite of barbarism.
22:56 it's the summit of German humanism, on the central square of old Weimar, like a marvelous town—that sort of little town, it's not a big city like Munich or Hamburg or Berlin, but a small town in Thuringia, marvelous, in which there is, at the Weimar National Theatre, where German dramatic literature was practically created, at the end of the eighteenth century, beginning of the twentieth of course, around the prestigious duo of Goethe and Schiller, and you have the statue of the two friends, the two greatest classics—because in Germany, they're considered classics and not romantics, they were rather wary of the Romantics, in fact, Goethe and Schiller—holding hands, a statue in front of the National Theatre, that's Weimar.
23:47 Now, I refer you—and I refer her too, Marielle—to another excellent site called The Friends of Georg Lukács, originally, but you just type German fascism and Hegel. Georg Lukács, German fascism and Hegel. You put that on Google and you'll come across extraordinary documentation compiled by Lukács himself, by the great Hungarian Marxist philosopher, where he quotes entire pages by Nazi philosophers really appointed by the authorities of the Reich to purge everything that was humanist, progressive, Hegelian—Marxist, needless to say—you see.
24:35 and they all say that the enemy is the humanism of Weimar. You see? That is to say the enemies are Goethe and Schiller, that is, German classicism, that is, Goethe is a great friend of Hegel. They weren't entirely on the same wavelength, but the two of them were united in that they detested the German nationalism that was already rearing its head, to the point that the Deutschtum, meaning, if you will, Germanness, how would you say it—Frenchness, I don't know.
25:08 Well. The Deutschtum, Hegel, making a pun, called it the Deutschdumm. Dumm means stupid in German—German stupidity. You see? Well. So I won't linger, otherwise it would take a rifle to stop me—these are interesting, important subjects, which help so much in understanding many things today. Let's say I'll end this parenthesis on Weimar Germany with this quote from a much more recent Frenchman, François Mauriac, a companion of De Gaulle, of course—and that's not my camp, he's a right-wing Catholic man—but who said: 'I love Germany so much that I prefer there to be two of them.'
25:54 You see? You'd get lynched for repeating that phrase in today's Europe. Soon we won't even be able to say it, otherwise, well. So, back to fascism and neo-fascism rearing their heads. So, I was visiting the Buchenwald camp, you see, and at the entrance, the authorities—this was at the time, of course, of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the DDR, or East Germany, if you will, communist Germany, eastern Germany—in short, a state that was taken from me. Well yes, they can take your house, your wife, but there, they really took a country from me.
26:27 It's still extraordinary. And at the entrance to the camp, the authorities, without any commentary indeed, had placed on a sign a quotation from Goethe, who often used to walk—we're at the gates of Weimar, but not at Buchenwald. When you walk on the Buchenwald hill, it's a kind of small rise, a hill, you can't help but have your heart filled with great feelings—humanist ones, understood—faced with this landscape, you see, almost like a terrible mockery.
27:03 There, three kilometers from the summit of German humanism, is the paroxysm of barbarism—not German this time, but Nazi. Right? There. So I'm adding this detail to the somewhat hazy memory she said remained with her. There, I'll move on fairly quickly. Thank you very much, Marielle, we'll certainly have the chance to meet again.
Question: does techno serve the counter-revolution? 27:33 And I move on to Romain Brouset. So, Romain Brouset, probably a young man, but let's judge rather. I'll read you his question. It's a bit longer and concerns the music consumed mostly by young people today. You see, it often happens that he criticizes, in particular—you watched the short film that Aliocha and Pierre-Alain were kind enough to film and put on the site.
28:07 'Hello, I wanted to ask Mr. Pagani a question. Having watched a few of your association's talks and videos, I obviously became aware of your musical knowledge, etc. So I was wondering, being directly involved, whether he had studied and would like to share an analysis'—I'm reading it as it's phrased, since I'm not at all from this field, hoping not to be too clumsy—'whether he had studied techno music, trance, and related styles. I haven't read a great deal, but I believe that rock'—I really like Romain's frankness, I really like people who dive in like that—'but I believe that rock, with the growing Americanization beginning with the Marshall Plan, was a new code of integration into liberal-libertarian society.'
28:55 We can see that Romain—he says he hasn't read a great deal, but he has read Clouscard. You already have to clear away obstacles to get to Clouscard amid the contemporary blackout. 'I wondered whether this more recent music—more recent than rock, presumably techno, electro, etc.—fits into the same approach and the same analysis, or whether there's something more.' I'll tell you right away, what touched me a lot in Romain's remarks is his frankness and at the same time the fact that he's torn between his investment in these current music styles—that's what they're called, I saw it last time at the Ministry of Culture, in the 'current music' subdivision—his investment and at the same time his rather acute political awareness, since he says 'I don't want to be on the side of the counter-revolution by listening to them either.'
29:52 There, well, rest assured—'I wondered whether this more recent music fits into the same approach, the one Clouscard criticizes, that of rock—repetitive, reactionary, claimed to be a contestation of the established order, whereas Clouscard shows that it's the most mechanical submission to the established order—or whether there's something more,' because I feel—and moreover he's very nuanced in how he expresses himself, he doesn't say 'I'm certain, I've thought it through, I've demonstrated it,' no, 'I have the feeling, perhaps mistaken, that there's something more'—already, in the use of drugs, he means—the context shows this afterward—he means that even if there are drugs, there already were in rock, of course, and now, nonetheless, they're not experienced in the same way. I quote his text: 'during these events, there already were, before, I imagine, but different, I believe.' What I noticed is that in rock, singers smashed their guitars on stage, you don't hesitate to do anything at all, whereas in raves—I assume he's talking about rave parties, of course—there's a more 'respectful' atmosphere—he put 'respect' in quotation marks—I'm not aware
31:02 ...of a DJ smashing his mixing desk to create euphoria, you consume, but not too much either, not everywhere, of course, you drink, but you must always have fun, not be too forward in dancing, be on top of one another, but not too intrusive — in short, I want to say in short, the rave party is described by Romain as the thug who has just been tempered, it's very rich, and I don't know if he did it on purpose, but it's very dialectical, not too forward in dancing, be on top of one another, well, I was wondering whether this also had something to do with the music as such — you see, so far it's well constructed, he's talked about behaviours, smashing guitars or not, shooting up to the max or taking it easy, same with alcohol, and now, what if we talked about music, because after all that was the subject, we haven't yet said, so far, in what way this music as music, mind you, and that's what interests me, could be subversive or, on the contrary, submissive to the dominant ideology, so I was wondering whether this also had something to do with the music
32:12 as such — in gabber, for instance, in the Netherlands, it's more debauched, there are more BPM, I learned recently, thanks Philippe, that this means beats per minute, well, that's a trivial observation no doubt, how does techno music and its derivatives fit into the ideological evolutions since the start of the counter-revolution, to what extent — his question focuses there — does this get retransmitted particularly in the rhythm, which is binary, totally, with higher BPM, is there anything else, might there not be a part of this music, and I find this almost, it's touching, I hope he doesn't think I'm being condescending when I say that, it is sincerely moving, might there not be a part of this music that could be used for revolutionary ends, in brackets, because I do like it after all, but I would hate to be taking part in the counter-revolution — well now, here's someone who has the merit of openly exposing his perplexity and thereby asking the most pertinent question there could be, he is caught in a contradiction into which today's society places him,
The sonic ghetto and the discourse that justifies it 33:23 isn't that so? So let me tell him the essential thing right away: let him consume his music as he sees fit, as long as it gives him some auricular, auditory, rhythmic, or even choreographic well-being, I don't see why he should have to blush over it. Firstly, what is reactionary is the discourse, it is making people believe that this music is what threatens the regime, isn't it? Coming back to what he says about rave parties, as I said earlier, he thinks he's defending them by saying, after all, it's not as destructive as in the days of rock when people smashed guitars and chairs too, and the seats in concert halls, from rock'n'roll onward, from the 1950s — but on the contrary, I find that he confirms the analysis that Clouscard and I were making at the time, when raves appeared, namely that at one time, the leather jacket with a bicycle chain in hand was considered a staged act, a form of protest,
34:33 even if it was a somewhat harmless posture, not very dangerous for those in power, but still, it presented itself as a violent, contestatory posture, whereas now, all our ravers, with an R-A-V-E of course, are nicely gathered together, surrounded by a cordon of gendarmes or riot police or cops or police officers — I mean, this isn't progress, it's rather a triumph of power more than of music, it seems to me, I mean, there you go.
35:05 And the essential thing, let me tell him right away what I reproach this music for, is the fact that you can't get out of it. As for me, I have nothing against any music, even the seemingly emptiest or most simplistic little song — simple is a quality, but simplistic, rhythmically, melodically, harmonically, and above all whatever parameters you like — can be defensible if it is moving in any way whatsoever, musically speaking.
35:45 Whereas what I reproach this music for is its black-hole quality, the fact that you never get out of it. And it is fantastically impoverishing compared to the potential of other musical heritages. That's why I speak of a sonic ghetto, that is to say that young people are objectively locked inside it. Nobody puts a gun to their head to keep them in these ghettos. It's even more serious than that, it's an adherence from within.
36:19 Clouscard spoke of an abduction of souls with the Marshall Plan. And so, once again, there is nothing reactionary about listening to this music. What is reactionary is listening only to it, and above all justifying it. And I'm not talking about the young people who listen to it, I'm talking instead about people who are much older and who sing the praises of this music as supposedly the expression.
36:49 There's a programme on France 24 that I find odious even though it presents itself as extremely likeable, a couple of journalists, a couple because it's a man and a woman, who spend their time in the suburbs interviewing groups, rappers, while they themselves are journalists at France 24, fine, I mean — and who constantly glorify what? Marginality.
37:21 So the ghetto. There you go. I mean, once again, let Romain not worry. If he takes pleasure in listening to this music, I have nothing to say against that pleasure. A pleasure that harms no one is never reactionary. It's not... it's like freedom in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it consists in doing everything that does not harm others, after all. There you go. We'll have occasion to come back to this. In any case, I am very grateful to Romain for having made this effort of clarification and thoroughness in the midst of real contradictions.
Marx without ontology: externalizing the interior 37:58 Real ones. That is to say he sets himself against his whole generation, that these are not contradictions within his own mind. There you go. Once again, thank you Romain. And now I turn to... yes, well, here we come back to something more strictly philosophical, with someone familiar to us, Chris Régnier, to whom I had already replied once before. And I'm very glad to find him here again.
38:30 He says, well, I want to thank you. There you go. Having, thanks to you, regained a taste for reflecting on context, I've been stumbling for some time now on the notion of ontology. I see it cited often — in brackets, Prolegomena to the Ontology of Social Being in Lukács, Being and Event presented by Alain Badiou — I remind those who aren't specialists in philosophical matters, ontology, I mean quite simply discourse on being.
39:02 I don't like all those who translate '-logies' as 'sciences of' — logos means discourse, discourse on. Of course, in the long run, when the discourse becomes scientific, discourse on the earth, that is geology, ends up being a science of the earth. But that's a bit of a shortcut. Literally speaking, normally, it's discourse on. So discourse on what? Logos on 'on'. 'On' is the infinitive of the verb 'to be' in Greek.
39:32 You can't get simpler than that. It's the doctrine of being. There you go. So Alain Badiou wrote Being and Event, presented as having the ambition to stand alongside Heidegger and Sartre on this question, an allusion to the fact that Heidegger wrote Being and Time on one side, and Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness on the other. Isn't that so? Now, it seemed to me I had understood that for Marx, there was no ontology. So we have a series of people troubled by ontology on one side, and on the other side Marx, you practically never see this word uttered, treated seriously — but rather a history of conscious beings and an externalization, or externalisation, whichever you prefer, of the human essence.
40:22 It's not complicated, I mean, when the architect, whom I often quote in Marx's writing, who has his house in his head before realizing it in the outer world — when he realizes it in the outer world, he externalizes it. There you go, the whole of human history, the history of praxis, is the history of an extraordinary double, reverse movement typical, mind you, of anthropology, well, specific to man, which is to interiorize what is exterior and to exteriorize what is interior.
40:56 Yes, the house I have in my head does not exist, it doesn't grow on trees — houses, that is; caves, you can find them ready-made in nature. Houses, no. Besides, after the caves of the Neanderthals come the stilt-houses of Cro-Magnon, already more elaborate, isn't it? Complicated to build stilt houses, you know, over ponds, when you recall the Ice Age. Well, in the Mousterian period, how shall I put it, prehistory — would you have any reading suggestions to clarify this point that's bothering me?
41:29 You understand why it bothers me, it's that there are people who claim to follow Marx — well, Badiou, Lukács, under very different labels, because — I don't want to scandalize the Marxist household, but I mean, I'll sum it up with the Gospel, it is said in the Gospel that in my father's house there are many mansions, there are many very different points of view within Marxism, all the better, after all, it's a living thing. I say this to make clear I am never against differences at this level.
42:02 As for the differences between, say, Althusser, Badiou, Lukács, Georges Gastaud, myself, etc., and Clouscard, there's nothing at all prejudicial about there being differences. I rail against divisions, when these differences become a pretext for division, which is quite different. So, back to it. Where it poses a problem is how one can be a Marxist, claim to follow an author who never speaks of ontology and who is far more concerned, mind you, with human activity than with being.
42:43 Being is not really a notion that expresses action. Often the two are even opposed, aren't they. If I say to you 'freedom', or, say, 'materiality', to take a very different notion, taking two words that end in '-ty', I am in being, in what is supposed to be. But if I say 'liberation', that's not the same suffix. 'Materialization', which is what the architect does when he leaves his plan and produces the house, when he produces it, it's a collective effort, from the contractor to the bricklayers and the migrant workers who are numerous on the building site — when it passes into realization, it is no longer of the order of being, it is of the order of act.
43:27 And you know this — who's 'you'? Well, you, who went to primary school, for heaven's sake, you were told this. Watch out, when there's the verb 'to be', there are no longer complements. When there are stative verbs — to be, to appear, to seem, to become, to remain, to stay — there are no complements after those verbs, because they are stative verbs, they are not action verbs, they are not 'Zeitwort' as they say in German. In German, the verb, as an expression, is called 'Zeitwort', the word of time, because it takes time to pass from what is in my head to what is outside, and effort, and sweat, and elbow grease.
Neither being nor having: man without qualities 44:01 When I say 'elbow grease', that's a metonymy, it could be the brain beading with drops of sweat, couldn't it? There you go. So, once again, most of the time, being and act are opposed. Act wavers, it moves, it doesn't have the stability of being. Hegel, who is often ironic toward those fascinated by Being — Being, mind you, to speak like the Heideggerians, with a good fifteen circumflex accents on the E.
44:35 Hegel, like many, had already achieved fame in Berlin, he was out walking, he was near Mont Blanc, and of course, at that moment, he's always flanked by journalists. 'Mr. Hegel, what do you think of the spectacle of Mont Blanc?' And Hegel said, 'Das ist...' Yes, that... that is. There you go, it doesn't move. It's solid, it's a rock. Man is not that. Man is not a having but a doing, says Hegel, just as Marx does. I would even say this is one of the rare points on which Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx are on the same wavelength.
45:09 At the beginning of Zarathustra, there is a magnificent passage where Nietzsche keeps multiplying images, because Zarathustra is a book of images, but in the most defensible sense, a bit like the prophets, the books of the prophets. Man is a bridge stretched over an abyss. Man is a rope. Danger in crossing the abyss, danger in staying in the middle of the rope. You see, man is not what is on this bank, or what may be over there.
45:41 It is becoming that allows one to pass from one to the other. It is movement. And we saw this last time. When I suggested, I asked you to watch the magnificent film made by Arte on the archaeological discovery at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, where fossils were discovered that deserve to be included in the genus Homo for reasons we should ask the specialists about, and which go back 300,000 years, exceptionally ancient for the genus Homo.
46:14 And the Frenchman leading the teams there ends up saying, you know, we always have this illusion of believing there is a moment T — I call it December 31st at midnight — where we finally passed from animal to man, that's it, now we're sure it's truly a homo, a man for good. In short, there's a human being, a human nature, just as there's an animal nature and a plant or even mineral nature. And he specifies, he says no, it's a permanent process of hominization, and it isn't finished.
46:46 That is exactly what Nietzsche means here. And on this point, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx are in perfect agreement: man is not a having, he is not defined by properties, the way you can define lead, sulphur, or the triangle by whatever properties you like. Because precisely, those things don't move, it holds for eternity that a triangle in the Euclidean plane has angles summing to 180 degrees, that its three medians meet at a point that will serve as the barycentre in physics, well, the centre of gravity, and so on.
47:22 Those are properties. Whereas man — magnificent title by Robert Musil, the German novelist — is the animal without qualities, the man without qualities. It's the same word in German, isn't it? It's interesting to see that 'Eigenschaft' means both what belongs to me in the proper, legal, economic, financial sense, and at the same time the chemical property, the properties of mercury.
47:55 So man cannot be defined either as a having or as a being, because there are people who are... there are, there are... Ah yes, you want to speak of Francis Cousin? Yes, if you like, he's part of it, but so is Séguéla. But what's the connection there? Really, that's outrageous, comparing Francis Cousin, a great Marxist, I speak as his disciples do, to Séguéla. But no, look at the dialogue between Séguéla and Giscard, Séguéla says, now, enough is enough, isn't it?
48:25 Enough of always being in appearance, we must get back to being. Séguéla! The one who gave us the 'quiet strength' slogan, which served Mitterrand's election so well. And so, he admits, moreover, in this interview that he himself was right-wing, but he did everything to get Mitterrand elected. Anyway, let's not get worked up. Yes, well, you know, those who oppose being and having nowadays, some of them think they're being profound by trotting out this banality that lies in the gutter — enough already, I mean.
49:01 Being and having have this in common: they define a nature, something stable, immobile, which I define by my property, by my bank account, or else by my genes, mind you, to be even more in the domain of being, of biological or physical being — in any case I define the human being, I alienate it into what philosophy would call the category of substance, I substantialize man. Some say essentialize, worse than essence. Essence is in words.
49:31 A mathematical definition is an essence. But when, to this essence which is in words, I make something real in things correspond, as if my aggressiveness were in my genes — this was said by Sarkozy. Indeed, these criminal teenagers, we should check whether it's not in their genes, because after all, it's not so clear, all that. I quote, I quote, a French head of state, two centuries after the Age of Enlightenment, coming out with that, almost three centuries.
50:01 So there you go. So we have a few reasons to be wary, as Marxists, of ontology. I don't know what the being of the Jew is, the being of the Black man, the being — oh dear, forgive me — of the African American, of the Afro... The Africans are much smarter, they say 'the Whites'. The White being, the European being, I don't know what any of that means.
50:32 Once again, it becomes more precise when we reconstruct a history. So, some say, yes, but you have to become what you are. To become, you must first be. That's not certain. Take a knot, a knot, you have it in your hands there, you see, a knot. Ask seamstresses, sometimes it takes ages to tie a knot, or ask fishermen when they're dealing with their nets. But once you've untied all the threads, there's nothing left. We thought there was something there, but it was a relation.
51:04 Ah, that's interesting, gifts. Indeed, I am not a man when I am the baby coming into the world wailing. I am still a little Mowgli in potential. If I'm abandoned in the forest, and if I'm not rescued by Pharaoh's daughter as Moses had the good fortune to be, and to find a new place. And as happens still every year, even today, in India and elsewhere too, but especially in India because of certain isolated regions, hyenas, particularly more than wolves, carry off children, and it happens very exceptionally that a she-wolf who is pregnant and whose teats hurt her because her milk is coming in — that suits her all of a sudden, doesn't it?
51:45 Instead of devouring a baby that has just been snatched from a hut, in a village, for instance, while the villagers were out in the fields, she suckles it. That's the story, the origin of Moses. We have never been able to humanize feral children. There are irreversible lesions that occur in the brain at a very early age, and if language, for example, has not been learned by a certain age, it can no longer be learned afterward.
Relation makes man: prematuration and inheritance 52:15 The feral child could never be either bipedal or speaking. There you go, I'll remind you that it's not enough to be born human, to sum up the philosophical conclusion, to be ontologically, to be human. So it is the relation that makes us human. And once again, when we are born, we are not left to our genes alone, we still have consciousness, and that matters, for better or worse, because unfortunately there are also genetic diseases we already suffer from at the neonatal stage, unfortunately, even if that's fortunately not very frequent, it's a classic case in medicine.
53:01 but, generally speaking, genes, for better or worse, determine what falls within their own domain, I don't know, eye colour, growth rate, the rate of calcification, whatever you like. But on the other hand, heredity, which I do not neglect and which is not my field, I leave to those whose speciality it is, back to the hard sciences, you see, I stay in my lane — heredity must not be confused with inheritance.
53:34 Now, language, the one the mother whispers to me, giving me verbal caresses I don't understand, the game — it's the newborn speaking, whom I make speak, even though he doesn't speak, but this babbling with which begins — well, let me get ahead of myself, I'm anticipating our approach to the Ring — with which begin the very first bars of this work, the longest in the history of art, not just of music. When the daughters of the Rhine, suddenly emerging from the depths of the Rhine, speak the first words after the prelude of The Rhine Gold, which serves as prologue to everything else, they are not words, it's childlike babbling, 'Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle'
54:11 — made of German alliterations there. In other words, it's the first stage of embryonic speech, and anyone who has had children understands perfectly what I mean. There's a moment when the child stops having cries or moans or... under pain or joy or surprise like a little animal, and all of a sudden, it becomes articulate, melodious. But you still don't understand what he's saying because he has finally mastered the channel, but he doesn't yet have the code, the language.
54:41 You see, it's at that stage that he is caught up by the relation, by the face. When I say 'the mother', it's a function, it could be his mother, that's the most common case, but otherwise it could be the nanny, it could be the father looking after him. I take this chance to say, and I'm the first to admit it, that today's fathers, I mean those much younger than me today, are much better parents than those of my generation. Sorry to those of my generation, but I mean, it's statistical, what I'm saying, I mean, there's the best individual case that outshines it, but I mean, I notice there are far more parents, more fathers who take care of putting their young children to bed than was the case in my generation.
55:25 So when I say 'the mother', it's a function, it's not... but the face of the adult, and this world that the child, emerging from an abyss, from a void — a void, I do mean a void, I'm summing everything up here — but, well, he is not armed from head to toe like a bear cub or some other young animal, and he is not viable. Well, fledglings aren't either, you only have to see how they look in the nest, a kind of pink ectoplasm.
56:00 No, well, but it goes very fast. And I always give you the example of that little fawn that falls from a gazelle who has just given birth in the savanna, and who manages to walk within three or four days and even to flee danger. Do you realize how long it takes a human infant to walk? And this has been demonstrated—here again I defer to the scientists on this point, I mean that's absolutely their specialty—there is a generic prematurity of the human being. When I say he comes from nothingness, he comes into distress.
56:32 Noth, in German, you'll hear that word often in the Ring. And by the way, Siegfried's sword is called Nothung, meaning both distress and want. Noth—a very strong word. The child comes into distress, into lack—not only hunger, fledglings too—but into incompleteness; the fontanelle is one of the traces of this, physiologically, anatomically speaking, for example.
57:02 And so, if there weren't the relational relay—I come back to the philosophical quotient—if there weren't the relation to the other, the relation to the thing, to my genes, all of that would be largely insufficient to make me viable. So when I say that man, the human infant, when he sees that face lean over him, its melodious sounds and its caresses, that draws him toward another world, and that world is the one that history travels through. For better or for worse, isn't it.
57:32 There you go. In any case, he isn't asked to remain in the nature he comes from, which hasn't exactly spoiled him. Look at the myth of Prometheus, where man is quite deprived compared to all the other animal species—no claws, no scales, no fangs. There you go. These are reminders, but ones that seem important to me. So, once again, it is not in his biological being—I come back to the justified perplexity, which I validate, of Christ, against those who have an ontological concern.
A second ontology: Aristotle, Hegel, Gastaud, Althusser 58:07 Now, wait, let's be serious. There can be a second ontology. There would be a primal ontology, the one we would have had if we had remained a natural being—I think that couldn't last long. And then there is a being produced by history. Once again, I mean, a house is no less material than a cave. A house is not something virtual.
58:39 Still. There you go. I believe I've made not the full tour of the question—we realize that ontology has been going on for 2500 years at least. That's even its role. But philosophically, there's Aristotle's Metaphysics, going back to the fourth book, book Gamma, on that famous question which inaugurates, I tell you, 25 centuries of ontology. There is a science that studies being as being. Not the being lying down, the being standing up, the mobile being of the physicists, or the singing being of musicologists.
59:14 No, no. Being as being. This science resembles none of those that preceded it, and all the other sciences are parts of this science. There's a great solemn moment for those legitimately concerned with ontology. I refer you to this beginning of the fourth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. That's not all. One could say that Hegel's entire Logic is an ontology.
59:45 But truly, it's a second being, that is, we've passed through the opposite of being, through nothingness. To have true being, that is, becoming, we've passed through being and through nothingness, the negation of being. What this means, becoming, is like a river flowing. It's something that at every instant is no longer and is again. If you think about it, being and nothingness succeed each other permanently, or are simultaneous, dialectically co-present in the notion of becoming.
1:00:19 Becoming is making the synthesis of the stable and the unstable, of movement and rest, and so on. There you go. I won't develop this further, because then we'd get into the labyrinth of metaphysics. It's not uninteresting, but Chris is right to point out that there is no explicit, manifest ontological concern throughout Marx's entire work. But, on the other hand, Marx does say clearly: we are constituted by history.
1:00:53 There you go. I followed very attentively a very interesting talk by Georges Gastaud, who intends to rehabilitate, within the Marxist framework—and he knows Marx's work very well—an ontology, this name, with the perfectly legitimate concern of not leaving neopositivists a monopoly on rigor, on science, on being, and even less on philosophy.
1:01:24 And so, once again, we may have differences, but ones that leave room for a dialogue that can be extremely fruitful. I think this is really a matter of semantics at this level, and that we can perfectly agree with each other as soon as we distinguish this second ontology from an original, primitive, in short, naturalistic ontology. There you go. Althusser had already said—you know I'm not preaching for my own chapel when I speak of Althusser, but I like to be honest with people whose other points I may reject.
1:02:00 Moreover, Althusser says somewhere that as soon as one starts insisting on words like life, vital, invigorating, invigorated, a god is brooding its claws somewhere. There, I'll conclude my answer to Chris on that. We're probably at a quarter past one, no? Ah okay, alright, I misjudged the time. Good, well that's convenient because I'm far from having exhausted the questions—I'll give them to you in the order I received them.
Orbital resonance and the music of the spheres 1:02:33 So, there's also a friend, a comrade, no pseudonym—I have trouble pronouncing it because it's ch-plus-u, c, k, there—who regrets that I interrupted my presentation, but Covid separated us, as it did from many friends. We used to have very interesting evening exchanges, whose scientific relevance I greatly envy this year—he's teaching for the first time this year, he's very busy, he mentions it in his question actually, and coming from a working-class background, he rose to a level of excellence in the hard sciences, mathematics in particular, theoretical physics if you like, and he tells me that if it's not really a question, it's a springboard, and I can't help sharing it with you so that you engage
1:03:43 with this line of thought. It's about orbital resonance. What is this? So, let me just recall first—wait, I need to find, there, his question, excuse me, yes, well, I'll summarize it, it'll be faster—he told me that despite all the papers to grade, etc., and all the research work he continues alongside this teaching, he had recently re-watched the talk I gave at the invitation of the Popular University of Saint-Dizier a few years ago, in 2015, and I had given it on—here he makes a little slip, our friend, he says the music of space, that was the title—actually it was the music of history, that's a nice slip, you can see the scientist in him there, well, and it's interesting because, after all,
1:04:53 the spaceship with which Kubrick's film begins opens with a waltz by Strauss—after all, why not the music of space, or music in space. No but very seriously, he tells me, at one point, he's speaking to me, I mention the mathematical youth of Plato who was initiated by his milieu and Archytas and the Pythagoreans, and in short, this whole movement from Thales, Pythagoras, the Greek mathematicians, which culminates in that extraordinary first stage crystallized around the name of Euclid, in the famous Elements of Euclid, the first systematic mathematics with proofs that have come down to us.
1:05:50 Now, not the first mathematics—Babylon, long before, had already gone very far in arithmetic in particular and even in trigonometry, and the Egyptians somewhat in geometry, even in a pre-science of the number pi—but there were no proofs, no mathematics as theory, etc., no modeling. And this happens, and Plato had frequented mainly Pythagorean circles—yes, the Pythagoras of the theorem, you know—and Pythagoras is the first to have done applied mathematics, and, you'll see why we're going to talk about music, this first applied mathematics was acoustics.
1:06:38 Pythagoras took the example of the string, the lute string: when you put your finger at the middle of the string, that geometric middle, that midpoint in number, one half, also gives the midpoint for the ear, that is, the note gives you the octave, that is, you'll see, excuse me, this—you have the same note, but an octave higher, it's all the same note. So, for the first time, a number, a pure abstraction, a ratio, a relation, one half—that doesn't exist as such, the mother exists, the daughter exists, the mother-daughter relation—there are no atoms of the mother-daughter relation, nor cells.
1:07:21 A relation is a relation, a substance is a substance; nothing is more opposed than substance and relation, it's logical—that is, substance is what exists by itself, relation is what exists through another. You think left and right are things? Turn around, and left and right are reversed. Now here a relation suddenly acquires a being, with applied mathematics, and the first instance was acoustics. And from this, he connects me and informs me—because here he knows much better than me, and that's not hard—by telling me this, sorry, here: orbital resonance, definition. Orbital resonance—you already see the musical connotation, Pythagoras spoke of the music of the spheres, and here we start from orbital resonance.
1:08:10 So, I quote: it is, in astronomy, the situation in which the orbits of two celestial objects, A and B, revolving around a common barycenter—I just spoke of barycenter earlier, that is, simply, center of gravity—have commensurable periods of revolution, that is, for those alarmed by the word, that's exactly the definition, we're among honest people, whose ratio is a rational number and not one with infinite decimals like the number Pi.
1:08:41 Well then, it's a special case of mechanical resonance also called mean-motion resonance. Orbital resonance is commonly noted N, I don't know if I'm reading it right, N, the sign divided, two stacked dots, N divided by P, where N and P are two natural whole numbers. There, I'll stop there to recommend you follow up on these leads. And I thank—here I'm not answering questions since he doesn't ask me any, on the contrary, he makes me raise questions, you see, he makes us raise questions.
1:09:17 But there is here a link—whether distant or metaphorical or real, I don't know, I'm no specialist—between the sonic thing, resonance, phasing, vibration, and the orbits of celestial bodies, which is not uninteresting, and in any case which has historical precedents. I remind you that Pythagoras spoke of the music of the spheres, even if that's surely much less precise than what we've just tried to define with orbital resonance.
1:09:52 And after all, one of the most advanced models, even if it's not approved by all physicists today, but well, it seems it's still one of the most developed mathematical or physical models, is string theory. You know what that means? We come back to musical metaphors, don't we, where the whole genesis of the universe is conceived from vibrations. I'll stop there because beyond that I'll start saying nonsense. But anyway, there's a whole field to which we're invited here by someone who is the least suspect of raving, and who is most seriously engaged in the hardest of sciences, our friend, CH-UCK, further on, UCK, whom I salute.
1:10:39 I'll move on—there are two very long questions which I'm going to answer briefly. There's Laurent's—but I do want to say Laurent A., dot, capital A, dot, in his email, that's another pseudonym, but an interesting one, Zeus Hera, isn't it? Zeus and his wife Hera in Greek mythology. We've known each other for a long time, we lost touch a bit because I'd lost his contact details, and I'm very happy he's reconnected, especially now with our site up and running.
1:11:18 Laurent is someone who has done work—I would like to invite him one day, if he's willing, if he doesn't want to remain anonymous, and if he's willing to present to us the results of the extraordinary research he's done—in the field, I'd say, of literature, in the literary field, he manages to find passages, excerpts that embody with remarkable precision, or that illustrate, in the best sense of the word, the most decisive philosophical problems.
1:11:57 And often in tune with Marxist fields and concepts situated in Marx's wake. So, I mean, there, I won't answer his question, which is very complex, very interesting, very rich. Either I'll answer it separately, since it deserves a whole session of its own, or I'll invite him to do that session together with me, where I'd ask him questions.
1:12:35 And there you go. But I must say I'm delighted with his collaboration. He has also thought a great deal about post-Nazism. And then, a very precise question from Jordan Amadouche, who, after saying thank you very much—I presume that's also addressed to Pierre-Alain and all the teams, etc.—says: having seen your videos on left-wing culture and your knowledge of language and of the major Marxian or Marxist works, or 'at the very least pedantic choices'—I quite agree, my dear Jordan, let's leave aside those overly controlling labels.
"One Yankee for three Chinese": a variant of Capital 1:13:25 I don't know a better person to ask this question, apart from Aymeric Monville. There, I say this mainly as a tribute to my comrade, publisher Aymeric Monville. In Book 1, in French, of Capital, chapter 25, 'The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,' section 3, quote, 'The Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army,' you know, Marx alludes to how the West maintains unemployment to put pressure on those still employed and wage-earning, saying: listen, if you're not happy with your wages, there are people asking to take your place.
1:13:58 You know, England starved Ireland, but systematically, by producing famines—the last famines of the modern era, in the twentieth century—famines that produced a massive exodus of the Irish to America, for example. England systematically impoverished the Irish population in order to have a reserve labor force and put pressure on English labor.
1:14:28 There you go. So when I explain what Marx calls the industrial reserve army, it is written—and he quotes Marx—'The capitalist system also develops the means of extracting more work from wage laborers, either by lengthening the working day'—all that is quite current. What did Sarkozy say? Work more. 'Or by making the labor'—by making the labor more intense, or again—that's for productivity, isn't it.
1:15:03 That is, you can increase the pace with the same number of hours, or again apparently increase the number of workers employed by replacing a superior and more expensive labor force—for example, as I was saying, the English worker—with several inferior and cheaper forces, Irish. Follow my gaze. Now, it's by entire boatloads that they arrive from Africa, when they're not devoured by sharks or drowned. So, if there are people, the CGT unionists, that's luxury—you see how the employers reason.
1:15:36 'By replacing a superior and more expensive force with several inferior and cheaper forces, man by woman, the adult by the adolescent and the child,' end quote, and a Yankee by what? By three Chinese. So, an attentive reader—and I congratulate him for it—and he shares the benefit of his sharp reading, Jordan adds this: I find in the French version, in the French translation of Capital, the same quote, but there's no longer the Englishman versus the three Chinese, the Yankee, sorry, versus the three Chinese.
1:16:14 In the German version, he quotes it one day, he wishes, Manhattan, Feiner, Gezen, etc., he knows German as well as English, likewise—the passage about the Yankee and the Chinese, the equivalence of one Yankee to three Chinese, is sugared over, removed. The French version would then be based on the first edition, whereas the English and German versions are based on the fourth. To what can we attribute, here's his question, the disappearance of 'one Yankee for three Chinese' in the other versions? I tell you right away that I don't have the answer off the top of my head.
1:16:46 This omission seems significant to me and inevitably evokes the pursuit of capital through relocation, even the famous 'great replacement,' which names the thing so poorly, as Camus would say, that it adds to the misfortune through its imprecision. There, with my thanks, Jordan. So, I take this opportunity to make clear that I don't have a sure, documented answer, but well, I don't know the editorial history behind why the equivalence of one Yankee to three Chinese was sugared over, cut, in the English and German translations.
1:17:27 Is it an oversight, an omission? Is it a passage that seemed incomprehensible? Is it political? Is it censorship? We'd like to know. There, I'm throwing the question out to everyone. Maybe it will come to us from those listening. In any case, bravo Jordan. But listen, I think that for today—are there any questions, Philippe? Are there any questions about the answers to the questions?
Marx against Malthus and the far right; a call to scientists 1:18:00 In Marx, it's clear, it's exactly the opposite of the far right. The far right has always been pro-liberal. It may say the opposite now, Marine Le Pen says the opposite of what her father always said. I don't know who that fools. But I mean, liberal economically, not in morals. Liberal but not libertarian, if you will. In other words, it's an old right condemned by history. That's why it's not the most dangerous right now.
1:18:30 That far right, the real far right, is wreaking havoc all over the world right now. I mean, it's rather formidable, from Bolsonaro to the Biden-Trump pairing. Yes, that would be an all the more mistaken confusion. Let me say very clearly that Marx very vigorously, as everyone knows, criticized Malthus. I don't know—I mean, saying that Africans have too many children, that was said by a well-known TV presenter, I don't know if you remember exactly.
1:19:06 But well, since he's dead, may the earth rest lightly on him, as they say in Africa. But anyway, we hear it often, 'they have too many kids, how do you expect it, it serves them right, if they're hungry, they should have had fewer children.' This presenter even told me, if I recall correctly, that they should be given a cut-off. I'm just quoting. There is nothing more abjectly reactionary than this kind of talk. No, no, I'm not being moralistic or making grand rhetorical gestures. Very precisely, because it's proof—they let it slip, they drop the mask that they're parasitic consumers.
1:19:37 Personally, I have nothing against consumption, you know that, I'm rather Decombes-like about that, I think we don't consume enough. But they, they're parasitic consumers—I criticize whoever consumes more than they produce. That's the ratio, especially when they produce almost nothing and consume a lot. The majority of those who talk like this—what am I referring to? They act as if all the little African children were nothing but mouths to feed or stomachs to fill. But they're also arms and legs, and they're also productive forces.
1:20:07 We can clearly see that these people completely ignore production. That's the most important thing in Marx, after all, in his analysis of economic matters. Still, it's production that must be remembered above all. I've often said that when a news report shows the crowd in a supermarket and calls it 'the mass of consumers,' I don't see why they're called consumers. The people in the supermarket, the mother of a family looking at prices and buying the cheap brands because she has 5 children to feed—and then she gets criticized on top of it for stuffing them with Nutella.
1:20:42 Because it's not expensive. And that supposedly makes these children obese. I would remind you that these people are first and foremost producers, especially those who watch their spending and check prices. But that's never said. No one ever talks about 'the crowd of producers'; they say 'the crowd of consumers.' It's really extraordinary. There you go. So that's what Marx criticized in Malthus, and also criticized in an English trade union leader who, in order to limit wage increases—there were already company unions, so to speak, house unions—had said that it's not by making the spoons bigger that everyone will get more soup.
1:21:25 When Marx said that, it means we're assuming that the content of the soup is fixed. Once again, we leave production out of account. There can never be more soup in the tureen, right, than there is now. So obviously, in that case, the bigger the spoons, the less soup there'll be for each. There you go. You see, I'm answering very precisely. Thanks to Marielle for hammering the point home. I don't see how one can drag Marx over to the far right.
1:21:56 On the contrary, he's reminding us that what we take to be race struggles—people coming to steal our jobs, and so on—are in fact class struggles, we can see it clearly. The English worker and the Irish worker, that's not a struggle of the English chromosome against the Irish chromosome. That's nonsense. It's a struggle between the better-paid worker and the less well-paid one. And there, we move from the qualitative to the quantitative, from the biological to the historical. You see how everything hangs together, and we move from the ontological—the racial—to the logical.
1:22:33 It's no longer the law of blood. It's the law of the sol—but there I'm making a pun. The sol, the currency, you see? Un sol, deux sols, that's what gave us "sous" in more recent French. There you go. It comes from "soldat" [soldier]. Originally it was the pay of the soldier in the Roman army. There we are. Perhaps there are other questions? Others? Other comments? Good. The rest and conclusion of the questions, I think, next time.
1:23:06 And the resumption, of course, of the focus on memory and anamnesis. So get ready for there to be some contamination from the presentation of the ring format, right? And from the attempt to propose a rigorous modeling in the human sciences, in the human domain. So I come back now to the question from our friend Huc, on which I'll make my last little remark.
1:23:41 I address this request to him. I know very well that we've all been separated, especially since one of us, a tremendous mathematician, has left. No, this isn't a judgment on my part, I'm not qualified to make one, but I mean, he was selected among very few French people to work on artificial intelligence at Cambridge, and so we no longer have him close by, but well, we do have the little screens. Look at Pierre-Alain, the work he's done from Reykjavik, which is much farther than London. I'm thinking here of Pierre Wolinski, Pierre Wolinski, our friend Huc, and Étienne Burle, of course, our founding father of our association, one of the main pillars of our house—I'm thinking of Thomas de la Rochefoucauld, a mathematician—and extending that to our comrade and friend Erwan, who is a brilliant physicist who, even if he isn't
1:24:55 very bling-bling, I would say—he doesn't agree with the word "brilliant," competence is enough for him. We could put together a team, I need this team to conduct a dialogue, I can't speak in their place, I can't speak within their fields of expertise, and I would really like there to be an exchange during this sequence that we'll begin in January. I would really like the involvement to be more recurrent and more regular, so that we can navigate together between philosophers and scientists, between scientists who devote themselves to philosophy and philosophers who need scientific validation, so that we can move forward and do something unprecedented.
1:25:47 There we go. Well then, see you next time for these great tasks that await us. Thank you all, thank you for being here, thank you for your comments, thank you for your questions, thank you to the technical crew—I have the impression it went well because Skype isn't always very, very... it sometimes gets a bit garbled. There you go, but this time it went very well. Thank you, Philippe, and see you very soon, and thank you everyone.
