English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
A point about Lula and Brazil 1:00 It's a technical problem. And it's not very nice for those who are kind enough to be present this evening, but there's not much we can do about it. And on the contrary, I'd be grateful to Philippe for doing everything he can to keep reconnecting each time. So, before commenting on the texts that were sent to you, the three texts, I'd like to quickly continue answering questions that I haven't been able to comment on so far because I lingered on the others.
1:40 And so, the first urgent matter, the first courtesy, would still be to answer these questions, especially since there are some that... This is the case with the one I'm going to start with, which dates from last November 10th. Well, it didn't have a conjunctural character, a conjunctural urgency, if I may say so. Yes, it's a question asked by Inès Oludé, who has followed us very faithfully from Belgium. She's a Brazilian comrade living in Belgium who is furious with me, and I rather think she's right to be furious with me.
2:22 Well, there's a slight chronological gap here, let me explain. She's furious that I echoed a friend who told me he knew Brazil well and had traveled there a long time ago. Well, a long time ago. Well before, when Lula was still even in the opposition, even before he became president, head of state. And this friend had told me: you know Lula, I asked him the question because I could see, from a distance, the complexity of Brazilian affairs.
2:56 And he had told me, this friend, you know Lula, you shouldn't have too many illusions, he's a bit like the Brazilian Mitterrand. So of course, Inès is furious, and when she tells me that—and it's true—that he has against him all the neofascists currently in power in Brazil, with the help, I'm always reminded, with the help of the powerful evangelical sect, without doubt it wouldn't have happened without the North American, North American, right, evangelical machine, which controls an enormous fraction of the petty bourgeoisie, alas, Brazilian, both the small and the large, but unfortunately also within a certain segment of the popular classes.
3:43 And you know to what extent—it's the same thing in Africa or the Middle East—with religion, one can thus, so to speak, neutralize discontents that can no longer be hidden, but deflect them onto reactionary or deadly paths. That's another debate, but let's be clear, when this friend told me that, it was well before Lula had the trials brought against him, and before the ignominy of putting him in prison to eliminate a candidate who would certainly have been elected—all the figures showed it.
4:27 And so, I agree with the fact that one shouldn't shoot an ambulance, as we say in French. I presume she resides in French-speaking Belgium. I'm sure we understand each other well. And I would never have brought up this reflection from my friend in the tragic context and the troubled Brazil since Bolsonaro's election.
5:00 So, I just wanted to set the record straight. Well, I don't question my comrade's judgment either. He's someone who knows Brazil well. Well, no doubt he was alluding to the social-democratic side. But we shouldn't deny that a great deal, a great deal, a great deal—and here Inès is completely right—a great deal of Brazilian misery. There's the EC, you know, no need to even say the word favelas.
5:32 Even before getting to the favelas, there's a rural Brazilian misery, not only in the big cities, which is terrible. And these people's fate, I mean, improved considerably during the time Lula was in power. You can't hide the sun with your finger, as Africans say. Duly noted. So, but again, I would never echo, I don't know, the idea that you should shoot ambulances, and even less those who are imprisoned.
The three conditions of scientificity 6:08 Thank you Inès for this slap in the face, as they say on the duck's side [a pun on 'Le Canard enchaîné']. And thank you too for your loyalty. Besides, there's also a question from our comrade and friend Léo, who, regarding the consultation we conducted, wanted to know whether, starting next January, I should talk about Wagner or about the relationship between the hard sciences and the human sciences, and especially about the question of the scientificity of the latter.
7:03 Léo is one of those who had opted, right, for the scientific subject, to put it quickly. So, his question—I'll summarize it, so as not to waste too much time. First, I should clarify that he's rather well placed to ask it, since Léo is preparing a thesis—I hope he'll forgive me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that his thesis deals with the relevance, the application of general relativity, of Einstein, right, of the Einsteinian modeling of relativity, to address the stability of the solar system, roughly speaking.
8:08 And so he's really in the hard core of the hard sciences, so to speak. And these are parts of mechanics, of physics, all of that is part of physics, which require a rather sophisticated mathematical level. Let me remind, in passing, for the laypeople, myself included. So, he says, Pagani seems to doubt the scientificity of the human sciences, the proof being that he doesn't call them sciences, he says they are at best disciplines—I'm adding 'at best,' you see that's even harsher—at best disciplines, discipline being an intermediate term between opinion and science.
9:00 It's not as contingent as opinion, it's not just anything, it's not café-du-commerce chatter like opinion, but still, there's something missing somewhere to have the dignity—well, it's not a value judgment, because a discipline is a lot in certain fields, just managing to make it into a discipline is already something—but to go quickly, I'll answer this way first, before answering on...
9:30 My position regarding the scientificity of the human sciences—let me remind you that science in general, that the epithet 'scientific' is only deserved when at least three conditions—there are others, but at least these three—are met. First, every science is defined by its object. A science worthy of the name must have a proper object; a science of everything is a science of nothing. Botany has a well-defined object, which is the plant world, zoology has the animal world, and the same goes for astrophysics, geology, which has the Earth vertically, and not geography, which has the Earth horizontally, so to speak.
10:17 There. Let me remind you that geography means 'drawing of the Earth,' not 'study of the Earth'—the study of the Earth is geology. Well, all these sciences have a proper object. That's not enough to characterize them as science. Next they must subject this object to laws, that is, to universal and necessary statements, valid everywhere and always. When we say heat expands bodies, that's not only valid in South Africa, or on the planet Neptune.
10:50 It's not valid in the Middle Ages and then false from the 16th century onward. No. There. And third—this is the condition we most often forget, and here, since it depends on how it's expressed, we're not far from philosophical reflection—expressing these laws in terms that allow for the application of measurement. When Newton says that all bodies attract each other in proportion to their mass and inversely to the square of their distance, the notions of mass, distance, and velocity can be the object of precise measurement and therefore of quantification, and you see mathematics coming in, of course, from there.
11:40 There. I recall these three conditions: having a proper object—this is what I hold against ecology, well, when it isn't specified, because originally it was a hybrid science, but since then it has become a political machine, right, it's the science of everything and the science of nothing, the environment. The environment—it's not that in my environment there's the natural, there's the artificial, there are cities, there's countryside, there's zoology, there's astrophysics, there's glaciology, there's—let's not exaggerate, I don't think the ecologist masters all these disciplines.
12:15 Bachelard already said that if the fire at the Library of Alexandria could wipe out, in one go, all the physics of the time, it's because that physics wasn't very developed—because, he said, today a single building couldn't contain all the works, right? He said that back then, before even today's miniaturized databases, which couldn't either—well, actually they could, since they're easily transmissible precisely because they don't depend on a single center.
12:47 A single library couldn't hold all the volumes devoted to physics alone today, you see, without even going into the rest of knowledge. So, having a proper object, formulating laws with respect to this object—that is, a universal and necessary proposition, which can always be improved. Newton's law was entirely universal in its time; its universality had to become more circumscribed with relativistic mechanics—that is, I mean, it remains perfectly valid, continues to be perfectly valid, for objects that don't approach the speed of light too closely, to simplify, that is, mainly in macro-physics.
13:37 And third, expressing these laws in terms that lend themselves to the test of measurement, of the metron. There. So now I'll answer on the substance—we'll discuss it further because I can't give a satisfactory answer to your question; we'll do that when we start dealing with this subject in detail starting next January.
14:11 But, programmatically, I can already point toward the direction of my answer to him. When he says Pagani seems to say that ultimately he contradicts Hegel and Marx. Hegel speaks of science, and that he has arrived at absolute knowledge, at science. Marx and Engels speak of scientific socialism. So why does Pagani doubt it? There. He puts it very kindly, I mean.
14:42 Léo is a friend, a comrade. He knows what he's talking about. But there's a small misunderstanding about the terms, you see. I'll start with a short passage from Hegel that seems to prove him right. Right from page 8 of the Aubier edition of Hyppolite's translation, in the preface: the true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of that truth. To collaborate in this task, to bring philosophy closer to the form of science—well, that's exactly our whole program starting next January.
Hegel: bringing philosophy closer to the form of science 15:20 To bring philosophy closer to the form of science—once this goal is achieved, it will be able to lay aside its name of love of knowledge, philosophia, love of sophia, in order to become actual real knowledge. Because as long as it remains a love of knowledge, it means it doesn't have it. It's not the money in my pocket that I desire, it's the money I don't have. We agree on that. So the search for wisdom is not the doing of a sage.
15:51 The inner necessity that knowledge be science lies in its very nature. And the satisfactory explanation of this point is one and the same as the presentation of philosophy itself. So, that appears in a preface. But I'll end with this sentence: if one could show that our time, our time—Hegel is speaking of his own time, but you'll see that on this point, we are indeed still in that time—that is, modernity—if one could show that our time is favorable to the elevation of philosophy to science, that would constitute the only true justification for the attempts that propose this goal, both by demonstrating the necessity of this goal, bringing philosophy closer to science, and by achieving it fully.
16:32 I point out to Léo that all this is programmatic. If Hegel sets himself the task of bringing philosophy closer to science, and if he thinks it's the great task of modernity in this domain, it's because it remains to be done. It's because it isn't science already in act. There. And as for the expression... as for the expression 'scientific socialism' under the pens of Marx and/or Engels, let me note here that it's rather rare for Marx himself to pound the table using the expression 'scientific socialism,' which is more frequent in Engels.
17:21 Now, I'm not trying to drive a wedge between the two, as certain detractors of Engels strive to do. They're not the same... it's not that one is superior to the other, it's not that one would be more mechanistic and the other more profound. No, no. It's a division of tasks. All right? Engels fights, afterward, even after Marx's death, to popularize—in the best sense of the term—what the Enlightenment fought for in order to produce that enormous masterpiece, the Encyclopédie of the sciences and arts, of the sciences and techniques.
17:59 It's not the 'reasoned encyclopedia'—well, as they used to say in the 18th century. Well, Engels, there you go—and when one does this didactic work, we'll come back to this for another question, the relationship of philosophy to imparting knowledge and not merely know-how, and so to the didactic, the pedagogical, and so on. Remember that the Phenomenology, from which I just read an excerpt and to which I'll return shortly for another question, has often been compared to a Bildungsroman—one can also say it in German—that is, a novel of formation on the model of Rousseau's Émile, you see, we are indeed here in the problems of transmission.
18:48 So, let me note here, after my little parenthesis on the fact that there's a division of tasks between Marx and Engels, and that one is necessarily more systematic when transmitting than when still in the midst of research—he must be well placed to know this. I'm sure that what he'll present during his defense will be clearer and more systematized, right, than it appeared to him at the beginning of his research.
19:18 Marx worked quite a bit on the difference between the order, between the real chronology and that of the exposition. Ordo Exponendi and Ordo Essendi. There, so, I'm not sure there exists a fully armed and constituted science called Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism-Leninism is not a constituted science 19:51 I am certain that within the whole mass of the human sciences, it is the one territory that comes closest to the form of scientificity. It's up to you, to us—I'm saying to you, speaking to Léo, to myself, and to everyone willing to collaborate, and to each and every one of those listening to us in particular, to whomever it belongs, as Hegel says so well, this eminently modern task of bringing what concerns the human sciences closer to the form of constituted sciences.
20:34 There, it's a task that's both more modest and more exhilarating—I'd like it, if what I keep persisting in denying is that there already exist human sciences fully in act, that is, that someone could explain to me with the same rigor as quantum physics, as quantum mechanics for example, what made us go from Haydn to Mozart.
21:09 Why are there three manners in Beethoven? I don't know. Under what conditions was the partition of Poland carried out at the end of the last war. On the other hand, to answer these questions, I admit we are never better equipped to answer them than when we are familiar with the tools that the advances of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, among others, mainly, have brought to the edifice of knowledge.
21:53 There. On that note, I haven't started yet—this is a bit of a catch-up on the questions that were overdue. I haven't gone through all of them. Let me remind you that for the very long questions, the ones I can't read to you because they'd take up several pages, I plan to devote a specific session to them. Again, they don't have a conjunctural urgency, so it can wait.
Reading of an excerpt from Clouscard's Le Capitalisme de la séduction 22:26 We'll answer them before Christmas, for example. On the other hand, I'd like to go back here to the text we sent you, and I'll start with Michel Clouscard's text. Right? I'll read it first as it is, it's not far. Let me remind you that it's taken from one of his works, among those that had the greatest commercial success, several tens of thousands of copies, it's Le capitalisme de la séduction, and it's a text which, although short, condenses in a rather rare way, condenses all at once the measure of a solution to the problems we've been asking ourselves for some time.
23:25 I'll read it first, then, without comment. We must set aside all theological nostalgia and all its epistemological drifts. Our destiny was not lost; it never took place; there was no destiny. Meaning was not given somewhere, fixed, and then forgotten, in any case perverted by history. We must reject any quest for and restoration of a lost substance.
24:00 In the field of knowledge as in that of politics, nostalgia for substance grounds all reactionary ideology. There is no indelible mark, no secret wound of the eternal Grail, no irrefutable testimony of a lost purity or innocence. Our destiny is yet to be made. Everything begins, everything has begun with the relations of production. End of this excerpt.
24:33 So, why did I insist on this text—you'll tell me it's quite striking, it's magnificent, yes, no, no, but it's much more precise than that. It's that, you see, I come back to the question from our faithful Marielle Euglue, who has also been following us for a long time and very faithfully. She had also asked me this question about the relationships between Buddhism and other pro-Eastern or pro-esoteric, pro-mystical enthusiasms with the far right and neo-fascism.
25:11 Let me recall this question, I'll reread her question because it's brief. Hello Dominique, I'm gathering information 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 such as deep ecology. And this obviously reminds me of you. I recall one of your workshops during which you mentioned a quote from Goethe—I've already answered. There, to be precise, I answered, it was the Goethe quotation at the entrance of the Buchenwald camp, three kilometers from Weimar, the summit of barbarism, the abyss of German barbarism three kilometers from the Weimar heights of Goethe and Schiller's German humanism.
25:54 A big thank you to you, well, well, well, etc. And no, etc. Bravo again to the whole team for this new site, much richer than a goldmine. I say this for the team, which deserves at least this praise. So, what's the connection with Clouscard's text? It's precisely that there's this question of nostalgia. You see, I come back to Clouscard's text—now that I've read it without commenting, I return to it—we must set aside all theological nostalgia and all its epistemological drifts.
26:26 There are two fundamental themes. The critique of nostalgia, that is, the idea that there was an absolute in the past that we should return to—there, you understand better the connection with the enthusiasms for mysticism, Nazism, an earthly paradise, well, one could multiply, right, the references to 'it was better before.' Right, in every sense, whether a recent 'before,' or, all the more so, right, a mystical 'before' prior to all humanity.
Critique of nostalgia, critique of substance 26:56 There are thus two essential themes in this excerpt, and they are linked, of course: it's the critique of nostalgia, but also—not the literary or artistic critique—the artistic critique, from an epistemological and philosophical point of view. Clouscard was the first to have personal nostalgic feelings, but that's just moods.
27:26 Second theme, the critique of substance, and above all — this is a fundamental statement, thank you Clouscard — nostalgia, it's in the middle of this short extract: nostalgia for substance grounds every reactionary ideology. So listen, take advantage of this, here you have a statement that lets us draw out a generic category for everything that lays claim to a very extensive term, that of reactionary, which runs from the petty bourgeois like this, really, not the one in charge of the Auschwitz camp, through all the counter-revolutions — that's a lot.
28:09 He says nostalgia for substance grounds every reactionary ideology. There you have it. We must reject — the word substance appears twice, just one line above he had already said we must reject any quest for and restoration of a lost substance. The term restoration, historians know it well, is a term with a very strong political connotation.
28:44 I've already said several times over these past years in different workshops that we're not living through times of revolution, we're not living through times of counter-revolution, we've essentially been living, since the French Revolution, through an incessant struggle between revolution and counter-revolution — if the regime we're currently suffering under in France is attacking freedoms to this extent, as never since the Liberation.
29:15 Pay close attention to the dialectic I'm trying to bring out. It's because it senses that revolution is coming back onto the agenda, looming on the horizon, and not only in France. The whole of world capital senses that something is starting to tip over, if only the geopolitical balance of power on the planet. I won't go into details, everyone knows them, even if they don't judge them the same way.
29:51 There's no panic on board yet, but you can smell the fire. And at that point, what happens is exactly what Clouscard had predicted back in the 70s, in Néo-fascisme et idéologie du désir — he had indeed said that fascism would come from libertarian liberalism. That's exactly what we have in power. It would not come, I mean the liberty-killing laws with which every fascism begins would not come from those who openly claim allegiance to the old far right, to the Poujadist-fascism of the Le Pens and so on and so forth.
30:42 There are so many of them, they resemble each other so much that sometimes I can't remember their name — it's very popular, well, it'll come back to me — on the right. And whom we see all the time, on the TV panel shows... you must know him better than I do. Thank you, thank you — there we go, the great replacement, that's it, Mr. Zemmour, yes, that's it, all of that is reactionary categories, and we are on the — these are the steps taking us down, not up, down toward neo-fascism, it's not — toward neo-fascism.
31:19 I'll come back to these words, which must be handled with caution. History never repeats itself; it could be worse — that's not at all to be excluded given the current means; it could be — what is certain is that it will be different. Better or worse, we'll see. So what is certain is that currently we shouldn't be surprised by violence in every sense — police violence, but above all social violence — and the violence with which the Covid pandemic is being managed, which is not an invention, which is a reality, but whose political management is incredibly violent.
32:08 Not only that — it's already violent, I saw a program about the 500,000 elderly people in nursing homes who are dying — that's my situation too, I'm not dying, thanks to you, I don't spend my time watching television eating chips because I have the good fortune to respond to requests for transmission, and believe me that keeps you going better than anything — but that said, all those who haven't seen their loved ones and who were deprived of the one little light of their final years, which was the weekly, twice-weekly, sometimes three-times-weekly visit from their loved ones — I mean, that's violence, but that's not even what I'm talking about.
32:56 I'm talking about the violence of the Covid management, the way that, on the sly, they're taking advantage of it to push through social wreckage that the MEDEF had always dreamed of, and which is now going through like clockwork, whether it's the privatization of EDF or pensions. Things that seemed firmly entrenched — but ever since 50 million dead managed to put it in place, that is to say since the Liberation.
33:34 So when I say all this, when I recall that Clouscard tells us that all these forms of reaction belong to a common genus — and there, that's a philosophical term, where will we talk about it if not here among ourselves — that of substance. Well, we'll have to define all that, of course, but I'd say, very briefly for now, even if it's more complex in detail, but in case we get lost I'd rather say it in advance, that it's often confused with essence.
34:22 Often people say, with very good intentions, that human relations shouldn't be essentialized — there is no essence of the African, the essence of the Corsican, the essence of woman, of man, these are not essences, they are things that take becoming into account, external determinations. Fine. In fact it's better to reserve the term essence for what belongs to the order of words and not to the realities these words designate. When you define a circle, you've drawn out an essence. The definition of the circle is a statement.
34:52 On the other hand, when to this essence you make a reality correspond, that it's in the genes of teenagers, as Sarkozy dared to say, that it's in their genes that we should find the reason for their criminalism, if I may say so — not even their criminality according to him. You see, there we pass from essentialism to substantialism. But there's a more general sense of substance. And there I come back to the theme I brought up first, nostalgia.
35:23 We are all in substantialism when we're won over by nostalgia, which we're entitled to. We have the right to be unhappy, to have lost this or that — I don't know, the security of childhood, the affection of those who are gone. But there's nothing wrong with that. Agreed? It becomes substantialism when we start embellishing the past, when we refer to an already-there that existed before, where the problems I'm struggling with today weren't supposed to exist, and which feeds this hatred of modernity that is typical of modernity — I never tire of repeating it.
Arnim, The Heirs of the Entail: the world before the Revolution 36:02 and to illustrate it, I'll use one of the first counter-revolutionary authors. It's the text, probably, of the least known author among those I sent you tonight, but who is an immense writer, very little known even in Germany — Achim von Arnim. Achim von Arnim, if you like, literally in French — Achim von Arnim, I recall that he — well, in short, he's a writer who wrote novellas that I recommend, I'm surprised that in the world of cinema, always looking for a screenplay, no one has yet seized on Arnim's novellas, which lend themselves perfectly to it, but here it's a novella called The Heirs of the Entail — that's a title, a function, the entail, in the feudal and monarchical era.
37:13 so here's a German Romantic writer who lived in the years bridging the 18th and 19th centuries — and this novella, which is a masterpiece — you see I'm not sectarian, it's very counter-revolutionary, you'll see, but it's a masterpiece nonetheless — you can find it, if you want to see it, I believe it's the first time it was translated into French, in the admirable anthology of German Romantics translated by Armel Guerne — I've already often referred to this admirable collection, I'm not the only one to consider it a landmark in publishing, and for those who might have trouble getting hold of it, I recall that it can be consulted on Google Books — so, Anthologie des romantiques allemands, Armel Guerne, chapter Achim von Arnim, colon, Les héritiers du majorat — and it begins like this, this is the very beginning of the novella: 'The other day we were leafing through an old almanac whose engravings depicted the follies of the year — how far away all that is'
38:23 'behind us now.' We're in 1805 there — how far away all that already is, already passed into the state of legend. How full the world was then! — so you get the impression he's talking about an era going back several centuries — no, no, look: 'how full the world was then, before this universal revolution to which France gave its name had turned everything upside down.' It's clear that the sole object of these Romantics' resentment is the French Revolution — let's be clear, we'll understand better after the text I'm going to read you — it's exactly the same period. 'How the world has become since the French Revolution, how uniformly poor it has become since' — does that remind you of anything?
39:17 Heidegger's critique of the greyness produced by the world of industry — if that were all it was, Heidegger — Heidegger is an extreme, you know I'm not one of those who wonder whether he's a Nazi or not, I've said he's the most Nazi of the great philosophers — I'm not talking about the small yes-men whom the Third Reich appointed in German universities from the 1930s on — no, he's the one, mind you, who persists and signs after the war in his indictment precisely of modernity, of technology and of greyness. 'How uniformly poor it has become since — centuries seem to separate us from that happy time, and we can hardly recall that our earliest years were part of it.' So he's talking about a period he himself experienced as a child — there are, you see, historical events like that, isn't there — you understand why I've brought this text into our reflection on memory — there are historical events like that which suddenly accelerate universal historical time — I'm not talking about personal time, we've seen enough of that with Proust — 'when we look closely at these oddities, which Chodowiecki's talent as an engraver, a painter, has preserved the image of for us, we discover all the elevation'
40:27 'the finesse and the clarity of the spirit of that time' — so he refers us to illustrations of the period, the pictures, the paintings — 'it mingles with all the silhouettes passing before the draughtsman's eyes — what wholeness, what delicacy of nuance, found in every detail of life — each individual formed, in his manner, in his dress, a world apart, each one settled on this earth as if he were to remain there for all eternity' — instead of being buffeted about, implicitly, in the stress of the modern world, isn't that so — 'and as people sought to live as well as possible, they welcomed enthusiastically' — what?
Buddhism and the four noble truths 41:08 So here I think back to Mariel's question about the far right's attraction to mystics, visionaries, conjurers, secret gatherings, mysterious adventures — so that's where the enthusiasm for the religions of the Indian subcontinent, Brahmanism and Buddhism, fits in — because I never said — some people have made me say I claimed the Buddha was a Nazi, not at all — the Dalai Lama is a feudal slaveholder, yes, that's why he's fully backed by the CIA — but the Buddha's teaching, for anyone who knows it, is on the contrary centered on the notion of compassion — since I'm on the subject, let me take the opportunity to recall that the foundation — just as I often say that Marx's 1859 preface is where there's the most Marx in the fewest lines, the Buddha's teaching in the fewest lines, gathered by those monks, those bhikkhus, as they're called, B-H-I-K-K-H-U-S, is the passage
42:20 on the famous four noble truths, to speak in the Buddha's own style — the four noble truths are: first, Dukkha; second, the origin of Dukkha; third, the cessation of Dukkha; fourth, the path leading to the cessation of Dukkha. So you'll tell me, all this will become clearer once we know what Dukkha is. Well, since there's a translation problem, I'll leave that for later — Dukkha is generally translated as suffering, but in fact it's much more extensive, and since people asked the Buddha about the meaning of the word, he ended up giving this superb predicate: everything that is impermanent is Dukkha. Everything that is not — everything that is not eternal, everything that is in time, everything destined to be born and to perish, everything that is, as the Greeks said, in genesis kai phthora, generation and corruption, birth and death — all of that is suffering. There, everything that is impermanent is Dukkha — you see, there isn't an ounce of Nazism in any of that. What would be Nazi is believing that the path leading to the cessation of Dukkha is found — and it's enough for me to go into my past, that I'll find, that I must restore
43:30 something that already existed — that would make light of charity, which is one of the fundamental values in one's relation to the world in true Buddhism. So I come back to this exemplary text, and 'as people sought to live as well as possible, they welcomed enthusiastically' — you see this completely somewhat delirious version, you see, in the Middle Ages, with all the massacres and everything that happened — 'they welcomed enthusiastically the visionaries, the conjurers' — yes, he also forgets that people were burned by the hundreds, isn't that so, it was enough for a good woman in the countryside to give advice to her neighbor in the next farm who had a toothache for her to be burned as a witch — barely exaggerating the point — 'the conjurers, the secret gatherings and mysterious adventures, the miraculous remedies, the prophesying illnesses which fed the impatience, the curiosity of the heart — to how many centuries was that era not linked by institutions that nobly upheld themselves'
44:40 'against all change' — that says it all, those are the last words of this extract — against all change, above all avoid change, the relationship to time — there, that was the necessary complement, last time I ended somewhat abruptly on the management of time in my answer to Marielle, but now I'm coming back to Clouscard's text on — I see some questions from people who know how to link the different talks together, which would take forever if we had to do it every time, but there it is, we mustn't — I say it often — we mustn't let the transmission
Proust and the lost intrauterine paradise 45:52 I'm striving for be like that landscape in the rearview mirror that disappears and doesn't come back — we must make connections, retain what allows us to make these connections. Now what is it — it seems to have no connection at all — the passage about the drama that was young Proust's bedtime as a child, and his mother not giving him the last kiss before he fell asleep, and the drama that could cause, well, when he alluded to the sobs that broke out when he found himself alone with his mother after his father had allowed his mother to spend the night with him for once, isn't that so — he says, indeed, those sobs never stopped, truly, they never stopped, and it's only for some time now that I've begun to hear them again a little, as one grows old — it's a very beautiful image — as in the peace of evening one suddenly hears sounds, bells, that were drowned out during the day by the noise, the activities of the day — there, what connection
47:03 That's three times I've said 'what connection.' I repeat, we must reject any quest for and restoration of a substance — the first nostalgia is the oldest one, I had said, apropos of Proust, who has a relation to fidelity that is a deadly form of fidelity — fidelity that reaches back too far, even before birth, the unconscious — for the unconscious, the lost paradise is the intra-uterine world, the ideal temperature, the darkness, the nourishment that comes without any gap, without any lack, between desire and its satisfaction, without there being, therefore, any notion of time — because I haven't said 'time,' that belongs to the physicist, but the consciousness of time, the fact that time seems to pass slowly or quickly — the consciousness of time is related to desire, and time never seems as long to us as when we are
48:14 in a state of lack — precisely, we must reject any quest for and restoration of a substance — restoration, a political concept, substance, which I'm now taking apparently very far from the political, into the intra-uterine world, but for those who remember, I had recalled that the whole history of human praxis consists in taking over from this lost paradise — not in having a passive and deadly nostalgia but a real one — in short, the pile-dwelling house of the Mousterian era in prehistory is a way of going beyond the cave to replace the uterus — it's still better, the pile-dwelling house — and a fortiori the house later on, from the historical phases onward, the Cretans being roughly the first, about a thousand years before Jesus Christ, isn't that so, to even create central heating with plaster piping, isn't that so, and boilers in the basement, and so on — so once again there's a link between the notion
49:27 of substance, the past, and all religions and all mysticisms, which have their share of truth, mind you — but a truth that isn't known by those who pose it in purely religious terms, that is, in terms of representation — I refer here to the fact that Hegel, whom people dismiss rather quickly, especially those who don't know him, as belonging to the field of the religious, isn't that so, of the mystical — Marx did indeed note the mystical turn of expression in that sacred Hegel, obscuring things — but I think, like Jacques D'Hondt, that it was mainly to throw off the censorship of his employer, which was the Ministry of Religious Affairs, something one must never forget — for someone who was a great admirer of the French Revolution, like Hegel, he had to tread on eggshells. So I come back to the essential point of what I was saying — there is a profound truth in religious speech which is
Genesis: the passage from zoology to anthropology 50:37 unbeknownst even to the religious person — I'll take the example of the earthly paradise in the Old Testament, since it's a reference more familiar in our parts, in our geography, than other forms of paradise — what is there before the fall? Adam and Eve are naked before the fall, they don't work to secure their subsistence, it hangs from the trees, so to speak, metonymically, their subsistence, isn't that so — and before the fall, third determination, childbirth happens without any problem. And then, right after the fall, that's when the Eternal notices that a fault has occurred — it's when he calls to Adam in paradise — the Eternal is a voice, it's auditory in our account of Genesis, we never see him, isn't that so, how could one see what cannot be represented — but we hear him, God is Logos, it's a word — 'Adam, Adam' — Adam answers, 'I am hiding because'
51:47 'I don't want you to see me naked' — and there the Eternal understands that he has tasted the fruit — the animal doesn't get dressed, isn't that so, it doesn't need to, it's born clothed. Second: you shall gain — and from now on the divine punishment — you shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow, instead of picking it off the trees — you shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow, praxis begins. And as for you, Eve, since it came through you, you shall bring forth in pain. Clearly, this is the passage from zoology to anthropology, when you think about it a little. So there is a profound truth here — there's been the theory of evolution, it's called a passage from zoology to anthropology — we talked about that throughout all the previous sessions, and progress has been made with the discovery at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, for example, among other sites — but whose commentary
The generic prematurity of the human species 52:57 was quite explicit on this level — that we never stop making this passage from zoology to anthropology. I recall it because I've had questions, including in private, since my remarks on this — that when I say it's not enough to be born human in order to be human, this has never been truer — that doesn't mean the animal has no relationships, of course there's a form of learning, birds learning to fly, or predators training their young to hunt, or the young training themselves by playing, by fighting with each other, simply to become predators — it's much faster, the difference — and I've said this so much before that I thought it wasn't necessary to repeat it, but there are some to whom everything must be explained, that what is proper to the human species is its generic prematurity. We come back to problems of prenatal origin, prematurity
54:07 generic — there are individual prematurities, but there is also a prematurity of the human species in general, which are at the origin of the human race — prematurity is part of a biological evolution, the narrowing of the pelvic bones in the transition to bipedalism, if you like — the mechanism owes nothing to the human sciences, I mean it's borrowed from the hard sciences, in particular physiology, anatomy, biology — the transition to bipedalism caused an obstetric catastrophe, and childbirth became much more difficult and problematic in the human species, on top of the narrowing of the pelvic bones — and that explains why birth is generically premature, which is manifested in traces such as the fontanelle, for example, on the newborn's skull, and above all in our motor helplessness, all of us, for a much longer time than in any other animal species — look at the speed with which mammals
55:17 of the African savannah get up on their legs and start fleeing danger just a few days after birth. So there it is, I'm reminding you of what this is — because of this lack, this insufficiency, this minus, it's this minus that made man a plus — I said this some years ago, we mustn't forget it, because if everything has to be started from scratch each time — I'm thinking of those joining the train mid-journey, of course, but there are some who've heard it 50 times and don't want to know anything — that's called repression. I mean, there are even some who've told me the unconscious doesn't exist — you see, I've never seen such a fine illustration of repression — these are comrades I don't want to speak ill of, but I mean, we were so educated in that — we shouldn't be surprised, the rejection of the two great anthropological advances of modernity, Marx and Freud, isn't entirely the fruit of chance, isn't that so — you find here the dominant ideology, neither Marx especially, neither Marx nor Freud, who is currently
Truth has the concept, not intuition, as its element 56:27 gaining momentum anyway, I'll come back to that. So you see, when Clouscard says — no, sorry, in the field — there's no — nostalgia for substance grounds every reactionary ideology, you understand why it's so extensive — reaction is what it does when it leans on this nostalgia, which is legitimately present in each of us, for a world of security, of food, of comfort, of course. So, as it happens, substance comes up two pages after the extract from Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology that I read earlier — it's precisely the passage that follows on from what he had just said, I think back to Léo, that I repeat — the true shape of truth is thus posited in this scientific character — there, truth is scientific or it is not truth, and conversely a science that is not in the true
57:37 is not a science. So this amounts to saying that in the concept — and there Hegel underlines the word, in fact it's in italics — this amounts to saying that it is in the concept alone that truth finds the element of its existence — the element, for Hegel, is not the element in the elementary, atomic sense, it means the element in the sense that water is the marine element for fish — it means the element without which fish couldn't even exist. So it is in the concept alone that truth finds the element of its existence — truth must dwell in the element of the concept, implicitly, and not, as the Romantics — of whom Arnim, from whom I just read you a very beautiful extract, not very reactionary, between us — and not in that of intuition, of the irrational, the opposite of the concept — that holds together in my texts. And there Hegel unleashes, or rather releases, his great anger — calmly, we sense it's muted, but he's got a real bone to pick — this isn't happening by chance, because it's in these pages that his protocol of rupture with his own youthful romanticism lies. I know well that this may seem
58:47 to contradict a certain representation and its consequences, a representation as pretentious as it is widespread in the conviction of our time — an explanation regarding this contradiction does not seem superfluous to me, therefore — a contradiction between the requirement of the concept, of scientific character, and that of intuition and of the irrational — even if it can be nothing more here, implicitly, in a preface (the demonstration comes afterward) — even if it can be nothing more here than a gratuitous assertion, exactly like the representation against which it — well, let's go — if precisely the true exists, implicitly as opposed to the concept, in what is named, sometimes intuition, sometimes immediate knowledge of the absolute — you see, there you have all the formulations of mysticism, immediate knowledge of the absolute, without those mediations that are knowledge, science, language, all those things invented by man — that all separate us from the absolute — if precisely the true exists in what is
59:57 or rather as what is named, sometimes intuition, sometimes immediate knowledge of the absolute, religion, being — there's our ontology, not the one Gastaud demands, we'll come back to that, our comrade Georges Gastaud — I said one could perfectly well found an ontology of becoming, isn't that so, and not an ontology of original being — so if precisely religion, being — not being at the center of divine love, but the very being of this center — you see how far Hegel goes in his critique of mysticism. So from this point of view it's rather the opposite — if it's those who are right, isn't that so, the Romantics — it's the opposite of the conceptual form that is required for the presentation of philosophy: the absolute must not be conceived but felt and intuited, not its concept but its feeling — that's all we get on television, for years now in politics we've had nothing but feelings, emotion, to mobilize the crowds, isn't that so, to make them love this or hate that. I recall
1:01:08 in Children of Paradise, the admirable dialogue by Jacques Prévert, isn't that so, when Frédérick Lemaître, an actor who really existed at the time, bursts onto the stage having just heard, during rehearsal, the authors saying, 'Couldn't you act with a bit more emotion, that's it, that's it, emotion, more emotion, always emotion' — nothing new here. So the absolute must not be conceived but felt and intuited, not its concept but its feeling and its intuition must have the floor and be expressed — response: if one grasps the appearance of such a demand in its most general scope, and if one considers it — and there everything is underlined — at the stage where self-conscious spirit presently finds itself, that is, let's come back down to earth, to the present, to the historical present, to the era in which we live, one sees that this spirit is beyond the substantial life to which Arnim's text alluded, before the Revolution, that spirit is beyond the substantial life that it led within the element of thought, beyond this immediacy of its faith — you remember
The modern spirit demands the restoration of substance 1:02:18 Nerval's line, ignorance cannot be learned — beyond this immediacy of its faith, beyond the satisfaction and security arising from the certainty that consciousness possessed, implicitly, in a fantasmatic way, possessed of the reconciliation of spirit with essence, and of the universal presence, both inward and outward, of this essence. In other words, questions couldn't be posed, answers preceded the questions, millennia of religious answers preceded the questions, which only began, timidly, stammeringly, to be posed — not until, as it happens, the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in which we're still struggling. So not only has spirit passed — spirit, that's history if you like — simply passed beyond this state, into the other extreme, that of reflection — and there, reflection is no longer in immediacy, no longer in intuition, let's say the thought of reflection deprived of substance — you see how we get there — deprived of substance
1:03:29 of itself, in itself — but it has gone even further than that: not only is its substantial life, for the second time, lost to it, but — Clouscard knows the texts well — it is also the spirit conscious of such a loss, and of the finitude that now constitutes its content — modern man knows there are no nymphs in the springs, but that it's H2O, if you prefer — reacting to its abjection, confessing its wretchedness (which means its unhappiness, that's the Latin sense), uttering imprecations against itself, spirit — and this is what the Romantics are, contemporary — demands from philosophy not so much knowledge of what it is, as the means of restoring, thanks to it, thanks to philosophy, this lost substantiality and the compact solidity of being — but I don't think one could be closer to Clouscard's text — look carefully, I come back to Clouscard — our destiny was not lost, it never took place. There was no destiny. Meaning was not somewhere
1:04:39 given, fixed, then forgotten — you see the connection with amnesia — in any case, perverted by history — remember Aurélien Barrau, whose competence in the field of astrophysics I would never presume to dispute, but who shouldn't meddle in what isn't his field, isn't that so, when he says that the fall of man begins with hunting and gathering, isn't that so, that already with hunting and gathering man is committing an offense against mother nature — you can't get more nostalgic for Mama Gaia, in the field of knowledge as in that of politics. So you see, meaning was not somewhere given, fixed, then forgotten — in any case perverted by history — we must reject any quest for and restoration of a lost substance, the same word from Hegel's pen, that's no coincidence, and from Clouscard's here — so I repeat this crucial sentence: confessing its wretchedness in reaction to this unhappiness of modernity, spirit demands from philosophy not so much the knowledge of what it is — that's underlined, what it is — as the means of restoring, we pass from being to ought-to-be, to what should be, all one need do — thanks to it
1:05:49 this lost substantiality and the compact solidity of being. If you ask, but what does he mean by substance, what does Hegel mean by substance — there you have it, the compact solidity, the very opposite of the void in which modernity is supposed to be floundering, in dissatisfaction, isn't that so, which is in fact what makes for the greatness of man, as Pascal had seen — I quote Pascal — 'for it is the wretchedness of great lords, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.' In order to accomplish this task, philosophy must not so much resolve the compactness of substance — a second time — and raise this substance to self-consciousness, which is what philosophy should do — it must not so much bring chaotic consciousness back to the order of conceptual thought as — listen carefully, this is the whole program of the dominant doctrines — blur the distinctions of thought, suppress the differentiating concept, and restore — it's underlined — the feeling of essence. It must not so much provide intellectual penetration as edification — edification, the beautiful.
1:06:59 The sacred, the eternal, religion, love are — listen carefully — the bait required to awaken the urge to bite; modernity is that, it's the urge to bite that's missing. So to revive it one absolutely has to find oneself some bait, right, one has to — it's like a job of fanning the air, as they'd say in a saloon, right, the beautiful, the sacred, the eternal, religion, love, so many gals fanning the air on the saloon stage if you like, gals, excuse me, that was their function at the time, poor unfortunate things — the beautiful, the sacred, the eternal, religion, love are the bait required to awaken the urge to bite, not the concept but ecstasy, not the cold and progressive necessity of the thing — there we're not far from mathematics — no, not the cold and progressive necessity of the thing, but the inflamed enthusiasm must constitute the force that sustains and spreads the richness of substance. There, I think we've made good progress on what 'substance' means, and if you're hesitant, it's better to listen for the epithet, or the epithet.
1:08:09 substantialized, that's the right word for it — the substantial, precisely in the sense that everyday language uses so well when you say, hey, I had a great meal, now that's substantial, meaning it wasn't just appetizers, we got our money's worth, put it however you like. So it's obvious — where are we timewise, Philippe, I'm wondering about the timing. Thank you. So now I'll deal with Mallarmé's text — you'll see why I'm moving on to it. So, first paradox: I'm moving on to this text even though it wasn't scheduled — I didn't tell the team, whoever posted it on our Facebook page, because I didn't want to add to their workload, they have other things to do, they don't only have that to do. It was a bit late to say so, I noticed it rather late, I sent it by mistake — it was meant for a future session's program — but since it fits very well into our cycle on memory and forgetting, I'll recall why this text
Summary: the restoration of substance and neofascism 1:09:19 holds its place in this cycle, and at the same time why it follows on from what I just said. So I'll start by summing up what we've just said: what underlies all reactionary thought, and in part the counter-revolutionaries, and today more than ever, neo-fascistic thought — you see how careful I am in my phrasing — the march toward fascism, the return of what most resembles fascism in the past, that is, a political sequence of which fascism is the closest approximation, and it's terrifying — these ways of thinking, this march has begun, we're not there yet, that's why I insist that everyone has a responsibility to clarify things at this level. Now what underlies this march toward neo-fascism is the restoration of substance — I think it's a bit clearer now, isn't it, what we've said now, that we've said that it's capitalizing on an old nostalgia that we all have
1:10:29 legitimately, but that human history has made a multi-millennial effort not to leave in the state of mere nostalgia, precisely, but to give a substitute for the lost prenatal paradise through the effort, the sweat of the hand and the brain of our fellow human beings, to whom we owe the fact that we are not in the total, wailing distress of the immature and premature human infant. So that's why, from there, I connect it to Mallarmé's text, because as you can well imagine — and I insisted on this in every session since we began this theme of anamnesis and amnesia — that memory is ambivalent: there's an effort to remember and at the same time an effort not to go all the way to the end of our memories, precisely because there's a trauma, there's something unbearable if we go all the way. So you see
Nerval's dream: forget-me-not and "do not forget me" 1:11:39 it's no accident that in Nerval's dream, which I bring up so often, where he comes close — where he reaches a proximity rarely achieved — to the memory of his mother, whom he almost never talks about except in his very last works, and even then in a very allusive way, when he has this dream, the dream goes much further into memory than our voluntary, conscious memory — you can well imagine. Now this famous dream, where he finds himself in his maternal uncle's house, right, where he's coming back, where he's tired, where there's an old servant, and all sorts of things that go back to childhood, who says to him, ah, you're arriving late — no, sorry, she offers him to lie down on the bed, to go to sleep, because the uncle will be back late. She says: we'll wake you for supper — a reassuring world. And in this room where he lies down — I won't go into the details — he says, I lay down on a bed draped in Persian fabric with large red flowers, with that hallucinatory precision that only exists in dream hallucination, in the dream precisely, he says: in front of me stood a clock in rustic walnut
1:12:49 and on this clock a bird that began to speak like a person. I won't dwell on the role of the prophetic bird in the symbolic order — it doesn't only exist in Nerval, nor only in our culture — and the bird says to me: you see that your uncle took care to have his portrait made in advance — I stress 'his,' with my voice, because it's stressed in the text, that the maternal uncle is a painter, so there are quite a few paintings in the room — you see that your uncle took care to have his portrait made in advance. I remind those who don't know, for the last time, that Nerval's mother died going to follow her husband on the Napoleonic campaigns, in cold Silesia, over there in Poland, that she's still buried there today, and that she left the little one, right, infans, who wasn't even yet at the stage of speech, with the aunts and cousins, to go follow, out of love, her husband. The husband came back, but not the mother. You see that your uncle took care to have his portrait made in advance. Now
1:13:59 she — it's stressed — is with us. Nerval continues: I set my eyes on a canvas that depicted a woman in old German costume — you see, the dream makes him cross the Rhine and everything, quite distant, that separates him from far-off eastern Poland — over there, a woman in old German costume, because at the time it was German territory — and her eyes drawn toward the riverbank by a clump of forget-me-nots. And when we know — it's overwhelming — that forget-me-not is 'myosotis' and in German — German is in the dream because Nerval is a great translator of German, he became known by translating Goethe's Faust — her eyes drawn toward what?
1:14:42 toward a cluster of forget-me-nots, and forget-me-not, you know, is 'forget me not' in English and 'Vergissmeinnicht' in German — do not forget me. He has the mother say: do not forget me. So you'll say, there, he's reached individual absolute knowledge, so to speak, the trauma that more or less determines his path — no, because at that moment the next paragraph immediately follows, on the next line: but the images grew dim, night thickened, and all of a sudden everything blurs, and he moves on to something else, to other visions, because it was becoming too clear. So this famous dream perfectly illustrates the two forces: one that tries to carry out an anamnesis, to go back to what's called in the Freudian field the primal scene, the mother's death, and at the same time another force that doesn't want to know it, that doesn't want to realize and take on this trauma. Now you see how well we're reviewing now with our texts — remember the first text of this cycle, we talked about the central figure of this cycle, who is Mnemosyne
Mnemosyne: language is neither nature nor convention but pact 1:15:52 I pronounce the Y in the Greek or German way, as you like — Mnemosyne, who is the deity of memory — you haven't forgotten that, or those who forgot it are remembering it now — ah yes, that's right, Mnemosyne, memory — but also of language, you see how we'll get to Mallarmé — and of language, no, not of discourse, not A plus B — sorry, excuse me, A equals B implies B equals A — that's not language, that's discursivity, there's a subject, a predicate, but that's not language, it's silent moreover, it doesn't even need speech, it hides nothing, it says everything. We've just seen that language — and that's why it's linked to memory — doesn't say everything, we've just seen that, there's a force within it. In other words, philosophers argued for centuries over whether language was by nature or by convention, as if there were only extremes, and I told you once
1:17:02 I'd really like us to remember this too, that language is neither nature nor convention, but a pact — you see, it's not as clear as a contract; in a contract everything is spelled out, if there's a dispute you refer to article number 29, etc., or if an amendment is needed, everything is offenbar, everything is manifest, everything appears in the light of day, of consciousness, shared by everyone — whereas in a pact, as you know, every time there are pacts in history there are secret clauses — you know, that's why I use the word pact — the secret clauses provided that not everything is said in the pact, it's concluded between those who make the pact, but not everyone is supposed to know everything that was agreed. Now there's a pact of speech among all men, we exchange something a bit — like a hot potato, as we say in French, like that, you see, without holding it too long, everyone's fingers get burned each time, you see, when it burns too much — language is like that, it doesn't have the univocity of mathematical discursivity. You see, I'm anticipating what's coming on the human sciences and the hard sciences.
Reading of Mallarmé: writing black on white 1:18:12 Now look at what Mallarmé says here about language, fixed in writing moreover — so I'll say it for context, this is an excerpt from what I prefer in Mallarmé — after all, what's subjective and idle, excuse me, but among his prose works, which I rank very high, at any rate among his prose works — this one is called Variations sur un sujet, and in Variations sur un sujet, easy to find in bookshops, there are several chapters, including this one called Divagation — it's taken from Divagation, and right away he alludes — we understand, because with Mallarmé it's not always very clear, like language, you know, he's often accused of being hermetic, but I reassure you, we're here to read it together — he's answering a young man who had written to him and confided in him the need to act, I quote — you know, there are many young people who tell me: I have to get involved, who sense that things aren't right, that something must be done, but they don't quite know which direction to take in these times of misery, moral misery
1:19:22 political and otherwise, right, especially in adolescence, right, and Mallarmé tells him that after all, writing isn't the worst response — that's how this excerpt begins, out of context: 'your act always applies itself to paper, since you speak of acting, write, for to meditate without a trace becomes evanescent, nor should instinct exalt itself in a few vehement and lost gestures such as you sought' — writing is more active than what one believes to be exterior action, which is often only agitation. Roughly, that's what this sentence means. And he goes on: 'to write —' and then, on the next line — 'the inkwell, crystal like a consciousness, with its drop at the bottom of shadows' — you see how we get there, language is not mathematical discursivity where everything is clear, where everything is defined before we even speak of it — you speak, or you define all the words before arguing with interlocutors, is that
1:20:32 how we learned to speak, with our parents? The parents gave the definition of every word before we used them, we just plunged in, we all did it that way, didn't we, and so we were doomed to have, one day, a Socrates come along and say: by the way, what do you call this, what do you call that? Well yes, we were caught red-handed driving without a license, speaking without a license — that's what philosophy tries to remedy, in all humility. 'The inkwell, crystal like a consciousness, with its drop at the bottom of relative shadows, that something might be' — then 'push the lamp away' — meaning: maybe you haven't said everything you wanted to, you've already written that tonight, that's fine, you'll write the rest another time. And there you notice — there we come back, right, to the ambivalence I was talking about in memory and in language — 'one does not write luminously on dark fields' — a superb line — 'the alphabet of the stars alone thus indicates itself' — it's only by looking at the sky at night, the starry night, that one truly sees luminous figures against a dark background — 'you noticed'
1:21:42 'one does not write luminously on dark fields, the alphabet of the stars alone thus indicates itself, sketched out or interrupted; man, hear this, on the contrary pursues, black on white, this fold of dark lace' — look at the semantic field: shadow, black, dark, the opaque side there is in language — 'this fold of dark lace which retains the infinite, woven by a thousand, each according to his thread or unheeded extension' — its pact, its secret — secret clauses assemble distant interlacings where sleeps an inventoried luxury, strige, knot, foliage, and to present it is a graph, the strige — 'with the bit of indispensable mystery that remains, expressed somewhat.' Mallarmé is no apostle, the opposite of the equal, right, of the irrational — this part of mystery, one must strive
1:22:52 that's it, with the extraordinary miracle of poetry, right, to make its shimmer show through, out of these shadows — 'with the bit of indispensable mystery that remains, expressed somewhat' — there it's 'ex,' it's no longer 'in,' it no longer stays inside, it's expressed somewhat. So, I'll use this text again — I've committed to it — when we talk again about the difference between a system of equations and everyday language, which I remind you is poetic — it's not me saying it, it's the linguists, it's the poetic function of language, see the Prague Circle, I won't keep repeating the same examples, but we spend our time making metaphors — when I say 'you're drilling my ear with your shrill screams,' I don't mean it literally, that would mean someone is making holes in my eardrum, that's not the case, it's metaphors; when I say 'day breaks,' that's all metaphors too, we're in poetry
Emotion cut off from knowledge as a political weapon 1:24:02 we're not in astronomy or medicine. All right, I wouldn't want to eat into the time for questions — are there any, Philippe? Ah yes, very good, I greet Rémi — I'll repeat, as I do every time, that I'd like friends of music to go visit this one-of-a-kind site called La Convergence des Luths (L-U-T-H-S), given that these are musicians who, in parallel with the Yellow Vests movement, right — orchestra musicians, the anonymous ones most often, choristers, etc. — and what happens to a dancer from a ballet company, right, when she ages, much more prematurely as far as dance is concerned, right, and what's demanded of her in terms of effort in the ballet — what is the retirement age, all these issues that those in power couldn't care less about — well, La Convergence des Luths, thanks to the initiative of Rémi Cardinal, has helped
1:25:12 put this issue on the table, so I refer you back to him — who is also, by the way, a marvelous pianist, and yes, not only did he create La Convergence des Luths, but he's also at the head, if I may say so, the way one is at the head of a cavalry charge, at the head of the army of Romantics in music, right, against a certain neoclassicism — but you know what I say about the 'baroque crowd,' and no, it's not a word against the Baroque repertoire, right, but against the discourse, right, that underlies this reference to music as, coincidentally, prior to the French Revolution — I'll stop there for now, a very Beethovenian music, yes indeed. So, I want to reassure Rémi again — I didn't say a word against emotion in general, I'm objecting — I'm not the only one — to the way all political problems are reduced, especially when trying to mobilize public opinion, to the sole register of emotion, which is fearsome — fearsome, remember the wars in Yugoslavia
1:26:23 began by stirring up French public opinion — if it was only French — through crowds of refugees on the roads. At the time no one said who was doing what; now we know that the leaders of the KLA, who were supposed to be the martyrs of the Serbs, right, are in fact war criminals, and they're being tried for it now, right, who even traffic in the organs of their own citizens, ever since we put them in power — we, meaning the NATO forces, we, meaning our countries — and for that, right, an emotion had to be stirred up, implicitly cut off from all knowledge. Of course Rémi doesn't separate emotion from knowledge — you can very well be moved by a Chopin melody or a Bach aria, right, without at the same time analyzing it — it's not while analyzing that we're most moved — but I mean the two aren't at all contradictory, that doesn't mean this emotion corresponds to nothing rational, right. So what's tragic, what's criminal, right, is reducing an issue
1:27:33 to political emotion, because you know, roughly 3 million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War, 50,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese, just a few years after roughly the same number of deaths, several million, had occurred in Korea — where there'd been the audacity to hold a communist option, we were already at 6 million — I'm slipping from amnesia into anamnesis, so I take the opportunity now and then to do some anamnesis. Now, if I show you a film where you see a Vietnamese soldier shooting at an American, and vice versa, the viewer who's stuck at the level of emotion will say: that's men for you, violence is everywhere, that's how things are presented. No one says why the one is there 10,000 kilometers from home while the other, the French — a country that had barely just freed itself from French colonialism and already there's a handover to the second imperialist power, well, for the second time
1:28:44 of a world imperialist power. So the Vietnam War follows on from — the American Vietnam War follows on from the French Indochina War. You see, if we only show images — which is what happens constantly every time reports are made, I'm looking at what's happening in Syria, in Venezuela — it's all just emotion, I can give you emotion however you like, and I can suddenly get a Nazi war criminal out of prison by using emotion, by saying he was a victim — ah yes, with emotion you can do anything. So, that's my answer to Rémi Cardinal, but I'm sure he's not one of those who reduce politics to emotion — I've talked with him enough to know that's not the case, and in any case he's right to defend the most legitimate emotion, right, the kind that isn't at all contradictory with lucidity. So, first I greet Jacques, who is following us very closely, and even very tightly, conceptually, which delights me — can you repeat
Space, time and restored past in Proust and Baudelaire 1:29:55 the question, so the terminology is clear, please, Constance — wait, excellent question. So I'll answer straightaway — the first thing that comes to mind to answer is a quotation from the Phenomenology, I'll find the reference later so as not to waste time looking up the pages, it's somewhere in the middle where Hegel says that in representation — which for him is always inferior to the concept, for him representation is never far from the fantasmatic — in representation, the flow of time has taken, I quote, 'the solid and compact form of space.' It's surprisingly close to what Jacques just said — yes, indeed — and space is the place of simultaneities in our representation. The theory of relativity showed that from the point of view of objective materiality, I mean, simultaneity was more in us
1:31:06 than in the thing — but I mean, when I imagine a house, I don't imagine that the kitchen is at noon while the cellar is at three o'clock, right. So I mean, in the world we frequent daily, which is not the world known by science, right, a world where Aristotle is more right than Newton or Einstein, a world in which there's an up and a down, where things fall downward — that's not the true world of scientific truth — in that world, space is the place of simultaneities, whereas time is that of successions. Simultaneity: all the parts coexist together on condition of excluding one another — that's where it's compact, two parts can't occupy the same space, otherwise they merge in space; for there to be a line, two points of that line must be distinct, if they merge there's no more line, there's only a point that absorbs everything, like a black hole, right, like a black dot. There, that's the order
1:32:16 of space, and therefore of simultaneity; but time is the order of succession — there too the parts exclude one another, but since a moment must always be either before or after another moment — I remind you that in Time Regained, very quickly, I'll conclude on this, very provisionally, it's a question we'll come back to — Proust, in Time Regained, says clearly that the miracle of what one should call secular ecstasies — I have a friend who wrote her thesis, sorry, her master's dissertation in literature, precisely on these secular ecstasies, as she very aptly called them, in Proust — they're not the kind of ecstasies known only from religious illumination before — here it's a madeleine in a cup of tea, it's the uneven paving stones of Saint Mark's square in Venice, a smell of gasoline in... squares full of ecologists — there's a very beautiful passage in Proust about a car driving by that reminds him of holidays and the rains that fell
1:33:26 during that spring — in short, all these reminiscences — there are plenty of other things that suddenly give him a kind of ecstasy. He says it's because it's scandalous with respect to the usual order of time, but it's something miraculous that explains the ecstatic side of it: we find ourselves at once, at the same time, in two distinct instants of time, in two moments, we're at once in the present and in the restored past. And my final line will be a poem, an excerpt from a poem by Baudelaire that expresses well this restoration, taking up this same word, the past within the present: 'Reader, have you sometimes breathed, with intoxication and slow relish, that grain of incense which fills a church, or the ingrained musk of a sachet?' We're in perfumes, as often in Baudelaire — 'Deep and magic charm, by which we're made drunk, in the present, by the restored past. Thus on an adored body' — thus the lover, on an adored body, 'gathers the exquisite flower of memory' — there, exceptionally
1:34:36 we have the illusion for a while that we are at once now and in the past — that's it, the point is to make these moments last, but that's another story. Philippe, are there other questions? Thank you very much — well, listen, thank you very much for these questions; may Jacques Carcin not hesitate to dig deeper into his question, to elaborate it and send it to us either on Messenger or on our site, so everyone can benefit, because these questions always help us move forward. Thank you all, thank you for being here, and see you next week. Thank you Philippe, and thank you to the production team, thanks to everyone.
