English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Program of the session, the debt crisis and the situation in the United States 0:30 I am happy to meet you again for this video. Second session of the year 2021 and for a program, a somewhat particular format this time, since you will see that today's session will comprise two rather distinct parts. First a part where I take up again the problematic addressed last time on the notion of scientificity in general, whether it is at work in the so-called hard sciences or in the human sciences. In the so-called human sciences, in the human disciplines called scientific, we have time to work all that out.
1:32 And roughly midway through the session, I will point to an example in the here and now of cultural expression in general — there we are in the human sciences, as was announced in the program, and as I was asked — I was under pressure to put the Ring on the program, I have often, in the workshops, brought in a few borrowings from excerpts of the Ring that could illustrate a philosophical problem.
2:17 That's not what's lacking in a work like the Ring, but equally in Balzac's Human Comedy, or in Chrétien de Troyes' quest for the Grail, or in In Search of Lost Time, it doesn't matter. But this time, this year, instead of making a few fleeting allusions to the Ring, I've been asked to present a bit of the story, which is not without analogy — some have already noticed — with The Lord of the Rings, and with Star Wars; each of the two drew on something, either deliberately or because it's part of the Germanic-Nordic-American culture, call it what you like.
3:07 It's obvious that the Valkyrie's sleep owes something to Sleeping Beauty, for example. There, I'll say, it's a bit the same background. But this will serve to illustrate a problem that I'm going to dwell on for a moment beforehand, in the first part, concerning the notion of understanding. That's a notion we've already seen several times; I asked that, in the announcement of this evening's session, we recall the link to a workshop from a few years back, so as not to — above all to show that in fact —
4:03 I care a great deal — I always take a bit the same image — that what I can present in my talks, whatever interest it may arouse (I thank you when that's the case, but all the more so when it catches on less), should not simply be like the landscape that goes by in the rearview mirror and doesn't come back. On the contrary, there had to be a minimum cumulativity to my talks from the start, so that a systematicity would begin to appear, which already makes it possible to answer many recurring objections that keep coming back, and which I have, for the most part, already answered 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago, depending a bit on the problems raised.
5:00 So then, I'm not quite at the point of saying, listen, refer to my complete works — mine are rather thin, you know I don't write a great deal. But still, there's a minimum of recalling to be done, and to help you with it, to put my own hand to the task, I went back to the video numbered 2-3. So that goes back to the time of our first great cycle, which was between Crisis and War, Philosophizing, which is not at all outdated as to the problems raised, is it?
5:43 I don't believe the dangers of war have receded since I addressed this cycle nearly 7 years ago. And as for the crisis, it's more serious than ever, isn't it? Our leaders and our politicians would love to blame that on Covid, wouldn't they? Whereas everyone was announcing a severe crisis, the big one, as the economists used to say.
6:13 When is the big one going to hit us? When you look at the level of debt of a country like the United States, or Japan, which exceeds 240% of debt. Well before the disruptions of the economy caused by the measures taken because of Covid came along, we were already busy putting out a fire with gasoline pumps.
6:46 With the quantitative easing practiced by all the Western central banks — to use a rather vague journalistic concept, I'm speaking of Western here — that is, in order to solve the debt problem, they were increasing it in a dizzying manner, weren't they, by creating liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. We must above all not show that the king is naked and that the crisis announced by Marx, the structural crisis of capitalism, is not only not outdated, but is more relevant than ever.
7:18 That's a little reminder. So neither the crisis nor the war, unfortunately, nor the danger of war has diminished. I won't hide from you that I'm rather worried about what is happening in the United States. Not the problem of civil war — one shouldn't stir up specters, it's not impossible, it's a country that has seen others, it's a country that began with a successful genocide. I mean...
7:48 They didn't make the mistake, like the Germans, of waiting for the final solution — they carried out the initial solution upon arrival, the American colonists. And so we can expect the worst. There's also good in the United States. I'm not anti-American. I'm underlining the negative aspect here, but it's talked about so little that it can seem a bit like — one might liken what I'm saying to provocation — well, I'm far short of the truth and of reality for now. I'm staying sober.
8:23 So I'm a bit worried about the little power vacuum we're witnessing, with an end of reign — let's simplify — between a maskless thug who will soon leave the White House, which is most likely, to make way for a masked thug. There are some who suddenly find incredible democratic virtues in him.
8:57 In the American Democrat, who make a... ...Americans. There you go. And I'm not even talking about the warmongers who have been around Trump, around Biden always, around the Democrats, right?
9:38 I'm worried when I see the frightening and appalling casualness with which the GAFA companies decide what is allowed and what is not allowed. In short, oligarchs — I'm not the one saying it, it's our Minister of Finance. You see, that's not my camp. But our Minister of Finance said, as did Mrs. Merkel too — it's rare that I quote them positively — that it was scandalous that Facebook or Twitter, right, should decide by right who has the right to appear on the networks. There are jurisdictions in modern states and there is a rule of law; it is up to states and to structures democratically designated for that purpose that this belongs.
Axiological neutrality and the Kantian doctrine of the faculties 10:20 This is to say that when I ask you to go back to the first cycle, Between Crisis and War, Philosophizing, we're not returning to stale news, quite the contrary. But I take this up here for now — you'll tell me, but what's the connection? I don't know, we've been in cognitive problems, in the sciences — what is this preamble? Ah, well precisely, that's going to be a theme that will occupy us today. I seem to often, when I compare the so-called hard sciences, which I prefer to call the sciences of nature — and I'll do so without any problem, though that leaves out mathematics —
11:04 whose models apply, like no other formalization, to the sciences of nature, but which owe nothing to experience — well, nothing in their formalization. Historically, yes: certain mathematical models would not have existed without astronomical, ballistic, military problems, etc.
11:35 I come back to this: it would seem that we ought to be in axiological neutrality, as they say in certain circles, in certain human sciences, without seeing the enormity involved in proclaiming axiological neutrality as soon as one leaves the equations behind. If we speak the everyday language, I believe I've already accustomed you to understand that saying 'the sun rises' is already leaving axiological neutrality behind — it's in the world of desire and no longer in the world of knowledge.
12:08 Going from bottom to top is more valorizing in every metaphor, in every language and every culture — we're not talking about racism here, are we? — than dragging someone through the mire, that's at the bottom, or dragging them through the mud, that's underfoot. It's better to hold the high ground — I'm playing on the metaphors, you see, to show that saying the sun rises, in language, there's already a tropism that concerns only subjects here and that no longer has anything to do with scientific objectivity.
12:38 It's not an astronomical statement — the sun hasn't set, it hasn't risen. So, first of all, we put pseudo-axiological neutrality into practice when it comes to expressing ourselves in natural language, in everyday language of course. We are not at all questioning the axiological neutrality of biologists, physicists, mathematicians in the scientific part of their work. Besides, they have the right to hold whatever political views they want.
13:09 It's not up to me to judge that. But if I speak in Kantian terms, I'm now going to become more and more precise. I will often refer to Kant in this cycle because he is, after all, one of the greatest epistemologists of all time, which will lead some to say that I am in fact a Kantian. I must repeat that I am — well, what I am is not very interesting in my discourse. But still, I'll say negatively, I am neither Hegelian, nor Marxian, nor Clouscardian, even though I think the three references I just mentioned go much further than all the others.
13:48 There you go, I understood, and above all to explain the world in which we — to account for the world in which we live. That doesn't mean I agree with every one of their statements. And that I can also propose others, at my own risk and peril, and while being aware of my gaps and my weaknesses and my ignorance. That said, why do I allude to Kant? Because you know that Kantianism has often been called a doctrine of faculties. There are essentially three: sensibility, understanding, reason.
14:21 If we look at the order of what is closest to what we call immediate reality, the sensible, if you prefer, toward what is most interiorized, right? Understanding — and if we systematize a bit the flashes of insight that understanding produces here and there, sometimes rather disorderly, if we systematize them, we arrive at reason.
15:02 I'll point out here that this tripartition — sensibility, understanding, reason — in recalling it, I'm not confining myself to just one philosophy, even if it be Kantianism. Because if you look at the passage from Plato that I often quote, and for good reason, since it sums up his whole epistemology, the passage that ends the book of the Republic — that is, just before the beginning of the seventh book stages the allegory of the cave.
15:37 The myth is an allegory, the myth of the cave — by habit, it's an abuse of language. It's not a myth borrowed by Plato from Greek religion, it's a homemade fabrication, so to speak, from Plato. It's an allegory. So the difference is not slight. On the path that goes from the back of the cave to the sun, you have these three parts. The back of the cave is the sensible, it's reality, in which, in Kantian terms, the faculty of knowledge at work is sensibility, perception, all that.
From Plato's line to the understanding of the "if… then" 16:16 Afterward, Plato moves to dianoia, which is translated as discursive knowledge, so we no longer content ourselves with feeling, twitching our snout, blinking our eyes, and grasping with our fingers. But we name things — that doesn't come from outside to inside, it's the opposite, toward the inside. And we name, in short, we produce concepts, and that is the world of understanding. And that's what I'm going to talk about today: understanding.
16:47 This faculty which occupies the median position between the two extremes that are sensibility — forgive me for starting at full speed, but I mean, we have quite a loaded program and we need to clear the ground for the essentials. Understanding thus occupies this median position — understanding in Kant, or discursive knowledge in Plato, the dianoia, you see the 'dia,' that which passes through like a diagonal, which divides in two, between the two extremes that are immediate, sensible knowledge, sensation, or reason. In Plato it would rather correspond to dialectic, right? That's not at all the case in Kant — there, on the other hand, there's a real divergence.
17:33 There is understanding, whose best illustration, Plato says very well, is the work of geometers, who, he says, start from hypotheses in view of a conclusion. That's why this is often called hypothetico-deductive knowledge — if you prefer everyday expression, 'if-then.' So, if line A is parallel to line B and line B is parallel to line C, then line A is parallel to line C.
18:08 That's a particular case of what is called, in set-theoretic language, an equivalence relation. So equality, far from being the only case — there's also parallelism. So, that's it. This faculty, understanding, is the ruling faculty in the so-called hard sciences. And precisely because understanding is by essence in axiological neutrality, since its aim is neither good nor evil, neither beautiful nor ugly.
18:42 Those are not its criteria. Its criteria are the true and the false, the criterion of science. It is understanding that is at work in science, and in science, I'll quote Spinoza here: it's not a matter of laughing or crying, it's a matter of understanding. Thus you won't find, in the immense majority of Marx's works, ukases or political prescriptions, as there are many of in Lenin, who had power issues to manage. That's not the case with Marx, who applies himself to understanding what is, how the world we live in functions, insofar as we live in a bourgeois capitalist society.
19:33 In other words, and these are important reminders, science deals with what is and not with what ought to be. Whereas the question 'what should I do?' is not only not scientific but, above all — every scholar has the right to ask it personally, I mean. But there, his competence as a scholar doesn't take him much further than what's called the faith of the charcoal-burner, doesn't it?
20:09 He may sometimes have more wisdom, more generosity, more moral worth than certain mad scientists — it has happened. The very great scholars who thought along the lines of the Third Reich — the number of physicists, chemists, biologists who were quite solid in their discipline, and with the leanings you can imagine. So let's clearly separate episteme, the search for scientific truth, which cares nothing for values — I could stop at the word 'values,' meaning axiological values precisely, the axis of good and evil, the axis of beautiful and ugly, the axis of just and unjust, there you go.
20:53 But also the axis of the lax and the authoritarian — we could multiply the axes. But in every case, of the good and the bad — it's not entirely true to say the good and the evil. In the Nordic languages, interestingly, 'good' means both moral good, right, and good cooking. In French we'd rather say 'bon' when it's a good wine or a good dish.
21:26 But still, it remains that after a good meal, you can pat your belly and say, 'well now, do I feel good?' These are fairly close notions. The Nordic languages don't really make the distinction. I note in passing, and we'll come back to it, this interesting polysemy when we return to what Plato says about the idea of the good. But for now, let's stay with my story about understanding. Understanding occupies the middle. Now, the middle — I hope I've accustomed a few attentive listeners to the echoes, like long echoes merging far away, to quote the poet, in everything I try to bring in, because my time is limited, so there is what I say in a linear fashion, and then there are the links one can make oneself, across several problems that apparently have no immediate connection with one another.
The ambiguity of the middle and the intelligence of the extreme right 22:34 I'm sure I've already noticed that many of those who are loyal to us make the connections and see clearly the coherence there can be between what I might say when I talk about music and, elsewhere, when I talk about the economic crisis. Now, precisely, on several occasions, for those who remember, I showed you the complexity of this concept of the middle. Not only of understanding, but of the position it occupies. When we say 'middle,' we should prick up our ears. Why? Because it's the most ambiguous position.
23:20 Come on, let me first take a simple word. The least clear — I'll take a step forward, I'll go back to the example I use of multiplicity to make myself understood in the simplest way possible for complex problems. If I take a segment AB with point M in the middle, there's my middle — if the half-segment AM, I'll assume the two are equal to simplify, if segment AM is covered in fresh red paint, and the part MB in blue, everyone knows that point M has a good chance of turning purple.
24:11 So you see, the middle is what partakes a little of both extremes, where everything blurs together. Don't we speak of 'red-browns' for some years now? Didn't Michel Clouscard show that, in this apparently more antifa case, leftist and libertarian, didn't he write about libertarian liberalism, neo-fascism, and the ideology of desire?
24:47 So you see, one might think the extremes — let's go back to my point M — there's a lot to meditate on regarding this segment, on this apparently very simple example. Things are quite different depending on whether you see point M as the arrival point of two forces, say two arrows, one going from A, the other from B, and pressing on M, or, on the contrary, M is a starting point torn between two forces that move away from the middle toward the extremes.
25:19 M trying to hold the median point. When you consider that the faculty at work in the sciences... For that, I made a very political and very historical preamble. And when I recall that there have been very great scholars who were, moreover, ignoble scoundrels at a moral and political level — there aren't more of them in science, there are rather fewer, in my opinion, than among the ignorant. Even though I would be careful not to say, like Voltaire — because there Rousseau is right to rap him on the knuckles, Voltaire in his letter to Rousseau, where he acknowledges receipt of the book on the sciences and the arts, and let's be clear, against the sciences and the arts, the young Rousseau's, since it's his first major publication — this famous letter, which is a masterpiece from a writing standpoint, but also a masterpiece of perfidy, Voltaire knows how to do that: in the first sentence, 'I have duly received, sir, your new book against the human race.' And bam, you see, in the first sentence, Rousseau is made out to have written a book against the human race, whereas he's rather writing against the dangers that threaten it, according to him, according to Rousseau.
26:39 In the course of his argument, Voltaire says this sentence, which I don't subscribe to, even though it's statistically verifiable in many cases, but still, it's hard to generalize: 'Great crimes have hardly ever been committed except by great ignoramuses.' There one senses the great bourgeois with his contempt for what he himself calls the rabble, speaking of you and me, and even more so of those who are still lower socially.
27:09 'Great crimes have hardly ever been committed except by great ignoramuses.' How many times have I told you to stop thinking that the fascist, the fascho, is my thick-necked brother-in-law? 'Stupidity with the brow of a bull,' as it's said in a rather beautiful poem, by the way. The worst is when the far right is intelligent — but intelligent in the sense of understanding, that is, in the if-then.
27:39 I say this because I noticed that among the younger generation, what's called young people today, to go quickly, the word "intelligent" had shifted in meaning compared to my generation. I'm not saying it's better or worse. I'm speaking here from a linguistic point of view, it doesn't carry quite the same connotations. When I was 20, it wasn't especially prized on the level of girls, for example. I mean, in flirting, etc. I'm deliberately using vulgar words that aren't my own. But so we understand each other in the game of love and chance, if some don't talk about it that way.
28:16 In what mattered at 20, all the same. It wasn't valued in that domain. When someone told you "he's an intelligent boy," that was a bit cerebral, it meant he's nice enough, he can reason, maybe he's cultured, he knows things, but... I would have preferred we play the map of tender feeling, as they say elsewhere, wouldn't you say? I don't mean the girl is silly, but it's possible she wanted a different kind of relationship with the young man than a string of syllogisms.
Hypothetical imperative and categorical imperative in Kant 28:50 I'm caricaturing a bit on purpose. Whereas now, on the contrary, when a girl says "that boy is intelligent," she's captivated. I've noticed this statistically, so to speak. It's now valued. So I'm talking about understanding in the truly cerebral sense. The "if... then." Now, Kant used the epithet "hypothetical," but not only for knowledge, also in his morality. I'm not defending Kant's morality here, but I'm isolating something in Kant's morality, particularly in the Critique of Practical Reason—there's also the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, but I'm referring here to the Critique of Practical Reason.
29:32 It doesn't have the same historical importance as the Critique of Pure Reason, but still, in it he distinguishes two kinds of moral imperatives. Here we're no longer in the realm of knowledge. The moral imperative—I don't know, treat others as you would want to be treated, each time there's a maxim like that, a moral commandment, a fortiori the two commandments. In short, whenever there is an imperative of a moral order, heavily charged with morality, there are two ways of analyzing it: either it's a hypothetical imperative, or a categorical imperative.
30:11 And let's take an example. A shopkeeper gives change scrupulously, he never cheats his customer. We'd say that's good, he's honest. And Kant says, watch out, it all depends on the reason why he gives change scrupulously. If he does it to have a good reputation and so customers come back the next day, rather than saying "oh, that guy cheated me, I'm not going back," that's not sufficient, says Kant, for it to be considered as someone doing good.
30:47 I'm not—I'm neither justifying nor invalidating what Kant says, I'm just showing his reasoning. In any case, where he's right is when he says: "because he acts according to a hypothetical maxim, namely, if I want my customers to come back, I mustn't desert them, I have an interest in being on the level." That's the hypothetical imperative. On the other hand, when one acts out of pure love and respect for the law or the value, then one is no longer in the hypothetical imperative, one is in the categorical imperative—from an old Greek root meaning "necessary," not "contingent." All the more so with technical imperatives, which aren't even moral.
31:30 "If you have a toothache, go to the dentist." You see, that's the hypothetical imperative. Good. So it's interesting that Kant had already seen that there's no moral value in the hypothetical, which is not at all a handicap for science. It's not science's function to tell us good and evil. One might think that's religions, one might think that's morality, one might think that's values, politics, customs, that's jurisdiction.
Action and knowledge: Augustus's erudition and decision 32:04 In any case, it's a whole other domain, a domain that governs actions and not knowledge. Because if you had to wait to know all the ins and outs before acting, you wouldn't act very often. That's what leads some to say that in order to learn to swim, you still have to get into the water. And not spend years studying Archimedes' principle to know whether you'll sink or float. So action and knowledge are quite different. And when you know—decision, that's it. Not everything is yet clear in one's mind, there are still gray areas, but time is pressing, a decision must be made. That's where you see that action is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge has infinite time ahead of it, there's progress over millennia in knowledge. Life is short.
32:57 "Art is long and time is fleeting," as the English poet says. Art is long and time is short. I say this also, as a small aside, slightly at the periphery of our subject, about erudition. Erudition is very good. As for me, I'd say, faced with a word like erudition, I'm full of admiration. And besides, I'm indebted to it anyway, like everyone who's passionate about study and research. What would we do without specialists?
33:29 The specialist is the one who will tell you that such-and-such a consonant only appears in the second millennium in the texts of the Zend-Avesta, the religion of ancient Persia, Iran, and who spends their whole life on that. Just as physicists spend their lives studying two immiscible liquids. You know, water and oil, they don't mix. The oil on top, which is lighter, the water underneath pushing it up. No, no, but they don't study the oil on top, nor the water at the bottom, but everything that happens between the two.
34:08 But I'm not being ironic. Thankfully there are people who are specialists and who focus on very precise things, because the day we need it, we're dealing with something solid. But there's a kind of infinite abyss in erudition—the closer you look, the more, to quote Ronsard, "the matter remains and the form is lost." And at some point you have to set a cursor and say, right, now I know roughly what I wanted to know, even if it's not everything, and I must make a decision. There, I'll stop there. I place here a bit the role of the politician with his technical advisers—at some point a decision has to be made.
34:49 The finest literary example of that, in our classical literature I mean, is Corneille. Everyone tells Emperor Augustus, behead your conspirators, rid yourself of this vermin. Others tell him that the great figures in history are those who knew how to be merciful. As is often the case, the Cornelian hero withdraws alone, without the pressure of any counsel, to make the decision. And that's what makes it so that when Augustus returns, at the moment when everyone is waiting for his decision, he says to the chief conspirator: "Let us be friends, Cinna, it is I who invite you to it."
35:33 With Corneille there are more lapses than with Racine, there isn't always Racine's versifying and incantatory perfection, but when there are peaks, everyone falls short, including Racine. And when Augustus says that to Cinna, it seems that the great Condé himself—who was a great slaughterer on battlefields, that was his trade as a nobleman and great feudal lord—the great Condé himself, the Duke of Enghien, Prince of Condé, burst into sobs in the theater.
To despise science is to give oneself to the devil; the logic of the subject 36:04 That's not me making it up. Right, so, understanding, itself, if... then, if... then, if... then, yes. Well, you understand now why a high level of scientificity—I'm not attacking the hard sciences, it's barbarous to denounce science in general, the sciences in general—that's why I've quoted twice for you the formula that Goethe puts in the mouth of Mephistopheles in his Faust, and that Hegel takes up in the Philosophy of Right, of all things, in his political testament.
36:46 "If you despise science and reason, the highest gifts of humanity, you give yourself to the devil and you are lost." Can you imagine how many people disagree with what I've just said, in these times of obscurantist regression that are underway, due on one hand to the calculations of our leaders and on the other to the unhappy consciousness. Leaders knowing very well how to play on the misfortune of those who've been put out of work.
37:20 These are misplaced dangers. Hitler too said Germany was threatened, yes, by the Judeo-Bolsheviks. She who was the main threat to peace at the time. Well, so, I've made this long detour. It's not a detour, we're at the heart of the problem. Why do I insist so much on recalling that there must be something other than logic at work in the hard sciences, in philosophy?
37:52 That doesn't mean this logic exists, it doesn't mean I possess it. Even less that I'm going to hand it to you. I'd love for us to be on the path toward constructing it, but not the path that allows us to construct it. But where I insist is that we cannot be indifferent to the necessity of making it emerge. And I've wanted to say nothing else during all these months in which we've multiplied the sessions on the cycle I've called the logic of the subject.
38:26 The logic by which a star implodes, explodes, becomes a supernova, I don't know, I'm not a specialist, that's a logic of objects. And God knows what leaps of insight, what extraordinary calculations, and what magnificent advances in rationality it took to bring these mechanisms to light. These are mechanisms to which things are subjected, without having much choice in the matter. Likewise, the reasons why a celestial body suddenly appears to us, its light having taken perhaps—I don't know, I'm saying whatever—a billion years to reach us, so distant is it.
39:13 That's the logic of objects. I wanted to insist that there is also a logic of the subject, which we began to address in the first session on January 6th, if I remember correctly, where I took Rimbaud's line, you know, "the exalted dawn like a flock of doves." Only a subject can valorize—as I said earlier about "the day breaks"—the fact that dawn, the movement from low to high, adds to all the positive connotations I spoke of earlier, doesn't it, what height of thought—we could multiply these in the language—what loftiness of view, what height of thought, what elevation of spirit, isn't that so?
40:07 And there is... In this work, the author attains the summits of wisdom, the summits. And conversely, the counter-values of mud, of mire. I'll add too that there's something libidinal added in there. I'm telling you, I'm not demonstrating it. Is it necessary to demonstrate it, given how, as we know, ignorance cannot be learned after the fact? Because the movement that goes from top to bottom is also—it's erection. We say a monument is "erected," don't we? And so the fact that spring, morning, dawn, and the symbolic creations relating to them are more exalting than those expressing twilight or autumn or the decline of the year, which are statistically more often melancholic.
41:04 There, we're not in the habit of looking for these things, but they're there. And that's proof that there's also something of this that colors the relation of high and low in everyday language—which is not the language of the hard sciences, but which unfolds a logic that only makes sense by, for, and through subjects.
41:39 I think it's a subject that signifies, that speaks. One can signify otherwise, through painting, through music—we'll get to that, since we're going to illustrate my point through a work that is both a text and a score. I'll give you a further clarification afterward. But since I've mentioned here that I said beings who know how to signify, I remind you—you see, I insist on this review.
42:09 This is the moment to gather them together. Not everything we've seen, but everything that will be necessary for this great epistemological effort that I expect from you, from myself. It's a lot to carry on my shoulders, that's why I need to do it with you. Namely, remember, each time I asked you to distinguish the sign from what is merely a simple signal.
Sign and signal; disturbing neutrality 42:43 The sign is the realm of man, I recall—I'm not demonstrating it yet, I'll be more precise afterward, more convincing. But for now, a reminder, to be clear, so as not to muddy the waters. Heraclitus—one of the formulas I prefer from him, as Cassirer said, in one of his most important fragments—the oracle that is at Delphi. An oracle speaks, it signifies something, we don't know what, but it signifies something.
43:14 "The oracle at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but only signifies." There, I had shown you that what we call the sign, in the strict sense here, is infinitely beyond the signal. I'll pick up my thread again afterward, but so as not to break it, let me quickly give you an example of a signal: smoke signals fire. Something the animal perceives very well, it doesn't need more than that for it. Understanding—sensibility suffices. With its snout, it smells the odor of smoke in the bush. Believe me, it bolts, because it knows what a bushfire is.
43:56 So the sign is infinitely beyond the signal, as we'll see, we'll get more precise about it afterward, but it's also very much below it in terms of univocity, of clarity—I didn't say depth—but of the clarity of mathematical algorithms. Because it remains—they called Heraclitus "the Obscure"—his sentence remains a bit mysterious.
44:26 "The oracle at Delphi"—I find it very clear—"neither speaks nor conceals but only signifies." That means A equals B implies B equals A—that speaks, it conceals nothing. There's nothing to read between the lines. There's no suggestion, no connotation alongside the denotation. You see? That speaks. And it even speaks, as I suggested to you another time—we're reviewing today—without speaking, in the silence of mathematics, in the silence of calculation. Yes, it's discursive, but it doesn't speak.
45:03 To speak is to say "the day breaks." Speech is always figurative. Mathematics carefully avoids that, fortunately, given the goal it pursues. Its aim is not to be figurative, its aim is for all subjects to agree on statements. So, thank you—if A equals B implies B equals A, that speaks; smoke signals fire without speaking either.
45:35 But here, now I'll demonstrate it: the succession from smoke to fire and fire to smoke is natural, it is sensory—that is, the animal knows that fire is not far off because, in sensory, natural reality, in what animals perceive—immediate perception, that of sensibility—the two are consecutive. Whereas when I say to you tablet, penguin, star, that has nothing to do—star has nothing to do with "star" or "Stern" in German.
46:12 That's not too far off, that's the sense in the Nordic languages. You see, étoile, star—diarra to say lion in Bambara, diarra and lion have nothing to do with each other to the ear, there's no consecution at all. That's what's called in linguistics the arbitrariness of the sign. The sign has cut all bridges with sensory immediacy, and it is therefore a liberation from the system of signals in which the animal spends its life.
46:43 As best it can. Often that's perfectly enough for the life it leads, in its burrow or on the ice floe. So now I'd like—if I've taken so much time talking about understanding, about the unsettling axiological neutrality—there's one that would be excellent if we managed to see it, but there's one that's troubling. It's the one that concerns itself only with what governs things and has no concern at all for values.
47:17 Do you remember when we worked on Chapoutot, one of the best-documented authors on the Nazi period, the historian—when he tells the story of that prisoner who asked the SS man why, because he'd forbidden him from taking a piece of ice to quench his thirst, and the SS man answered him that there is no why. That SS man was probably a good engineer, he wasn't scientifically incompetent, he wasn't a mere prison guard, he wasn't a high-ranking officer.
48:04 If I've lingered over the terrifying side of what lies in the middle, there, like that—which can therefore look toward both extremes, like that, and engage in the worst confusions—that's not serious. I myself am full of confusions. Who isn't? What's serious is confusionism. The way in which current events—current events in the media sense—when information elevates to the pinnacle and puts at the center of all its material sentiment, emotion, is something extremely troubling.
48:51 Because it can be taken in every direction. There were SS men, since I was speaking of them, who burst into tears when they saw someone abusing a dog, and who had just gotten some practice that morning gunning down several prisoners in the camp. Beware of those who say "oh, he'll be good, he'll be kind, that child, because he loves animals." So, to illustrate now, I told you that in human affairs, production here—I'll take the framework of a lyric drama by Wagner, The Rhinegold, which is the first part of the enormous tetralogy—trilogy with a prologue if we count The Rhinegold as the prologue—The Ring of the Nibelung.
Dwarves, giants and gods: Wotan's contract and Freya's wages 49:40 I sent you the full French text of The Rhinegold on our Facebook page, and I sent you a paginated version so we can find our place together. And the section we're going to look at unfolds between page 27—I'll check that right now.
50:27 Yes, that's right. Between pages 24 and 29, there are five pages that unfold the various scenes I've isolated. Why? What do they have in common? So here I have to tell you a bit of the story. Because the scenes we're going to see take place in Nibelheim. So Nibel—nebulous, Niblung—you find in French "nébuleux," it's everything that is mist, fog, darkness. It's the world below, it's the underground world.
50:58 I'll point out to you that our Germanic material, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, seems very far from Wagner. Not so much, because we're going to see dwarves who work in the underground, again in the scene we're about to see. And of course, Snow White's dwarves are much nicer. Some of them are lazy, some of them are grumpy, but still, they're likable. Whereas some are terrifying in the scene we're about to see. But what proves all the same that they come from the same source, showing that Snow White's dwarves are borrowed from the same background, is that they're small.
51:34 So here it is. What you need to know before the curtain rises is that there are three categories of beings in this mythology. There's the one who lives underground, in the world below, the Nibelheim, the dwarves. They're black, they're dirty, they work—we'll see why in a moment. And they're small, and from time to time they come up to the surface, but that's rare, most of the time they're underground. On the earth itself there's the race of giants, in the words of the text, the giants who roam the surface of the earth—here we find the equivalent of the Greek Titans. And above, on the heights, the heights of Olympus for the Greeks and of Valhalla, as it's called, the citadel of the gods, the Germanic Olympus, that's Valhalla.
52:35 Whenever there's "Wal" somewhere, as in Walküre for that matter, that means bravery behind it. We can move quickly past that. So, there you have it, there are three levels, or rather one basement and two floors above. And in the scene we're going to see, we'll see the gods, and even the boss of the gods, the chief of the gods, the German Zeus, that is Wotan, whose name comes from a root Wut, meaning rage, anger.
53:05 That one's not to be trifled with. Like Zeus, he wields the thunderbolt, doesn't he? It's that kind of anger. They make a descent into the underworld—but the underworld here in the sense of the world below ground, not the Christian hell. A descent into the underworld, why? Because a problem has arisen between the gods and the giants. It's that the gods asked—the gods don't work. Marx saw very clearly that in Greek mythology, the conflictual and at the same time complementary relationship of the Titans with the gods in the Greek religion, in Greek mythology.
53:46 That is to say, the Titans forge weapons for the gods, so in that sense they collaborate with them, but on the other hand they are often in conflict with them, they rebel. Hence the Gigantomachy, the Titanomachy. And Marx shows clearly how more than transparent it is to see in this ambiguity — working for them while also being in conflict with them — the conflict that exists between slaves and free men in the city-state. Now here, the gods do not work any more than, in the Greek world, the citizens of the Greek city, the free citizens, do. And Wotan wants to build himself a palace, a palace that would protect him from possible adversaries, and also, more comfortable than his usual residence, and he asked, of course, the giants — two giants, two brothers who are giants — to build it.
54:45 Remember the two giants well, because later, after the Rhinegold, in the sequel, in Siegfried in particular, we'll see one of the two turn into a dragon, the dragon that guards the treasure of the Rhinegold. The two giants get to work, and as payment, Wotan has promised them nothing other than Freya. Freya is the German Venus.
55:19 I'll hold off for now, because first I want you to listen, and we'll go into more detail afterward. But here I'm just giving the skeleton of the drama. Freya, the Free One, is again the equivalent of the German Venus; she has beauty, youth, she tends the golden apples that give the gods eternal youth, and that keep them safe from the ravages of time. And since this beautiful Freya is also the sister of Wotan's wife, who is just as difficult as Hera was for Zeus, isn't she?
55:57 There's a domestic scene well before the scene we're about to see, up there, up there in Valhalla, in Olympus, where Fricka, Wotan's wife, says to him, "You're not going to give my sister to those brutes, those oafs, it's just not possible, the goddess of beauty, of grace, etc., in the hands of those terrifying and thoroughly crude people, hardly a pleasing prospect." And since he doesn't want a domestic scene, they'll say, "We'll work something out, we'll work something out."
56:28 He has the flaw — when guys, and I say guys on purpose, I include myself — the weakness, the cowardice, of putting off the worry until later. Statistically more common among guys than among women, that kind of cowardice. We're in the human sciences here, it's not 100%. So, we'll see, we'll see, he says he'll sort it out at the last moment. In fact, the giants arrive, we see the magnificent palace finished, Valhalla, all that's left is to move in — "give us our wages."
Loge and Alberich: renouncing love for gold 56:58 The word "Lohn," the word used in union struggles in Germany when they say wages — Lohn, L-O-H-N. And Wotan says to them, "Oh, you can't be serious," — I said that jokingly — you see, a scene breaks out. And war threatens between the giants and the gods. I'll go quickly. At that point, Wotan tries to buy time. He's waiting for his advisor, the cleverest one, the equivalent of Hermes-Mercury, the messenger of the gods among the Greeks, who here is Loge, the god of fire. Loge knows a bit about every domain, including the underworld. You need fire, after all, to forge metals.
57:32 It's the blacksmiths in the mines, and at the same time it's the fire of heaven. Loge is a very ambiguous god, by the way, but he is Wotan's advisor, his evil genius, and he takes his time arriving, and when he does, Wotan says to him, "Listen, get me out of this, what can I offer the giants in exchange for Freya, there's no question of giving them Freya." And Loge says, "You brought this on yourself." "It's love, Freya — what do you mean? I know of no being — I travel the whole world, through air, water, fire — there's not a single being who would put anything above love." And then all of a sudden he says, "Yes, there is one." There is one, and that "one" we'll see in the next scene, which we're going to show in an excerpt. There is one: Alberich. Alberich — the root, if you touch on the Gauls, it's not Vercingetorix, but it's the same root. Alberich, the king of the dark elves, the black elves, underground — Alberich has stolen the gold from the Rhinemaidens. We'll come back to this original scene, the very first scene, of the Rhinemaidens frolicking in the Rhine and guarding the gold — but guarding it poorly, since she chatters and reveals, in her chattering, to the dwarves who want to grope them — I'm not making anything up, it's even more libidinal than that —
58:59 The gold is safe, there's nothing to worry about, because to seize the gold, one must renounce love. Remember that, because it's the algebra that will govern the logic of this whole work. Either one chooses gold, wealth, money, or love. The dwarf, having been sent packing, as we say in French, by the Rhinemaidens, after trying to catch them and frolic with them, since he's repulsive — we'll see a very interesting text by Clouscard on this passage.
59:35 And yes, the dwarf decides he has nothing to lose by renouncing love, and so he renounces love, and takes the gold. And that's what Loge reports as news to the god, saying there's only one who has renounced it. And the god says, we must go down into the underworld, into Nibelheim. So this poor dwarf will have renounced love, and on top of that they're going to take the gold from him too. But the gods, you know, they do that sort of thing all the time. Well, the gods — call them what you like, the Medef, whatever you want — it's "stroll through the nice neighborhoods," you'll see what Valhalla is like, not complicated. Well, you walk up there in the light, as the saying goes. So for now, let's do the first scene. No one knows the gods are about to arrive in the underworld through cracks in the ground.
1:00:26 Loge knows the way, he guides Wotan, and we immediately fall into what goes on daily in the hell of the underworld. We see Alberich, who ever since he stole the gold has been putting it to work, in the true sense of putting capital to work. Wagner died in 1883, the same year Marx died. Wagner fought on the barricades in [18]48, to put things in perspective. Even if many things separate them, or even oppose them, elsewhere.
1:00:57 He's much more interesting as an artist than as a political man. That's the least one can say. And so his texts, on the other hand, are politically very pertinent — his works, far more than his speeches, his off-stage pronouncements. So we arrive at the moment when he's making the mass of dwarves work, and thanks to the power of the ring he's forged, he's become master of the world, because if gold is forged with a certain science, that's where understanding emerges. A certain technology is needed to enslave others. Very interesting — a certain technology — and this technology is expressed by two objects throughout the Ring: the ring itself, of course, which gives its title to this gigantic work spanning four days, the Ring of the Nibelung, but also — and these are the scenes we're about to see — the helmet, the Tarnhelm, Helm gives "heaume" in French, the old medieval helmets.
1:01:51 A helmet which, when you put it on your head, not only makes you invisible, but also lets you take whatever form you want. And in the scene we're about to see, the lord of Nibelheim, Alberich, the one who stole the Rhinegold, is whipping his brother. It's appalling — whipping him because his brother, whom he'd ordered to make the helmet, is trying to keep it for himself, to hide it, or make it seem it isn't quite finished.
The descent into Nibelheim: anvils and leitmotifs 1:02:25 That's it, I won't say more. Let's move on. So, I recommend the text. You really must follow along. For those who don't speak English — for those who do speak English, no problem, they can do without the text — but otherwise, the link I sent you on one of our Facebook pages gives the libretto in French, a French translation by Laure Durin, you take it to page 24, and at the end of page 24, the last paragraph, there's Alberich saying "hey hey hey hey," that's where we need to start, right? And so, let's go, I'll ask Philippe to…
1:04:43 Well, you'll notice there's no voice at the start, right? There's no vocal music at the start, it's purely instrumental during this vertiginous descent from the sublime, luminous heights where the gods dwell, down to this underground and unsettling world. It's a purely orchestral interlude, unlike the other works of the tetralogy. This piece isn't divided into three acts as the others are, but runs non-stop.
1:05:16 There are different tableaux — one moment we're with the gods, another we're in the depths of the Rhine with the Rhinemaidens, here we're in the underworld — but it's continuous, with no curtain falling. The staging here is by Patrice Chéreau, with Pierre Boulez conducting. This is the Bayreuth Festival production made for the centenary of the Ring, a famous staging that is one of the best, which is why I chose it.
1:05:59 And it's interesting to see that… Bayreuth, which has always been somewhat subversive and cutting-edge artistically, chose two provocative Frenchmen — well, provocative each in his own discipline, theater for Chéreau and music for Boulez, both a bit at the avant-garde of their field. Now, you see, Chéreau had the excellent idea of showing us real staircases descending into coal mines.
1:06:29 We are truly in the world of the proletariat, in everything that connotes the world of mining. So this isn't an underground for wandering or studying spelunkers, but here we're at the very heart of exploitation. And you heard the sound of the anvils — that's an extraordinary audacity. You heard the anvils, and you heard them — I'll say several things, because once you've heard them, I'll slow down my remarks. For now, I'm giving you all this a bit hastily, but you'll need to get used to musical motifs that we'll encounter again over the coming sequences, right up to the end of our journey through the Ring — these famous musical motifs called "leitmotifs," motifs that help you find your bearings, guiding motifs, if you will.
1:07:32 Leit, leader in English. Leitmotiv. Leitmotiv, which is much more than a descriptive device — we'll come back to that, we're not going to do musicology right now. But what interests me here is that we heard one that sounds roughly like this. It's what's called the forge motif. All these titles — the sword theme, the forge theme, the ring theme — Wagner never named any of them.
1:08:10 It was later critics who, in order to keep track, made catalogues, and looking at what's happening in the action at each moment, said: every time this theme appears, it's either objects — the sword, the ring, the helmet — or ideas — servitude, that one. Like an animal moan, a kind of groan that we'll find throughout the work. And even more so when it's not played on piano but with strings, it's quite striking.
1:08:43 And so, you see, these themes rush forward, and the first excerpt, I believe, stops... Right, we didn't see Alberich stirring, that's fine. Well then, since we've reached the bottom of the descent, I've pointed out two themes to you.
1:09:17 The forge is truly Taylorism, assembly-line work repeating itself over and over like that. And servitude. There, very grueling. And throughout the descent, all these themes keep breaking off to give way, in the brass, to a theme that is at once solemn and sad. And that's the theme of the renunciation of love.
1:09:48 It's a descent. Like this, or again… Do you see the logic at work here? Since the gods are going to seek the gold, they should, in principle, renounce love. They should, indeed. The algebra I told you about is being enacted musically. And in any case, we're drawing closer to the one, the only one who dared to renounce love.
1:10:22 I should point out that in the libretto, he allows himself to say this extraordinary thing. I had allowed myself to pass it on to Clouscard, who leapt at it, and said to me, "That can't be right." The guy says this, namely, "Thanks to the gold, I may have renounced love in order to have the gold, but thanks to the gold, I'll be able to buy myself pleasure." There's a lot in this work, you know, that's interesting for decoding the society we live in.
1:10:56 So, we have the material — you have three themes there, try to follow them, of course, the more you listen to them, the easier it will become. And now the second excerpt — I asked Philippe to play the second excerpt, because we've reached the bottom. What's happening there? We're going to see Alberich, as I told you, preventing his brother, who is one of his slaves, from escaping with the magic helmet he's just forged, and let's not forget, this is the whole point of my detour through the Ring, it expresses here the work of technology, of science, of understanding.
The magic of the helmet: technique increases power, not ends 1:11:36 We call it magic because we're in mythology, but it's this same power that fascinated Descartes when he said that mathematics allows us to make man master and possessor of nature. Now, it doesn't manage its own time. He is master of the world thanks to the ring. There it is — the Lord of the Ring. I'm not the one inventing this, it's the very cause of the drama, it's stated explicitly in the libretto. Let's go, Philippe, second excerpt.
1:13:03 ...Nacht und Nebel, niemand gleich. ...siehst du mich, Bruder? ...wo bist du? Ich seh' dich nicht! ...sow Dering, unnum, hau' d'Aschug'n, ... d'Ase, ein Nenske, so wé, oi, oi! You can see this is quite a disturbing world.
1:13:38 It's a technology in the service of evil. Let me remind you that everything technical, whether it's a chipped stone flake, from I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of years ago, or a particle accelerator today, has this in common: they increase our power. But power, what does that mean? Look closely — potentia, possible, they go together. An acorn is an oak tree in potentiality. That is, when I have an acorn, a tree seed, thanks to that seed, the tree is possible, it isn't yet real as a tree. It's never more than a seed. I'm not going to take a nap in the shade of a seed.
1:14:34 An oak or a linden tree, a vast tree, isn't that right? Those familiar with the philosophical categories familiar to Hegel could say the seed is the in-itself. It's the tree in-itself, in itself. Well, you see, this is where we see the limits of the in-itself. Of course, it's essential — without it there'd be no tree at all. But still, if there's only the in-itself, there's no tree either. Without the work of watering it, planting it in the ground, weeding it, sheltering it from the cold depending on the category of plant and so on, it takes time to pass from the in-itself to the for-itself.
1:15:10 From a linden seed to make a magnificent tree that becomes the centerpiece of the little square in every German town, in every old town at least, that's a work of ages. The tool, in general, techné, since that's what's at stake in the sequences we're watching — the helmet, the ring, etc. — that's what allows, and this is what fascinates Alberich, the increase of power. And he's even aiming for power over the whole world, he says so, urbi et orbi, in the scenes we're about to see.
1:15:44 But power to do what? You see clearly this means nothing without an object. Power to do what? To go to the beach? To go to the doctor? To go to the cinema? To take a nap? In short, you've understood, technique is the means — we might have guessed — which says nothing about the end it's meant to serve. So when I say it's technology in the service of evil, evil is not in the tools, it's not the helmet that is wicked, it's not the ring.
The forge, servitude, the ring: Mime's account 1:16:19 It's the one who uses it here for shameless exploitation, as you saw in that quite terrifying scene. Can you imagine the sadism? I make myself invisible, I whip someone who doesn't know where the blows are coming from. Third sequence.
1:18:03 ... un reines Gold, un gelben Reif, ... ... de sauvres zauber, zingert er staurend, ... ... mit ihm zwingt er uns alle, ... ... der Niedungen wächst es her. Sorglose Schmiede, Schopenier sonst wohl, Schmucht und Zerweiberl, long ich geschweigt, niedlichen Lieblenden Hand, wir lachten los dich der Blüten.
1:18:49 Chirin Leuch en den Hohen.
1:19:27 Dichträgen, so lieben, draus en Zoll, Mich ärgsten, ach, mich zwang er zu ärgsten. Ein Helm geschmeid hieß er mich schweißen, anche Ta l' schlug, mech'n Le Zauber, der ihm entzucht, Dem Zauber ergeb' ich nicht recht.
1:20:45 Wer das Werk mir riet, Und mir es entriss, Der lehrte mich nun doch leider zu spät, Welche Liste lecken im Helm,
1:23:51 Well, I imagine that for some of you this is already unforgettable at the auditory level, right? Nietzsche said there is no music better suited than this to turn into an obsession. The servitude theme, since you saw there we're dealing with slaves at work. And simultaneously, layering one on top of the other — that's called "composing" — the forge theme, plus servitude.
1:24:21 And then the ring theme, of course, with its mysterious harmonies, and periodically, in Mime's narrative, when he speaks of the helmet that isn't quite finished yet, that there are formulas he needs to refine further, we hear what are called the helmet harmonies, which are just two chords. There, I wanted to familiarize you a bit with this sound material. So, if you have a moment, try to immerse yourself in it. I think that with the French libretto I sent you, which lets you follow along at home, whenever suits you best, when you're at leisure — with the lockdown, we have a bit of free time.
1:25:00 Maybe we didn't… I'm not talking about those doing remote work, I mean, I know quite a few people telling me they have more time now. Some have taken up a musical instrument again, others have gotten into organizing, accounts. In short, because it takes time. You can read a book quickly, skimming, but music is incompressible. We can't suddenly play it at double speed like a 45.
Clouscard, Refondation progressiste: Vulcan, a figure of praxis 1:25:32 We won't be long before we part ways, or give you the floor if you have questions, but I do want, here, since I mentioned Clouscard, to tell you that if the dwarf decided to take the gold, thus renouncing love, it's because he was, once again, sent packing. I'm using a softened phrase — it's much more violent in reality. And here, I refer you to a book by Clouscard, one of his last ones, called "Refondation progressiste."
1:26:09 And I want to acknowledge here Marie-Antoine Rieux, who was a philosophy professor in Toulouse, and who came to know Clouscard through his writings, and who came to Gaillac to interview him, and that gave us this book, after all, isn't that right? And to whom we owe this "Refondation progressiste." And I'm looking right away, from the introduction, even before chapter 20, that is, on page 27 — what am I saying? — the introduction, on page 19, sorry.
1:26:44 Clouscard answers the question of what a progressive renewal means, and Clouscard brings out two mythological figures, the Sphinx, Oedipus, the enigma. He brings out two others, Narcissus and Vulcan. You see, page 21, Narcissus and Vulcan. Narcissus, content with his appearance, and Vulcan, the ugliest of the gods, the blacksmith god, Hephaestus in Greek, Vulcan among the Romans. How curious, I told you there's a logic to the subject — how curious that in Greek mythology, Hephaestus, the ugliest of the gods, who is lame besides, has Venus for a wife. And there, the giants, we wanted, Freya, the Germanic goddess of beauty. Yes, the giants, workers with callused hands.
1:27:38 Now, I'll read you Marie-Antoine's question and Clouscard's answer. You'll see the connection with the scene we just watched. Could you translate this conceptual approach to praxis into something concrete? You proposed, with the figure of Prometheus, a complex made of the convergence and identification of the allegorical, the mythical, the symbolic. That's exactly what we're doing with Wagner, we're making them converge in order to understand what praxis is. The mythical, the allegorical, the symbolic. Can praxis be defined according to a concrete typology that reveals its logic? Clouscard's answer: one character will ensure the very incarnation of praxis. And he's thinking, I'll tell you in advance, of Alberich, whom you've just seen. One character will ensure the very incarnation of praxis.
1:28:29 He will be the mediation between the mythical, the symbolic order, and the concrete. He comes out of the bowels of the earth to work directly on an element of the cosmos, which makes him similar to a god. On the other hand, in civil life, some girls mock him because he smells bad. So the scene we haven't seen, which is the primal scene, you have it in the text, since you have the full text, again, of the French translation of The Rhinegold, go back to the first scene.
The Rhinemaidens: symbolic order and the symbolism of classes 1:29:01 And there, I can ask Philippe what time it is to see if I have time to do this. It's fine, I can't resist reading you the very first words of The Rhinegold, and thus of the tetralogy, a work that lasts four days. The very first words — we're at the bottom of the Rhine, the three girls, the three sisters, the three daughters of the Rhine frolicking, right? And here are the first words of the first, Woglinde — well, let's leave the names aside.
1:29:33 "Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle, walle zur Wiege, wagalaweia, wallala weiala weia." You'll tell me, 'wait, wait, wait, that's not even German, what is that?' I repeat: "Weia, waga, wave, wallow, rock the cradle, wagalaweia, wallala weiala weia." And I'm sure that parents with young children, or who have had them, will say 'that reminds me of something.' But of course, that's my kids — they didn't know how to talk yet, but they were already starting to babble, to articulate, to imitate adult speech.
1:30:10 They already had song, not cries, moans, tears, or wails. It was like birds. That is, it modulates, but they don't have the code yet, they don't have language. And that's where it begins. When you think — I seem to be jumping from one thing to another, but no, I'm starting to point you toward the symbolic order. You read Freud — it wasn't his thing, nor Wagner's, that's not his field at all, so they didn't coordinate with each other.
1:30:45 But Freud, more than a generation later, says in particular in the symbolism of dreams, but especially in the long psychoanalytic case of President Schreber, that in dreams, when one sees birds, it signifies young girls. I'm not trying to prove anything. There's a link between birds and young girls. And here, the young girls babble like birds. And look closely at all the bird names given to girls across cultures — parakeets, hens, birdbrains, meaning there's nothing inside, along with the misogyny.
1:31:34 And Clouscard said he got sent packing because he smelled bad. Let me give you a few excerpts from the dialogue between him, rising from the dirty depths of the earth, while she frolics in the shimmering waters of the Rhine. The three girls say to him: 'What do you want there below? You're spoiling our games, staying there all stunned, if you were to dive up...' Meaning, they're at the surface up above, he's coming from below, at the bottom of the water. 'If you dive up, Nibelung is...'
1:32:04 I would like to frolic and flirt with you. You see that the libido is not implicit here. Woglinde: he wants to play with us. Is he mocking? You shine in such clear and beautiful light. I would so love to embrace the slender forms of those who might glide toward me. It gets more and more libidinal. Flosshilde: Ah! I laugh at my fear — because they got scared when he rose from the depths. The enemy is in love, this lecherous fellow. Then there's a scene, really, of vamps like saloon girls, I mean, and indeed in Chéreau's staging he dresses them as saloon girls.
1:32:43 Well of course he tries to catch them, the rocks are slippery, a whole scene where they really make him suffer, right, they ridicule him, and this helps us understand why he had nothing to lose when he renounced love. And at one point, one of the three says to him: 'If you're smitten and eager for pleasure, let's see, my handsome one, what you look like. You there, quite the pretty boy — hairy and hunchbacked, a black dwarf all callused and full of sulfur — go find yourself a beauty who'll fancy you.'
1:33:16 Clouscard exaggerates nothing, on the contrary, he understates it. Now, what are we witnessing? The symbolism of class relations — those who live down below. Those who live not merely on the ground, but beneath the ground, in the underground world, are dirty, are small in stature, are smaller. It seems the Japanese, with the rise in living standards after the war — the most spectacular case of this kind — grew 38 cm in average height over 75 years, moving from a traditional rural society to a hyper-urban, industrial one. You see, thanks to comfort and better food, etc.
1:34:06 So we're talking about serious matters. One of the greatest genocides of the postwar period was in Rwanda. The two most terrible ones are the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus, who had been whipped into a frenzy. Let's leave the political file aside because that would take us far afield. Now, you'll say to me, you know, Africa, ethnic wars, it's terrible. Ah, but no, but no — it's the same language!
1:34:38 The Hutus are short, the Tutsis are often two meters tall. That's because the Tutsis remained herders. You don't need to be a great doctor to understand that they eat practically nothing but the milk of their cows, dairy products, curdled milk, milk and meat. They have a greater height than those who remained farmers. And it's the same ethnicity! There you go. So this story of small and tall, of giants, of gods who live up there in the light, and gnomes who haunt the underground world, is linked to divisions of praxis.
1:35:13 I continue: Clouscard — on the other hand, in civil life some girls mock him, so that's the daughters of the Rhine, of course, because he's bad off. It's Alberich, says Marie-Antoine, the dwarf from Wagner's The Rhinegold, a cousin of Vulcan, the Greek god of the Forges. And Clouscard answers: the procedure consists in proposing allegories to express the great intentions of the human. It will be systematized to constitute the determining figures of praxis. Clouscard is unfolding our program.
1:35:43 These will have to meet two requirements of anthropological knowledge. Family ties must be translated in the manner of Freud — since there are those who use Clouscard, you know, to do away with psychoanalysis — and the logic of praxis, the opposite and the contradictory, must be stated. There, I'll skip a passage on kinship relations. I come now to the most speculative part of my anthropology. Once it's established that the identitary is a pair, what must be the opposite of Vulcan? Since Vulcan's nature, his act, is to produce — the blacksmith, you saw a bit of that, he produces, he has every interest in producing. Since Vulcan's nature, his act, is to produce, what can the opposite act be? It can only be to consume.
1:36:29 And so you have the primordial pair, which we can very well set here as Alberich versus Wotan, who is much more elegant — he wears a tie in Die Walküre in Chéreau's staging, far from Nibelheim. The pair of Narcissus, contemplating his image in the reflection of the water and consuming his own image of himself, right? And the producer, and the world of production in any case, and the producers. Any questions, Philippe?
Reading the conflict between the giants and the gods 1:37:10 Well then, if there are no questions — on the other hand, I'll pick up Wagner's text again, this time to quote you a few excerpts from the scene of the real social conflict between the giants and the gods, when the giants learn that the gods don't want to give them Freya, which had been agreed as payment for building the palace of the gods they've just finished. So here I'll read you the text with commentary. They arrive on stage — their theme is terrifying, we'll see, it's impressive.
1:37:42 Even the gods are impressed by the giants' strength. And on arriving, Fasolt and Fafner — 'a sweet slumber closed your eyes,' he says to Wotan, Wotan was forgetting, forgetting before they arrived. 'A sweet slumber closed your eyes; we two built the stronghold without sleep, with great toil.' Jamélas, the stronghold, that's the palace of the gods. 'We laid stone upon stone, we raised towers, doors and gates closed protect the hall of the slender castle.'
1:38:17 He points to the castle. 'Here is what we have raised, by day, the flash of a brilliant light. Enter it, pay us our wage.' Wotan: 'Tell me, the wage — what do you think you can demand as wage?' 'It was all agreed, what seems fair to us.' 'Is your memory so short?' There you see, we find everything again — the social conflicts, contract breaches. 'Is your memory so short? Freya the sweet, Holda' — I won't translate that, it's a genitive in German. Freya die Holde, Freya the sweet — Freya already means 'the free one,' but not Freya the sweet, and Hölderlin, it's the contract. 'We're taking her home with us.' Wotan: 'You're mad, with your contract.'
1:39:02 'Look for another price. Freya is not for sale.' And there, you see, the tension rises. 'What are you saying? Ah, you're thinking of betraying the treaty.' I'm showing you here truly a labor struggle. 'The runes inscribed on your spear are a game to you.' On Wotan's spear there are runes, inscriptions in Old Norse, in old Germanic, which are supposed to record contracts, treaties, pacts.
1:39:33 So you see, there's always a question of law. 'The runes inscribed on your spear are a game to you, these runes of the alliance concluded.' Fafner, the other giant, interrupts him — more realistic than his brother — and says to him: 'My dear foolish brother, don't you see we're being cheated?' Indeed, of the two giants, one regrets, would rather have Freya, and the other will be more tempted by the gold. Fasolt: 'Son of light, of light essence' — look how the giant speaks of the gods — 'son of light.' So you have dichotomies there — high, low, dark, obscure, luminous. Heavy, light, when we say someone is a drag.
1:40:09 Well, yes! It's not heaviness in kilograms — you clearly see we're in the symbolic order. 'Son of light, of light essence, listen and take care' — meaning, beware of the failing of production. 'And people who hear me, for you, so that you may seem light, so that she may not be burdened by our heaviness. Listen and take care, be faithful to the contract. What you are, you are only through contracts, through law.'
1:40:40 'Your power, after all, rests on a convention' — contract, convention. 'You are wiser, more skillful than us. You have understanding, you are cunning, especially with Loge nearby' — the god of fire, the damned soul, the chief god's consultant, his Séguéla, his spin doctor. 'You are wiser, more skillful than us, we were free and you forced us into peace. I curse all your wisdom, I refuse your peace if you don't know how to be frank, loyal, and free, to remain faithful to the contract.'
1:41:15 'So a stupid giant' — he's speaking of himself — 'advises you, the wise one — learn it from him.' Wotan: 'How clever, to take seriously a pact made in jest' — look at the lightness of power — 'a pact made in jest — the graceful goddess, bright and light, what would louts like you do with her?' Class contempt. And here we clearly see what Clouscard was pointing out, the link — which he alone formalizes in our time — between praxis and psyche.
1:41:48 If one can fall in love with Freya, because — how does he put it? — her light grace, 'the graceful goddess, bright and light' — it's because she's unburdened. She doesn't have hands made callused by labor, she doesn't have reddened hands — I think of that ironing woman in Degas. The Degas painting, we're going to see it — an ironing woman who, out of exhaustion, is yawning, not at her ironing board. She's all hunched over, her hands are red. 'You mock us — how unjust,' wie ungerecht.
1:42:19 'You,' he says to the gods in general, 'you who reigned through beauty' — see, psyche and aesthetics, and having, how it all goes together — 'you who reigned through beauty, noble and radiant race, what folly to aspire to towers of stone, to trade the charm of woman for a castle! We, clumsy oafs, toil, sweating with callused hands, to win a woman who, kind and gentle, would dwell in our humble home.'
1:42:52 That's why he became frightening. 'And in your view, is it a bad bargain?' There, I'll stop there to show you that it's a matter of demands, wages, labor, and on the contrary, idleness on the other side, of domination. No questions, Philippe tells me, I believe. Good. And what time does that make it now? Very good.
Announcements: the site La Chose en soi and collaboration with scientists 1:43:27 Well, I think I can go on, because I'm afraid of starting something long. Yes, I'm online here. OK, I'll take advantage, since I have a quarter of an hour left, to mention — I'll take advantage of it to first point out a site I discovered called The Thing in Itself, no less.
1:43:58 It looks as though he doesn't choose that title lightly — quite the opposite. It's someone who is far too modest relative to the excellence of his site. I don't know his name, so I call him The Thing in Itself, that's his pseudonym. I saw him answer a question on the forum of his video, I don't know, visited via his video, in the comments. Taking his time, it's a long page explaining that there's no contradiction when he says Hegel is a monist and that people don't understand what's supposed to be his idealism.
1:44:33 I've rarely seen, on a subject as difficult as the dialectical relation between monism and dualism, a summary this apt — especially in the way Hegel's thought perfectly embodies precisely this dialectic of monism and dualism. I've rarely seen it in so few pages — there's enough there to fill pages of books — such a pertinent condensation.
1:45:03 So I ask his forgiveness for offering him up like this to another audience, for making him blush with praise. I would like right away, if Pierre-Alain is listening, I say this also for Thomas, for Philippe, all those who help me put all this together, I tell them that starting tomorrow, they absolutely must be added to the friendly sites, on the site.
1:45:36 Our Thing in Itself, our Thing in Itself. And by the way, there's someone I'd like to thank — not merely mention, but thank. So here, we have to cross the whole Mediterranean. It turns out that our pages, our talks, our videos have a strong resonance in the Maghreb, and I'm delighted about that. Especially given the issues stirring there — not only recently, but for some time now, and especially in Algeria.
1:46:11 There are quite a few in Tunisia, quite a few in Morocco, but it's in Algeria that there are the most. And among them, I'll make someone else blush — I am very honored to have gotten in touch, thanks initially to comments, we're now friends on Facebook, with a great mathematician named Amel Boulaïa, who offered — let me answer her orally here since I have so much to do, I haven't yet replied in writing — to her declared availability.
1:46:42 She's ready to give us a hand in this cycle on the hard sciences and the humanities. I'm very glad to have the support of a very sharp mathematician who didn't hesitate to go back to Fibonacci to clarify what was somewhat imprecise in what I had sent her about the golden ratio. What I said wasn't wrong, but it was less precise than what she says about it.
1:47:13 So, thank you, Amel. Very soon, I'll write back to define the precise area where I'll need your contribution, your support, if only sometimes to validate statements that aren't in my field — and I don't like talking too much about what isn't mine.
1:47:43 Furthermore, of course, it's not at all ruled out that Amel might take part. It's a dream I hold on to, together with our visitors and friends, our comrades and our subscribers of very high scientific caliber. I'm thinking of people as different as Loïc Chantry or Pierre Bolinsky, who work at Oxford on artificial intelligence, where there were many called but few chosen.
1:48:20 I cherish the hope that one and another, here, might be able to help me — not with a formalization in the mathematical sense of the human sciences or of philosophy, which is an old dream that will never succeed, since we've shown well enough why it collapsed along with the dogmatism preceding the Enlightenment. But even if there are still some who believe in it, as you know, in current neopositivism or in analytic empiricism.
1:49:02 Simply to offer us, to inspire in us, the mathematical equivalents of certain forms, as I just showed here with the analogies between high and low, light and dark. I'm sure all of this can be drawn out of its shimmering, colorful cocoon, to arrive at a more rational, more economical, and more rigorous modeling.
1:49:41 There you go. So I'll discuss it further privately with Amel. I wanted to thank her publicly for her offer of availability for the work we're doing together in this cycle on epistemé. I'll also take the chance to tell you that the more you listen — I'm not asking you to listen to a Vivaldi concerto, that's a much heavier undertaking — but at least, for those who find it too much to listen to music, who aren't used to listening to classical music, and even less to sung classical music, at least to immerse yourselves in the texts. You have them — if you look carefully, you put 'libretto in French' after the title — there are four parts, in chronological order: The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods.
Lyric drama is not opera; conclusion on understanding 1:50:43 The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods. You look up 'Tetralogy' and 'Wagner' on Wikipedia, and you'll have... I'm asking you — I have nothing to demand, but it would save so much time, wouldn't it, if we had at least a few shared references, so we wouldn't have to repeat the basics, except of course when necessary for the intelligibility of a detail. And so, I'll also take the chance to tell you that, despite appearances, we're not doing opera. Sorry, this is a bit more musicological, what I'm saying here, I'd like to end on this. Wagner wrote operas in his youth, that's a genre — for those who want to know more, refer to the episodes of Musicosophie, the videos I make thanks to Aymeric Monville, my publisher.
1:51:39 Twice a week, the next one is on Friday actually, let me give you a preview, where I detail much more precisely the signs, the forms, the musical genres. But here we must be precise, we are not in opera despite appearances. It's not enough for there to be theatre in which people sing for it to be opera; there can be theatre in which people sing, but if the subject is religious, it's not an opera, it's an oratorio, for example.
1:52:10 In the Passion, the Passion according to Saint Matthew, the Passion according to John—I say "Saint" for Catholics, I say "John" without the "Saint" for Protestants. There's singing, there are instruments, there's an orchestra, and it's not opera, it's a Passion, or a cantata. Let's not complicate things—here, Wagner invented a new form, both a genre and a form. A genre, that's… what he called, he himself named it the "Tondrama," the lyric drama, word for word, that is, an action in music.
1:52:48 Now here we come to some very interesting problems that I won't risk developing given the little time we have left this evening, but I refer you to works written on the subject—it's not just the notion of lyric drama, Jean-Jacques Nattiez wrote about the theme of the androgyne in Wagner. You might ask what the connection is? First of all because there are many androgynous figures in the mythological stories Wagner relates in his lyric dramas, especially in the Tetralogy, not least Siegfried's parents, who are twin brother and sister.
1:53:25 But Jean-Jacques Nattiez in particular, who is both an anthropologist and a musicologist, an ethnomusicologist as they say elsewhere, Jean-Jacques Nattiez wrote The Theme of the Androgyne in Wagner. Why am I mentioning this? Not to detail a work for you, we don't have time, but to say roughly that in lyric drama, the text is the male element, the music is the female element. Sorry, that's in the animal world. The text is the virile element and the music is the feminine element, which is not quite the same as male and female.
1:53:59 Far from it—there are males and females in nature, there are men and women in history and in culture. So it's important that this indissociable union of text and music is very different from opera, where often the text is mediocre—not always, but often—or conversely, one can produce, which is even worse, bad music set to an interesting text. Well, let's say a mediocre text, flat, and in any case that's a tradition, quite often, for example in the bel canto tradition, which I adore when it produces masterpieces—don't think I'm dismissing that out of hand.
1:54:33 I'm thinking of Bellini in the melancholic genre or Rossini in the comic genre, where flourishes are added to showcase the soprano's throat, or the tenor's, and their vocal power, and especially their ability to produce flourishes on a single syllable. Well, we see that here the text matters little, often you can't even understand what's being said, it's so high-pitched. Now, that's not at all the case here. So Wagner invented a genre where you have to remain attentive throughout to what is happening, to the action—we are not in the lyrical mode.
1:55:04 Wagner succeeds a Romantic generation, he succeeds Schumann, Schubert, Chopin—these are essentially lyrical composers, who themselves succeeded the great dramatic composers, Beethoven. Wagner takes up the dramatic torch that Beethoven carried to great heights, but Beethoven did so essentially in the instrumental domain. Beethoven was not very inspired by opera, he only wrote one. Wagner takes it up and applies it precisely to vocal music, to dramatic musical art.
1:55:40 So then, we are not dealing with operas. I say this because Wagner himself often presents lyric drama as an anti-opera. For example, there's no repetition. You saw it in The Rhinegold, it moves forward. We don't keep repeating "We arrived this morning, we arrived this morning." One could repeat it eight times, since it's essential to make a beautiful melody and to do vocal runs. You see, there's never any repetition, the action moves forward. And a composer as little suspected of conformism as Pierre Boulez, after having criticized Wagner when he was younger, ended up—having conducted him, having known him from the inside through the scores—saying that what is most modern in him is this way of moving forward without ever going back. Except for the one recurrence that keeps you from getting lost in this continuous flow, which is precisely the leitmotifs that return with variations. Not always with the same rhythm, not always with the same chords, sometimes they are glorious.
1:56:39 The same leitmotif. Sometimes it's depressed, but that's what still creates a recurrence, in short an effect of memory—we noted this in the previous cycle—on the listening experience. There, I'd like us to leave it there for now, I'll develop this further of course, as we listen to the excerpts. Today I especially wanted to show what could be terrifying, particularly in this staging by Chéreau and in the text.
1:57:10 The Wagner who is terrible. What is terrifying about it, what the understanding can come to when it is caught up neither with the reality of sensibility, nor with the illumination of reason, which is the faculty of ends and not of means. Let's stop there for today.
