English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Wagner and the Wagnerians 1:27 Good evening dear friends, good evening to all the comrades, good evening to those who were patiently waiting for the continuation of the Ring. Good evening to our audience, I would even say tonight from 7 to 77 years old, following this animation, these excerpts from the Ring in animation. As you must have seen on our Facebook page, I took the liberty of offering you a few links, but that's a tiny fraction of the productions one can find, if only in streaming, I mean online.
2:07 I'm not even talking about the written publications, I believe I mentioned it in my little note accompanying these links, where I recall that Wagner is nonetheless the figure about whom the most books have been written. I'm not even counting the articles, just books, works, right after Jesus and before Napoleon. There you go, that's no guarantee of anything, I mean, maybe he's especially gifted at getting people to talk about him, I don't know, but in any case, it doesn't mean, it's not because a million books have been written about him that it's proof he's a better musician than Mendelssohn, Schubert, Bach or Mozart, or John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, there you go.
2:58 No, no. But still, it does make you think. There's a fascination, you can guess it, with everything we've just seen. I'll tell you right away that there are a few points I share with Nietzsche. You see, because I often quote him more to accuse than to defend. And even then, it's less against him than against those who called themselves Nietzscheans during the Cold War, whom Nietzsche would have vomited on. But that's another debate.
3:31 There's one point I share with him, which is that you can discuss Wagner all you want, but what doesn't deserve much discussion, and what is detestable, is, on average, Wagnerians. "Vile race," Nietzsche said again. There you go, and if I include in that mass the people he's alluding to, people moreover who listen to Wagner fairly little, even less as complete works, who constantly replay the same old sausages. "Sausage" is a term from French jazz slang designating themes, standards that we've heard so much.
4:12 Anyway, classic sausages like the Ride of the Valkyries, the Funeral March from Twilight of the Gods, the overture to Tannhäuser. There are people who listen to nothing else, a bit like someone who only knew Michelangelo through the thumbnail of David. Even assuming there was nothing else but David in Michelangelo's work, it would be the same proportion. But among the Wagnerians, if we extend the term to mean those who appreciate and admire Wagner, there are also people like Lévi-Strauss. That's quite a leap between the people I just mentioned, and then, I find, someone who knows it admirably and in detail, doesn't he?
5:03 Badiou too, I've already pointed out that Badiou surely wrote — Badiou is guilty of one of the thousands of books written about Wagner. Forgive the anecdote, but I had the chance to tell him everything I thought of his book quite by accident. I was with our comrade Jean-Hermé on a bus heading to the Librairie Tropiques, the 62, I won't hide it from you, which goes toward the 14th arrondissement. And lo and behold, at the second-to-last stop, I see Badiou get on. He comes and sits across from us — he doesn't know us — and he wasn't even going to the Librairie Tropiques, it was pure chance.
5:41 And I simply lean toward him, since he was sitting right across from me, and I tell him all the good I think of the little book he wrote on Wagner. Usually people congratulate him for his writings on Marx and Mao, on contradiction, for his dialogue with Žižek. I bring up Wagner instead. And of course... he tells me that's kind of me, and I add that I believe I know — I told him your mother took you to Bayreuth when you were 15. Bourgeois upbringing has its uses. There you go, I allowed myself that little joke with him — Oh, he's excellent. But let me get back to Lévi-Strauss.
Lévi-Strauss: Wagner, father of the structural analysis of myths 6:23 Why? Because — a phrase I've already quoted, but it needs to be repeated throughout the Ring — Lévi-Strauss says that Wagner must be recognized as the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths. He even adds a small footnote, and even of tales, and in the note: see The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. That's another story. I'm not going to talk about my own tastes, I'm not here for that.
6:57 If I had to keep only one work of Wagner's, that's perhaps the one I'd keep. Anyway, it changes a bit every week. It's a bit pointless. The undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths. I'm starting again from there because let me remind you that the reference to the Ring was imposed on me by you, by our audience, largely.
7:28 Philippe, whom I greet because I'm actually very glad to talk about it, but I wouldn't have done it spontaneously. It's meant to illustrate a reflection to which I've been inviting you since this fall of 2021, on the possibility of developing social sciences, human sciences — in short, sciences in the sense that they have nothing to envy the sciences of nature in terms of rigor and logic, except that it's neither the same logic nor the same rigor. That's roughly it. Now, I don't know if all this is pointless or useless, but let me remind you that this is the thread we mustn't lose. That is, in any case, our aim. Perhaps it will end in failure.
8:22 I'm throwing the dice, if you will, and I'm using the Ring as one of the privileged models allowing me to support this scientificity of properly human matters. I'll come back to that. As you know, I often set up an opposition. I'm making this reminder so we don't lose the thread with what we were seeing just before the Ring, in order to return to it better. You'll see. Let me remind you of one of the ways — one of the ways, we mustn't reduce everything to a single formula, that would be dogmatic and thus reductive, for problems as complex as these.
Hard sciences: natural sciences and mathematics 9:03 But one of the ways of drawing a clear divide between the sciences of nature, between the "hard sciences," as people say these days — all right, let's be rigorous. For me, the hard sciences are the sciences of nature, I'll keep that name, plus mathematics, which is not a science of nature. Try doing mathematics without the equivalence relation, and you'll see. Yes, equality is one form, among others, of the equivalence relation. It's a set-theoretic notion, but the notion of equivalence is far more extensive than that of equality. Why am I bringing this up?
9:46 Because it was to illustrate that mathematics is not a science of nature. Because when you see the fundamental role that equality, equivalence in general, equality in particular, plays in mathematics — this is the moment to recall that Leibniz used to take his interlocutors, his listeners — that was the way philosophy was done, in parks, while talking and walking — and say to them: "Find me in the park two equal leaves, two identical leaves." It's a formidable human creation, A equals A.
10:29 The principle of identity. And what's even more incredible is that man demands that nature conform to it. In mathematics, you can measure exactly four times two, for example. Whereas as soon as you move into nature, physis, as soon as you move into physics, into applied mathematics — at that point, if you look closely, or if you remember your physics classes, there's always an error. Purely numerical measurement is never safe from either a relative error — though that can be improved — but never from what's called absolute error.
11:22 Because measuring the length of a table, for instance, would presuppose that this length doesn't change while I'm measuring it, which is a foolish assumption given that everything is in perpetual motion, panta rhei, to quote Heraclitus. Everything flows, and at the two ends of the table there are electrons moving, altering that distance in an absolutely infinitesimal and imperceptible way for us.
11:52 And the carpenter is perfectly right to be indifferent to this kind of nuance, but it can turn out to be decisive and very important when dealing with experiments at very high speeds or very large distances, at very small or very large scales. I mention this only to give one illustration, among others, that mathematics is not a science of nature. So let me return to my terminological proposal. I'm addressing this both to my scientist friends and to others. Can we agree, at least in everyday language — as I keep repeating, language has its limits, its clarities, its shadowy zones, its ambiguities, its polysemies —
12:38 To limit somewhat the occasions for error that this polysemy causes, can we at least agree on this simple statement: I call "hard sciences" the set of the sciences of nature — elsewhere we'll call them the applied sciences — plus mathematics. For example, when I say, first, Lévi-Strauss — a quote, it's rare he talks like that — Lévi-Strauss says that Wagner is the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths, and even of tales, indeed of The Mastersingers.
13:23 Well, you see, in the excerpts we've just watched — let me take this opportunity, I'll make him blush, to say a huge bravo to Philippe Moreau, who prepared this opening sequence — I don't know how he managed it, I only sent the video links, I'm not a good enough navigator — I avoided saying surfer — I'm not a good enough navigator to go into the details.
13:53 You see, but not only did Philippe go into the details for your proper enjoyment of the Ring, but on top of that he made this extraordinary edit of the opening sequence, didn't he, by having several versions overlap — not chaotically at all, but in a very rigorous way. And in particular, I come back to it, you see, the one where the giants brutally drag off poor Freia — you know that comes from the root "Frei," which means "free," found throughout the Germanic countries; there's one in Germany and one in Switzerland — I'm thinking of the place name Freiburg, mot for mot, Freiburg, Freia, Freiburg, free city — in French we say "ville franche." We still have plenty of those in France.
Freia, beauty and love 14:45 There are some on the Saône, and there are some by the sea, and even in the Lauragais, where they make excellent cassoulet — and not only Freia, the goddess of beauty and love, of Eros, the equivalent of Venus. Because if Venus were only the goddess of love and desire, she wouldn't be depicted as one of the most beautiful female creatures there are.
15:38 Now, it is in that dialogue that Plato offers, as nowhere else, with such richness of development, his definition of the beautiful. It's in the Phaedrus too, but above all in the Symposium. Isn't it? So the fact that Freia is present — we begin to see what is structural here. As soon as love, eros, is at stake, beauty will come into question. I'm not saying that one implies the other, that one is the cause of the other, that would be too crude. I'm saying there is at least — since I'm borrowing from mathematics, though here more metaphorically, because these are rigorous notions one shouldn't juggle too loosely — there is at least an intersection.
16:25 In the set of discourses that speak of beauty and the set of discourses that speak of love, there is a kind of intersection. Why am I bringing up this example? Why do I refer, in the whole montage Philippe prepared, to the moment when poor Freia is carried off by those two brutes? I imagine the sadism of the animator, who must have relished depicting — I was about to say "the frail" — she's not that frail, she's rather well-built, she might even have more muscle than I do, but still, she's graceful.
The accumulation of gold and the accumulation of capital 17:04 The graceful Freia, carried off by these two gigantic brutes — you'll notice that at that moment, the giants demand that the god pile up gold, the accumulation of gold. Wait, wait, we're no longer just in the myth, I'm getting too far ahead into Marx — accumulation, accumulation, the accumulation of capital. Last time we saw primitive accumulation, well, we got a vague idea of it. It was terrifying, the sadism with which Alberich whipped Mime, wasn't it?
17:45 It was terrifying, the howling of the Nibelungs, wasn't it? Terrified by the toil, by the physical suffering, but also by the terror instilled in the workshop, in the factory, in Nibelheim. Let me remind you that comes from a root we also find in French in "nébuleux" [nebulous, cloudy], for instance. Now, Marx says, in the notes to Capital, which are of an extraordinary empirical richness — I say empirical because that's where he quotes reports from English factory inspectors, it's not propaganda or...
18:32 He talks about a workshop in Stoke-on-Trent, I believe, west of London, where there was so much dust flying about — nebulous, nebulous — that, one might think, still, the workers could barely see each other, at one or two meters, they'd lose sight of one another, and they breathed this foul air. At that time, nobody talked about pollution in the mines of Laurion, already five centuries before Christ in Greece. What are we going to talk about? It's only since the upper crust of the social classes and their second homes began to be affected by pollution that people started talking about pollution.
19:25 It's since, on my beach, I suddenly see tar stains or bits of plastic sometimes, that it's considered terrible — it was far more terrible back then, when nobody talked about it. So, gold is piled up in front of Freia — let me pick up my thread again to illustrate what "structural" means in all this. I mean nothing at all like what's called structuralism, but on the contrary, to reach the rigor I claim there must be — there must be a rigor in the sciences of history, because I will no longer say the human sciences or the social sciences now, let that be clear — in the sciences of history, or the historical disciplines, historical science, if you prefer those terms for historical science, there is a rigor that need envy nothing, I'll go that far, in the hard sciences — this time mathematics included — but which is of an entirely different order.
Cause-effect versus sense-sign 20:31 And to illustrate it, let me recall, after this long parenthesis — and keep the image of Freia and the giants in mind, I haven't finished exploiting it — one of the least reductive ways to divide the domain of the hard sciences from that of the sciences of history is that in the former — but this is a proposition I'm putting forward, excuse me, sorry for the pleonasm, I mean, and I take responsibility for it, so verify it, support it, illustrate it, or refute it, if you get the chance — the domain of the sciences of nature in particular is governed by a matrix pairing, that of cause and effect, roughly speaking. There you go. Let me clarify, for those who are less well-read and thus react too quickly, because they're physics teachers somewhere and think themselves on par with a Nobel laureate, don't they?
21:47 I have nothing against physics teachers, mind you, I have some among my best friends, and thankfully so, because they often keep me from saying a lot of nonsense. Yes, some would tell me, no, that's outdated, determinism, cause and effect, that's old physics, you're behind the times. There's always this tendency, which has nothing scientific about it, but which Clouscard defined as the fashionable tendency to dismiss things as "passé." The issue is no longer being progressive or conservative, but being "out of date" or "trendy." And let me slip in one of my favorite sayings.
22:20 I'd rather be an old-fashioned progressive than a trendy reactionary, from a certain point of view. Let me get back to it. Cause and effect — let me clarify, for the benefit of the one who was starting to frown because he's in a hurry and has read little beyond popularization books — that this causality can be either mechanical, to use a general term, or statistical, of course.
22:56 Of course, one can say the electron is not in a precisely determined location — see the uncertainty relations, for instance — but that it's somewhere between here and there. And the precision achieved with this statistical determinism goes far beyond the old precision of mathematics and/or of physics prior to the great advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There you go. So cause and effect, understood with the nuance I've just added. Whereas in the sciences of history, it's the pairing of sense and sign. What cause is to effect, sense is to sign. But careful, careful, because I just did something that isn't very rigorous, except in mathematics.
23:50 I just made an analogon, an analogy, if you will. Why do I say it in Greek? To recall that it has both an everyday meaning and a scientific meaning. In the everyday sense, one must be wary of it. Analogy is often — we make what appear to be intelligent, subtle comparisons, and so on, and in fact we're just making amalgams. On the other hand, there's a very precise definition of the analogon: that the sum — rather, the product — of the extremes equals that of the means, in the theory of proportions.
24:24 The theory of proportions, first developed by Eudoxus in ancient Greece. And it's worth noting that the more we distrust our Eurocentrism, the more we realize there were advances even before the Greeks, in the fields of mathematics as well as astronomy, in the Middle East, the Near East, in China, in Iran, well, anyway, no matter.
24:58 Eudoxus developed the theory of proportions, what we call fractions. Among ratios, a proportion is the equality of two ratios, A over B equals C over D. Well, you don't need to be a great scholar, do you, anyone who remembers their secondary school classes knows that AD equals BC, the product of the extremes equals the product of the means.
The analogon and immanence in Spinoza 25:29 So what analogy was I making? This is why we need to look closely, because it doesn't necessarily have the rigor of what I just said — namely, that what cause is to effect, so is sense to sign. But there are enormous differences. First, it's the relation to time. The cause is prior to the effect. First there's the cause, then afterward the effect. Understood? I let out a cry of admiring astonishment at the splendor of the Alps in winter, and lo, I trigger an avalanche.
26:04 An avalanche, right? It's an impersonal game, I won't presume to claim credit. There are places where you know you shouldn't make noise, and places more prone to avalanches than others, and certain locations, certain years, certain times of year, with powder snow. The cause comes before the effect. Whereas the sign is immanent to the sense. Sorry, it seems like I'm straying from the Ring, but we're in a philosophy class, in a course — we're trying to be initiated into philosophy.
26:34 Now, here, I'm recalling a fundamental distinction found in someone like Spinoza, for instance. It's the difference between immanence and transitivity. Spinoza says that God is the cause of the world, for example, but he says explicitly: God is an immanent cause, not a transitive one. He is not a cause like all the other causes found in nature, where first there's heating, and afterward the expansion of the metal.
27:09 Where first there's the evaporation of the oceans due to the sun's heat, then the falling back as rain when that water, having risen high enough to condense because of the drop in temperature, falls back down as rain. There, there is always a temporality, and a relation that mathematicians — I told you about the equivalence relation, which contains many other relations.
27:40 I'm speaking of it, by the way. Equality is its emblematic form, but parallelism is one too. We can say that if line D1 is parallel to line D2, and D2 is parallel to D3, then D1 is parallel to D3. It's exactly as if A equals B equals C, then A equals C. That's called transitivity. You see? Now, what were we saying? There is a temporality in causality, with the cause preceding the fact. And this temporality, like everything concerning the order of time — I just let slip the word — brings us back to the order relation. There are two fundamental relations in mathematics, there are others, but these two contain almost all the others, don't they? The equivalence relation — equality, parallelism, similarity, whatever you like.
Equivalence relation, order relation and Hegel's now 28:39 The equivalence relation and the order relation. In the broad sense, in the sense where I can say A is greater than or equal to. You see? So there it's not quite before, after — it can be simultaneous, at the same time, during. And then there's the order relation in the strict sense, where two moments cannot be simultaneous. What comes after presupposes the cancellation of what preceded it. As Hegel says in the first chapter of the Phenomenology, in sense-certainty, which will soon collapse, moreover, and partly because of what we're about to quote — when we come to the "now," every singular thing presents itself to us as this, here, now.
29:28 I don't know if... This tablet where I see the screen, our meeting, this, here, in the Val-de-Marne, in Cachan — I won't tell you the exact address — and now, at such and such an hour — it's already past, it's already past, to quote Hegel's phrase. And we see that the now is precisely...
29:59 It has precisely this feature of already being no longer when it is. And we see that the now is precisely — that is to say, when we speak of it truly with accuracy, well, when we speak of it in order to name it, to grasp it, as I fix here, I can fix with a nail, but the now, no, because it is already past. But for the here, we can see a little bit of an equivalent, because what we're aiming at is the point that is not. But still, that's another negativity. There, I seem a bit abstract, I'm doing it on purpose.
30:29 To recall that, in order to clearly delimit these two domains, there is cause and effect which define a transitive logic. Let me sum it up: first the cause, and then we transport ourselves — trans means beyond, in Latin. If you want to translate it into Greek it's meta, and so you know a lot of things, you knew it, you know these words, you know what a metabolism is, don't you? And yes, a transaction, it passes to the other, doesn't it? It's like a transport, whether it's a transport of blood, as they said in the grand siècle, or a nervous transport, or public transport, or private transport.
31:19 When one is completely transported elsewhere, then that moment is not just trans, but trance, isn't it? And believe an old African, that can be furiously real among certain peoples. So, that's the order of time. Whereas God is not a transitive cause, that means he does not say let there be light and there was light. No, it is in eternity that God creates light, darkness, the earth, mankind, outside of time.
Eternity, dream and organic totality 31:57 And be careful, eternity is not immortality, it doesn't mean a temporal duration that lasts indefinitely without ever stopping — that's the Greek gods, but that's immortality, not eternity. Eternity is truly outside of time. God is an immanent cause. So, let me give you a little example. I dream. Not just anywhere, I dream while camping. I'll make a confession to you, I discovered camping late, and I regret it, because I've never slept so well as in a tent.
32:29 But it happens sometimes, sometimes, that there's a little pebble, especially when you do a bit of wild camping, in your back, isn't it? So let's suppose three dreamers, right? In the same tent or in three different tents, it doesn't matter, for the example. Each one, however, has a little pebble at roughly the same spot, let's say between the two shoulders, which is a bit unpleasant. One dreams he's bitten there by a dog, let's say — that's not it exactly, proof that it's something else is that the second dreams his rival gives him a stab, a knife in the back. I'm saying anything, but not entirely at random, you're starting to guess.
33:07 The analogon between these three examples. And the third dreams he's had a relapse of the rheumatism attacks he thought he was cured of, for example. In other words, each one goes looking for an external cause. Each one seeks the cause within his dream, right? Within his dream. There's a dog that bit me, he sees a dog that was there first and now bites him. Whereas the real cause is external to the dream, external to time, external to space. It is immanent, simultaneous with the effect.
33:53 That's the cause. Immanent and not transitive. I know this is a bit abstract, which is why I'll give you a second example. A second example that no longer relates to cause and effect, but to the relation of the whole to the parts. Right? The whole includes the parts in space. A house includes the rooms that compose it, doesn't it? And all these parts — the bricks are parts of it.
34:25 The bricks are parts of that whole which is the wall. The wall is a part for that whole which is the room. The house is that whole for those parts which are the rooms, for example. But that only holds for mechanical totalities. The most typical mechanical totality is the pile of stones. You remove one stone, it remains a pile of stones. Remove your cerebellum, and there's nothing left of you.
34:57 Only the remains, as they used to say in the classical century, in the plural — it's no accident that I moved on to the cerebellum, it's that we've moved from the mechanical whole to the organic whole. Think of a plant. There, not only are the parts not included in the whole, but the whole can be included in the part. Think of the animal, think of Buffon the First, Buffon, 18th century, who had that beautiful estate near Tonnerre, in Burgundy, in northern Burgundy, and who was the first to show that with one part, one organ, one could reconstruct the entire animal, which would later become fundamental in paleontology.
35:45 who now arrive at results of staggering precision — sometimes half a molar is enough, and they reconstruct for you the missing link between the brontosaurus and the diplodocus, which is a bit nonsensical anyway. But how is that possible? It's quite simple. Look, if the tooth is extremely pointed, that means it's a canine; if it's pointed, that means it's a carnivore's, it's for tearing meat. If, on the contrary... there are big flat plates like millstones, big molars, it's an herbivore. So, whether it's an herbivore or a carnivore, its stomach isn't built the same way.
36:23 Because to digest leaves or thorns — I'm thinking of giraffes swallowing thorns roughly the way I swallow my café au lait — and to digest tender grass, or meat, gazelle meat, that's not quite the same stomach that's needed. We all did in primary school the cow's stomach, which is made up of a bunch of stomach parts, almost a plural stomach if I may say so. Well, the main one being the rumen, which by metonymy is now used to mean the belly, we say 'paunch.'
36:59 What does that mean? It means that all the parts of a living organism — this is the difference with the pile of stones — conspire. It's a very Leibnizian term, conspire among themselves. There's something that circulates within the parts, that's immanence. You see? Something that conspires, but which is not of the order of visibility. I mean, the link is not only visual, there's no relation at all between the shape of a tooth and the shape of a stomach. But one functioning for the other, since the teeth prepare the work for the stomach, pre-digest, if you will, the food bolus before it passes into the stomach — there's an identity of what? Of function, of finality. There, the big word is out. Isn't it?
Entropy, finality and freedom 37:48 So, if we want to remain — not non-materialist, for I never leave materialism — but non-mechanistic, non-reductive, non-positivist materialism, or even much more regressive still, neo-positivist, because positivism was progress, on certain points, which is not the case for neo-positivism. I'll recall here that entropy causes living beings to eventually die.
38:21 Agreed? So properly mechanical causes end up prevailing, mechanical in a very broad sense, biochemical. Causes that make complete abstraction of all finality, of all subject. On the other hand, during the period of growth or simply of the individual's development, there is what's called negentropy, that is, negative entropy, where there is a reinforcement of order.
38:53 I'm going a bit quickly over these notions to show you what? To illustrate the difference between what is at work in the hard sciences — I come back to this — especially the natural sciences, where we understand that mathematics is always a case apart, namely the cause-effect couple with the implacable determinism, whether mechanical or statistical, that it entails. In short, the total negation of freedom. Where there is that determinism, the one at work in purely natural things, there is no freedom at all. And the meaning-sign couple toward which the beings who emerge in the order of the so-called sciences of history strive, or the various disciplines that make up historical science. I'm starting to be a bit clearer, I hope.
Alberich, the three levels and the pact with the giants 39:53 So, when I now come back to Freia with the giants, I know you enjoyed that — poor Freia, dressed, not like a vamp — the Rhinemaidens are staged like vamps and indeed they put on a vamp act for poor Alberich, we understand why he decides to renounce love. I hope you all watched at least this first scene, I gave you four or five different stagings, it's a different scene each time, this first scene, on purpose, not so that... what remains each time is the invariant quotient.
40:26 The invariant quotient is that it begins with libido. The first character who appears besides the Rhinemaidens is Alberich, who says outright, 'if you come a bit closer to me, I would love to embrace your body,' etc. There's nothing to make a fuss about after all. Except that he courts badly, doesn't he? He does his courting poorly, he doesn't 'unravel the labyrinth of his feelings,' as they say in Cyrano de Bergerac, right?
40:56 You know, to Christian de Neuvillette who says 'I love you,' to Roxane, who is a précieuse, who was expecting a somewhat more elaborate declaration. Yes, that's it, speak to me of love, I adore you. Unravel the labyrinth of your feelings. When Freia arrives and the accumulation of gold — the accumulation of capital. Wagner and Marx died the same year. I never said Wagner was a Marxist, still less that Marx was a Wagnerian.
41:30 Marx must have been aware of certain hyper-reactionary ideas of Wagner's, alongside others that were very progressive. But he probably didn't know Wagner's texts on the Revolution. But never mind, that's another file we'll have time to deal with elsewhere. But at other moments in our approach to the Ring, we can no longer hide the sun with a finger. And when Freia arrives, the giants — and I'll take this opportunity to recap everything for you, right, while this scene unfolds in the depths of the Rhine, up above, among the gods, there's a rendezvous with the giants. Let me remind you there are three levels in all this. There's the basement, well, there are three levels. There's the basement, Nibelheim, the forge, the productive site where surplus value is extorted.
42:23 And where the ring is forged, the helmet. And on the surface of the earth, on the back — Wagner says, on the back of the earth — wander the giants. You saw they're not easygoing. You saw that Wotan, the king of the gods, doesn't feel too confident when they appear. And up in the heights, the gods, of course, in the heights and in the luminous weightlessness. I'm thinking of a poem by Hölderlin: Ihr wandelt droben im Licht, you walk up there in the light, O blessed spirits, and the divine breaths of the breezes touch you as the musician's fingers touch the sacred lyre.
43:13 That's not very weighty at all, whereas when the giants arrive, they throw their weight around. Poor Freia, you saw, she who is frail — well, frail again, she's well-fleshed but graceful, as I had said. Now, what happens at that moment? The giants demand that the gold be piled up in front of Freia, you noticed. Why? Because let me remind you of the pact that had been concluded between the gods and the giants. The gods ask you — the giant asks Wotan in particular.
43:44 You will build me the palace of the gods so that we, the ruling classes, are finally secure, and safe from all subversion, all undermining from below. And in exchange, we will give you Freia, the goddess of beauty. Of course, they didn't need to be told twice, you see, it's rustic, it's sturdy. It brings a bit of human warmth, even especially feminine warmth, doesn't it, a Freia among these brutes after all? When you come back a bit from the labor of having built block upon block — this is in Das Rheingold, all of it — block upon block with calloused hands, and you come back and Freia has prepared you a little meal, a little snack, a treat.
44:30 And then at the last moment, Wotan backtracks and says, no, but I was just saying that — at the moment they bring Freia, you saw it, there, chained, because they're waiting for the wages before releasing her, and the wages are Freia in their possession, isn't it? So for now, they've just taken her as hostage because the gods have gone back on their word, Wotan especially. Because his wife made a scene at him, I don't want to go through it all again, right? 'It's my sister that you promised, you're all the same, you men' — well yes, all that is very topical.
45:04 'You're all the same,' she's right — I already told you last time, and I repeat it, the two main differents of men, and I include myself, are weakness of will and cowardice. Weakness of will, because what we want, we want right away, to the detriment of things that may be more important sometimes. As for cowardice, we always put off until later what's a bit unpleasant at the last moment. There, that's what Wotan does. 'I'll get out of it, I'll get out of it.' But his wife doesn't let him get out of it just like that — 'you're not going to give away my sister.' There, to these brutes, it's out of the question. Well, and so the tension rises, you remember.
Loge and the only one who preferred gold to love 45:40 Finally, fortunately, Loge — I'll go quickly — the god of fire, the cunning one, the counselor of the gods, the German Hermes, the Mercury if you will, rather Germanic — because it doesn't come from Germany, it comes from Scandinavia, all this, and the books, the old tales in Old Norse, as it's called, this old writing, this old language. The oldest are in Iceland, aren't they? They were preserved in Icelandic monasteries, the sagas, the Eddas, sorry, the sagas are from Scandinavia and Iceland, it's the Eddas that Wagner had devoured.
46:14 The structural analysis of myths — he didn't improvise. I come back to Loge and Freia to stay structural, to start guessing what's being set in motion. The god of fire arrives, who circulates a bit everywhere in the universe — fire is mobile, that's why Heraclitus, who said that everything flows, made of it, for him, the most divine element, whereas for Thales it was water, etc.
46:44 Or air, for Anaximander or Anaximenes. So he arrives and Wotan tells him, get me out of this, you're my consultant, I can't get out of it. And Loge starts by playing the idiot, he who's the cleverest, he says, you promised the very essence of beauty and love, who's going to accept anything else than that? What could you find better in the universe than beauty and love? There's nothing, is there? And then he becomes serious: there's only one who preferred gold to love.
47:25 And there, we come back to the first scene, to Alberich with the Rhinemaidens, remember? He gets sent packing three times, each of the three in turn, the vamp act, then, isn't it, being sent packing in a brutal, degrading manner. He comes from the depths, from the lower classes, he's not very attractive, we're in traditional society. Better the charming prince for a shepherdess, isn't it, than the lout her father wants to marry her to. Or her mother, or both. So, he had nothing to lose by renouncing love, he's the only being who dared do that, and thereby it's the condition for him to seize the gold.
The seed of the structure and Freia's gaze 48:07 I ask you — and here we arrive at the heart of the structure — not to forget it, we'll see it confirmed later, meaning more concrete, but here we are at the core. We don't yet have the tree in the full fullness of its leaves, its branches, but we have the seed of the structure. Namely the incompatibility of gold and love, reciprocal exclusion, either you take the gold or you take love. All those who will try to have both, it's going to end badly.
48:38 The curse of the ring is already contained in this incompatibility. So, I come back to Loge, who gets the gods out of their predicament and tells them, I'm summing up what we saw last time all the same, we're taking our time — there's only one, and of course one of the two giants, Fafner, the one who later turns into a dragon — in the old Scandinavian mythologies, he's called Fafnir, it's the same one. Fafner as a dragon, hoards the gold, whereas the one who is sentimental, the other giant Fasolt, is more tender.
49:22 He's the one who makes that great wage claim to Wotan, of which I read you extensive extracts last time, saying that while you were floating up there in idleness, in light and in lightness, we toiled for you, we were shifting blocks. We thought at least we'd have as wages a bit of Freia's charm, and now suddenly you go back on your word, you break the contract, it's serious.
49:54 And so, deal struck, the gods descend, go fetch the gold, and the scene you saw where they pile up the gold — the gods have just come back from Nibelheim where they did something terrible, they stole the gold from the dwarf who had renounced love to have it. One can think what one wants of Alberich, they say he's the negative character — not in the logic, no, in the logic he's straightforward, let's say, he may not be attractive, whatever you like, he's brutal, he's exploited. But he's logical, namely: to obtain the gold, I renounced love. Let me remind you, since we're in the structure, he said in Wagner's text, 'to have the gold, I renounced love, but with the gold, at least I could buy myself pleasure, it could come in handy.'
50:40 To structure the so-called sciences of history and the relations between praxis and psyche, between calloused hands and the charm of love. So, why do they pile the gold in front of Freia? Because the sentimental giant, Fasolt, he — I see her, I'm under her spell and I can't let her go. So that's why you saw them piling up the gold.
51:23 While the gold is being piled up, for those who will have the very good idea of watching that again, I recommend it. For those with a bit of classical musical experience — for now I'm using images, films, because it's more concrete for a first contact, but if you can listen to the audio versions, which are a thousand times better musically than all the staged versions, available online, on streaming — I say that because it hasn't been that long that we've been filming, you know, in an extensive way, under good conditions, with good sound, good picture, it hasn't been that long.
51:58 Now, the greatest interpretations of classical music in general and of Wagner in particular are not always, but often, earlier than this technology. Besides, when you discover the work, you shouldn't be too distracted by the image and the action, but rather be attentive to the action that the musical drama expresses, where nothing concerning the action is absent.
52:28 I'm making this little detour to tell you that while the gold is being piled up, for those who want to watch this passage again, you hear several leitmotifs simultaneously. First, that of the accumulation of gold. Well, I won't dwell on it, it's almost self-evident, it's almost descriptive. Second, you hear servitude. Servitude, because the dwarf who enslaved the other dwarves is himself enslaved by the gods and bound.
52:58 So that his gold can be torn from him. And even the ring. Yes, the gods took all his gold from him, which the giants are piling up, but Wotan kept the ring on his finger. That one he won't let go of, since he learned that the ring gives power over the world, since the Lord of the Rings holds mastery of the world. 'It is no longer to you that I must answer, madam, it is no longer your son, it is the master of the world,' says Burrhus to Agrippina in Britannicus.
53:33 So, Wotan kept the ring. Why am I giving all these details? To make you understand a passage that lasts a few seconds, sublime. Watch the passage from the animated film again, that's enough for me. It's very well made, this animated film. They pile up the gold. And Fasolt walks around Freia. The gods are uncomfortable, it's a shameful deal, it really looks like pimping, this mixture of the goddess of beauty, covered in gold.
54:04 And Wagner knows what he's talking about in his century, and in many others, especially in his century. So, Fasolt walks around Freia, she seems hidden, and suddenly he sees there remains a small gap, she's not entirely hidden, and through that gap you can see her eyes — remember the passage where Freia presses her eye to a little hole in the gold, and we hear a theme, another leitmotif we hadn't heard until then, which is Freia's theme, with the charm of love, which comes into such contrast with all the brutal themes of exploitation, of servitude, of the accumulation at the forge and of assembly-line labor.
Nature and landscape: dune and nude 54:47 I made this long development to remind you that I had asked that we review a little. Now, for those who are a bit attentive to the past lessons, in the very broad sense, to the workshops from past years, remember that I had done a whole cycle on nature and landscape. We talk a lot about the beauty of landscape, there isn't only the beauty of men, of women, of children, there isn't only the beauty of Eros, there is the beauty of landscape.
55:17 Even though sometimes the two can exchange their functions. I say this because I noticed that photographers, you know, there was a Hachette executive who thought he'd please me by sending me a fashion shoot done in the desert, since I was in Niger at the time, where the Sahara takes up a large part. And anyway, there were models being photographed on the dunes, two-thirds naked, right?
55:48 And I noticed that the theme of dunes and desert kept coming back in fashion casting. And I realized, thinking about it, that 'dune' is 'nude' backwards. But there I'm getting ahead of what the symbolic order is and the logic at work in the sciences of history. All right? Because from a geological point of view, a dune has nothing to do with roses. Believe me, you have other things on your mind when you're without water among the dunes.
56:21 Than trifles. But dune, nude, right? The shape of dunes, the fenders of a car—a well-designed car has that curve, that contour. All right, let's stop there. So what is... He sees, through a gap, glimpsed—not Freya's breast, not everything the Rhinemaidens showed and displayed to poor Alberich, right? Because there's no exhibitionist without a voyeur, as you well know. No, it's her gaze. Her pupil, as he says. Her gaze. And immediately he holds on to Freya. He can no longer let her go. We hear this fabulous theme.
Erda, the ring and the first murder 57:03 That's where fate is fulfilled. Fafner, the one who prefers gold to love, will say 'there's a ring on Wotan's finger, that's what's missing to complete the pile of gold.' Of course Wotan refuses to give up the ring, he's very attached to it, and fortunately for him, right, the earth splits open at that moment. I don't know if some of you watched The Rhinegold to the end. I gave you the link to the Boulez-Chéreau staging. You have the whole of The Rhinegold there. Especially since there's no curtain fall. It's all one continuous stretch. It lasts a bit over an hour. So the earth splits open and out of the earth rises—the earth itself, Earth in English, Erda in German, which is the origin of 'earth,' right? E-R-D-A, Erda rises up; she's the goddess of the earth, and everything telluric—prophecies, you know, like the Pythia in Greece who is inside a cave.
58:15 And so Erda, the old deity of the earth who has seen things since the earth has existed, says to Wotan: let her go, give it up, I see a dark future for the gods. So already in The Rhinegold, we see a threat looming over the race of gods, to speak in the language of the Ring, right? We see a threat. Throw away the ring, don't keep it.
58:46 There's a moment of suspense where the gods watch, especially Freya, right, wondering what she depends on. Finally Wotan takes off his ring and throws it to the giant. The two giants leave with their sack. Freya, radiant, drunk with joy, jumps into her sister's arms. Into Fricka's arms—she is finally freed. The gods start breathing again, because Freya, whom the giants had taken hostage until all the gold was supplied, Freya's function in Valhalla, the Germanic Olympus, was to cultivate the golden apples that give the gods eternal youth when they eat them. You see—Eros, love, youth. There's a logic to all of this.
59:35 And so the gods come back to life, everything goes very well, the two giants leave, except—you've all seen westerns, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where the crooks who robbed the bank fight over the loot. That's structural. Wherever there's treasure, there's a dispute among those who found it. It's not even when several of them found it together. There's always just one who knows where it is and hides it, who perhaps will never enjoy it, and then several others find it afterward. And that's when there are scores to settle to be the sole owner of the treasure.
1:00:07 And since things quickly heat up, Fafner strikes down his brother, the one who was sentimental and who was moved by what remained of Freya's gaze glimpsed through the gold. Fafner strikes down his brother before the terrified gods, and especially Wotan, who begins to understand that the Ring—the Ring of the Nibelung—is beginning, that the curse the dwarf pronounced in revenge for having his gold stolen and the ring torn from his finger—it's a terrible passage musically, torn from him—even though he had renounced love to have it, now he has neither the gold nor love.
1:00:56 So, a curse he pronounced upon all those who will have been in contact with the ring, who keep it, who give it importance. And there, for the first time, the prophecy comes true—the first victim. Listen, I'll tell you the rest next session, but I wanted to show you what was structural about it. And I'll end on that before handing over to you, if there are questions or comments.
Love resembles, like nothing else, freedom 1:01:29 It's that in my cycle on nature and landscape, I spoke about so-called natural beauty—done in aesthetics regarding the beauty of works of art, and then natural beauty, a beautiful landscape, a beautiful forest, a beautiful sunrise, a beautiful sunset over the sea, a beautiful sunrise over the countryside. I had answered a question, some very interesting questions from a girl named Camille, I believe, in the audience.
1:02:00 That was at Gossigny again. 'Many and many years ago,' as a poem by Edgar Poe says, it's been quite a few years now, before the lockdown. No, it seems almost prehistoric to us now. Time dilation in all these current events. So, she had asked me the question—I don't quite see the connection between love and freedom, because I had said, there's a Gauthier criterion, where I had dared, against the prevailing relativism, capitalism, us all being shut up in our respective bubbles, and would always prefer—not skepticism to dogmatism, there I agree with him, skepticism, whatever one thinks of it, and whatever limits it may have, is always progress compared to dogmatism.
1:02:51 Well, if we can dismiss both and arrive at knowledge, at science—it's the same word in Latin, right? 'Scire,' I know, to know, even better. Now, I had given a few examples to make the link between love and freedom understood, and I'll sum it up like this before we part. If love concerns us to this degree in all cultures, all civilizations, in different forms, according to different protocols, not for the same objects, not based on the same visual criteria—never mind, it doesn't matter.
1:03:27 But if love—the relationship not only of man to woman, but of the lover to the beloved, with an h or without, it makes no difference here—if it overwhelms us to this degree, it's not because it's the most important thing. I know I'm going to scandalize many of my female listeners. I'm being a bit sexist in saying that it's women who give great importance to love. Measure it, we're in the human sciences. Do a statistical survey. Among women, nothing is ever more important than love. That's not a flaw to say that. It's generous, actually. Except that, I should specify, love isn't quite the most important thing.
1:04:07 But if it concerns us to this degree—I left my... my hypothetical proposition hanging on purpose, now I'll state the main clause—it's because it resembles, like nothing else in the universe, what is most important, which is freedom. But it resembles it. And I had given these examples, right? I see a young girl walking—I'll take a young girl because it's simpler to understand within the culture, but we could take a young boy.
1:04:39 Provided he's cute, as girls say, slender, right? Intelligent, which also means not 'relou'—relou, that means heavy, doesn't it? Verlan slang, I believe. So the metaphor matters, you see, we're in the immanent order, not in transitivity—one can not be heavy in kilos and be heavy in verbal expression, in thought, in manner of expression, in quickness, or rather in reactive slowness, etc. So the one who is both beautiful, slender, slender, with an intelligent look in the sense that's used among young people today. I told you that wasn't an erotic value in the past—it has become one.
1:05:20 Within one generation, before that meant a bit cerebral, a bit abstract, a bit caught up in reasoning—not very fun. Now, on the contrary, it's the one who understands—understands what? No doubt, my desires. So that doesn't mean this individual is more free because he weighs 50 kilos, right, than a creature weighing 120. That would be monstrous to think. And it is. But it resembles it.
1:05:56 That's where you see the analogue. Because surface, beauty that plays only on surfaces, on appearance—Schein. In German, Schein is appearance. Schön is beautiful. Erscheinung, the phenomenon. There's a lot there. And 'shine' in English means to gleam. And as you know, all that glitters is not gold. Let's go back to The Rhinegold, which helped us understand all that.
1:06:29 So, if this appearance of beauty concerns us to this degree, gives us this properly erotic shock, so to speak, in a very extensive sense—whether it stays platonic or moves to action doesn't matter here—if it triggers this process, it's because it recalls what? Someone light is less subject to the law of gravity than someone heavy. It's as simple as that. It's not the most complex things that are the hardest to understand.
Bachelard: simplify the real, complicate reason 1:07:03 Don't confuse the complex with the difficult, and the simple with the easy. You know, those who always say 'it's complex, it's complex'—it's more complicated than that. It proves how anti-scientific they are. Whereas a great epistemologist like Bachelard said that the hallmark of science is to simplify the real and complicate reason. You know, explaining the tides before Newton by invoking deities, things, vengeance, gods—because it rains, it's because a god wants to punish us.
1:07:36 That's much more complicated than Newton's little sentence, a line and a half, on universal gravitation. Science simplifies the real. A car engine that seems to me a nightmarish labyrinth of mechanics—that's partly true. For a professional mechanic, he sees the logic of the thing right away. He knows why there's that cable there.
1:08:06 Does that go to the brake fluid, to this, to that? There you go. Science—the fact of knowing—simplifies. So those who play the clever ones, or make you think it's always more complex than what you're saying, it's because you got the better of them on some point. And so as not to get stuck, they dodge by saying it's more complicated than that. Bring on your complexity, we'll see, we'll deflate it. But on the other hand, it's simple, but it's difficult. Why? Because the subject doesn't want to know. He wants what attracts him, what charms him, what bewitches him, to be in that person, in that object, in that landscape.
1:08:44 If I tell him, no, it's only a surface on which your desire for freedom is reflected, I de-substantialize his desire. I become someone who must be criticized, fled, repressed, fought. There you go. I'll ask Philippe if there have been any reactions on... Yes?
Siegfried, act II: the middle of the tetralogy 1:09:17 Ah, if we have time, I'd be delighted. So let me introduce it in a few lines, I have time. All right, well, listen, since there's only one question and it's very long, let the questioner not be upset if I put it off to next time because there's little time left. Now I still have one excerpt to play for you. I believe I've finished speaking to you, except to introduce this excerpt. I'm going back—I'll go quickly—to the beginning of the Ring. So I won't return to it again. The beginning of The Rhinegold, plus a few passages from Siegfried's Forging. All of that is, after all, the prologue to the tetralogy, to the Ring.
1:09:57 I'm not going to the end, the Twilight. Twilight of the Gods—I want the middle. You know I have a soft spot for this crucial moment of mediation, of the medium, of the middle, of the hub for a wheel. Now, The Rhinegold, in order: the Valkyrie, Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods. Wagner conceived the poems in reverse chronological order. He started with Siegfried's death—I'm speaking of the texts. On the other hand, for the composition, it's the order you see now: The Rhinegold, what I just told you about the Valkyrie, Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods, as far as the musical composition goes.
1:10:39 Arriving at Siegfried, in the second act, we're at the midpoint of the tetralogy in terms of duration, because Twilight of the Gods is very long—we're at the midpoint of the tetralogy. All of Wagner's dramas are in three acts. So the middle act is always the second. It's in the middle of the second act, when Siegfried is in the forest—I'm getting to it—that Wagner interrupted the composition in 1857, in the spring of 1857, the year The Flowers of Evil was published.
1:11:14 Musical revolutions appear at the same time as poetic revolutions, right? I recommend Baudelaire's admirable letter to Richard Wagner—just type 'letter from Baudelaire to Wagner' online, and you'll see for yourselves. That's musical criticism. For someone who says he doesn't know much technically, it's fabulous. And so, in 1857, he interrupts his composition. I'll go quickly. Because suddenly his sensibility turns to other things to express—he comes to feel a devouring, unhappy passion for a woman who has gone back to her husband, her 'lal,' the great bourgeois—coming back to the essential.
1:11:54 He embarks for Venice to drown his sorrows in the Venetian lagoon, if I may say so. That's where he'll die later—death in Venice. And for twelve years, he abandons the composition of the Ring. There was this great period of truce. The passage I'm going to play, on which we'll part, lies precisely in this middle. Now, for once, it's one of the passages I prefer, and it's the most ecological in the whole tetralogy, perhaps even in all of Wagner.
1:12:34 The passage known as the 'bird passage' is known both in musical criticism and in discography—as you'll see it labeled as an excerpt—called the 'Forest Murmurs.' If you want to listen to it on its own as an excerpt, that's what it's called, you see—we're in full ecology. We leave behind the underground world, its mists, the forge, industry, the anvils, hard metal, screaming metal, and we find ourselves amid the stirred breezes of the great conifers of the great Teutonic forest, the one that begins east of Paris and stretches all the way to Siberia, that never ends, the Taiga.
1:13:20 I use that because it plays a role. It's the backdrop against which the figures, the themes, the leitmotifs that will appear in the sequence you're about to hear will be drawn. There's this backdrop that keeps going 'di-da-di-da-di-da' like that in the strings with the eighth notes. That's the branches of the trees in the quiet breezes, and over that you hear birdsong from all sides. There you go. Among which one in particular will play a crucial role, since it will guide Siegfried toward the woman sleeping surrounded by flames on the rock. But I won't say more for now.
Presentation of the Forest Murmurs 1:13:53 I'll leave you at the moment when Siegfried, for the first time since he was born—these will be my last words—he was raised in the forest by a blacksmith who makes him believe he's his father. So this blacksmith is Mime, you know him, the one who made the helmet, who managed to escape from Nibelheim and went into business for himself. Freelance, a free agent, he's no longer in Nibelheim, he lives alone in the forest. He has a forge there where he tries, but never manages, to reforge the fragments of Siegfried's father's sword, which Wotan shattered.
1:14:24 We'll tell you the story of the Valkyrie another time. I ask all my female listeners to be present when we talk about the Valkyrie—they won't be disappointed. And he doesn't manage it, the blacksmith. And Siegfried, who presses him with questions, telling him it's not normal, when he claims to be his father—he's looked at himself, because there's no mirror, we're in prehistoric times, we haven't reached humanity yet, there are giants, gods, dwarves, but not yet men, in the historical sense—that will only come in Twilight.
1:14:55 He tells him: 'You say you're my father, but you don't look like me. I don't look like you, I've looked at myself. I've seen that the fawn resembles the doe. I've seen that the young boar resembles the wild boar. Me, I don't resemble you.' So he presses him and threatens him so much that the other finally admits he's not his father, that he found him, like Oedipus, abandoned to the wild beasts, wailing in the forest a stone's throw from the dragon's lair, along with the fragments of a sword that he had found.
1:15:25 He reheated it, he tries in vain to forge it, and Siegfried jumps for joy—he finally has a trace of his ancestry. And of course, that's how the first act of Siegfried ends, before what we're going to see. He forges the sword, which is the equivalent of the sword in Star Wars, the lightsaber, the magic weapon that appears in all symbolic tales. I don't know. And with this sword, once it's made, Mime takes him into the forest, right near the dragon's lair, hoping he'll kill the dragon, since only Siegfried has the strength to kill the dragon, before which the dwarf, like everyone, trembles with fear.
1:16:07 The dragon—don't forget it's the giant who killed his brother, who transformed himself into a dragon and has been watching over the gold ever since, like Scrooge McDuck. He says it himself: I watch and I rest, and I watch and I guard the treasure. It's his rent, so to speak. And so, right near the dragon's lair, he leaves him. And there, for the first time since he was born, Siegfried is alone, without his adoptive father. He has just learned what his true parentage is.
1:16:41 He has learned that his father—we know nothing about him, we've never seen what's true, Mime has never seen, he doesn't know that Wotan is in Siegfried's lineage. And as for his mother, he has only painfully learned that she died giving birth to him. He thinks about his mother, tries to picture her, tries to imagine the doe of the woods—he only knows wild animals. The cabin is deep in the forest, he's been alone with Mime since he was born. He's met no one else. And there, just before I leave you, he says, 'Meine Mutter, meine Mutter, ein Menschenweib.' I imagine her as a beautiful woman.
1:17:24 And at that moment, he falls asleep. You see Rousseau's reverie at the end of the eighteenth century, the reverie, the drifting off, 'schlummern.' 'Schlafen' is to sleep in German, 'schlummern' is to slumber. The reverie begins, the most essential moment of vision, of the passage into the symbolic order, where images surface. And at that moment, the Forest Murmurs scene begins. I won't say more. The bird wakes him and immediately he thinks that—please, let's hear the sequence, and I'll see you next time, since I won't have the heart to speak after such beauty, I could only say foolish things.
