English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Bach: the Art of Fugue, the Musical Offering, the Partitas 2:24 Utexon, utexon. Good evening everyone, I hope you can hear me. I'm sorry that my voice has to follow this piece that overwhelms us, which is astonishing in a way, isn't it?
3:28 Learned music, so-called learned music, has an immense repertoire. We think immediately of Bach, of course, and within Bach's work there is music that is more or less learned. It was obvious that a gigue like... with a slightly dancing, almost peasant quality, not like at a peasant wedding, those weddings so well illustrated by a painting of Bruegel, with an entirely Flemish gaiety. But the piece we want to hear is drawn from The Art of Fugue, where it culminates. If we wanted a rather pretentious metaphor, we could speak of the higher mathematics of music.
4:17 It's a metaphor, but one that is nonetheless right at the heart of our subject, since I'm picking things up again after our discussion on how to make the historical sciences real, and how to prove that they already exist in an unnoticed way. That is, that they already have a rigorously formalizable object, as do the movements of the stars, for instance, or those of particles—even if the equations aren't quite the same, at least below certain speeds, or below certain masses.
5:06 But what is certain is that The Art of Fugue, around the same period, stands alongside monuments of learned music—monuments never equaled, nor even approached, of their kind. I'm thinking of the Musical Offering, which in fact inspired the photo that opens this video, which is the beginning of the admirable royal theme—I'll come back to it—called that because it was the King of Prussia, who fancied himself a musician, who was apparently an excellent flutist, and who had heard about this musician, this German musician. There weren't many among... the musicians were mostly Italian, sometimes French, but very rarely German.
6:04 And he'd been told, 'There's a fellow over there, in Leipzig, it's incredible, he manages to improvise with his feet, he plays fugues on the pedals.' And he invited Bach. And when Bach, somewhat intimidated—he wasn't someone who often frequented such eminent social circles—the king showed him a theme he had just composed, which is why it's called the royal theme, the admirable theme of the Musical Offering, asking Bach whether he could compose something on it.
6:40 And Bach asked for a little time, then came back with the Musical Offering. The name says it all. But of such complexity, and I insist, of such beauty. The works—on a point that has already been noted, not only by me, far from it—but what a strange paradox, what a dialectic! The works, the greatest works of Bach—it's unanimous, don't think there's room for personal taste on this level, only fools or ignoramuses believe everyone can have their own opinion about things this important—are works to which Bach had given, from the outset...
7:30 ...and even in the printed edition, a didactic function. For instance, The Art of Fugue should be taken as 'the art of properly tending one's garden.' This is how one makes fugues. It's really a word, 'art,' that is closer to the root of craftsmanship than of artistry. What humility, you see! Now, it is in the most pedagogical works, I'm thinking both of The Art of Fugue and of...
8:05 In short, of the partitas—right at the very start, the prelude of the First Partita, from, look at the title, the Clavier-Übung. Übung is effort, it's really learning and practice, you see, the modesty of this absolute masterpiece, of which there exists an unforgettable version by the great Dinu—further on—Lipatti, D-I-N-U L-I-P-A-T-T-I, Romanian pianist who died of leukemia without even reaching forty, after a final concert which you can of course find on any streaming service you like, poorly recorded—though these aren't inaudible historical recordings either, but still, a very unflattering sound quality—a concert in Geneva and in Besançon. The final concerts, a few weeks before his death, the doctors had told him to play pieces that weren't too demanding.
9:00 And there's this partita by Bach, isn't there? And there's also the version everyone knows of... because I have cables plugged into my keyboard. So you see the paradox: it's in the most didactic works, presented as almost mere exercises, that Bach is sometimes the most poignant, the most present in terms of inwardness.
9:35 The prelude with which the opening credits began—well, the prelude that forms the substance of the credits, the very form, if ever there was one, of the credits that opened this livestream, with an attempt at visualization for which I salute the technicians and the on-screen graphic designers. I don't know the proper term, it's not my field, but I truly salute their work.
10:07 They managed to render the exact transformation, almost in the algebraic sense, of the score into visual terms, with the red voice at the top, the orange-red voice, and the green voice below when it begins, and then afterward the superposition of the two. So, I warn you, this is going to be a fairly dense session, because as I said, I'm picking things back up—we made a lot of detours, a lot of digressions, we relaxed thanks to the Ring, which is a dreadful tragedy. Not a happy ending, we can't say that, but there's still something there.
"Regular as music paper": returning to the labor of the concept 10:52 Musically, it ends with redemption, with love, with a humanity that succeeds the arrogance of the gods and their betrayal—plural. But still, we were at the theater, at the concert; now we have to return a bit to the effort—'die Anstrengung des Begriffs,' as Hegel says in the Phenomenology, the strenuous effort of the concept. We're going to need it. If I titled this session 'It's regulated like sheet music,' it's because music is going to play a major role for the intelligibility—I say intelligibility while thinking of scientificity, but let's not assume our problem already solved—for the intelligibility, the determinability—I'll come back to this, you'll see a nuance with determination, more than nuances, in fact—and thus for the predictability, in the sense in which astronomers predict eclipses, of texts by Nerval that we're going to look at together.
12:10 It's regulated like sheet music. The music isn't chosen at random. Don't think that every time I'm just foisting my tastes on you. It's convenient for me because I love music, and I'm not the only one. We've known plenty of people who don't like music. There are some, very rare. Generally they're people whom music affects deeply and who protect themselves from it. We saw this already regarding Kafka, in Mignon, didn't we? And precisely because I mention Mignon, I confirm that I'm asking you for a big effort, but at the same time a clarifying effort, if I may say so, for those who were a bit lost in our comings and goings, our detours and byways, and our differences in tempo. And apparently the impression I gave of often jumping from one line of inquiry to another without finishing.
13:07 Precisely, you'll see that the arrangement falls back into place thanks to the reading of the three texts, thanks to their superposition, which we're going to carry out. They weren't written to be superposed, that is, read practically line by line side by side, as they say—a comparison line by line. I remind you in this regard that these are texts written in contexts that could not be more opposed, indeed quite different.
13:39 As for the text of Angélique, I won't dwell on it too much because I've devoted several videos to it, to which I refer you—a whole cycle—not in order to spare myself the explanations, far from it, but because, to go into the detail that this extraordinary text by Nerval deserves, I say that it unfolds a displacement, a journey that is perhaps longer than the Odyssey. Yes, yes, yes, the Odyssey of Ulysses by Homer, which it may be longer than, and which lasts ten years, whereas this is a short story, less than a hundred pages, and which, in spatial terms, doesn't extend beyond a radius of some 50 km at most around Paris.
14:23 If I set aside the very first lines, which begin in Frankfurt am Main—well, that's not exactly the ends of the earth compared to Paris either. And I tell you that this text amounts to a journey even longer than that of Ulysses, with the same structure—but let's not get ahead of ourselves. So I refer you to that series, Angélique by Nerval, which you'll find on our YouTube channel; I recommend you click not on 'Home' but on 'Videos.'
14:53 It's not that—well, there you'll have them in chronological order, and as you scroll down you'll come across the Angélique series. I'll nonetheless recall what needs recalling here: that Angélique is perhaps Nerval's most journalistic narrative—not only in a figurative sense, in that it instills a journalistic tone, but in the literal sense, because this text appeared as a serial in a newspaper, just as a law had been passed forbidding serialized fiction—'feuilleton novels,' as the law of the time put it.
15:32 The Riancey Amendment, that's the name of the sorry character who introduced this amendment under Guizot, at a time when the counter-revolutionary power was tightening the screws before Napoleon the Little's coup d'état settled the matter once and for all and worsened the situation regarding freedoms still further. This amendment had been passed forbidding authors from writing serialized novels, and so Nerval sets out in search of a book he needs in order to prove... he isn't telling a novel, a fiction as we'd say today, but is speaking of a character who really existed, which is true.
16:12 And so, for this, he needs to find the book in which this gentleman recounts his memoirs, published in the eighteenth century. And he can't find it, and that becomes the occasion for this narrative. In the meantime, since he had promised the editor of the newspaper—the paper in question, Le National—to deliver 'The Abbé de Bucquoy,' and since he cannot supply it because the book has become impossible to find in libraries. And believe me, Nerval is more than a bookworm. There's even a passage in Angélique about rats and mice gnawing at manuscripts in libraries and erasing collective mnemonic traces. But that's another story. In the meantime, he tells the reader: I'm going to sketch out the landscape, the setting, and he travels through the Valois, which is in fact his home region.
17:08 So here, you see, I'm crossing over lines of inquiry that I've just been developing in the continuation of my analytical reveries, the very latest of which was recorded the day before yesterday and will be released shortly. I thank Pierre-Alain, who never stops working on our recordings. I hope he had time to work for himself, since he has a lot of work and is much in demand independently of me. I thank him all the more for it.
17:40 And so this... this latest recording was the continuation of our third analytical reverie, which was a reading of Promenades et souvenirs, written in the same places and roughly the same setting and roughly at the same... it's the period of Les Filles du feu, and hence of Angélique, an excerpt of which we're going to see. So I'm making crossings and connections. Now, this may seem complicated on a formal level, yes, a bit like not knowing which way to go when a lot of roads cross at an intersection.
18:17 But at the same time, I mean, it gives perspective and an intelligibility that wasn't there when one stayed inside each of the texts separately. For instance, you'll see that the theme of the voice—the voice of music in general, in particular vocal music, but not opera, the fresh voice, as he always calls it, of young girls still young enough that their voices haven't yet been, as he puts it, I quote, 'spoiled by the lessons of the conservatory,' who haven't yet learned to phrase, as he laments that Sylvie does, to the point that he no longer recognizes her on that level, precisely in Sylvie—is a theme we're going to find again, isn't it?
From the hard sciences to the historical sciences: cause and sign 19:07 So I feel like, without further ado, reading the texts—you'd surely agree, since Nerval's words are certainly more interesting than mine, and above all more beautiful. It's never a beauty added on top of the content. The more beautiful it is, the more pertinent the content; the more pertinent the content, the more perfect the sentence. That's great art, isn't it?
19:38 Even without the creator's knowledge, it is 'as good as it gets.' But just before that, allow me to recall that our problem is the passage from the hard sciences to the sciences of history. And so we've made progress, we've seen that in the hard sciences, particularly the natural sciences, there's the pairing of cause and effect that gives rise to law, to determination, to physical determinism—and this is not at all called into question by quantum theory. On the contrary, quantum theory achieves a precision in measurement, for instance, and hence in prediction and in the approach to objects of physics, even fleeting particles.
20:36 I say this because the Higgs boson, whose existence has finally been confirmed—there are photographic traces, not of the boson itself, let's not dream, but of the collisions it was the object of, as an effect, if you like, in particle accelerators—for a fraction of a second, I won't even venture to say whether it's a thousandth, a millionth, a billionth—too ignorant for that—I believe it's at least millionths, I'm sure of that, but it's not seconds. For a thousandth of a second, they managed to bring into existence this particle without proof of whose existence the entire contemporary physical corpus would collapse.
21:16 The general, canonical theory. So, in the same way here, I'd like to recall that we've already seen that in the sciences of nature there is cause and effect, and in human affairs there is meaning and sign—but that still doesn't solve the problem of rigor. If I say there is a symbolic determination, it still has to be shown that it produces objects that are just as...
21:50 So this is where I'm going to speak of determinability and determination, of things just as determined, just as rigorously formalizable if you prefer, where nothing is present by chance in human affairs—and here we're dealing with written expressions. You see, written verbal expressions. A rather clumsy formula so as not to simply say 'literature,' because one could do this, couldn't one, for the commentary on a football match in L'Équipe.
22:32 'The implacable East German discipline got the better of French panache.' That was a line, I remember, in an article reporting on a football match between France and the former German Democratic Republic. We'd been beaten by I don't know how many to nothing, but well, to console us, the journalists said 'the implacable machine.' Fine, all right, they're strong, but they're oxen, they're machines, they're proles, and communists to boot. 'The implacable East German machine got the better of French panache.' In short, we're the best, but we just didn't have much luck, we weren't very alert that day, maybe we'd stayed out clubbing too long the night before, we're French.
23:12 This shows that the symbolic order isn't reserved for poetry and literature alone, far from it. It governs the whole of the language I'm speaking to you in right now, of true language, of language proper, which is not merely a discursive discourse, as for example Y equals F of X—that's a statement, that's discursive. There's a subject and a predicate; there's a subject Y and then F of X, Y as a function of X—there is indeed a predicate.
23:44 But rather than using the words I use—where one never knows whether I'm speaking literally or figuratively, because they're always more or less figurative, to the point that we forget this and sometimes believe we're dealing with the literal sense. Which isn't without its wit—I do it on purpose. Because I speak of the salt on the table, don't I, or 'you are the salt of the earth'—that's not without its wit either. Between these two extremes, you know, we say... we made a rather salty joke, you see.
24:16 Everyday language, without even going to look at literature, is both salty and sweet too, depending on the moment. But it's imaged, it's metaphorical. In other words, it's polysemic. Whereas for each sign, signal—I prefer to say, in this case, of the highway code, these are signs, they are conventions in rigorously linguistic terms—but still, there's a bijection between the signs of the highway code and the way they must be defined. Otherwise you fail your written test when you take your driving exam.
24:52 You know, telling yourself you have to give the definition word for word. Good. So, I'm making a long introduction. And it's not over. Because the stakes are enormous. Since these stakes—I find it hard to state directly, because it sounds a bit, I was going to say, pretentious, a bit overblown, isn't it? One must say that by superposing two or three texts by a dreamer of the nineteenth century, a dreamer in prose—that's how he describes himself, 'it's been a long time since I wrote poetry, there is now in me only a dreamer in prose'—we're going to cross what Kant declared to be an unbridgeable chasm between the determination at work and the hardness of the sciences that it authorizes—hardness in the sense that it holds up.
25:48 The road doesn't give way beneath our feet. The so-called exact, hard sciences of nature—if we add mathematics, the hard sciences—and this rather lamentable state in which the edifice of the so-called human sciences finds itself these days, at least as they are taught. There are excellent things, don't put words in my mouth that I haven't said, but what a shambles! Isn't it? A cat couldn't find her kittens in it.
26:20 And I borrow from the language. And I tell you, one can show that texts are just as rigorously arranged as the movement of the Moon around the Earth, or the exchange of information between two synapses—a chemical exchange, after all—or between two cells of our body.
Why music: two quantifiable axes 26:51 That's the stake. I went by way of music, and I even gave it as a title, 'It's regulated like sheet music,' so I won't go back on that. This is to say now, to move forward from a technical point of view—I say this may be a bit dense. In what way is music privileged, in that it's not one of my whims to set it apart among the arts—it's that, on the matter of rigor, it is the only one of the arts whose expression, on a score for example, or even if it's a traditional oral music, I don't know, African or Amazonian, is always notatable.
27:35 As soon as it's notated, it unfolds along two axes—yes, in the Cartesian sense—the axis of pitches. Y, if you like, isn't it? But here I'm speaking of what I know, music: there's the axis of pitches and the axis of durations, both quantifiable. That's why, when we say 'it's regulated like sheet music,' it's to recall that on sheet paper, you set down things that are very rigorous.
28:10 And moreover, if you buy manuscript music paper, from a stationer or a specialized bookseller, it doesn't matter, a music shop, you'll notice there are no squares, there are lines, but no squares—the lines of the staff. But not only that, there are vertical bars. That means that before a single note is written, before any musical note at all, time is already formalized, time is already divided into intervals of equal duration. Well now! You see, when we say something is 'regulated like sheet music,' it goes far. You understand why I chose this photo, don't you, which, I remind you, is very moving.
28:56 The first page, the facsimile of Johann Sebastian Bach's Musical Offering, which he composed around the same time as The Art of Fugue, and which he offered to the King of Prussia. And besides, Nerval keeps returning to the musical thing, in particular the voice, the female voice—I come back to it—and not just any female voice, I repeat, that of young women, except once, there's a men's song, but for that I refer you to the third of our analytical reveries, the first part of Promenades et souvenirs, where there's a man who reminds him of his father, who picks up a guitar and sings in a public place in Saint-Germain—but otherwise, almost every time, it's female voices.
29:59 Nerval frequented the opera, so he had plenty of choice; he wrote texts for Berlioz's operas, not least for The Damnation of Faust. But what—I was going to say what 'seizes' him, from the verb 'to seize'—there's no other word for it, is it? It's compulsive. What makes him suddenly change his itinerary, his subject, the continuity of his thought, is when he's struck, as one is struck by an arrow, by this kind of voice.
30:32 And all this means I couldn't not include this sequence returning to the question of how the sciences of history can be real, because showing that they are is indeed my ambition this evening, whether through the medium of music—not only for the sound references, or even visual ones, the photo you've already heard in the opening credits, you'll also hear the same canon again at the end, in a different version, a bit slower—but also, after the first text by Nerval that I'm going to read, I'll allow myself to read you a text by Claude Lévi-Strauss. You see I'm not sectarian—he's one of the authors most criticized by Michel Clouscard, and toward whom I often voice serious reservations, since he was at the forefront of one of the strongest moments of the counter-revolution in the theoretical and ideological domain—but at its peak, nonetheless.
Political parenthesis: Lévi-Strauss and the theoretical counter-revolution 31:40 I'm opening a political parenthesis here, political and philosophical at the same time, since I'm going to talk about forms of expression of political discourse, and thus aesthetic even in the original sense of the word. This discourse has to appear, has to be perceptible, if it wants to be political, either in appearance, aisthesis. The ideological battle is waged on very different fronts. The Germans knew something, I remember, forgive me for laughing, it's not very funny, but anyway, having been in Germany with families connected to my family originally, who told of the happiness they'd had during the war occupying France in Toulouse, we never ate so well, etc.
32:31 We had excellent French friends, they were collaborators. That front, that front, the Wehrmacht front in Toulouse, that's not quite Stalingrad. Fortunately, during that time, there were Muzhiks making the greatest sacrifice humanity has ever made against barbarism. And that sacrifice was made by those the Germans described as barbarians with knives between their teeth.
33:06 So what do I mean? I mean that when it comes to carrying out a counter-revolution at the level of the agrégés of philosophy or the Collège de France, they don't take just anyone. Obviously, they don't take a YouTuber like me to put me on the level of the YouTubers I am, de facto. No, no, they take very different people. Althusser, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser has counter-revolutionary aspects.
33:41 I don't reduce him to that, far from it. In many other respects he's a comrade. And I've already pointed this out several times, I won't dwell on it. As for Lévi-Strauss, I mean, he's one of those who did the most to ensure the success of what would later be called structuralism. And who was probably the most effective in pushing back what you're led to believe was the state of philosophy teaching at the time, namely the dictatorship of Marxism in higher education. What a huge joke! I guarantee you, you can ask all the people who lived through it, don't just take my word for it, that you could be agrégé in philosophy without ever having opened a book by Marx, or quoted a line of Marx.
34:25 It took a Hegelian who himself said he was a right-wing Hegelian, I'm thinking of Bernard Bourgeois, a great Hegelian. It took a Hegelian, this program, even a right-wing one, to propose for the first time putting Marx on the list of authors for the agrégation in philosophy. No, no, don't worry, the Cold War started very quickly, and there you go, there was still Bergson in the 1950s, then very quickly existentialism, it was Sartre who reigned, wasn't it? Of course, who here and there paid Marxist tributes, but who was never strictly speaking a Marxist, still less a communist.
35:11 He once said 'Every anticommunist is a dog,' to which René Andrieu, who wrote very fine editorials in L'Humanité, and excellent programs back when France Culture still deserved its second word, 'Culture'—that was before Laure Adler. Before, and I salute him here, Edmond Jansen, a pillar of Delga along with Aymeric Monville, created the association against the wrecking of France Culture—that's how I came to know him, Delga didn't exist yet, but he had already formed that association.
35:55 Yes, and every Saturday, we had the voice of the Communist Party, which, at the time, didn't... you know? It didn't go out of its way to court people, it still spoke of social classes, and as a result it got 24% and not less than 2, right? So less than 3, I should say. So René Andrieu had answered Sartre, who had said 'every anticommunist is a dog,' he told him 'we didn't ask that much of him.' Those are other matters. Lévi-Strauss is someone I quote often too, not against him, but in his favor. When I say he was first and foremost among the finest musical epicures of Paris, you can never say it too often, but this is precisely the occasion to repeat it today.
36:42 The text I'm going to read to you, after the reading of Angélique, I reassure you, is taken from the preface to The Raw and the Cooked, which occupies such a place, this work that inaugurates his Mythologiques series and which marks a turning point, by his own account, in his research, which until then had linguistics as its flagship discipline—I'll go quickly—and which, from the mythological series onward, of which The Raw and the Cooked is the first portal, turns away from linguistics toward music, without abandoning it, of course, toward music, as being better suited to carrying out the structural analysis of myths.
37:23 I won't go on because the text itself will say it very well, I'll get to it shortly. So you see, this is to tell you that it's not a whim on my part. When I say it's regulated like sheet music, it's not only Nerval's text, and literature in general when it succeeds. I said that the more beautiful it is, sorry. The more relevant the content, the more profound truths are expressed in it, if you prefer, truths common to all of us, not just to the author. The more beautiful the form. It's strange.
Determinability and determination: the image of the investigator 38:04 And so after this long preamble, I move straight on to the first of these two texts. No, this is the end of my introduction, all right, I reassure you, this is the punchline of my introduction, but not without first making clearer for you the distinction to be made between determination and determinability. So as not to get lost and take up too much of your time, I'll borrow an image from detective fiction. When an investigator, it doesn't matter, Sherlock Holmes, Ahmed, whoever, let's say Hercule Poirot, arrives in the room where the crime took place, where the body was found, he begins his investigation, right? And when he comes back later and it seems to him that someone has passed through, that someone has been in that room, right? He can't say right away what, he doesn't see what's missing, what's been taken.
39:00 In other words, he senses that there's a determinability even though he hasn't yet fixed the determination. He doesn't yet know who came, and when and why. But he can feel, right? That someone came, that it's not just the wind that stirred the shutters. That's the difference. Determinability is when an analysis, an approach, I'll use a word that's never used, I'm inventing it, a barbarism, when you take a phenomenist approach—I say this on purpose instead of phenomenological, since it's contained within it, not out of contempt or rejection, whether it's Husserl's or Hegel's, I mean.
39:45 Because these are two species of a genus which consists in beginning by studying what is there, right there, in front of us. That's what an investigator does, right? The strict facts, as a forensic pathologist does when he says the bullet could only have been fired from a height of 1m72, well, there you go, I mean, and from a caliber of such and such, and this bullet had such and such a velocity, so the gunpowder wasn't distinctive. Up to that point, that's really the approach I call phenomenist. A phenomenist approach ends up concluding in a determinability, that is, concluding that in a certain context, it's not possible that it happened by chance.
40:27 By chance, by chance, in the ordinary sense, that is, corresponding neither to an end nor to a law. Yes, we're getting dense today. Let me explain quickly. I run into someone in the street by chance. I say by chance because I wasn't expecting to see him. An old friend, good grief, what are you doing here? And he says 'and what about you, it's been ages.'
41:00 Yes, what does chance mean there? It doesn't mean at all that we wandered around at random and just bumped into each other. No! There were very specific reasons that made me go to that particular place, say the Place du Châtelet, I'm just making this up. And maybe he too had reserved seats at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, at the time. Or at the Théâtre du Châtelet. They say Nerval's body was found hanged at the exact spot—since the street no longer exists—where the prompter's box of the Théâtre du Châtelet now stands.
41:33 Which makes me think that it wasn't perhaps by chance—I said I picked the Châtelet just like that, at random, but you see, I must have been thinking of my texts. Anyway, you can make of that what you will. What I'm going to say is much more rigorous. So here, we ran into each other by chance, meaning neither of us wanted it, you see, absence of an end, of a purpose, neither had as his purpose to meet the other that day. So here chance means the crossing of two necessities, of two final necessities for now. Of two necessities due not to chromosomes or the movement of atoms, but to wills.
42:14 A will that couldn't be realized, of course, without our cells, our bodies, our bones, our muscles. But anyway, I've already quoted enough for you a famous passage from Plato, taken up moreover by the minister on this point, which remains extremely relevant, and which clearly distinguishes causes from that without which causes would never be causes. A more materialist passage of Plato. There you go. Or else we say there's outright chance, not just an absence of finality, but not even any necessity at all, as some interpret it in quantum theory, and at that point it's the negation of a law and not merely the privation of an end. That's what I wanted to clarify.
43:02 So, when we highlight a determinability, that means showing that... oh dear, this can't be chance, right? After that, I refer you to all the detective films, the books, the stories, but not only those, right? You could tell your girlfriend, when you start being unfaithful to her inwardly, without even having noticed it yet. You could tell her, this is a personal point, you could tell her it's because you arrived very late to the meeting, or even forgot it altogether, good grief, but I must have completely forgotten that my boss had called me in to discuss my request for a raise.
43:48 It's possible, chance, you want it to just be bad luck, it's not that you... But when you pull that trick on her ten times, etc., for her, there's no more chance involved. She doesn't need Freud or Pagani to tell her there's necessity in that repetition. There you have the saying, right? Errare humanum—church people know a thing or two about this—perseverare diabolicum, right? To err is human, to persist comes from the devil, the repetition of the error comes from the devil.
Reading of Angélique: All Souls' Day in Senlis 44:20 There's my punchline. So we're going to superimpose these two texts and I'm going to ask you to look with me. And we'll see their determinability. The first is taken from Les Filles du Feu, a work from the end of Nerval's career. Most of his great prose works were written in the last five years of his life, between 1850 and 1855. Angélique is the first novella that opens the collection Les Filles du Feu, and it's divided into letters, because, as I told you, these aren't chapters but letters he sent as he went along on his wanderings around Paris, to the editor of the journal—'All Souls' Day, Senlis, the Roman towers, the young girls, Delphine.' And here's the text.
45:21 The avenues that surround Senlis and which replace the ancient Roman fortifications, later restored following the long stay of the Carolingian kings, now offer to the eye nothing but the rust-colored leaves of elms and lindens. However, the view is still beautiful in the surrounding area at a fine sunset. It is All Souls' Day that I am writing to you. Forgive these melancholy thoughts. Having arrived in Senlis the day before—so he crossed the forests, if you know the area, especially at that time between Paris and Senlis, but even now. Having arrived in Senlis the day before, I passed through the most beautiful, the saddest landscapes one could see in this season.
46:00 Going out, I skipped a small passage where he visits the church. You mustn't miss it, if you go to Senlis, it's one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Christendom. Going out, I was able to admire, under a ray of the setting sun, the old towers of the Roman fortifications, half demolished and covered in ivy. Passing near the priory, I noticed a group of little girls who had sat down on the steps of the door.
46:33 You'll see, it's not the sight of the little girls that draws his attention, it's their singing. She was singing under the direction of the tallest, who, standing in front of them, clapped her hands to keep time. One, two, three, come on ladies, let's start again, the little ones aren't keeping up. I want to hear that little one on the left. Remember this passage in relation to Lévi-Strauss's text, which will draw a comparison between musical forms, the solo, the tutti, etc. And in saying that this is how the myths of the Amazonian Indians should be heard, you see.
47:07 Come now, mademoiselle, let's start again, the little ones aren't keeping up, we'll see this more clearly afterward. I want to hear that little one, there's a solo, on the left, the first one on the second step. Come on, sing alone! And the little girl begins to sing in a weak but well-pitched voice. 'The ducks in the river,' a nursery rhyme. And Nerval takes up the narration again, another tune I was rocked to sleep by. He took a long time over this novella. At first, we arrived in this region, the Valois northeast of Paris, because according to him, it was only there that he could get information about the Abbé de Bucquoy. He searches in vain for the memoirs ever since he found the book in Germany. You see, he takes us for a walk, literally and figuratively, from Frankfurt, and even in the slang sense, a bit unsettling. He takes us for a walk from Frankfurt and around Paris too, we've moved around. I refer you once again to our series on Nerval's Angélique.
48:05 Another tune I was rocked to sleep by—yes, it's his mother's home region, which is 6 km from Senlis. Childhood memories revive when one has reached the midpoint of life. So important: it's neither Nerval as a child nor Nerval as an old man—he unfortunately never became an old man—it's Nerval at the midpoint of life. It's like a palimpsest manuscript whose lines are made to reappear through chemical processes. Imagine Proust reading that—in a single very clear sentence, it unfolds the whole immense Proustian enterprise.
48:43 The little girls together took up another song, another memory. I'll take the chance to tell you that Nerval wrote... I'm not dealing with determinability yet, we'll see that together. For now, I'm giving a few elements to help you contextualize all this a bit, for those discovering the text. But Nerval wrote a great deal, he was fascinated—you can guess—by folk song, because it's not only the voices of young women, and even those not spoiled by conservatory lessons, it also has to be young women from populations barely literate, even illiterate, like the Filles du feu.
49:31 Three girls in a meadow, my heart flies, my heart flies, my heart flies to your liking. 'These are children's rounds,' said a good peasant who had stopped near me to listen to them. 'But you're too nice, now you must dance.' You remember that Mignon sings and dances, according to Goethe himself, right, in the show she puts on with her troupe of travelers, of Roma people. 'The little girls got up from the steps and danced a peculiar dance which reminded me of that of Greek girls on the islands. They all line up, as we say back home, one behind the other, then a young boy takes the hands of the first and leads her backward, while the others hold each other's arms, each one gripping the one behind her, this forms a serpent—look how we find our spiral again—which moves first in a spiral and then in a circle, and which draws tighter and tighter around the listener, forced to listen to the song, and when the ring closes in to embrace the poor children, who do this graceful thing for the stranger passing by.'
50:38 We think it's about himself. 'I was not a stranger, how could I be a stranger in my mother's country? But I was moved to the depths of my soul.' Nerval wrote elsewhere, by dint of traveling, one ends up becoming a stranger to one's own country. 'I was not a stranger, but I was moved to the depths of my soul, recognizing in these little voices intonations, trills, and subtleties of accent heard long ago, and which are preserved the same from mothers to daughters.' It's beautiful, it's lyrical, it's not extremely original, right? Who hasn't felt nostalgia for the songs of their region, of their childhood?
51:16 The music in this region—and here he makes a more general reflection—had not been spoiled by imitation of Parisian operas, salon romances, or melodies played on the organs. More popular music was played in the organs than you'd think. Churches were places people came and went, right, where people chatted a bit about this and that, outside of services. And there, popular tunes were often played, taking advantage of the organ equipment.
51:49 In Senlis, they're still at the music of the 16th century. Nobody listened to 16th-century music. At the time, there wasn't yet, fortunately, the revival of the pre-classical repertoire. Pre-classical, that is, prior to equal temperament, or contemporary with its emergence. I was thinking of so-called baroque music—a term I don't like because none of those musicians ever used it to describe themselves. Still less early music, that which predates even the baroque musicians.
52:24 In particular the polyphony of the 16th century. Nerval had some knowledge—he cites Porpora in his books. In Senlis, they're still at 16th-century music, traditionally preserved since the Medici. The era of Louis XIV, a bit later, also left its traces. There are, in the memories of country girls—yes, yes, they're not opera singers, they're not prima donnas, right, trained in all the social graces, no—there are also, in the memories of country girls, laments of a delightfully bad taste.
52:59 There one found remnants of pieces from 16th-century opera—it's a bit early for opera, perhaps—or oratorios from the 17th. In fact, we're right in the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, where opera appears, emerges, around, of course, Monteverdi, the divine Monteverdi. As a musicologist put it, this engineer of rare boldness, since he threw a bridge between the music of the 16th and that of the 17th century, Monteverdi, right, who was born in Cremona and died in Venice, who created the first opera that really holds up, L'Orfeo, even if it's not quite the very first, no matter, it's in his era that opera appears.
The two-entry table: superimposition of declines 53:46 And we'll do the musicology another time, at least as far as opera is concerned. So I come back now to the beginning of this text, I'll go back and draw up a summary with you. This is where you need to pay attention. Attention to the determinability. You'll notice that right from the start, if we make a two-entry table, if we formalize this text with a two-entry table—I'm getting serious now. This isn't formalism, my talk about being formal. You can have a formal requirement without falling into formalism.
54:30 By letting the content unfold its own form. Look closely. All Souls' Day, the avenues surrounding Senlis, autumn, All Souls' Day, the deciduous plants. It's the decline of vegetation. It's also the decline of the year. Autumn is the moment when the year declines. I'd say it's the same decline, it's the seasonal decline, of course. But it's interesting to see that it moves from life toward death, the leaves, soon the mushrooms that grow on death, on humus, posthumous.
55:11 It offers to the eye nothing more than the rust-colored leaves of elms and lindens. However, the view is still beautiful in the surrounding area at a fine sunset. Now wait, here it's getting harder and harder to maintain that it's chance. That the leaves fall at the decline of the year is not only not chance, it couldn't be more logical. But that he sees this spectacle both at the moment of the decline of the day, or rather that he expresses it to us in the same passage—that's what interests me, it's the logic of a text—that in five or six lines he makes the decline of the year, autumn, and the decline of the day, the sunset, overlap. But that's not all.
55:59 He reminds us, in case we hadn't noticed, that there's good reason to be melancholy. It's not just any autumn day, 'it is All Souls' Day that I am writing to you.' And suddenly, this recurring apology comes back in a nagging way, if you know the text. We should comment on this repeated ritual of apology that Nerval makes to the reader, as if he were apologizing for letting his subjectivity show through, for being a bit melancholy.
56:33 Now up to that point, he was full of humor, playing the tour guide, as he'll go on doing afterward. You see when he says 'the Roman fortifications, later restored following the long stay of the Carolingian kings,' he plays a bit the historian, a bit the guidebook writer. I love this vein, Nerval did it admirably. Forgive me, this makes me want to apologize now myself, you see, it's contagious, for a personal anecdote, but if I were given—I don't believe a word of it, but just for the pleasure of the hypothesis and especially for its conclusion—to be reborn, to be reincarnated in a future life, and if I were asked now, in that life, to choose my profession, I would like—it wouldn't be to practice the professional role of neither philosopher nor teacher—I'd be an author of travel guides in a collection, in a big collection like the Guides Verts, the Guides Bleus, I don't know, the Petit Futé, I don't know.
57:33 There you go, what a fine genre, combining the skills of history, geography, memory, archaeology. There, I close my little personal parenthesis. 'It is All Souls' Day that I am writing to you,' and he says sorry. But there's another reason that isn't only personal, it's not just that he lets... It's coming, he's caught up by it, he's in his mother's home region, we know his mother died when he was two years old. Actually, it's worse than that, if that were all.
58:09 She died a little after leaving him. She died having left him to go rejoin her husband on the Napoleonic campaigns between Poland and Russia. Nerval remained faithful to his mother, his mother. It's the 'Mignon' theme within Angélique that speaks, by never speaking of his mother at all—not at all, he will speak of it a little, so we get memories, but very discreetly. No, but here, here. There's no question of it. In an era when everyone talks about their own life and does nothing but confide, in the Romantic era, he's very careful not to talk about himself, he takes a long time.
58:40 But here, as he wanders around his mother's home territory, he tells the story of Angélique de Longueval. You'll read this novella, it's the first of the Filles du feu. I recommend it, that's the least one can say, but he tells how at one point she follows her lover into the campaigns of Italy, though she comes from the mists of the Valois. And he says it seems a bit bold that a woman of that era would join soldiers and live not far from battlefields, barracks, and military camps.
59:14 But in fact, this goes back to tradition. You know, German women, and he says, and Arab women continue this tradition, are often pushed by their men to the front lines, right, to inspire the courage of the fighters. I'm not going to check what Nerval... What he says is interesting, but it's not simple. Here's someone who knew the Orient well, believe me. But in any case, what's interesting is that this is his way of remaining faithful, right? He doesn't say 'Pagani is exaggerating, my mother didn't abandon me,' he just doesn't talk about it.
59:51 Simply, you have to know that for him, this is entirely unconscious, isn't it? It's not just that she died, it's that she died because she went off to follow, and she never came back from her travels, she caught a fever somewhere between Poland and Germany. And she is still buried, as I speak to you, in Poland. And yet, the view all around is still beautiful in a lovely sunset. It is the Day of the Dead that I am writing to you. Forgive these melancholy thoughts.
1:00:23 And I told you, that's personal. But he writes this in the 1850s, and now I'll move forward — it's not a matter of repeating myself, but these are important things — this is the moment when Romanticism, the most powerful movement that marked the beginning of modernity, where everything went through it — literature, music, economics, history, I'm thinking of Michelet, with Michelet's lyrical outbursts, law. What discipline escaped Romanticism?
1:00:59 It's Armel Guerne who speaks of the fabulous verbal ocean, for example, of German Romanticism. And now it is going out of fashion, it is going to hand over to Realism — I refer you to the literature textbooks from the middle of the century, the midpoint of the century. Angélique begins with this short sentence: "In 1851 I was passing through Frankfurt," exactly the midpoint of the century. So, on top of that, he apologizes because he knows it's no longer fashionable. Forgive me for boring you with a melancholy that was perhaps already out of date by the time of the publications of Lamartine, the Poetic Meditations, or the early Hugo, or Chateaubriand, or Senancour, or Benjamin Constant, but not in the 1850s.
1:01:52 Now it's Balzac who talks more about bailiffs and debts that Père Goriot is forced to run up for his daughters, or another for his mistress, than about the Day of the Dead. But at the same time, I will never stop repeating this sentence that I've often repeated in my serial on Angélique.
1:02:23 We shouldn't let it pass too quickly... If I've dwelt on this a little, it's still extraordinary. I'd like you to realize this — that one feels the need to apologize for being melancholy on the Day of the Dead. So, having arrived at Senlis the day before, I passed through the most beautiful landscapes, but since it's the beauty of autumn, the saddest one can see at this season. On my way out, I was able to admire, under a ray of setting sun — you see the repetition. It's not me interpreting, I'm analyzing.
Ivy, faint voice, anamnesis, and Dantean spiral 1:03:02 That's the second time there's a setting sun. We know well it's the sunset, there's a continuity in the text. I was able to admire, by its ray of setting sun, the old towers of the Roman fortifications, half demolished and covered with ivy. I told you, a double-entry table. On one side you put the vegetation, the nouns, and on the other column, the epithets. Are the plants deciduous?
1:03:34 Or are they evergreen? For example the conifers, the ivy — for the towers of the Romans are half demolished but covered with ivy. Ivy was an emblem of Dionysus, the god of intoxication, the ever-green god, the god of eros too. Whether it's the intoxication of the senses, or the one due to the bottle, or both. So, on my way out I was able to admire, under a ray of setting sun, the old ruined towers. There again, the building too is in decline, the building is in ruin.
1:04:10 Remember that this is written by the one who said "I am the Prince of Aquitaine at the ruined tower." And yes, the more quotations I give you, the less you're tempted to attribute all this to chance. And you're quite right, if I wanted to be convincing, it would take me hours, I'd just be piling up texts. I wouldn't need to interpret. I would tell you — what do you think of that? You ask yourself that question, and you're right, one must always doubt. But here's a text by Nerval, here.
1:04:42 So, we'll come back to that later. So, the year is declining, the day is declining, and the buildings are in ruin. It's not over. Passing near the priory, I noticed a group of little girls sitting on the steps of the door — good, these aren't old people, these are little girls, quite full of life. They were singing under the direction of the eldest, who, standing in front of them, clapped her hands to keep time. "Come now, miss, let's start again. The little ones aren't getting it. I want to hear that one on the left."
1:05:15 "I heard her, she must have been a little off-key." Just like that, you see them as if in fantasy. "The first one on the second step. Come on, sing alone." And the little girl begins to sing with a weak voice. The voice is weak. Keep that in mind, because you'll see in the next dream, he'll speak of a vibrant voice. And the little girl begins to sing with a weak but well-pitched voice. "Ducks on the river," etc. Another tune I was rocked by as a child. Childhood memories are revived when one has reached the midpoint of life. So, there we have the decline of the author beginning.
1:05:47 We learn in passing. It's a banality, so I'll skip it. It's like a palimpsest manuscript whose lines are made to reappear through chemical processes. Yes, decline is banal, but on the other hand, anamnesis as a privileged subject of literary expression — that was rather new. There are great firsts, embryos already in Chateaubriand, the famous thrush, isn't it, near Combray — I mean, near Combourg. It's somewhat of a tour, near the ancestral château.
1:06:19 But it's Nerval who first gave it its full pedigree, and Proust saw this well, didn't he? There was a cult around this author, who was very, very little read at the time Proust praised him. "The little girls together took up another song, another memory. Three girls in a meadow, my heart flies, my heart flies, my heart flies at your pleasure." Now, they were the children of a good peasant, who would have loved to listen more, "but you're too kind, now we must dance." So there, you see, we're not in ruin anymore. The little girls rose from the steps and danced a singular dance that reminded me — not of the past this time, not a distance in time, but a distance in space.
1:06:58 It's strange to think of dances of Greek girls on the islands, when one is amid the mists and ponds, or the Gothic steeples of the Valois. And that's because he's at the foot of the cathedral. "They all line up, as we say, in single file, then a young boy takes the hands of the first and leads her backward." And you'll have noticed, in my first reading earlier, that the text borders on the fantastic genre. It's not while the others hold arms that each grasps — even though it's a children's rhyme — grasps behind her companion.
1:07:30 This forms a serpent — it starts to become a bit more unsettling — which moves first in a spiral and then in a circle. He's a reader of Dante, Nerval, who knows very well that the descent into hell in Dante is the constant passage from one circle to another, isn't it? And Dante's hell is like an immense spiral where Lucifer occupies the center. A circle that closes in more and more tightly around the listener, forced to listen to the song, almost a prisoner of the children.
1:08:04 Even if all this is very touching. And as the round closes in to embrace the poor children. I found myself no longer — in very poor countries, as was the case in the countryside at the time, we're still in the countryside there, it must have been — a bit like English children, on Christmas night, going to sing at the porches of buildings, hoping to be given a little cake, a little coin, a few pennies, etc. You need a few cents now that we're in the United States. I wasn't a stranger, but I was moved to tears recognizing in those little voices, so again, you see, Nerval's fascination for the quality — I'll say almost chemical — of the intonations, the trills, and the subtleties of accent once heard, and which, not from parents to children, but from mothers to daughters — we stay within a single sex there, you see, as far as this song is concerned — remain the same.
1:08:59 And then, he generalizes — this whole region is spared the damage caused by the industrial explosion this century is experiencing, and of course the Paris region at that time. The music in this district has not been spoiled by imitation of Parisian operas. You see, it's not so much industrial pollution here as artistic pollution — the fashionable tunes, the pop music we'd say today, or rather popular music — whereas he finds popular music there, salon romances or melodies played on organs. Here at Senlis we're still at sixteenth-century music, as if there were pockets of the past preserved there, as if these places were conservatories in every sense of the word.
1:09:47 Historico-musicological, traditionally preserved since the Medici. The era of Louis XIV has also left traces. In the memories of the country girls there are laments of ravishing bad taste. Nerval's most famous text is Adrienne's song in Sylvie. If you want to hear or imagine it — you can't click on Nerval's text and hear the sound of Adrienne's song. But Nerval talks about it. It's as good as the song would be if it had been recorded. "Each stanza ending with those quavering trills that young voices bring out so well when they imitate, through a modulated shiver, the trembling voice of the grandmothers." You see to what level of detail he goes? Here too, we find remnants of seventeenth-century opera pieces, perhaps, or seventeenth-century oratorios. An oratorio is an opera with a sacred subject, taken from the Bible for example, or from the Old Testament.
Reading of the dream in Aurélia 1:10:55 Yes, from the Bible. So, I'll skip ahead. No, actually, before moving on — yes, still, I'll come back to the Lévi-Strauss text, I'm breaking my promise to Pierre-Alain, but we'll bring down the Lévi-Strauss text, we'll get back to it, of course. And I'll move right on to the text I promised to read aloud. That's why I don't want Lévi-Strauss to make us forget the text we've just read.
1:11:31 And while it's still fresh in our ears and eyes — some of you know that all this is on Wikisource, Nerval, Les Filles du feu, Angélique, Letter 6, you have all the references. So now, we're no longer in the journalistic narrative, we're no longer on the stroll, we're no longer wandering between Senlis and Chantilly and playing at being a historian or tour guide, no. And writing to readers and to the newspaper editor, one has to keep the readers waiting — here it's much more serious.
1:12:04 This is a text, as I've often told you in other contexts, that we owe a bit to Nerval's doctor, who had said: if you can put your obsessions, your visions especially — and so the dreams. We say dreams, and we'll see it here, but often it's the dreams he has in broad daylight, so the hallucinations, so what he himself admirably calls — this is where what I would call the overflow of the dream into real life began. And here he says a dream, so I don't want to force his thought, I hate interpreting, I don't want to press his words — so it's a dream, you see, we're far from the context we've just seen, it's a dream, this whole work is written in the clinical urgency of someone trying to cure himself and escape his obsessions.
1:12:49 "A dream I had again confirmed me in this thought. And here is the dream. I suddenly found myself in a room that was part of my forebear's dwelling. It seemed only to have grown larger." That's what happens in dreams. "The old furniture gleamed with a marvelous polish. The carpets and curtains looked as if renewed. A light three times brighter than natural daylight came through the window and the..." "There was in the air a freshness and a scent of the first spring mornings. Three women were working in this room and represented, without quite resembling them, relatives and friends of my youth."
1:13:28 "The eldest spoke to me in a vibrant" — not weak — "and melodious voice that I recognized as having heard in childhood. I don't know what she was telling me that struck me by its profound aptness, but it drew my thought to myself. I saw myself dressed in a small brown coat, of an ancient cut, entirely woven by needle from threads as fine as spider webs." It was, you'll see, a series of epithets used only to characterize the clothing of a child, a little boy or a little girl, but really very small.
1:14:06 "I was dapper, the coat, graceful, and imbued with sweet scents. I felt all rejuvenated and all spruce in this garment that came from their fairy fingers. And I thanked them, blushing" — and here he says it — "as if I had been nothing but a little child before great beautiful ladies. Then one of them rose and went toward the garden." Everyone knows that in dreams one never sees the sun — we'll come back to that. Though one often has the perception of a much brighter light, objects and bodies are luminous in themselves. I say that just in passing. In the dream, the light is not centralized by the solar dictate.
1:14:46 "I saw myself in a small park where arbors of vine trailed on, laden with heavy clusters of white and black grapes. As the lady guiding me advanced beneath these arbors, the shadow of the crossed trellises varied, for my eyes, her shapes and her garments." It's magical, Nerval's sentence. It couldn't be clearer, but almost too clear, because of the number of shifting nuances and details he manages to make parade before us in an extremely clear language, without reaching for learned words — the shadow of the crossed trellises varied, for my eyes, her shapes and her garments.
1:15:22 "She finally came out of it and we found ourselves in an open space. One could barely make out the trace of old paths that had once crossed it in an X" — the garden. "Cultivation had been neglected for many years, and scattered stands of clematis, hops, honeysuckle, jasmine, ivy, birthwort, stretched their long trailing vines among trees of vigorous growth. Branches bent to the ground, laden with fruit. And amid the tufts of weeds bloomed a few garden flowers, gone back to a wild state."
1:15:59 I'm sure that none of you, among those kind enough to attend this talk — I'm sure, I don't mean those who have already read it, for whom it quickly becomes obvious — that there's no chance involved. That you've found the first text turned inside out. I say it, people think I'm exaggerating, that this text is the Angélique text multiplied by minus one. But no, I'm not joking, I'm not forcing it, it's not a metaphor. Good grief, come on, let's take up our double-entry table again. The buildings, right? Let's go back to the beginning of the dream.
Aurélia is Angélique "multiplied by minus one" 1:16:41 So, a dream I had again confirmed me. I suddenly found myself in a room. There's a precision about the building, isn't there, which was part of my forebear's dwelling. I remind you that his forebear is his maternal uncle, I mention that in passing. It's stated a little before and a little after in the text, but that's not in the dream, so I'll skip it. It seemed only to have grown larger. Good grief, the Roman towers were half demolished, weren't they? And here, the dwelling seems to have grown larger.
1:17:11 The old furniture gleamed with a marvelous polish. The carpets, the curtains, were as if renewed. A light three times brighter. Good grief! The light was, in the entryway in the first text, a building in ruin; in the second text, enlarged. It's not the ruined tower, it's the restored tower and beyond. The declining light in the first column, isn't it, three times brighter than natural daylight in this text.
1:17:43 The season was autumn, and there was in the air a freshness and a scent of the first spring mornings. He could have said winter, summer. He goes looking for the season that is the exact opposite of autumn. It's not a solstice season, winter or summer, it's the season of the equinoxes. When day and night are of equal length, as it says in one of Hölderlin's most beautiful poems, the one that ends with "the sea takes away and gives back memory."
1:18:24 The three women — the eldest spoke to me with a vibrant and melodious voice. So again, the voice — it's weak in the Angélique text, it's vibrant here — that I recognized, though it's an adult anyway, not a child, as having heard in childhood, and I don't know what she was telling me that struck me by its profound aptness. But it drew my thought to myself, and you know the rest, he has a little coat, he's swaddled, so to speak, if you look closely.
1:18:55 A small brown coat of ancient cut, entirely woven by needle from threads as fine as spider webs — you can't get more weightless than that. And the coat was dapper, graceful — these three women are a bit like good fairies, aren't they, not threatening women — and imbued with sweet scents. I felt all rejuvenated and all spruce in this garment. You see, I told you, these are epithets that characterize more early childhood than adulthood, to say the least, that came from their fairy fingers. Especially since we're somewhat in childhood, in the world of fairies, there. And I thanked them, blushing, as if I had been — and here it's explicit, I'm not interpreting — nothing but a little child before great beautiful ladies.
1:19:42 The human relationship — I continue my table entries. An adult surrounded by little girls in Angélique, a child surrounded by three adult women in Aurélia. Good grief! I tell you it's the same text, I said multiplied by minus one, but do you think Nerval wrote with a computer, a tablet here, a PC there? And in what way would that be enough? Such rigor in the texts, such an elimination of chance, would be enough to follow through.
1:20:21 After this superposition, one can no longer deny that there is a determinability, but we don't yet know — since I'm being very careful — what the determination is. Is it a Freudian determination? Origin in the last instance libidinal? Is it a class determination? I look toward Marx. Is it a coupling of the two, since we are all traversed by both determinations? We were first children within families, as Descartes said, for we have all been children before being men, governed by our appetites and our tutors, who were not often in agreement among themselves, as he understood.
1:21:05 The appetites of the child, of the children we once were, drove us toward things that were generally disapproved of by our tutors, whether parents, teachers, supervisors. In Nerval's time, they were often people of the Church. There. We haven't seen the plants yet. So, here we come. So, one of them rose and went toward the garden. Here we go. Everyone knows that in dreams one never sees the sun — whereas there we saw it clearly, it was declining, but we spoke of it often, the sun is setting. Though one often has the perception of a much brighter light — there it isn't declining.
1:21:44 Objects and bodies are luminous in themselves, but we've seen what light — it's not three times brighter than that of natural daylight. I saw myself in a small park where arbors trailed on — well already that's not quite... well, arbors laden with heavy clusters — ah yes you see, grapes, it's autumn, wait! With heavy clusters, he spoke — there was in the air, wasn't there — scents of a spring morning. And in a dream, one can very well superimpose one onto the other — as the lady guiding me advanced beneath these arbors, the shadow of the crossed trellises, sorry, of heavy clusters of white and black grapes. Here, I can't help doing some intertextuality, I'm leaving analysis a bit, without it being mere interpretation, I'm doing intra-reading.
1:22:30 In one of the poems of the Chimeras — the poems in general were written during Nerval's moments of madness. "Am I Love or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron? My brow is still red from the Queen's kiss," with apparently discontinuous notations, like this, a hesitation over identity. "Am I Love or Phoebus. Beneath the pallor of Abel, alas, bloodied" — they called him gentle Gérard — "Beneath the pallor of Abel, alas, bloodied, I sometimes have Cain's implacable redness."
1:23:02 That's not it. One could barely make out the trace of... yes, actually, I'll come back to the heavy cluster of white grapes. In the Chimeras, there's a poem called Myrtho, M-Y-R-T-H-O, it's a first name, since he addresses a young girl who bears almost all the titles of the Chimeras — many, not all — Daphné, Artémis.
1:23:33 And so, in this one, Myrtho, which is under the sign of Naples — Naples is a region of fire, the daughters of fire, because of the Vesuvius volcano, isn't it? He says this: "I think of you, Myrtho, divine enchantress, on the Posillipo" — the Posillipo, that's the mountain overlooking the bay of Naples. They say "see Naples and die" — it's the setting of Così fan tutte and of Mozart. "I think of you, Myrtho, divine enchantress, on the Posillipo, lofty with a thousand brilliant fires, on your brow flooded with the brightness of the Orient."
1:24:08 So here it's the brightness of morning — "on your brow flooded with the brightness of the Orient, in the black grapes mingled with the gold of your tresses." There it's not black and white grapes, but it's a contrast between the blackness of the grapes and the gold of your tresses. "It was also from your cup that I drank intoxication, it was in the furtive flash of your smiling eye" — hard to stop it. "Thus, even at the feet of Iacchus" — that's one of the names of Bacchus — "I was seen praying," and that's my downfall, rest assured, "for the Muse made me one of the sons of Greece," that is, one of the sons of an age when mythology was part of daily life, with a rigorous symbolic order.
1:24:50 There, now I'm certainly interpreting, but we understand each other, so make of it what you will, I won't intervene. "She finally came out of it, one could barely make out the trace of old paths that must once have crossed it in an X. Cultivation had been neglected for many years," and scattered stands of clematis — here we go — of hops, of honeysuckle — you're kidding, it's more the rust-colored leaves of elms and lindens that remain on a few trees around its edge — "stretched their long trailing vines among trees of vigorous growth."
1:25:22 But yes, we're right at the heart of the Ivory Coast, of Gabon, of the Amazon soon, in the dream. The dream can do that, you know. Branches bent down to the ground, laden with fruit, you can almost hear them creak, you want to put in stakes to hold them up. The branches mustn't break. Branches bent down to the ground, laden with fruit, and among the tufts of weeds — not us, it's a few garden flowers gone back to the selvaggio state. Selva, the wild forest, isn't it?
1:25:55 If for each text taken separately one can hardly leave aside determinability, then it becomes impossible, not merely difficult, to eliminate determinability — that is, the fact that all these symmetries cannot be due to chance — from their superposition. Which is not something we do: when we read Aurélia we don't think of Angélique and so on, unless we know Nerval's work by heart and repeat it to ourselves in our head.
1:26:28 So we decided to read his complete works. All this is a matter of habit that makes it not happen often. If it's a book you bought like that, at a station kiosk, at random, because you liked the cover, to fill the hours on the train, this won't show. Nerval's suicidal discretion. There, now I can go back to Lévi-Strauss. Thank you, Pierre-Alain. And sorry — thank you, rather, because it's a piece of work of a complexity that today's session in particular requires.
Transcending the opposition of the sensible and the intelligible 1:27:04 So Lévi-Strauss, as I told you in the introduction, starting with the series of works, of publications, whose generic title is Mythologiques, in the plural, and whose first volume, the door that opens this edifice of the Mythologiques, is The Raw and the Cooked. After that there's From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and so on.
1:27:38 I've already told you that from the moment he begins this series, music isn't just something that holds an important place — it's his reference point as a model of formal intelligibility, between forms that come from logos, from logic, from language, and... non-vocal music, if you like. There would be, as it were, an intermediary — there would be musical forms that are intermediate between logical forms, the syllogism, reasoning. Now, we're not dealing here with almost overlapping disciplines, an intersection, you might say, mathematics, between certain parts of philosophy and mathematics. See, for example, truth tables.
1:28:36 And here, the passage we're going to read — I'm getting to it now, having introduced the rest sufficiently earlier — is initially the passage where he justifies this quite unexpected fact that this anthropologist, known as a specialist in the study of peoples living deep in the Amazonian jungles, in order to render their mythology — and God knows how complex it is — intelligible, in particular the Indians of the Mato Grosso, that's mainly where he worked, though not exclusively, of central Brazil if you prefer.
1:29:14 Why does this gentleman suddenly refer to music? It doesn't seem serious, you see. And he says this, at the beginning of this introduction — I've skipped 20 pages, we're on page 22 — where he had talked a lot about the fact... what was specific in his approach to myths. Let's not forget that myths are, above all, words. If you ask the Dogon in Mali what is, for them, the origin — since when have men had mastery of fire — they will tell you a myth.
1:29:50 It's not like handing over a genie. But the answer is a spoken word. So when he talks about myths, he's not thinking of myths, he's not off dreaming. Lévi-Strauss recorded them, he has tape recorders. He recorded — that's the material, that's the gear the anthropologist works with. Especially in societies without writing. Indeed, at the beginning of this introduction, we declared that we had sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.
1:30:23 Here we're neither in ethnology, nor in anthropology, nor in music — we're at the very heart of philosophy. And that's where it began. The first great written philosophical system that has come down to us, that of Plato, rests entirely on the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Even though — and this brings us closer to what Lévi-Strauss is saying — Plato tells us that if the opposition were total, if the separation were absolute, we don't see why something, all of a sudden, at the back of the cave, would wake up one of the prisoners and prompt him to leave the back of the cave to go and see, behind him, the models rather than the copies.
1:31:06 For that, we already saw elsewhere, when I said that "philosophy is the daughter of crisis," you need either a great misfortune or, on the contrary, an illumination. But let's leave that, that's great Plato. Indeed — or let's leave that, yes let's leave that, I'll quote Baudelaire but that will come in its time. These myths express the one, the intelligible, by means of the other, the sensible.
1:31:37 In other words, look at the title, The Raw and the Cooked. Until then, logic never dealt with sensible qualities. The opposition between smooth and rough isn't philosophy. Philosophy traditionally left aside raw and cooked, sweet and salty, didn't it? All these qualitative operations, what was traditionally called in logic since Aristotle the secondary qualities — there was no logic of secondary qualities, and here Lévi-Strauss is going to rehabilitate it, but he'll say so himself.
1:32:14 So I won't dig too deep into that side of things — in any case it's quite clear here that to explain the origin of the world, or of fire, or of laughter, or of table manners, of cultural ornaments — the feathers of macaws in particular, which play such a large role in ritual body decoration among the Amazonian Indians, especially among the Bororo whom Lévi-Strauss studied — all of this yields explanations which, by contrast, don't leave out secondary qualities, or notions that apparently hold no interest for science and logic, namely raw and cooked, well, I mean, as such, as felt by the one who tastes something sweet or salty.
1:33:14 Science will explain why such a molecule gives the taste of sweetness and such another the taste of saltiness, but not the sensation itself. So at the beginning of this introduction we said we had sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible by placing ourselves from the outset at the level of signs. Indeed, these... So you see why this connects to our conclusion before the break, we had indeed seen that there was cause and effect in the natural sciences.
1:33:52 Indeed, these signs express the one, the intelligible, by means of the other, even with a very small number of them. Look, with the 23 letters of the alphabet, 24, 25, 26, depending on the European language, with the letters of the alphabet, the quasi-infinite number of notions and words and discourses that can be built. It lends itself to rigorously arranged combinations that can translate, down to their slightest nuances — you see, it's just like the approach to texts we've just been doing — the whole diversity of sensible experience.
1:34:26 Thus we hope to reach a plane where logical properties — remember that logic only studied primary qualities, extension, time, in objects since Aristotle — will manifest themselves as attributes of things just as directly as flavors or scents, whose particularity, excluding any mistake, nevertheless refers back to a combination of elements which, chosen or arranged differently, would have given rise to the awareness of a different scent. Thanks to the notion of sign, it is therefore a matter, for us, on the plane of the intelligible and no longer merely of the sensible, of restoring secondary qualities to intercourse with the truth.
1:35:20 Whereas for 2,500 years, since the appearance of philosophy and logic, essentially with Aristotle — I've said it three times now — secondary qualities had no access to logic. People talked about them, for other purposes: Plato says that the sophists claim that wine tastes sweet to you, so it is sweet, it tastes bitter to you, so it is bitter, so there is no flavor in itself. Of course, at that level, but there wasn't a logic precisely because of that changing, subjective, and fleeting side of sensation.
1:35:52 They couldn't be installed at the heart of a logic. This search for a middle way — decidedly, mediation is perhaps the most Hegelian thing about Lévi-Strauss without his knowing it. This search for a middle way between the exercise of logical thought and aesthetic perception. So, logical thought, the understanding, aesthetic perception, sensibility, sensations. Aesthesis is the sensible in its origin. Anesthesia is suppressing the work of the senses. He was naturally bound to draw on the example of music, which he had always practiced.
1:36:35 This way of using, of establishing a mediation, a middle way — a mediation becomes profound as soon as one takes an opposition that seems forever irreconcilable, like the unbridgeable abyss Kant placed between the hard sciences and the human sciences, to put it quickly. As soon as one takes an intermediate category, something like between raw and cooked — I've already mentioned it — there's the fermented, that is, chemically cooked.
1:37:14 Tahitian-style fish spends a night "cooking" in lemon, in spices, in vinegar — marinade, wild boar, and so on. Every time things seem completely opposed, either raw or cooked, there are things that partake of both realms. And there we are in the concrete, because the world we live in is never at one of the extremes. It's a world that is always in the middle term.
Succession, simultaneity, solo and tutti, recitative and aria 1:37:47 And it wasn't only from a general point of view that the parallel imposed itself. The parallel between the way myths are expressed, the speech deployed in the telling of a myth, and the unfolding of a musical phrase or a piece of music, obey the same logics. That's what Lévi-Strauss is saying: and it wasn't only from a general point of view that the parallel imposed itself. Very quickly, almost from the start of the writing, we found it impossible to organize the material of this book — this book whose purpose is to study the mythology of the Amazonian Indians, let's not forget — according to a plan respectful of traditional norms.
1:38:34 The division into chapters — I remind you that the preface is called "Overture," as before an opera, before the curtain rises, there is the overture, isn't there? And let me give you a few titles, since he had a very broad musical culture: "Cantata of the Opossum" — the opossum is an animal that plays an important role in the mythology of the Indians, a kind of small marsupial. "Cantata of the Opossum," "Fugue of the Five Senses," isn't it? "The Short Life," that's about the myths that tell how man's life came to be shortened — except that "La vida breve" is also the title of an opera, I know very well, by Manuel de Falla, the great Spanish composer.
1:39:14 The division into chapters not only did violence to the movement of thought, it impoverished it and mutilated it, took away the bite of the demonstration. Paradoxically, it appeared that for this demonstration to seem conclusive — there you have it, determination, determinability — it had to be granted more suppleness and freedom. We saw the sinuous quality of Nerval's sentence, "the lady I was following, her slender figure unfolding with a movement that made the taffeta of her dress shimmer in shifting folds."
1:39:53 Yes, it's an almost imponderable sentence, yet precise, sinuous like that. Well, I mean, ordinary language struggles to restore this kind of imponderable, this kind of musicality, of curvature, of tropos — tropism comes from the Greek word tropos, which means curve. Heliotropes, you know, sunflowers, flowers — it means those that curve toward the direction of the sun. We also noticed that the order in which the documents were presented could not be linear, and that phases of the commentary were not linked to one another by the simple relation of before and after. You see how important the relation to time is for understanding Nerval's work.
1:40:50 What's happening to him? In the dream, he finds himself back in his maternal uncle's house, which has grown larger. The past is no longer past. Time no longer exists. One can relive sequences. Now, what's typical of time is irreversibility. This isn't real time, unfortunately. "The more I am no longer what I once was, the more I shall never be able to be it again. My sweet spring and my summer have leapt out the window." It's a song — a text that Rousseau set to music, and Nerval comes across the manuscript at Compiègne shortly before these lines.
1:41:26 I'm not making anything up. So, artifices of composition were indispensable — you see, that's a musical term, composition — in order to give the reader, at times, the sense of a simultaneity no doubt illusory, since one remained bound by the order of the narrative, but for which one could at least seek an approximate equivalent by alternating a stretched-out discourse and a diffuse discourse — if you like, a linear discourse, as I'm trying to do a bit more today, and a discourse full of detours, as I do too often — keeping them separate.
1:41:59 Thus we noticed that our analyses were situated on several axes. That of successions, which is the order of time par excellence — 4:05 comes after 4:00, which comes after 3:58. That's the order of successions. Whereas space is the order of simultaneities. I'm not speaking as a physicist, but for you and me, ordinary people in everyday life, space is the order of simultaneities. That's how it speaks to our language, to our imagination, and to our sensibility.
1:42:30 And indeed, if you have two very good, excellent-quality clocks, and you put one in the cellar, one in the attic, one in the living room, they show the same time. Space is the place of simultaneities. In space, places are external to one another. We often say "partes extra partes" — each part is outside the other. There couldn't be a line, a straight line rather, to put it more rigorously — that would only be true if each point were external to the other.
1:43:00 There would be only one point, like a black hole, which would absorb the entire line. So space has to be given for there to be one point beside another point, beside another point, and so on. Partes extra partes, that's the order — but all that is within simultaneity. Time, on the other hand, is the order of succession. Look at what Lévi-Strauss says: several axes. That of successions, of course, but also that of relative compactness, which called for the use of forms evocative of what solo and tutti are in music. You know, in spirituals, first there's the preacher chanting alone, and then the whole choir of the faithful answers, "Yes, my lord!" or repeats what the preacher says.
1:43:57 I use this example — though it's not the only such opposition in music, that of solo and tutti — because I was struck, in the depths of Africa if you will, yes, by what happens when you break down out in the bush: figures appear from everywhere, only too willing to lend a hand, helping you fix things in a matter of seconds, with maybe fifteen young men who... You're in some forsaken spot where there's no one around, and yet people always turn up.
1:44:27 And in the effort, they push you aside saying, "Don't get your hands dirty, we know how to do it." And so there's a leader of the operation who calls out "adegadabada" and then they all push together. That's where it comes from, this exchange between the preacher and the congregation of the faithful in Gospel music. It's striking once you've heard it. So these structures — the opposition of tutti and soli, which is neither succession nor simultaneity — but also that of relative compactness, which called for forms evocative of solo and tutti in music, where both can occur at once, simultaneity and succession — that of expressive tensions and substitution codes, in terms of which there appeared, over the course of writing his book, oppositions comparable to those between song and recitative, instrumental ensemble and aria. It sounds a bit technical. Well, you see, the recitative is what tells the story a bit in opera, or in the oratorio, or in a Mass or a cantata when the subject is religious.
1:45:37 So, Jesus withdraws from the temple, etc. But it's sung a little, chanted, half-declaimed — you'd say "slammed" today, you see. But it's not the aria. When the narrative stops because it has just said something that provokes a deep feeling of sadness, of dejection, or on the contrary of jubilation — Easter Sunday for instance, Alleluia — then it's the aria, the aria form. And at that point, you see, when Mozart does... I should unplug the cables on my keyboard.
1:46:27 You can tell right away it's an aria, whereas before there was banter between Susanna and the Countess, because he's so sweet — Cherubino, you'd think he was a girl, good heavens, how pale his skin is. He's going to wreak havoc among our ladies, etc. He's between two sexes and between two ages, Cherubino. But well, the separation is very clear when suddenly the recitative stops and a magical aria, as is often the case in Mozart, bursts in — a drinking song.
1:47:03 What is called, in Italian opera, a brindisi — that's a drinking song, isn't it... Tom, tom, tom, tim, ta-da, woman... woman is often fickle, la donna è mobile, like a feather in the wind... or else... admirable, the fountain of the brindisi, if I didn't believe he was a cheerful fellow — well, I mean, in his operas, his operas are terrible naughty tales, a very healthy man. And he wasn't at all a melancholic, introverted, depressed person. At times, like everyone, but truly no more than that, a good-natured man at times.
1:47:45 But in his operas there are often drinking songs. Yet, coming back to an aria when it expresses mourning or dejection, in Bach's St Matthew Passion, the incredible aria "Erbarme dich." I'm looking for an exact translation — simply "have mercy," but it's very strong in Protestant theology, "Erbarme."
1:48:18 And try to listen to it as sung by the unforgettable Kathleen Ferrier, an English contralto with a voice timbre absolutely unique in the history of recorded singing, in any case. I think of Nerval, who was sensitive to voices, and who was carried off by leukemia in the prime of youth. Listen to her in Mahler and in Schubert, but here, watch how she sings the "Erbarme dich"... of liberation. Well, that's it, it was a bit technical, I tried to be a bit more concrete as I went along.
1:48:51 We find, in the content, in order to account for the myths, that sometimes shifts are needed comparable to those found in reading. There's a kind of contrast between the song — meaning the aria — and the recitative, between the instrumental and the vocal, you see, for the sake of variety. There's a purely instrumental passage — I mention it because I know many of you listen to music — I'm thinking of the repertoire, I'm thinking of Bach's cantatas, for instance, I'm thinking of Cantata No. 21, a kind of monument.
1:49:26 So, "Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis" — I was plunged into affliction, roughly speaking, it's hard to translate. So, with these heart-rending oboes in the introduction — the oboe is always what's most tragic in Bach, the crucifixion. And yet it's a pastoral instrument. But the second-to-last aria is a joyful one, and rightly so given the words — it's "Erfreue," he says "Erfreue" — he says, rejoice — "rejoice my heart, rejoice my soul, I am forgiven." There, that's the point.
1:49:58 There's a cello accompaniment, as if it were the seventh — since Bach wrote six suites for solo cello, it's as if this were the seventh suite — a cello that literally frolics, dance tunes, it's extraordinary as an accompaniment to this jubilation of the forgiven sinner. There, redeemed, as they say. From the freedom we thus took to draw on several dimensions in order to arrange our themes, it followed that a division into isometric chapters, that is, more or less equal in length, had to give way to a division into fewer but larger and more complex parts, unequal in length, each of which would form a whole by virtue of its internal organization, presided over by a certain unity of inspiration. I'll leave you to read the rest, since you'll be given the text anyway. I'd like to speed up a bit and move to the end of this text. Let's go, we'll scroll down, there, here, but at the same time — you see, there's a second part.
Wagner, father of the structural analysis of myths 1:51:10 Up to this point he has given the technical reasons — that's why I'm not dwelling on it, it would take too long. It's fascinating, I really recommend it to you, I urge you to consult it — how he probes the parallel between mythic narrative and the unfolding of musical phrases, or of musical time.
1:51:40 But at the same time, as if it were something quite different, yet which not only doesn't contradict but actually reinforces the point, from a completely different angle, we could not avoid another problem: that of the deeper causes of the affinity, surprising at first sight, between music and myths — an affinity whose properties structural analysis merely brings out, simply taking them up on its own account and transposing them onto another plane. We've just seen this. And certainly, that was already a great step forward toward answering how it is that there are these analogies between the way music and myth proceed.
1:52:21 It was already a big step on the way to an answer, being able to evoke this invariance—it's rare for him to speak about himself, in a personal capacity. This invariant of our personal history, something that never varied throughout my whole evolution. What is it? Not even the dazzling revelations that were, for a teenager—we're in music here—hearing Pelléas, the only opera written by Debussy, then Les Noces, an extraordinary opera, as pagan as can be, but primitive Russian, by Stravinsky.
1:52:57 And then there's also the revelation, because he belongs to that generation. Lévi-Strauss was able to attend the first performances—well, not directly, but I mean at any rate he was able to discuss very closely with people who had attended those unforgettable premieres, most often thanks to Diaghilev's ballet, the Ballets Russes, since the great premieres of avant-garde music of the twentieth century, in which the Russians held an important place, took place in Paris. All of musical Paris went to the Ballets Russes, as they say, thanks to the immense Diaghilev, who was a great choreographer.
1:53:33 And a great communicator too. So, you see, the sentence is left hanging. This invariant of our personal history that no episode ever shook, not even the dazzling revelations that were, for a teenager, hearing Pelléas and Les Noces, the most avant-garde music of the time, namely the service rendered since childhood—parents should listen to this—to the altars of the god Richard Wagner. In quotation marks, it's a quote from Mallarmé. The already funereal silence of a moiré—there's a series of tombeaux in Mallarmé, you see, it's a poetic genre, the tombeau, one of the poems dedicated as homage to someone who has died.
1:54:12 There's the tombeau for Verlaine, the tombeau for Baudelaire, the tombeau for Edgar Poe, which contains this line—everyone knows the expression, though people rarely realize we owe it to Mallarmé. "Such as into Himself eternity changes him at last"—yes, that's from the tombeau for Edgar Poe. But here, we're dealing with the tombeau for Wagner, but here, it's not a little tombeau for Wagner, it's marked "Homage," in the singular. And at the end, the already funereal silence of a moiré, one senses its solemnity, arranges more than a single fold upon the furniture. If you don't understand everything, that's fine.
1:54:47 that a settling of the main pillar owes—we're in a temple—hastened along with the lack of life, our old triumphant frolic of the grimoire—you know, the quest of the initiated, now it's Guénon who's fashionable, I believe, isn't it? That everything holds together like that, the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, the pagan tradition, the Hindus, the Chinese, all of it, there's... Yes, yes, yes, but not for the reasons people think, of course, that there's a concrete universal in anthropology, I don't know, but to darken it in the mysticism of those who deal with this kind of problem, that's what he calls our old triumphant frolic of the grimoire, hieroglyph exalted by the thousand-fold that propagates from its wing a familiar shiver, implying it's always the same thing—bury me rather in a cupboard.
1:55:38 From the smiling original crash—we're no longer in the cupboard—hateful, from among them a masterly clarity has burst forth, the subject is delayed, up toward a forecourt born for their semblance, a forecourt of the steps of a temple, a church, a cathedral. It's about Bayreuth, up toward a forecourt born for their semblance, born for operatic, theatrical, musical performances. Has arisen up toward a forecourt born for their semblance, the god Richard Wagner, irradiating a rite, badly silenced—from the verb "taire," hard to conjugate—badly passed over in silence, badly silenced even in sobs, sibylline in ink.
1:56:19 There. "For if one must recognize in Wagner the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths," this is the 36th time I've quoted just this sentence. Today, for the first time, I'm citing the page. Because it's not really about Wagner, it's about—I've said this here—the symbolic order, and about which Lévi-Strauss, in conclusion, will say, I reassure you, that it's no coincidence—it's the first time it was brought back with rigor, through a musical score.
1:56:59 "For if one must recognize in Wagner the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths, and even of tales—see The Mastersingers—it is highly revealing that this analysis was first carried out in music. So when we suggested that the analysis of myths was comparable to that of a great musical score, we were only drawing the logical consequence of the Wagnerian discovery that the structure of myths reveals the symbolic order."
1:57:31 I'm going to scandalize those who are believers on a literal level, but true Christians are not those who believe on a literal level—the first Christians didn't care whether the tree in paradise was an apple, a banana, a peach—there is a banana, because some have said that the true Garden of Eden must have been the islands, the Canaries, because at the time it was more humid and there were bananas, but you know, that's the stupidest realism there is, it's not scientific realism. My God, there's nothing concrete except through the abstract, as Hegel used to say.
1:58:05 So you see, we were only drawing the logical consequence of the Wagnerian discovery that the structure of myths is unveiled by means of a musical score. So if all of a sudden I restore the whole page where this sentence appears, the importance of what arose from Wagner applies to the symbolic order in general. So I'm picking up my thread again, the story of the earthly paradise. There's a logic in it that is exactly of the same order, isn't it, as the one found deep in the Amazon or on the edges of the desert, to take an exactly opposite climate, isn't it, where water is rather rare instead of too abundant.
1:58:49 And that's where we'll also find invariants. And yet, to finish, this preliminary homage confirms the existence of the problem rather than resolving it. That means it confirms indeed that there's a determinability at work, that there's a logic, and that we were wrong, weren't we, to say that logic is only on the side—that it's really only physical phenomena, isn't it? For the rest, afterward it's each person's caprice. As if there were no concrete universal, as if everyone were condemned to remain alone in their bubble. That's exactly where today's dominant ideology is headed.
Myth and music, temporal languages; the quadrilateral 1:59:31 And yet this preliminary homage confirms the existence of the problem rather than resolving it. The true answer lies, we believe, in the common character of myth and musical work. There's the common trait of being languages that each transcend, in their own way—which is not the same—the plane of articulated language, while requiring, as language does, and unlike painting, a temporal dimension in order to manifest themselves, like language. You see, I had told you that far from getting confused by the fact that several of our discussions intersect—here I've talked a lot about sound, about music, about sound without speech, the telephone's crackling in Kafka's text in our first analytic reverie, or else the bell of the telephone, from The Castle, still in Kafka's novel. A bell is not a vocal sound, is it? But still, it seems to be calling, doesn't it?
2:00:40 It's even like a call, strictly speaking, according to the author. The noise of the telephone like a million childlike voices, far off, very far off, etc. The seashell that is put to his ear in the last seconds of a sublime Welles film, The Immortal Story, with Jeanne Moreau and Roger Coggio. And Welles himself, moreover, always playing the role of the old man, who hears this sea murmur when we hear "Faun in a shell" and who closes the last seconds of the film saying "I heard it before."
2:01:16 I've already heard that. But where? I've already heard it before, but where? Let time pass, stranger. So this overlaps now, we're not the only ones. From my very beginnings, seven years ago, when I started my first workshops, I would say that philosophy, if one really wants to delimit the field proper to it in relation to a host of things toward which it sometimes tends—to the point that it's sometimes confused either with religion, or at the other extreme with science.
2:01:52 And I had said that the philosopher partakes of both the poet and the mathematician. He has a demand for rigor, for demonstrability, for rationality, for communicability. So a truth that must be transmitted through language—to come back to that—which is common to mathematicians, logicians, scientists in general, and to poets, whose instrument is still speech, whether spoken or written—even when written it is still meant to be recited, of course. "That my word be understood, it must flee and fly"—I often repeat this line of Rimbaud.
2:02:35 But precisely, I mean, with everyday speech, there's both a sonorous side and a logical side. So everyday language is already itself a middle term, isn't it, between music for example and mathematical language which, for its part—well, mathematical discourse—I like to say, isn't quite a language. It's much more rigorous than language. So, an intermediate position, we see it here—the myth, which is a form of speech.
2:03:14 So, the genie entrusted the Indian Berimbau, I don't know, with the urn that held the first flame, and ever since the Indians eat grilled meat. And as for the musical work, the common point is being languages that each transcend, in their own way, the plane of articulated language, while requiring, as it does and unlike painting, a temporal dimension in order to manifest themselves. And I had said, precisely, in my first two workshops—I'm picking up and continuing—that to these three figures, the two extremes, the mathematician, the poet, and the philosopher who tries to hold the mediation, perhaps music needed to be added.
2:03:54 Especially when it is... vocal music. And especially when one of Rimbaud's most beautiful texts, the one called "Mouvement," which I've analyzed in other workshops, ends with this sentence which seems to have no relation to everything that preceded it in this poem, which is less than a page long: "Learned music is lacking to our desire." Something was missing—the mathematician, the philosopher, the poet. Here, with Lévi-Strauss, we now agree to transform our triangle into a quadrilateral. And yet this preliminary homage confirms the existence of the problem rather than resolving it. Let me reread and conclude.
2:04:40 The true answer lies, we believe, in the common character of myth and musical work, of being languages which, in a very broad sense—which transcend, one might say, mathematical language, though it's actually very different from what we strictly call language—of being languages that each transcend, in their own way, the plane of articulated language, while requiring, as it does and unlike painting, which exists in space, a temporal dimension in order to manifest themselves.
2:05:13 When you enter a room in the Louvre, you see a painting, you see all its parts at once. You take time to look at the details, but it's not the painting that is in time, that varies over time. It's you, it's your perception. The painting itself—the Mona Lisa's left eye is not in a different time from her right eye. Whereas between 5 minutes, 40 minutes, 20 seconds and 3 tenths into a Schubert sonata, and 20 minutes, 3 seconds, 5 tenths in, the music is not making you hear the same thing at all.
2:05:52 Even with someone like Schubert, who likes to insist, linger, and repeat. There, I think I'd like for now—this is just the beginning—this superposition of texts, I'll give you the fully formalized summary next time, but I think what's important today is to show you to what extent, isn't it, we had expelled chance from a production that belongs to the field of historical knowledge, in this case to literature.
2:06:31 But I've already told you that when you say "scram" in slang, it's also a metaphor, it's not a matter of actually breaking anything with a hammer, in the spinal column—we were in every case within the symbolic order, and that this symbolic order followed an impeccable, implacable logic. It isn't threatening either. And we have proven the determinability at work in the historical sciences.
2:07:10 There remains, but no! Now, to take yet another leap, another jump, it's to go from determinability—I take up my image from the beginning, the detective hasn't found the culprit. There is determinability, he's certain of that, but he hasn't found the determination. And why he did it, the motive, etc. That's yet another matter. There! Now I won't speak. In your place, I'd lean in and look at the comments. There are always excuses for being late, but I find it miraculous that you're here, now that we're finally inaugurating evenings that are, well, unlocked-down, until what time? It's 11pm now. You're very kind given the magnificent weather these June days that seem never to end.
Determinateness, determinability, and value judgment 2:08:01 What joy to find Paris again with its open terraces. I'm in Cachan, well, I've gone to Paris fairly often these past days because I missed it. Like giving a child toys to keep him quiet, no doubt guessing what alcohol I was missing, chance threw at me photos of my city. Images of my city, sorry, photos scattered on the floor, to borrow from Aragon. So, Dominique Pagani, just one reproach to start with—you have a talent for going live exactly when I'm least available. I'll listen to you tomorrow, through recordings. Thank you, Richard, faithful as ever, no worries. That's how I began all my talks.
2:08:46 Between us, I'll get a bit personal—I used to like belting out a tune with very close friends. I'm going to die soon, I'll leave my descendants nothing else, nothing as an inheritance, except a little 120-page book that a publisher, with much delicacy and patience, finally managed to wring out of me. But otherwise I talk, I do nothing but talk, and that leaves no trace. Words fly away, writings remain. And that's when some young people who were discussing this ended up agreeing on this point: "Wait, nowadays you can speak and it leaves traces, even your talks—it's called the Internet." There. Thank you. So, Richard, nothing is lost, quite the contrary. There.
2:09:33 Next, Geoffrey—it also remains to move from determinability. Yes, a small point of semantics, sorry to interrupt Geoffrey's question, I'll get right back to it. Sometimes I say "déterminabilité," sometimes I say "déterminité." In French, both are valid translations of the German Bestimmtheit—for once I'm giving the German term. Bestimmtheit, determinability or determinateness; Bestimmung, determination. That's much more decisive. So again, I have a slight preference—I gave both to play fair, but I understand that in the writings sent to you in the program, I have a slight preference, though it's a bit longer, for "déterminabilité," because of the suffix "-able," which stresses the potential—being capable, isn't it, something that is unbreakable, meaning it doesn't have the property of being broken, something unbreakable. What's washable is what can be washed, it doesn't mean it will be washed—it's not the washing in act, but in potential; it can be washed.
2:10:38 Determinability is what is apt for determination. It also remains to move from the determinateness perceptible in an individual, Nerval, to the determinability of humanity in general. But good heavens, Geoffrey, we're on the same team, of course, but that's precisely the stake of my talk. For if I say that we must—we must make explicit the logic at work in the reality of materials, of the historical disciplines—literature, history, archaeology, no matter which for now, economics, etc.
2:11:19 I greet my comrade and friend Antoine Vatan, whom I'll be reaching out to soon, who doesn't believe I'm going to drop it. Far from it, but I've had to redouble my efforts this past year. I need time for big projects with him, which I won't reveal to you until later, because it will interest you precisely, dear Geoffrey. There's of course a collective stake here. Geoffrey's remark—I'll develop it a bit, I don't want to shortchange the others, but very quickly.
2:11:56 So if I say quickly, that means spare me the demonstrations, otherwise it takes time. But I have them ready for you. I've already done them in other videos, and I'm willing to do them again however you like. Except now. Remember when we talked about aesthetics, we borrowed from Kant, who gave us the first philosophical aesthetics—to which it pays homage, moreover—systematic, otherwise there's Plato, as a corpus.
2:12:28 But still, you have to take a piece from here, a piece from there, in this or that dialogue, to make an aesthetics. Here, we have the Critique of Judgment, the critique of the faculty of judging, which is the birth of aesthetics in the modern sense of the term, isn't it? Which is already Hegelian to note. It took reaching the moment when the end of a world reaches its twilight, so that one could step back from the works of art it had left since Antiquity, and that one could begin—not to make works of art anymore, one can still make them, proof being that what has come since isn't bad—but to begin reflecting on works of art.
2:13:06 What Hegel says is... we are people of museums, we moderns. Now, precisely, we had seen, thanks to starting from Kant, while going beyond him, that "it's beautiful" is a judgment of value. Everyone agrees on that. It's not a judgment of existence like one that measures 3 meters in length. I'm exaggerating. He must have a complex. Not quite. Go on, 2 meters.
2:13:39 So that's a judgment of existence, it can be measured if people disagree, etc. Then there are judgments of value, about which people say it's a bit a matter of each person's taste, to put it colloquially, isn't it? We saw the sophist earlier—the wine appears sweet to you, so it is sweet; it appears bitter to you, so it is bitter; we don't go looking for how the wine is in itself. Well, you see, we're not far from Geoffrey's question, we're getting right to the center of it. The aesthetic judgment is a judgment of value, and a judgment of value, the big difference with a judgment of existence, is that one cannot abstract from the subject.
2:14:18 Not only by saying it's subjective, but because it only makes sense in relation to an end—I used to take, since there were quite a few athletes listening to me—if I say this stadium is well built, well designed, etc., you understand well that if I don't specify whether it was built for ice hockey or for football, it's not the same specifications. So if we don't know the end, we can't issue a judgment of value. It's always implied in a judgment of value.
2:14:50 There I took a very simple example, "it's beautiful," it's obvious that it involves value; I could have said "it's good," "it's tasty." It's anything that can't—anything that doesn't merely note a measurable existence, doesn't merely make a judgment of pure existence, but in other words speaks at once of the object and of me. What I mean when I say "it's good" is that it also does me good, the dish in question for example. So, I said I wouldn't be long.
2:15:21 Aesthetic judgment is a judgment of value. In that sense, it only makes sense in relation to an end. As a result, the famous problem of the criterion of the beautiful—and here I'm arriving right at Geoffrey's point—is either we side with the skeptic who says there are as many beautifuls as individuals, just like with wine, for the sophist, the skeptic, all of that is on the same side, the side of those who have no interest, isn't it, that what today's power has every interest, for its part, isn't it, in preventing us from reaching the critical mass of something that would unite everyone who is... We're in a pre-election period, increasingly so. It's tearing apart on the left, tearing apart on the right, tearing apart on all sides, isn't it? And the PCF, where does it stand?
2:16:13 Well then, power dreads nothing so much as something that would be common to all those it dominates, and on which they would agree. So, in terms of value, you realize, that would reach what's called in nuclear physics critical mass, and the atomic bomb explodes. Fortunately for the powers, that doesn't happen. Either there are as many beautifuls as individuals—there, I'm getting to it.
2:16:44 Or there is an end common to all humanity, a desire common to all humanity, to be concrete. But no, no, nonsense, there aren't the same desires between someone who's loaded with money and me. Or else there is a deep desire common to all humanity, immanent in all desires, even if it's not at the same moment in each person, we agree on that. The same supreme value—I suggested it was freedom, I said I wasn't demonstrating it, so I'll go very quickly. And in that case, a science of art becomes possible. A universal criterion of art can be possible, one that isn't reduced to a single individual.
Nerval: from the mother's tomb to the sage's grave 2:17:27 I really like Geoffrey's remark, because if I use Nerval, it's because he's an author who, like no other author I know—and this is precisely what no one can deny as his uniqueness—made an effort that no other author has made, to try not to reduce his sensibility to his personal novel. God knows how heavy that was, this child who remains faithful throughout his life: "It is death—or the dead one, she alone whom I loved, still tenderly loves me—it is death, or the dead one, oh delight, oh torment."
2:18:09 "Three times they plunged me into the waters of Cocytus, but, alone protecting my Amalekite mother, I sow again at their feet the teeth of the old dragon"—I'm switching poems—the doctors, the psychiatrists. There, these are lines a bit like children's tales, somewhat mysterious, but magnificent. Éluard said that in Nerval's Chimères—it's a small handful of sonnets, very short—one probably finds the most beautiful lines of the French language, according to Éluard. So I'm not talking about that, about its aesthetic quality.
2:18:39 Nerval, as I said earlier, was linked to this—Nerval makes a gigantic effort, precisely as never elsewhere in his work, in Angélique—a work that seems secondary to many compared to the prestige of Sylvie, of Aurélia, of the Chimères, of the rest of Les Filles du feu, even of the Voyage en Orient. But Angélique, you know it's a bit overlooked, a story that seems disjointed—he makes a gigantic effort. Everything suggests he's going to be swallowed up by mourning for his mother, and in fact he does arrive at a mourning process, which is the whole point of Angélique.
2:19:14 The end point of the walk he invites us on. We set out from Senlis on foot through the woods, happily breathing in the autumn mist. But this time, they head toward Ermenonville, to Rousseau's tomb. And there, I answer Geoffroy by recalling the model I propose for the whole of Nerval's work. He's not the only one, but no one else carries this logic through as he does, the logic at work in it.
2:19:44 And all successful aesthetics, that's the whole itinerary, I do it like this, I redo Ulysses's journey, don't I? The great loop with a little gap at the bottom, right? I often think of the letter omega, you know, because it has a little gap at the bottom. I think of it so much that I once got my knuckles rapped by a Hellenist who told me, what you're saying is very interesting, but the O of Odysseus is an omicron, not an omega, it's the small o in Greek, not the big O.
2:20:15 But there you go, I use that as the image of the loop of the journey around the Mediterranean. This journey, or think of a horseshoe, because this curve is bent between two poles. Those are the two poles at the edge of the little gap at the bottom. In Homer's Odyssey, that's Ilion and Ithaca. Troy and Ithaca. The starting point, the ending point. And what a detour! So many detours! From one carnage to another, from the initial carnage to the final carnage.
2:20:52 Nerval's work follows the same structure. I propose to Geoffroy, and to you of course, because it's essential, the Odyssey — but here the two poles are not Ilion and Ithaca. It's the mother's tomb and the sage's tomb, which for a madman is extraordinary, isn't it, this effort made by Nerval.
2:21:29 When he died, having killed himself, you know, those who committed suicide had no right — suicide is a mortal sin in traditional Catholicism, to put it quickly. And so he had no right to be buried with the sacraments, to deserve the sacraments. The doctor who was truly ahead of his time, the very one who had prescribed that he write down, set down his visions, his dreams, wrote to the Archbishop of Paris just after the suicide: I can guarantee you in any case that Monsieur de Nerval looked his madness in the face. That effort of lucidity he made not to fall into the deadly grip of the personal novel that lies in wait for all of us. We are all born into the initial carnage.
2:22:25 Here I refer to a magnificent book called "Ambiguous Adventure," by a Senegalese author named Cheikh Hamidou Kane. You can find it in paperback, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, "Ambiguous Adventure." I won't dwell on it, but at one point there's an allusion to the first arrival of white people in Africa. It's the first. He says, "It was a morning of labor." "Gésine" is the work of childbirth.
2:22:59 "It was a morning of labor." Now, birth is something that happens in mud and in blood. Births are always a bit bloody and brutal. Passing from warmth to cold, from being carried to gravity, to weight. Not just of the head, of everything, of the abyss that lies in wait as soon as one strays where one shouldn't. So you see, between the tomb, the personal novel into which he could have been absorbed — and that's perhaps what makes it so, Julien Gracq saw this comparing him to Proust, and I've never said a negative word about Proust, this is the first time I've made, not a reproach, but placed Nerval even above him.
2:23:49 Him whom Proust admires so much. Gracq rightly says that, in the last analysis, for all the ecstasy and everything, finding the solution for Proust is finding the personal memory again. Even in Time Regained. There's a very fine theory of simultaneity, of being at once in the past and in the present, it's admirable. But there isn't, as there is in Nerval, a quest that he lost for a long time, as with many who are still, as I mentioned, caught in initiatory thinking, aren't they?
2:24:22 Where it's always the same things coming back. For a long time he believed he could find it in analogies — that's all there is in religions, isn't it? They say it says everything's the same. It makes me laugh when people set them against each other. There's a neo-paganism that spends its time railing against the totalitarian religions of monotheism, or the reverse — monotheism that takes the Bororo for savages, or the Pygmies. In fact, all these religions often turn around either the Oedipal triangle, don't they.
2:24:56 But they express the universal, though without knowing it. Nerval would want it not to be without our knowing it. And in that sense, he's a hero of thought as much as of literature. And it's no accident that the sentence of his I quote most often is one that has above all a cognitive interest: ignorance cannot be learned. Once one knows, one cannot un-know. One must not, and should not be able to, do so. As if... oh yes, yes, for me the earth is cubic — I learned it was round, I don't believe it's round, once I've learned it's round.
2:25:34 In short, once it's been proven. Thank you Geoffroy. Raphaël tells us, and this indirectly answers my question, thank you Geoffroy. I've noticed, sometimes I get a bit long-winded in my questions because I know the same question underlies several of you. And I thank you for that, it means you're circling around the essential. Are there other questions, Pierre-Alain?
2:26:09 Otherwise, I'll see you for the thrilling continuation of our passage from determination to determinability, because there's still a text, a dream, we need to look at next time. No other questions? I'm looking because I'm here. No, I don't think so. But in that case, it remains for me to thank you, and not only for your questions, but once again for having been present, despite all the reasons to be doing something else, at the end of spring and the start of the easing of lockdown — that made for a lot of reasons to be elsewhere.
2:26:51 And so I thank you all the more for having kept us company. See you very soon, and thanks again. Thank you all.
