English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Question from the audience on scientificity in Hegel and Marx 1:51 Good evening everyone, for this new session of the Advent series. Thank you for being here. In keeping with the program, which I assume has been sent to you, I will continue answering questions and follow on, not by jumping from one subject to another, but in the wake of my answers to the questions, I'll move on to our theme, which remains that of memory, forgetting, and anamnesis.
2:43 And of their reciprocal relations, whose complexity we increasingly suspect, and at the same time their logic. So I'll continue in order to clearly illustrate the fact that there is a connection between my answers to the questions and the text — the only new text we have worked on here. Because the others, as I often repeat, the others don't just pass by like a landscape in a rearview mirror, receding, never to return.
3:20 I mean, we need to keep them in memory. You have them on our Facebook page, so it's not very complicated. You have either the full text, or the link in one click that you can refer back to the original. This time, then, the only new text is an excerpt. I don't know if we can give the excerpt or the reference. The reference is Act 2, scene 5 of Act 2 of Racine's Phèdre. There you go. Of Phèdre, or of the Phèdre, however you like, of the tragedy Phèdre by Racine, which was in fact initially called Phèdre et Hippolyte and which, in its second edition of 1687, was left simply as Phèdre.
4:01 That's how it's been known ever since. To show that there is a link with the answers to the questions, I'll start by continuing — I haven't finished — my answer to our comrade and friend Léo. Léo, let me recall the question. So he answers at the same time, well, he does answer. On one hand, he asks the question, he's kind enough to ask the question, just like the other participants, quite directly. But on top of that, he takes the opportunity to answer our big poll, you know, which asks whether I should continue in the first quarter of 2021 with an analysis of Wagner's Ring, the Ring of the Nibelung, the tetralogy, whatever you want to call it, or with the difficulty of the link between the natural sciences
5:13 and the human sciences, to put it very simply. And it being understood that all these labels can be modified — well, that's the underlying issue. And so our friend and comrade Léo, who is by the way a brilliant scientist — I believe I mentioned a word or two about him, I don't know if he'd give me permission, but I'll say it, it's rather interesting — he will soon be defending his thesis on the stability of the solar system in light of relativistic mechanics, well, of Einstein's theory of relativity.
5:51 It doesn't look like much put that way, and I don't want to put myself in his place — I'd have a hard time of it. But anyway, I believe, insofar as I understand a few elements of the popularizations that are not lacking in this field, that we should congratulate ourselves every day for this stability of the solar system. It would only take a small shift in the trajectories of giant planets like Jupiter or Neptune for the climates — well, human activity would be laughable compared to what would happen then.
6:27 There you go, okay. So, I recall Léo's questioning in three points, very methodically — I thank him for that. Dear association, I very much appreciate that people address me as a collective, which is the least that all those who gather around the videos available to you afterward deserve, and for the site, of course.
6:57 My choice fell — this is for the poll — on the status of scientificity beyond the natural sciences, for three reasons. I like his phrasing. Scientificity, not in the human sciences — we don't know if they are sciences — but beyond the natural sciences, for three reasons. First, obviously, the theme of scientificity and the historical sciences interests me as a natural scientist — in parentheses, I am an astrophysicist — and a passionate reader of Marx and Hegel.
7:30 So here is someone who can claim the double credential and who is doubly attentive to this questioning. Second, Marx and Engels, but already Hegel, claim the scientificity of their method. An allusion, of course, to a famous title by Engels, for example, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
8:00 Marx and Engels, but already Hegel, claim the scientificity of their method. I quote Hegel here, "the inner necessity that knowing should be science," in the Phenomenology in particular, "and they justify it in their work," notably Hegel, "from the preface of the Logic onward," otherwise called "Science of Logic." I recall the German title, which he renders very well here in his French translation, "Hegel's Logic," or as we say, "the Greater Logic," so as not to confuse it with the lesser Logic of the Encyclopedia — this is again an abbreviation of the title, which is "Wissenschaft der Logik," that is, word for word, "Science of Logic," as Léo translates very well here.
8:47 Marx in Capital and Engels in numerous pamphlets where he speaks of scientific socialism — I just quoted a title to you — illustrate what Léo says, but Dominique Pagani often says that the historical sciences are not a science but a discipline. And I am very glad to see that there are those who pay attention to my attempt — I don't know if it's always successful, or if it is only some of the time, but I mean, I make the effort, which is the least a philosophical work should do — I strive, not to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe, to quote Mallarmé who reserves that for poets, but as a philosopher — I had recalled that the philosopher is always somewhat indebted to two great, opposing, extreme influences that act upon him, which are rigor coming from science, and in particular from mathematics.
The philosopher between the mathematician and the poet 9:57 "Let no one enter here who is not a geometer," from Plato; Descartes, "I was especially pleased with mathematics because of the certainty and evidence of its reasoning, but I did not yet notice its true use" — you'll see why I'm continuing this — "and thinking that they should facilitate the work of men," I'll stop there. But Dominique Pagani often says that the historical sciences are not a science but a discipline, so there — I took the word discipline to try to find a word that shows that philosophy strives to move out of opinion, and therefore toward science.
10:36 As early as ancient Greece, doxa, opinion, is opposed to epistēmē, science — doxa versus epistēmē — and this is stated even before, one could say even before philosophy, as early as the Presocratics, well, from the proto-history of philosophy if you like, if we date its beginning to Socrates — just before him there is still Parmenides, who in his famous poem, one of the longest texts to have come down to us from the Presocratics, so let's take advantage of that, delivers a great blow of the axe to clearly separate what opinion is — leave, turn away from opinion, I say to the disciples, and attach yourself to what is — for what characterizes science is that it relates not to what ought to be, but to what is. I personally think we should govern France [differently], well, that's not important, those questions, but that's no longer within the order of science — science must relate to what is, not to what ought to be, you see — we'll come back to this relation between science and being, so, an old complicity of mathematics,
11:50 torn, then, between the mathematician on one side and the poet on the other, who also steps outside ordinary language, but not to produce equations and an entirely formalized language like mathematicians do, but rather restores, gives us back ordinary language, though through a speech that quite often departs from ordinary language — I'm thinking of Rimbaud who said that to understand my words, they must flee and fly — so, the philosopher being between the two, I thought that it was not opinion — I'm summarizing, for those who weren't as attentive as Léo to what I was saying at that moment — so we are not at the corner café when we're doing philosophy, but we can't say either, this is my point of view, that we're at the CNRS or in the laboratory — so, in between the two, I found that the notion of discipline suited rather well; it means you can't just do anything, you have to strive for rigor, you have to give yourself rules — that's what a discipline is: the four rules of Descartes' method and Aristotle's Organon, Kant's transcendental logic,
13:03 Kant's transcendental analytic, Hegelian logic — that's already quite a lot of elements of methodology — so, Marx, in Léo's phrasing, but Dominique Pagani often says that the historical sciences are not a science but a discipline, and the justifications given, implicitly, are often evasive, without further justification — that is, if I don't come and explain myself on this, I presume, that's the point of his question — one might think that Pagani positions himself as a critic of Marx and Hegel: they call themselves scientific, but in fact they're not scientists, at most they're disciplines — that's what he has me saying — and that would call for serious arguments. I don't know how one should take that, but it means, well, who does Pagani think he is to say that Marx and Hegel are not scientific? Well, I know that's not our comrade's tone, but on the contrary, he is quite right to say that for such an important claim it is better to explain oneself — I think I have done so, but one never does it enough, so I'll come back to it — choosing this theme would be a good opportunity to deepen and clarify all that. Third point,
14:14 the second point being the longest — third point: from the standpoint of transmission and popular education, popularizing difficult books — Capital, sorry, because the text is a bit shaky on my screen — from the standpoint of transmission, sorry, and popular education, popularizing — sorry for the blank — these difficult books, Marx's Capital and Hegel's Logic, and motivating activists to read them — motivating them through the theme of scientificity seems to me a rationality; it is urgent to talk about this at a time when a regression toward obscurantism threatens us.
Marx, an unfinished work, and Engels the pedagogue 15:00 okay. Well then, in answering, I'll say right away, because I don't want to get into the heart of the matter just yet, that I committed to showing that there was a connection with the text I'm proposing to you. Yet it seems quite the opposite, really, of what Léo is asking for. We're not dealing with an excerpt from Capital, nor from Hegel's Logic, but with an excerpt from a tragedy of the grand siècle.
15:35 We're closer to Versailles here than to the Renault factories in Billancourt at the time of the general strike. I say that because at the time, when Billancourt sneezed, France was paralyzed. There you go. So, metonymically, I'll answer him on two important points.
16:08 I maintain that philosophy — I was speaking of philosophy — is a discipline. Now, I recall, I challenge Léo to find in Marx how many occurrences there are of the expression scientific socialism. There you go — I'm not betraying Marx, I'm not contradicting him, not in the least by doubting; I spend my time saying that Marx opened up the continent of history to science.
16:42 Agreed? He is dead. He is dead. He died leaving his great work unfinished. It's actually extraordinary, the trajectory of Marx's writing, I mean. It's a whole series of works that never come to completion, in order to arrive — except for a few, like The German Ideology or the Manifesto, but those, in both cases, were written with Engels — but when it comes to his own research, it is of such richness, and he has such a capacity for work, he finds every time such extensions of the problems he studies, that one never sees the end of it — but that's not a reproach, quite the opposite, it's a work in progress, as we say in English, or let's say his whole analysis is a working through, to continue with English expressions.
17:40 Now, you know, far from everyone knows that Marx died at the very moment when he had put as the title of the chapter meant to continue his writing of Capital, "Social Classes." Full stop, and he dies. You'll agree we would have loved to have the status — that's it, the theoretical status of the concept of social class in Marx, given the decisive and central role this notion plays in his analyses.
18:17 There you go. So I repeat that this is a work always in the process of being built up, which keeps putting its hand back in the dough, so to speak, and this is a tribute, not at all meant to say there are gaps, far from it. And once again, the expression scientific socialism, contrary to what people would have us believe in a wooden language — I'll show whom I'm not alluding to; there are plenty for whom it is a wooden language, all that, so we don't get confused.
18:52 I mean, I'm not talking at all about Georges Gastaud, who recently made an excellent publication on Engels, and not at all in wooden language, quite the opposite, and who rails, and I rail along with him, against those who try to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels — Marx, the great intellectual, the great philosopher, and then the laborer, Engels, who is already quite kind to have given money to poor Marx, but who is a bit crude, I'm overstating a little, but anyway you see what I mean, who is somewhat plodding, who lacks Marx's theoretical subtlety, and who contributed not a little to the establishment of a dogmatic dialectical materialism, etc., and then you know the rest of it — all this to say that as soon as communism is in power, it must be fought, even if that means allying with the CIA and the Red Guards, and the Khmer Rouge, I mean rather — but we'll come back to that, for those who don't believe it,
20:02 I advise you to consult the files, it's even more appalling than we imagine — anyway, Gastaud is entirely right to rail against this division of labor, the head and the legs almost, if you will, caricatured between Marx and Engels. Simply, Engels is an immense pedagogue, he goes for what is most urgent, and when you go for what is most urgent, and when you're in the fight, when you're not in know-how but in making-known, and both are indispensable, of course — we're not — you'll recall that Hegel's Phenomenology is an immense didactic and pedagogical attempt, where Hegel says that common consciousness must be raised to philosophy, but philosophy must also be brought down to common consciousness, in both directions — which is exactly what Engels does admirably, because, as Gastaud says very well, reading Capital, and especially certain passages, is not obvious at first glance, nor even the third or tenth time,
21:13 and so it is essential that Engels drew out a corpus, for activists and for the general public, that locks in, so to speak, condenses, however you want to put it, the essence of the advances being made — as I alluded to, in progress — by comrade Marx. There you go. So that's not a small difference.
21:44 But I note that, in his work, in its didactic intent, and in the pedagogical simplifications — I did not say simplism — the pedagogical simplifications that this implies, Engels's formulations are sometimes more rigid than Marx's, which remain within research, and not within transmission. It's not at all a relationship between one who is profound and the other who isn't, or one who's a great intellectual and the other a plodder. It's a division of labor, once again, between seeking to know — word for word, philosophy after all — and know-how.
22:30 Making known and know-how. Making known is indeed didactic. So, the somewhat more dogmatic-seeming expressions of Engels, that's a dogmatism that must — not only do I not criticize it, but I recommend it to all who teach — to give their teaching a clearer form than what they have in their heads before standing in front of the class. That's the least one owes to one's interlocutors. The great Goethe, whom the whole of Romantic Germany came to see there like a commander's statue, dreaming of an audience, and who would stammer in front of him — to this, Goethe would say, if someone has something to tell me, let him tell me clearly.
Transmission requires clarity 23:18 As for problematic matters, those I already carry within me are enough for me. It is the least a teacher can do to make an effort at clarification. I would even say — I'll close this passage on didactics here, you know this fascinates me, transmission — I would even say that it is the very exercise of teaching, of transmission in the broad sense. It can be from parents to children, from the teacher, the schoolmaster, to the little ones, I say affectionately, from the lecturer to the students, it doesn't matter.
23:54 But I mean, transmission is asymmetrical, whatever the advocates of non-directive education think, which is wonderful — what's magnificent is that you learn to learn as soon as you come into contact with the learner, that is, it's the students who force you to suddenly find a systematicity, a logic, and a clarity that were not obvious before you started teaching.
24:30 And I'll end this long parenthesis arising from my answer to Léo, still on didactics, with a reminder: I had the chance to teach for years in countries where French wasn't even the mother tongue, and where the students, my students, hadn't had the chance that most students here, in Europe, at home, have — that is, of having books at home, of parents, well, of being able to count on some continuation or relay.
25:14 It's not just the teacher's instruction, there's nothing at home. It's not from my students' parents, except for a few gris-gris, a few very precious objects. And so, one must strive to lay the concepts out flatly and be so clear and fundamental — which we practically never do. You know, as soon as you go deeper — I'm talking musicology with someone, I'll finish on this — there is tonal music and modal music.
25:48 Amateurs aren't caught up in that; music lovers know this opposition well, when they say "Oh, listen to that, listen to Coltrane, in My Favorite Things, there, he's starting his modal period. Great. We've left tonality." And there, we've left tonality. But as soon as you look closely, I challenge you to give me an unambiguous distinction between mode and key. Especially when you recall that the key of C, the mode — you see, I myself said the mode of C, it's not, as they say in musicology, the tonality based on the C scale — is itself a particular case of mode.
26:30 There used to be all sorts of modes — I won't list them — and we're only left with two from the classical era onward: the C major scale and the C minor scale. There you go. So, from a distance, all these distinctions seem clear; as soon as you look closely, it gets muddled. So I return to this scientific socialism and utopian socialism.
Scientific socialism and epistemic caution 27:02 Engels's fine title — he's entirely right, I don't have a single comma to cut from Engels's text — he's quite right to say, watch out, we mustn't take Marx for one of those people who say "we just need to," and what there was at Lenin's time too — there was "Land and Liberty," there were all sorts of utopias flourishing as now, as in all unhappy periods. We're fed up with it.
27:32 And I remind you that the contemporaries of the evangelists really thought that the apocalypse announced to them was for the following week. That's been 2,500 years — well, 2,000 years we've been waiting for it. The opposite of what Hegel calls the patience and the calvary of history. So, having clearly clarified what I think of the Marx-Engels relationship, I nonetheless maintain that the label scientific socialism — I understand one might disagree with my point of view.
28:08 I already said, last time in fact, that Marxism was rich enough to allow, within itself, different currents running through it, differences, and that I had nothing against these differences, but I would rise up when they become a source of division. Which is not my case. So there, I maintain that it's a discipline, and that this word is quite convenient to say that we are making our way — we make a great deal of effort so that we make our way within the limits of ordinary language, terms which Léo does not address.
28:43 That would have been too long, we no doubt have a question. But he, being a scientist, I presume that when he defends his thesis, it will be backed up by equations. And that the metalanguage, as we say — that is, the everyday, non-scientific language we speak — occupies little room in his calculations. And fortunately for his calculations, he does as all scientists have done since Euclid, and much more so than in Euclid's time since then.
29:16 That is, he drops the ambiguities of everyday language in order to use a fully formalized discourse. That's not the case for the philosopher, who uses everyday language, even if it means, as I said earlier about the poet, twisting it in a way that somewhat surprises the average reader. Of course. But anyway, there it is. I maintain the word discipline — I insist that it is in no way for me an occasion to contradict either Marx or Engels.
Against the epiphanic reading; language as a pact 29:52 It's a way of encouraging those who are kind enough to listen to me toward epistemic caution. I do mean epistemic, not epistemological. There you go. So, as for the last question, we would need to start reading Hegel's Logic, Marx's Capital. I remind Léo that we never stop doing that.
30:24 I'm exaggerating a bit on purpose, but still, I mean — Althusser hadn't even been born, so to speak, when he wrote Reading Capital, saying, nobody understood Capital before me, Althusser, we must start reading Marx again. Every time, we start back at zero. We can't spend all our time doing that. You can see it doesn't work. There are plenty of people who have read Marx attentively and who don't hold at all the same position as mine, nor as Léo's.
30:56 So, of course, they think they're wrong. So do I. It's not because they haven't read Capital. So what's the point? It's a bit naive to believe that access to the text is there. I've criticized Althusser enough, and denounced his decoupling of Marx and Hegel, which cost the working class so dearly, that I'll allow myself here to pay him homage on one point. And on that point, he was perfectly right to have invented the concept of epiphanic reading.
31:37 These are references, aren't they, to the New Testament and to sacred text. One mustn't dream of an access to a text where suddenly the absolute, or God, will be revealed. Or where truth — be it that of dialectical materialism — will finally become transparent in the lines of the text. Remember the text by Mallarmé that I left you with last time. Mallarmé, the great reader of Hegel.
32:07 That's rare among the French poets of the time. Especially in the decadent milieu he moved in, which was rather elitist. Now he tells us, Mallarmé does, doesn't he, that man does not write luminous on a dark field. Only the alphabet of the stars is thus inscribed. You know, the constellations against the night background. Only the alphabet of the stars is thus inscribed. Man continues, he says. You heard — unlike the night sky — man continues, black on white.
32:42 There is that share of darkness, says Mallarmé. And I recall — since Léo shows me he's paying attention to what I'm trying to convey — he should remember that, since I strive to be dialectical, and therefore ternary rather than binary, every time there's a binary problem that's been put back on the table for centuries, like the question of whether language — since we're on the subject — is by nature or by convention. There are those who say language is by nature.
33:12 You know this shows up in words like 'plouf,' like 'crac,' where one supposedly imitates the raw external fact. That doesn't go very far, because we already say 'Cocorico,' whereas the Germans hear 'Kikeriki,' and the English, who never do anything like everyone else, hear outright 'Cock-a-doodle-doo.' So, even at this quasi-onomatopoeic level, language elaborates, doesn't it, and doesn't just pick up what's deposited in the ear.
33:51 It reconstructs it. So, yes, between language by nature and language by convention, the extreme of language by convention is formalized, logico-mathematical language for example, and language by nature would be the ideal — it's not a language, but a very elaborate form of communication — that of bees, that of dolphins, certain social animals like that, whose way of conveying information we manage to decode: where the food is, at what distance, and any information bees can transmit to each other.
34:28 Human language being far from concerned only with food. So, I recall that somewhere between the two, between nature and convention, I proposed connivance, the pact — and there we find again our background of darkness. You know very well, a contract is a contract, everything must be perfectly clear; as soon as there's the slightest change, an amendment is needed, isn't it, so that the change is clearly brought to the knowledge of everyone, of all the contracting parties.
34:58 There, we're truly in the light of day, nothing remains in the shadows. Whereas with a pact, in all the historical pacts you know of, there is always mention of secret clauses, of tacit clauses. Well, language is a pact among men. We never learned language the way we learned the highway code; we didn't learn to speak the way we learned the highway code, with a flawless bijection between this signal meaning that, meaning turn left, and that one meaning turn right.
35:31 We didn't learn to speak like that. We threw ourselves into the water, and it served us well. That's how we tipped over into human society. So it was necessary that one day a Socrates would arise to say: what do you call this, what do you call that. It was never clear. There you go. So I recall that it is with this kind of language, and its background of darkness, that philosophy builds itself up. So I chose this text by Racine to say that not only are we not going to work — another time, yes, in another program — as I did with revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin, passing through Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Lenin.
Why read Racine with Marxist categories 36:20 No, no. But this time, I'm choosing this text precisely to show that if the logic of this text, by Racine, a great poet of the classical era, which is not at all in revolutionary theories, far from it, who was a courtier of the monarchy at its height, a man of the court — well, this text rises to its highest light, in my view, this is what I'm going to try to convey to you, when we bring to bear on it categories that did not exist before Marx.
37:00 the best homage one can pay to Marx, to Engels, to Lenin, is to show the efficacy of their discourse and its validity precisely where one expects it least. There we could constitute human sciences that flow from Marxist advances, rather than being cobbled together, borrowed piecemeal, sometimes from the natural sciences, with the reductionism that implies, or sometimes drowned in a metaphysics where, precisely, the issue gets muddled.
37:37 So I'll recall very briefly, I'm going to recall very briefly the gist of the text we're going to work on, but before that, I'll allude to a few other questions very quickly, because I'm a bit sorry to speak of them so fast, because they really are... I don't like saying 'followers,' I'm looking for a French word, but I'm used to 'listeners,' though now that it's image as well as sound, in our generation, well, among the audience, there really are...
Ontology of the act and representative democracy 38:12 Some who have been faithful from the start, and who moreover have extremely pertinent contributions, and who are often comrades and/or friends, aren't they? I mentioned Marielle Leblue the other day, but for her, I tried to answer one of her questions; here I'm referring to my old comrade Patrick Chalonic — he's not an old comrade, he's a longtime comrade. Meaning we've been comrades for quite a while already — longtime comrade, friend, and accomplice, accomplices in anthologies of magnificent texts.
38:50 I know he knows them and loves them. There you go. Now, Patrick asks me, regarding the question of ontology — someone asked me about ontology, what does ontology have to do with Marxism — he had said to me: shouldn't we build an ontology of the act? I tell him right away, yes, of course, but I think that's roughly what I was going to sum up when I spoke of ontology, that is, I dismiss both ontologies of being, when being has that reductive meaning of being opposed to becoming, that is, when Parmenides is isolated from Heraclitus — I'm sure Georges Gastaud knows those references very well — that is, being in invariance.
39:40 And outside of mathematics, I don't quite see where invariance is. I'll come back to the fact that mathematics is not one of the hard sciences, but the hard science par excellence, yet precisely for that reason it is not a science of nature. As Gonseth said, a great logician of the early last century, mathematics is the logic of any object whatsoever.
40:10 So it can apply to demography, to climatology, to the distribution of consonants and vowels in Racine's text, since we're on the subject, with the same efficacy. So, back to it. Of course, I'm not against, a priori, constituting a new revolutionary ontology, but on condition that it be an ontology of the act, as Patrick Spoffer puts it so well.
40:43 I won't dwell on it, Patrick, we agree so much. There you go, but we may devote a special cycle to this problem, this issue of ontology which has the distinction of troubling more than one person. Since it's been going on for 1500 years, there must be good reasons, at least since 1500. And besides, there's another very faithful person, a friend too, whom I'd almost call close, and who is almost too self-effacing when he's there.
41:20 He has already vanished by the time I go to speak to him at the end of my talks, back when I still did them in a room, before the lockdown. I'm thinking of Jean-Michel Toulouse, who wants... who... There you go: 'I have followed Dominique from the very beginning and I've watched almost all of his videos.' Thank you. I take that as a matter of principle. Well, moving on. There are tributes I'm not sure I'm worthy of.
41:51 Now, I think he has a lot to say on these subjects. He wants to talk about political philosophy, to quote him. From the political zones of Greece and direct democracy to the critique of Hegelian political right, to historical flashes such as the sans-culottes. Excellent reference to Year II. Oh, soldiers of Year II. The sans-culottes, for me, are the true soldiers of Year II. The Commune of '71, the soviets of 1905 and 1917, and all the workers' councils. I remind you that 'soviets' in Russian simply means 'councils.' And all the workers' councils that dotted the history of the twentieth century.
42:24 Germany, Italy, Hungary, Spain, the resistances to Nazism in France and elsewhere, revolts in Latin America, in Africa or in Asia. You see, we have to stop because it would go far. It would be essential for him to address these subjects, because it is unthinkable — and I think this is the most important thing he says — to let people declare the end of political history. Excellent question, which deserves a cycle of its own. And it gives me the idea — the best way for me to answer him, not in detail, but more decisively — that I intend to open a cycle, a cycle lasting at least a term, if not two, no doubt after our scientific bout, so to speak, on this problem of what representative democracy amounts to.
The plot of Phèdre and the role of the confidants 43:16 We cannot say this isn't an issue of the day. The day is, as it were, a metonymy for the strange era we're living through. And I'm not just going back to the start of the lockdown, as you might suspect, even though it only accelerates the problematic side of things. There you go. So, I'll go straight from one extreme to the other; I'll read directly the passage from Phèdre on which I want to focus our reflection on amnesia and anamnesis.
43:53 And of course, I'll give a few clear summaries of the story, but I'd rather begin at once, without commentary, with this text. First, because I cannot interrupt it — one does not interrupt one of the most beautiful melodies of all time. It's the passage from Act 2, Scene 5, where Phèdre — well, she hadn't come for this, but she makes a confession, she confesses to Hippolytus. I remind you that Phèdre is the wife of Theseus, of a late Theseus — not the Theseus of the Minotaur, of Ariadne, of youth, of great exploits — this is a Theseus in his later years, somewhat settled down, who no longer dallies with Ariadne, Phèdre's older sister, who was too young at the time of the Minotaur, but who has since settled down, it's a sort of...
44:49 I always think of Michel Piccoli, who would have made a fine Theseus in Phèdre, because... No, I'm not saying that ironically — it's a thankless task to play seducers with graying temples to perfection, it's not easy, and Piccoli does it very well. I mention in particular a film by an immense communist, by the way, from the time when television was something else — I'm thinking of Marcel Bluwal, who made a striking Don Juan by Molière, in which the demonism of the father was softened by Piccoli.
45:28 But anyway, there you have Theseus, somewhat like that — as Desproges would say, he has mileage on him — and it so happens that he is absent at the start of the play, and indeed he's believed dead — I'll go quickly, because we'll get into detail on several points later — but right away a problem of succession arises, and there are several claimants: the son of Theseus and his wife, Queen Phèdre, that's the least of it, but there are also other parties who have their say — it's the son Theseus had earlier with Antiope, queen of the Amazons; you can forget those names, but what you must not forget is that Theseus had a son with the queen of the Amazons — what man goes so far as to father a child with the queen of the Amazons, no less?
46:23 Really, quite a character, this Theseus. And it's important to remember it because he had Hippolytus from this strange maternal line, something wild that plays an important role in what we're about to read. Wild in the sense of someone who rather flees society and worldly life, as Racine puts it so well in Phèdre — 'the pompous tumult of Athens and the court.' So, and then there's — now we change political plane — there's little Aricia.
46:56 Aricia, who is she? She's the sole survivor of a family that ruled Athens before Theseus — before Theseus's family, his father Aegeus, who gave his name to the sea — took power. There was a family ruling there, the Pallantides, descendants of Pallas; you can forget that too. What you must not forget, though, is the girl's name — the sole survivor whom Theseus didn't slaughter — it's Aricia. He slaughtered all her brothers and said: as for her, no boy must approach her, because I had enough trouble exterminating that wretched line.
47:26 That's me putting words in his mouth. And so, she must not have descendants. So, there you go, she lives in seclusion, under surveillance. No man must approach her, somewhat under Theseus's guardianship — but since Theseus is absent and even believed dead, isn't he — Hippolytus, who is in love with her, I should mention, for the first time in his life feels something like love, which for him is a great novelty.
47:56 He's someone who spends much more time hunting boars and stags than with women at court. And he has fallen in love with Aricia. And I'm only telling you what precedes the scene we're going to do. He has just barely made his confession to Aricia, which we'll come back to. And he has only one wish, to leave. And now, he's told that Phèdre is asking for an interview.
48:26 Because after all, he has just lost his father. If it's true that Theseus is dead — we'll learn before the end of the play that Theseus is not dead, and that his return will be a real catastrophe in all this, of course. Because when the cat's away, the mice will play. And when the cat comes back, the mice are vulnerable. So there you go. And so, he's told that she is mourning a husband. He is mourning his father. So there, she asks for an interview. And this interview is urged on him by her nurse.
48:59 I recall here — it isn't said often enough, I think it's never said anywhere — quite simply, that the confidants in Racine are Cornelian, and the confidants in Corneille are Racinian. What I mean is that classicism — we are at the summit of classicism with Racine, or Molière, or Corneille, but especially Racine, in terms of tragedy — classicism, having as its model, of course, the ethics of the Greek city, detests everything that is hubris, everything that is excess.
49:34 Isn't that so? And so, to balance out the excesses of the tragic hero — since tragedy is that the hero commits an excess — we've known since Aristotle that tragedy consists in showing how this excess must be purged. Catharsis. Catharsis means purge. Purged and punished. So, since Racinian heroes are always victims of an excess of passion — of course, erotic and amorous passion essentially — their confidant always reminds them that there is nevertheless honor, family and political status, in short, the rights and duties owed simply by living in a society, whether it be the narrow society of the family.
50:23 Look how, in Corneille, the Cid avenges his father who has been dishonored and defends his homeland against the Moors. You see, the small community, the large community. So, in Racine, the confidant reminds the hero of honor; in Corneille, the confidant says: listen, there isn't only the sword in life, let yourself go a little to feeling, it does one good now and then. There you go — such a reading can be valuable.
50:54 Now, here, the confidant has told her: listen, your states of soul, yes — I haven't told you the essential thing, but I always assume everyone knows it — I'll recall all the same that what makes this a tragedy is that Phèdre, before making her confession — I'm going to read it to you — no one knows it publicly, except the confidante to whom she has just told it: Phèdre is in love with Hippolytus, that is, with her husband's son. It's scandalous, it just isn't done, as they say in the suburbs, isn't it, it just isn't done. And so she reproaches herself, it's abominable and all that, and she wants to die and so on.
51:30 And her confidante tells her, ah, this isn't the moment — now that your husband is dead, after all, he's no longer there, so your fault is less serious — I'm not exaggerating, I'm not interpreting, she doesn't even put it that crudely herself. You may want to die, but think of your son, who meanwhile, if you don't intervene, it's the other one, the Amazon's son, who will inherit the throne. Of course, neither of them thinks of little Aricia, three claimants. So there, she arrives with her confidante who tells her, this isn't the moment — so, you see, I'm giving you a little prelude to the tirade on which I'm going to slow down, so I'm going a bit fast here, this is just what introduces this tirade, isn't it?
Reading of Phèdre's confession (Act II, scene 5) 52:12 There you go. 'Here he is' — Phèdre speaks to her confidante — 'Here he is: toward my heart all my blood withdraws; I forget, on seeing him, what I came to tell him.' You see, already in the second line, there's forgetting. We're right in our subject.
52:42 'I forget, on seeing him, what I came to tell him' — whereas the confidante has come to tell her: forget your amorous passion, what matters here is to recall your little son's fate. The political, not love. Oenone: 'Remember a son who hopes only in you.' There, that's pure Corneille — it's honor that matters, not passion. Phèdre. And here begins this dialogue, with — I'm being a bit solemn when I say one does not interrupt a melody — such beauty.
53:12 Gide, Proust, others, perhaps even Aragon at certain hours, think that this may be the summit of our language, the passage we're about to read. Let me say in passing, in petto, that Aragon was once asked — the kind of question one asks famous men — who are your favorite poets. He must have been asked that 500,000 times. And this was a bit before Elsa's death, so it's the last period of his life. And he answers — I give it to you as is, without gloss, that's not our subject — 'Euler, Euler and Rimbaud.'
53:45 But, in both cases, for reasons no one will understand. Let's go back to this text. So, Phèdre, at last, face to face — there we are — with Hippolytus, meeting at the summit. Isn't it? We're now in Act 2, Scene 5. 'They say a swift departure takes you from us, my lord. To your sorrows I come to add my tears. I come to explain to you my alarms for a son. My son no longer has a father, and the day is not far when my death too must make him witness it. Already a thousand enemies attack his childhood.'
54:18 'You alone can, against them, take up his defense. But a secret remorse stirs my spirit. I fear I have closed your ear to his cries. I tremble lest your just anger soon pursue, on him, a hateful mother.' She has been odious with him, like a stepmother. 'I tremble lest your just anger should soon pursue, upon him, a hateful mother.' Reply: 'Madame, I have no such base feelings. Even were you to hate me, I would not complain of it, my lord.'
54:49 'You have seen me bent on doing you harm. Into the depths of my heart you could not read. To your enmity I took care to offer myself. On the shore I inhabited, I could not bear you. In public, in secret, declared against you, I wished by seas to be separated from you. I even forbade, by an express law, that anyone should dare pronounce your name before me. Yet if offense is measured against punishment, if hatred alone can draw your hatred, never was woman more worthy of pity, and less worthy, my lord, of your enmity.'
55:30 Hippolytus's reply, about the rights of his children — a jealous mother rarely forgives the son of another wife, Madam, I know it well. Troublesome suspicions are the most common fruit of a second marriage. Any other in my place would have felt the same shadows of suspicion, and I might have suffered still greater outrage from you. Ah, my lord, heaven — I dare attest it here — wished to except me from this common law. A very different care troubles and devours me.
56:01 Hippolytus: Madam, this is not the time to trouble yourself further. Perhaps your husband still sees the light of day. Heaven may yet grant our tears his return. Neptune protects him, and that tutelary god will not be invoked in vain by my father. Phèdre: All this is the prelude to the great tirade that's coming. One never sees twice the shore of the dead, my lord. Since Theseus has seen those dark banks, you hope in vain that a god will send him back to you, and greedy Acheron never releases its prey.
56:39 What am I saying? He is not dead, since he breathes in you. Always before my eyes I think I see my husband, I see him, I speak to him, and my heart — I am losing myself, my lord. My mad ardor betrays itself in spite of me. Hippolytus: I see the prodigious effect of your love. Though dead, Theseus, present before your eyes, your soul is still ablaze with love for him.
57:09 And there, Phèdre replies, striking up that melody without equal. Yes, Prince, I languish, I burn for Theseus. I love him not as the dead have seen him, fickle worshipper of a thousand different objects, who went to dishonor the bed of the god of the dead, but faithful, but proud, and even a little wild — charming, young, drawing all hearts after him.
57:47 as our gods are depicted, or as I see you now. He had your bearing, your eyes, your speech, that noble modesty colored his face, when he crossed the waves from our Crete, a worthy object of the vows of the daughters of Minos. What were you doing then? Why, too young still, did he not gather Hippolytus among the elite heroes of Greece? Why could you not then board the ship that brought him to our shores?
58:21 By you, the monster of Crete would have perished, despite all the twists of its vast lair. To unravel that uncertain maze, my sister would have armed your hand with the fatal thread. But no — in that design I would have gone before her; love would first have inspired the thought in me. It is I, Prince, it is I whose helpful aid would have taught you the windings of the labyrinth. What cares that charming head would have cost me! A thread alone would not have reassured your lover enough.
Tragedy of confession and three conditions of scientificity 58:57 A companion in the peril you would have had to seek, I myself would have wished to walk before you, and Phèdre, descending into the labyrinth with you, would have been found again with you, or lost with you. Now, forgive me — these are the summits where the air is a little unbreathable, lacking in oxygen. And you'll understand why this is a summit, because it's not always on a first reading that one sees it, especially if one isn't used to Racine's poetry besides.
59:36 I said that, for now, we don't see how any scientificity at all is being instilled into human affairs here. I'm going back a little now, moving like a crayfish, going backwards. This is a confession scene. Now — and to be fair, I must say — I was surprised as a student to find that Barthes had pinched the idea.
1:00:08 When you're young, you think you're the first to have the idea. When you find it in a book afterward, you say, well, Roland Barthes already said it. And then I saw, from the publication dates of the book, that he'd said it before I thought of it after all — namely that this would be a tragedy of confession. This confession comes in the umpteenth position. There's a first scene, I won't dwell on the detail — I refer you, this will be posted afterward on our Facebook page, referring to the video number, now that the site lets you get there with a single click, the videos where I devoted more than a term to reading Phèdre.
1:00:51 We're not going into the detail. But so, let me recall, for now, what concerns the confession. The first scene takes place between Hippolytus, who announces to his confidant that he's going to look for his father, of whom there's been no news. And since our subject, despite appearances, is scientificity, and I told you last time there are three conditions — if you've followed well — for a discourse to deserve the epithet scientific, it must have a proper object, a specific object.
1:01:29 Second, that it subject this object to laws. And third, that these laws be formulated in such a way that they lend themselves to experiment, to measurement, to quantification. Why did I say all that? Because, look, from the very first words, it starts like this. The play begins, Act One, Scene One, Hippolytus and his confidant. 'The plan is made, I leave, dear Theramenes, and quit the pleasant abode of Trezene.'
1:02:00 'In the mortal doubt that agitates me, I begin to blush at my idleness. For more than six months, far from my father, I know nothing of the fate of a head so dear to me, I do not even know what place could hide him.' And before the confidant answers, 'And where, my lord, will you go to seek him then,' I already notice that from the very first line, Hippolytus says 'The plan is made, I leave.' Hippolytus is in mortal danger — I'm now introducing my equations.
1:02:33 There is a logic to classical tragedy. There is the unity of place, as you've learned, of time, of place and of action — the three unities. You shall not leave, Hippolytus. By dint of saying you're going to leave, you're going to die. Because to leave would be an intolerable hubris, wouldn't it? You'll see how many times he says 'I leave, I leave.' The sails are hoisted in the harbor. Everything is ready. Let's go. Since this isn't a detective story, I'll tell you the ending: he will die before leaving.
1:03:04 'The plan is made, I leave, dear Theramenes, and quit the pleasant abode of Trezene.' Trezene, compared to Athens, is a bit like what Versailles was to Paris in Racine's time. That is, it's a small hunting residence, it's not Athens. You see? You know Hippolytus, I've told you, is a wild young man who doesn't much like social life, who prefers hunting, and so he's better off at Trezene than at Athens. 'In the mortal doubt that agitates me' — since there's been no news of Theseus — 'I begin to blush at my idleness for more than six months,' and there's the first measure our text offers us.
1:03:40 You'll say to me, where are you going with this? What more are you going to say about it? I'll say six months, five months. Yes, six months — remember that, it's arithmetic, we're not even in algebra yet. We're in N+. 'For more than six months, far from my father, I know nothing of the fate of a head so dear to me, I do not even know what place could hide him.' Well, I wish you the whole scene — no, don't just wish it, read it. Every half-line is a marvel, but there's a dramatic intensity when you read it at the right tempo, that is, when you see the stakes pressing in at every word, don't you think?
Theramenes the psychoanalyst: Hippolytus castrates his father 1:04:13 Because it's a real game of cat and mouse in the scene I'm skipping over — I've just told you the beginning, but the confidant is going to perform an extraordinary psychoanalytic number. He's older, he's a bit like the servant, the one Theseus entrusted with his son — 'raise my boy, make him a hero like me, a tamer of monsters.' Result: he chases wild boars, not so much monsters, and he avoids women. So this confidant would very much like his young master to be a bit more like his father, to resemble his father more, the great hero, tamer of monsters, who purges the earth and works for humanity — that is, by clearing the earth of monsters that prevent man from making his way there, like Hercules, isn't that so?
1:05:02 Moreover, he says somewhere, when we learn Theseus is dead, 'the gods deliver to the murderous Fate the friend, the companion, the successor of Alcides' — Alcides being another name for Hercules. Now, a true psychoanalyst who's going to make crumble, one by one, all the reasons Hippolytus gives for leaving. He tells him, 'You're going to look for your father — well, I've been everywhere, I'm your slave basically, that's fine, I didn't wait around like you, I wasn't idle, I ran the two seas that Corinth separates, I asked after Theseus among the peoples of those shores where the Acheron is seen vanishing among the dead, I visited Elis, and leaving Taenarum behind, went as far as the sea that saw Icarus fall' — he recited that all in one breath, all these geographical names where Racine plays wonderfully with place names well before Proust — you see, it's unsettling, it's a whole mythology of unsettling things, look, 'the sea that saw Icarus fall,' the fall of Icarus, no, and 'I asked after Theseus among the peoples of those shores' — shores are always dangerous — 'where the Acheron is seen vanishing among the dead,' the river of the underworld, well anyway, so your father, fine, and then second argument,
1:06:13 even worse, and who's to say your father wants to be found? Implying: he's a womanizer, your father, everyone knows it, and as for me, that's what I admire in him — we're in traditional Mediterranean society, a bit sexist — him, his thing is conquering women, not like you, implying, you know, at best, game, when it comes to women, that kind of game, you're not worth your father, excuse me — so there it is, and there Hippolytus stops him abruptly, saying, 'Stop, and respect Theseus, those youthful errors now behind him,' and there we see right away — I'm modeling it, showing that there's a logic at work, and that it isn't a single thought of Racine's, Racine doesn't have three computers in his head — well, his work, yes, it produced far more than three computers' worth, but judge for yourselves — and he shows that not only might Theseus not want to be found, but by answering, Hippolytus says, 'tell me the story of his exploits,
1:07:23 but stop telling me about his conquests of women' — in other words, Hippolytus inverts the castration, he castrates his own father, don't think I'm interpreting: 'Happy, had I been able to snatch from memory' — snatch, you see, snatch — 'happy, had I been able to snatch from memory an unworthy half of so fine a story' — meaning the son reverses the roles, it's he who moralizes the father; usually it's the father who says, the father in Molière's comedies, 'I work, I accumulate money, I'm Harpagon, and my son runs after skirts,' that's not right, and he spends money on women, that's the rule — but here he reverses the rule, and even says that the radiance, the legend of Theseus, he'd gladly remove half of it, a serious frustration — 'happy, had I been able to snatch from memory an unworthy half of so fine a story' — and once his arguments have collapsed, that it's not really to go find his father, he ends up saying, yes, true, he betrays himself with one last line
1:08:36 in his tirade, which I skipped over: 'by an unworthy obstacle he was not held back,' he answers his confidant, and 'fixing his desires on his fatal inconstancy,' he allows himself to say that his father's fickleness is a fatal destiny. Phèdre, long since — the official wife at the moment he speaks — 'no longer fears a rival; in seeking him at last, I shall follow my duty' — interesting, it's not my affection and my love for my father, 'I shall follow my duty, and I shall flee these places that I dare no longer look upon' — bang, in the last line, diabolically, Racine, who is one of the greatest perverts of literary genius, isn't he, bang, a style, the little poisoned note, that makes it impossible to leave it there — he confesses, 'and I shall flee' — we thought what was motivating him to leave was something out there, his father somewhere in the Mediterranean, and now he says he's fleeing something behind his back, isn't he — so the other seizes the opening, doesn't he, 'and since when, my lord, do you fear the presence of these peaceful places so dear to your childhood,' in other words, this hunting lodge,
The daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, Aricia, and Neptune 1:09:46 'this is where you're happy, you don't like the court, and whose stay I've seen you prefer to the pompous tumult of Athens and the court — what peril' — or rather, what a psychoanalyst — 'what grief drives you away?' So, you hear, there's a woman behind this, for once you're in love, they take great pleasure, admit it — wait, not so fast — 'that happy time is no more, all has changed since the gods sent to these shores' — and there, a line I've said is the most beautiful in the French language — 'the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë' — a line made entirely of proper names, referring of course to Phèdre — heavy lineage indeed — the daughter of Minos, king of Crete, who had the labyrinth built, judge in the underworld, and as if that weren't enough, his wife, Pasiphaë, adds still more — everything about the mythology surrounding the Cretan cycle has something unsettling about it.
1:10:51 His wife — he clearly, very clearly alludes to this in Phèdre — committed one of the worst acts of hubris there is, and that's saying something in mythology, isn't it: she coupled with a bull, she even had a statue of a female bull built, with an opening — yes, it's in the mythology, I'm not inventing anything, isn't it — and from this monstrous union was born, as you'd guess, the Minotaur. And so, watch out, the half-brother of Ariadne, the legitimate daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, of Ariadne and of Phèdre, marvelous names — the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë — but there's a heavy past, and here he's addressing an audience, Racine, at a time when everyone knows all these stories by heart.
1:11:38 There is total homogeneity at the time between the creator and his public. The creator is limited — well, the public is limited, that's why there's this socially restricted homogeneity, and thus demographically too. But the allusion is clear, so, yes, well, if I'm leaving it's because I have a stepmother, a mother-in-law who's picking fights with me the way mothers-in-law often do and who makes my life impossible — let me translate into bourgeois language, but that's what it means.
1:12:11 And the other one, well, has even less trouble untying this argument — after all, a valiant young man like him, vigorous, afraid of a woman past her prime who's also been agitated for some time by a mysterious illness that's making her dying, mortally ill. 'I hear the misunderstood cause of your sorrows: Phèdre here grieves and offends your sight, a dangerous stepmother' — you see, he pretends to agree with him — 'no sooner did she see you' — but that's in the past — 'than your exile, at first, was to her credit' — Phèdre began by exiling him, in fact we now learn it's because she's in love, so as not to be tempted, she did everything not to succumb to temptation, it wasn't at all out of hatred but rather out of love that she exiled him, isn't that so?
1:13:01 'that your exile, at first, was to her credit' — but her hatred, look how the confidant returns to the charge, I told you he's diabolical — 'but her hatred, once attached to you, has either vanished or greatly relaxed; besides, what danger can a dying woman, who seeks only to die, pose to you? Phèdre, afflicted with an illness she insists on hiding, weary at last of herself and of the light that shines on her — can she form any design against you?' We mustn't make fun of people, that's what all this means. Hippolytus, who finally begins to arrive at something like the truth: 'Her vain hostility is not what I fear' — well, one would have to know, Hippolytus, in leaving, is fleeing another enemy — well now, but we're still in the feminine — 'I flee, I will confess it, this young Aricia, remnant of a fatal blood conspired against us' — well now, that's the last straw, that's what he invokes as the danger driving him away, a poor recluse young girl, confined to house arrest, who has no right to leave her home and who is surrounded by guards, ordered by Theseus,
1:14:11 who watches so that no man approaches her, isn't it? And so, and they say she's a threat on the pretext that her family was once a danger, even though Theseus wiped out her line, so Hippolytus, even more so, Theramenes, the confidant, even quicker, isn't it? 'What? You yourself, my lord, persecute her?' Look how he becomes a tempter: 'Did the lovely sister of the cruel Pallantides ever share in the plot of her treacherous brothers, and,' the killing phrase, 'must you hate her innocent charms?'
1:14:46 In the hyper-coded language of the time, that means her breasts and her behind, it's very precise for the period — the art of saying everything without naming anything, immense poetry — 'and must you hate her innocent charms?' She's a very young woman who's never yet known any man, isn't she? Answer: 'If I hated her, I would not flee her' — so I'll skip ahead, then the other confesses in his place: 'May I be permitted to explain your flight? Could you no longer be that proud' — meaning arrogant at the time — 'Hippolytus, implacable enemy of the laws of love and of a yoke Theseus has borne so many times? Venus, so long scorned by your pride' — he reminds me that in the Greek world, in that religion, one mustn't slight even a single god, it's very complicated, Greek ethics, one is torn between several divinities, but one mustn't be too much in love, that's not good, but one mustn't not be either, because that insults Venus.
1:15:46 'Venus, so long scorned by your pride, would she finally wish to justify Theseus, ranking you among the rest of mortals, and forced you to burn incense at her altars?' That's where we come to the reply I wish for you — it's long — where we suddenly see the aggressiveness, quite unconscious, of this boy who claimed he was leaving out of love for his father, in search of him for news — an aggressiveness in which he puts on trial, saved from castration of course, a castrated Theseus so to speak, that is, Theseus the tamer of monsters, but who supposedly never approached any woman, isn't that so?
1:16:24 'You know, you used to tell me then' — I'll just take this excerpt — 'you used to tell me then the story of my father,' so we clearly see the little boy there and his older confidant recounting the father's exploits — 'you used to tell me then the story of my father, you know how my attentive soul, at the sound of your voice, warmed to the tale of his noble exploits' — the identification of the son with the father, for now, we're following the rule — 'you know how my attentive soul, at the sound of your voice, warmed to the tale of his noble exploits, when you painted for me that fearless hero, consoling mortals for the absence of Alcides,' of Hercules, 'the monsters strangled, the brigands punished, and Procrustes, and Cercyon, and Sciron, and Sinis, and the scattered waters of the giant of Epidaurus, and Crete steaming with the blood of the Minotaur.'
1:17:11 That's for the positive side. 'But when you recounted less glorious deeds' — but note well, the son allows himself to say what's glorious, what's not part of the career of Theseus, who is his father, and who is king, and a hero, even a demigod at that time — 'but when you recounted less glorious deeds, his troth' — meaning his fidelity — 'his troth pledged and received everywhere in a hundred places: Helen stolen from her parents in Sparta, Salamis witness to Periboea's tears, so many others whose very names have escaped even him, too trusting souls that his passion deceived.'
1:17:48 'Ariadne, on the rocks, recounting the wrongs done to her.' Ariadne, at Naxos, isn't it — waking and seeing outside her veil the fleet of Theseus already departed, having forgotten the woman who saved him in the labyrinth, isn't that so? 'Ariadne, on the rocks, recounting the wrongs done to her; Phèdre, at last,' who closes the list, according to him, 'carried off under happier auspices. You know how, as though reluctantly, listening to this account, I would often press you to cut it short. Happy, had I been able,' — you see, I invent nothing, I never interpret.
1:18:19 'Happy, had I been able to snatch from memory an unworthy half of so fine a story.' Well, and things heat up a little, and just as he's about to wring the confession from him, isn't it — 'But what good is it to affect proud words? Confess it — everything has changed, and for some days now one has seen you less often, proud and wild, now making a chariot fly along the shore.' I told you before because we're in algebra, I'll insist — making a chariot fly, for that you have to tame horses.
1:18:55 It's Neptune who, in mythology, taught men to tame horses. Neptune is the tutelary god of Theseus's father, and Hippolytus will be torn apart by his own horses at the end of the play, torn apart by the god of the father. I'm not inventing anything, I told you. Everything falls into place, you see, the logic of the thing. So, 'one has seen you less often, proud and wild, now making a chariot fly along the shore, now skilled in the art invented by Neptune, taming for the bit a horse that seemed untamable.'
1:19:35 'Charged with a secret fire, your eyes grow heavy; there's no doubting it, you're in love, you burn, you're dying of a malady you conceal. Has the charming Aricia managed to please you?' I think this is where he'll crack. Answer, and this closes the scene: 'Theramenes, I leave, and go to seek my father.' He spends his whole time saying I leave. He worsens his own case. There. You see, so, I told you this is, thank you, a succession of confessions.
Hippolytus's confession to Aricia: the common law 1:20:06 A succession of confessions. That's the first one. After that, I'll skip over it, there's Phèdre's confession to her confidante, in the scene that follows almost directly, of course, one on one, no one knows about it, only the confidante is devastated by this confidence. And this scene is interrupted when we learn, of course, that for Phèdre it's a catastrophe, it's Venus who's relentless, who's taking revenge on her family, having already driven her mother to couple with a bull, her sister to fall for a womanizer like Theseus and thus to agonize on Naxos.
1:20:45 'Ariadne on the rocks recounting the wrongs done to her' — she even says this very beautiful line: 'Ariadne, my sister, wounded by what love did you die on those shores where you were left!' Look at all the flutes there are in her vowels, isn't it — 'wounded by what love did you die on those shores where you were left' — and you can even hear the silent 'e' of 'left' even though it isn't pronounced. It ends with a messenger arriving and saying, 'Well, we now have confirmation that Theseus is dead, his absence is indeed what we feared.' And that's when the confidante, we come back to it, tells her, 'All right, I was almost of your opinion, better to die than to bear so fearful a love, but after all, now that your husband is dead, you must think of the succession, of your son.'
1:21:26 And so, we come back and ask, 'What is it? What's become of it?' in the story of measurement, taking a detour through quantification. Well, it's that, just before the confession of Phèdre and Hippolytus, there's a confession we're missing, that of the one who had never confessed to any woman, the wild young man, Hippolytus, to little Aricia. So there, I'll give it to you in substance, it mustn't be too long — not only will he confess that he loves her, which is already a great surprise, but on top of that, he's going to allow himself — there could be nothing more criminal toward Theseus, whose corpse is still warm, so to speak — to
1:22:06 He's going to annul all the laws Theseus imposed against Aricia, last descendant of the political clan opposed to his own — outright, it's like a betrayal, that, politically, even if it seems very noble. And so, I'll just give you this passage: 'Madam, he comes to see Aricia, before leaving' — third time, he leaves.
1:22:43 'I believed I owed it to you to warn you of your fate.' It's part of the algebra, that every time Racine never misses a chance to remind us that he's worsening his own case by talking about leaving. 'I believed I owed it to you to warn you of your fate. My father is no more; my just suspicion foresaw the reasons for his overlong absence. Death alone, ending his glorious labors, could hide him from the world so long. The gods deliver at last to the murderous Fate' — there were the Norns in Wagner, there's Fate here, this is the Greeks — 'the friend, the companion, the successor of Alcides.'
1:23:15 'I believe that your hatred, sparing his virtues, hears without regret the names that are his due. One hope softens my mortal sadness: I can free you' — and there, 'from a stern guardianship.' He already acts as though he reigns. 'I revoke the laws whose rigor I lamented' — those are his father's laws — 'I revoke' is strong language, 'laws whose rigor I lamented. You may dispose of yourself, of your heart, and in this Trezene, today my portion, once the inheritance of my grandfather Pittheus, which acknowledged me without hesitation as its king, I leave you just as free.'
1:23:54 And then, the little poisoned note, one last word, "Freer than I am, more free than I." So there too, she catches it on the fly, like the confidant did earlier. There. So there, she plays a bit of a Cinderella. It serves her right that she falls for it after a rather sad life. "Of all I hear, astonished and confused, I fear, I fear that some dream may deceive me. Am I awake, can I believe such a design? What God, my lord, what God has put this in your heart? That your glory is rightly spread everywhere, and that the truth outstrips your renown."
1:24:28 "You yourself, for my sake, wish to betray yourself, was it not enough not to hate me?" A little coquettish around the edges, she gets there all the same, you see, she knows very well he'll never confess unless she meets him halfway. That poor fool. So she tells him, "was it not enough not to hate me?" What's more, you see, what's more, "you overwhelm me with kindness." "I, hate you, madam," — she scores a direct hit here. "Whatever colors my pride has been painted with, does one believe that a monster carried me in its womb?"
1:24:58 Look, this is algebra. "Does one believe that a monster carried me in its womb?" Yes! He is the son of the Amazon. These are reminders that Racine gives us. There are people who know very well that it's a monster who carried him in her womb. A monster, at the time, is hubris. I don't know. The Amazons who executed all the men who were in the vicinity, except those needed for reproduction. Whom they executed afterward. "Does one believe that a monster carried me in its womb, what savage customs, what hardened hatred" — in other words, even the son of an Amazon could, upon seeing you, not fail to be softened.
1:25:33 "Could I resist such a deceptive charm?" I've never seen the word "deceptive" used with connotations of strangeness. In fact, it's he who is deceived by himself. I don't know, about falling in love. "What, my lord, take care to say no more." "I have gone too far already. I see that reason yields to violence, since I have begun to break the silence. Madam, I must go on." There, I'm obliged to read because it doesn't serve your purpose. "I must inform you of a secret my heart can no longer contain. You see before you a pitiable prince, a memorable example of reckless pride."
The six months: a measure within the text 1:26:06 "I, who, proudly rebelling against love, long insulted the fetters of its captives, who, pitying the shipwrecks of weak mortals, always thought to watch the storms from the shore." I really do read that phrase — the great politics, "now enslaved under the common law" — by what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself? We have to go back. From the seventeenth century, to Racine, long before Freud, to see the hero suddenly realize his fall right here.
1:26:37 His fall is realizing that he is like everyone else — "now enslaved under the common law." Well yes, men fall in love. Women too. "By what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself?" Away from what psychoanalysis calls the ego ideal. But let's leave psychoanalysis aside and add to the Freudian unconscious the Clouscardian unconscious, that is, the Marxist one, the unconscious of the unconscious. Because the unconscious of a king's son can only reinforce this claim to being an individuality that cannot be reduced to the common run of mortals.
1:27:19 So it's even more humiliating, not for a prince, than to have to say "now enslaved under the common law." I am in love like a shepherd with his shepherdess, damn it, so "by what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself," from what I believed myself to be? All right? I had always forgotten who I was. You see, love here provides Hippolytus with an anamnesis by bringing him back to his primitive truth, which is the human condition.
1:27:55 You'll tell me, yes, but we still don't see your story about the six months. Now I'm getting to it. I'll finish on this to give you the floor, but because I want us to part on a measured note. But yes, but yes, a measured note. Not when he makes his confession. "For more than six months, ashamed, in despair, bearing everywhere the wound that tears me apart, the one that comes from your eyes" — understood.
1:28:25 "Against you, against myself, in vain I struggle. Present, I flee you. Absent, deep in the forests. Absent, I find you." More than six months — it's not possible, but it's arithmetic. It's even more rigorous than algebra, it's arithmetic. At the start of the play, second verse: "For more than six months, far from my father, I know not the fate of a head so dear to me, I know not even the place where they can hide it."
1:28:58 It's been six months since my father disappeared and we've had no news. And there, we learn: it's been six months that I've been in love with you. And then people will say, Pagani's overdoing it, he's injecting Freud into it. I'm not interpreting anything. I'm putting this arithmetic right in front of you. But don't for a moment believe that Racine had read Beyond the Pleasure Principle from the pen of Freud, or the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, addressed to the American bourgeoisie.
Return to the tirade: the common law and the political 1:29:32 There. I think, I don't know if there are any questions, Philippe, I'll check in a bit... All right? Good. In that case, in that case, let me take the opportunity to go back to the beautiful melody, to Phèdre's great confession, which I read straight through, but wasn't detailed, in order still to highlight a few points that will bring us closer to what seems totally absent in a work like this, where we feel that Eros is discussed at will, between kings, between queens, between princes, between heirs, etc.
1:30:18 and this confined atmosphere, if I may put it that way. In Racine it always happens between one column and three curtains, even if we constantly learn from the messengers that the sails are flapping in the harbor while waiting for departure — the politician won't come. And I want to make this illustrate the political philosophy of a Marx.
1:30:48 Now, for that, I ask you not only not to interpret, but to be even more literal than we ever are with Phèdre's tirade, the one that begins with "and they say a swift departure takes you from us, my lord." You see, she comes back to the departures. Well, she begins by fulfilling what she tells her confidant, she strives to be Cornelian, not Racinian: "I come for a son to explain my alarms" — so she comes about the problem of succession, except that she notices she's speaking to the person with the most reason to do her wrong, because she was odious to him, seen from the outside, especially since he couldn't understand that it was for reasons as monstrous as, that is, her love for him, so we know it was the classic move of — he says it with disdain, doesn't he?
1:31:41 "A jealous mother rarely forgives the son of another wife, madam, I know it, unwarranted suspicions are the most common fruits of a second marriage" — but when you're in love, nothing worse can be said to you than to be told your feelings are perhaps more common, that's fine, no need to make a whole story of it. And there, instead of seizing the opening, he says, oh no, but I don't know, excuse me, I wasn't talking about that, I wanted — let's get back to the problem of succession — instead, so wounded by this indifference and this reduction to politics, she says, "Ah my lord, I want to attest here that heaven willed to except me from that common law."
1:32:21 So he has just confessed — whereas, as we saw with Aricia, that he is now "enslaved under the common law" of Theseus, that hurts him — "by what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself," away from what the word "myself" designates when it has a capital M, for each and every one of us. And now here, for Phèdre, it's the opposite, she's still in Eros, and, as always in Eros, one thinks that what one is living is unique. "That heaven, I want to attest here, willed to except me from that common law, that a very different care troubles and devours me."
1:32:54 These are almost confessions already oozing out. And there Hippolytus takes two steps back. "Madam, this is not the time to trouble you further. Perhaps Theseus still sees the light of day." But how? We've just seen the scene with Aricia, where he's so convinced his father is dead that he settles the succession: you are free, you may dispose of yourself, of your heart, there. And then, an equal division of territory: "the plains of Crete offer Phèdre's son a rich retreat. Trezene obeys me, Attica is your possession. I give you Athens. As for me, the hunting lodge is enough." Attica is your possession.
1:33:25 And there, now, he remembers that after all his father might be alive. Something must have worried him about Phèdre's behavior. "Madam, this is not the time to trouble you further. Perhaps your husband still sees the light of day. Heaven may grant our tears his return. Neptune protects him." It's terrible, because he's going to be torn apart by his own horses. Neptune having taught men the art of taming horses. "And this tutelary god will not be invoked in vain by my father." Algebra — it's terribly true, since when his father, upon his return, learns through a slanderous accusation from the servant that Hippolytus supposedly made advances to the queen, a monstrous inversion of the truth, he will invoke his tutelary god Neptune to avenge him.
1:34:10 And that's how Hippolytus's horses are terrified by a sea monster that Neptune will raise from the depths of the ocean, sending his chariot careening so that he's torn apart in the accident. "Your husband still sees the light of day." And what does she answer? "One does not see the shore of the dead twice, my lord." It's as if she almost wished it for herself — she who is dead. We understand well.
Phèdre winds back the clock of time 1:34:40 Why? "Since Theseus has seen the dark shores, in vain you hope" — well, you'd expect her to say "we hope." You see, I'm doing algebra, I'm not interpreting. We hope. You've lost your father, I've lost my husband, the king. Isn't that so? "In vain you hope that a god will send him back to you" — she's going to stop him. One doesn't let one's prey go. I won't reread the rest to you, it's too beautiful, but what does she say next? It's an immense anamnesis, a deceptive anamnesis. She relives, in a hallucination, as if in the present, the great moment, the greatest moment of that whole story.
1:35:16 Theseus's feat, the one that makes his name still known, even in our day, the one who freed the Greeks. You see, we come back to politics, from the yoke of the Cretans, since historically the Cretans and the Phoenicians dominated the Mediterranean before the Greeks. And when we say the Minotaur needed, every year, seven young Athenian boys and seven young girls to devour, that's a fine symbol of the fact that the Greeks had to pay tribute every year to the Cretans. So it's Theseus, the fickle one. If Theseus remains in memory, it is not for stories of skirt-chasing, precisely.
1:35:49 Not that it's secondary, but he earned those skirts because he is a hero. Besides, women aren't fools. And one of the most important lines in this tirade, which I won't reread to you, is — and I ask you to pay attention if you reread it, read it until you know it by heart like a chant — it's not a song, it's a chant that never stops, that keeps unfolding. Try not to miss the moment when she says "when from our Crete he crossed the waves."
1:36:25 In the first line, she says "I love him," not as he was seen in the underworld — so "I love him," present tense, indicative. Three lines later: "Charming, young, dragging every heart after him," still present tense. "He had your bearing, your eyes, your face." We move to the imperfect, and then suddenly the simple past: "When from our Crete he crossed the waves." There it's the great heroic act, when he embarked from Athens to go to Crete, there at my home, at my home, Phèdre's.
1:36:56 Since we had never seen him, but all of the Mediterranean was buzzing with talk of his exploits, and so we were in love, my sister and I, when we were little, with him, isn't that so? As La Rochefoucauld puts it very well, at the same period: I know some who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard tell of it. Now, what were these young girls hearing about? And she says it right there, look, I'm not interpreting anything: "when from our Crete he crossed the waves, worthy object of the vows of the daughters of Minos."
1:37:28 It's arithmetic — the daughters of Minos, there are two of them. There's Ariadne and herself, Phèdre. And here we learn that he was already the object of the vows of the daughters of Minos even though they hadn't yet seen him, since he was still at sea, sailing toward Crete. There. So of course we come to the labyrinth. All this is experienced in a mode of hallucination. In the present, she wants precisely the one impossible thing: to turn back the clock of time. You understand how this fits into our...
1:37:58 She wants to live in the present something that is irremediably past. She wants to replace her older sister, to have the great Theseus, not the Theseus of Xiemnos she inherited, who's grown a bit tamer since he's rather young. She takes what's at hand. No, she wants the great Theseus, the one who conquered Ariadne and then forgot her, abandoning her on the rock.
1:38:28 So, arriving at the labyrinth, she goes so far as to say: "It is I, it is I whose helpful aid would have taught you the labyrinth's turnings." You have every mood of the verb and every tense of the verb. You have the indicative, then the future perfect for the tense, then the subjunctive, then the past anterior. The conditional: "by you the monster of Crete would have perished." You, you would have what she wants. It's someone as young as Hippolytus but who now, in the present, has the heroic courage of his demigod father, be it Hippolytus who slays the Minotaur, and as the fruit of that feat, falls into Phèdre's arms — "what care that charming head would have cost me, a thread" — look, the thread of Ariadne, that of her sister, of her secondary self — "a thread would not have been enough to reassure me, your lover, companion in the peril you had to seek, I myself, before you, would have wished to walk," and Phèdre — look at the rhythms — "into the labyrinth with you,"
1:39:38 descended — it's as if we're going step by step — "with you would I have found again or lost," and at the time, believe me, everyone knew what it meant in school for a woman to be "lost," a "lost" girl. There, curtain on what happens at the labyrinth in poor Phèdre's anamnesis — I'd gladly take her in my arms, she's sublime. Now, in all the critical readings or the school commentaries one reads, we learn about a couple of young innocents, victims of this atrocious tragedy, who have nothing to do with it — poor Hippolytus, a virtuous, timid, young prince in love, poor Aricia, secluded like that — I didn't read it to you so as not to lengthen things, but she tells her confidant that what pleases her about Hippolytus is the fact that he's never been in love and never done the deed.
1:40:28 There's a slightly sadistic streak in little Aricia. So much so that I once gave my students as an essay topic: who is the most guilty character in Phèdre? I already knew the answers. Sorry — the most innocent. Excuse me, bear with me for what follows. It's the most innocent. Everyone said they hesitated between Hippolytus, Aricia, Theseus too, who is absent from all this, who is not without blame in all these crimes, even — from the realm of the dead — to dishonor the marriage bed when he's not there. And there I tell them, no, it's Phèdre, the most innocent, she's sublime.
1:40:59 There. Memory, isn't that so, taken up again with imagination, can conjugate every tense and every mood of the verbs. If there are no other questions, Philippe? All right. So I'm being told here — I couldn't notice this myself from the control room.
Announcements and answer on the formalization of philosophy 1:41:33 Philippe tells me there were a few cuts, please forgive me again, you know we can hardly help it. I admire the mastery with which Philippe caught the problem. So anyway, everything was recorded, there won't be any cut in the final result. It'll be posted on YouTube. And I take the opportunity to remind you that since the new site has been available to you, it's had such success that we've just crossed a milestone.
1:42:11 And there I thank everyone, starting with you, all the teams without whom you and I would never have met. And I would miss that very much. I just learned we've crossed the 2000th subscriber. In all modesty, that's not much. But still, I can say, when you have no budget to make buzz — you see, buzz, not bug, sorry — when you don't have, you see, powerful patrons, I much prefer it this way.
1:42:41 There are friends who are sometimes wonderfully generous with us. And there, now, we don't have the means of those who are not exactly regulars, but the near-permanent fixtures of TV panels, isn't that so, in the world of force and old age. And so we don't always get fools, but very often, all the same, it's dismaying. And it's almost always the dominant ideology, sometimes a bit better armed than in most cases.
1:43:11 So to reach 2000 subscribers with all that, like this, throwing bottles into the sea, and I'm the first one happy about it. Especially since our audience now stretches from Mexico to Singapore, and I take the opportunity to greet someone who will recognize himself and whom I congratulate for the marvelous performance he posted on Facebook, on his Facebook page, of the Tempest, of Beethoven's sonata, the Tempest, and it's admirable that he lives in Mexico and follows attentively what we do.
1:43:49 And in Singapore, we have our faithful Rudy, who knows Lacan's work well and lives there in those cities I knew as a stopover when I was under five years old. So, 2000 subscribers, bravo. I'll follow the same method next time. I'll keep answering questions. It's the best way, as we've just seen, to move on to new material that advances the idea that there is indeed a logic at work in human affairs, even if that logic is quite different.
1:44:29 That's what I want to anticipate for next term. It's quite different from the logic at work in applied sciences, and even in mathematics, even though I maintain that mathematics has a special status. Here, and these will be my last words, I warmly greet a great comrade, I mean, a great... First, he's a... I don't know if I'm qualified to judge, but I believe he's the best mathematician of his age group. I'm thinking of course of Pierre, here, who is now at Oxford — I was mistaken, I had thought Cambridge, but he was selected at Oxford to advance the most cutting-edge work of the moment on artificial intelligence, you see, and who is nonetheless an excellent reader of the classics of Marxism and of dialectical philosophy, among other things, and who sent me, and I apologize for having somewhat overlooked it, I only saw it this morning, a very long message in which he reacts
1:45:40 to the fact that I'm calling somewhat on my scientist friends to come lend us a hand during this sequence where we'll discuss the relationship between philosophy and the human sciences, the natural sciences, and the hard sciences. I'll answer him in detail, of course, but let me say it right away here, to finish on this, because it's important — perhaps I wasn't clear, or I was insufficiently clear, or I was in a hurry in my appeal to willing scientists and went a bit beyond my own thinking — but I never thought that philosophers needed, that philosophy needed, mathematical formalization, because he finds that pointless, and I agree with him. That's the message I want to deliver to him right away before going into detail next time. There, I fully agree with him, it was never my intention — if he consults the videos I've made over the past seven years,
1:46:50 he'll see that it's a constant with me — the poet — when I quote Plato's line, "let none enter here who is not a geometer," I always add: if Plato put that at the entrance, it means we won't be doing mathematics inside — that it's an excellent training for considering truths one doesn't always see with the eyes or smell with the nose, but besides, I mean, this faculty of accessing the intelligible, abstraction, concrete abstraction if I may say so, to stay dialectical, won't be exercised at all in the same way as mathematics.
1:47:26 There — what comes next, which will be fascinating with a subject like this, on December 23rd, I specify that Philippe and I will be at our posts, so our next workshop will indeed take place on the 23rd at the usual time — Philippe, we agree, 8:30 pm, there, so we're not changing the time — and if between now and then some of you can't attend because you've gone off to the provinces or somewhere else, or abroad, why not, we still know how to travel as much as we live, well, I wish you wonderful holidays, of course, but yes, of course, wonderful holidays, a merry Christmas and a good "capodanno," as they say in Italy.
1:48:14 There, until next time, and thank you.
