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The art of conversation and an African childhood 0:00 There, we manage, because with the Virgin Mary, with her, everything, she understands everything, the bearded one, the father, let's not even talk about him, he doesn't hear anything. Hello Dominique Pagani, we're meeting here in a little Parisian café, also in the company of Victoire, who is an occasional listener at the workshops you organize regularly. That is to say, quite the opposite of a groupie. Right, we don't say "Paganette" the way there were "Claudettes" for Claude François.
0:33 That's too bad. It doesn't sound very good, Paganette. You're giving me ideas, my friend. A Dominiquette, that could work. A Dominiquette is a bit long. That sounds good. I did indeed attend some of your talks, in person or on YouTube, on the internet. I've read part of the book you wrote and gave me last time, on femininity in Hegel. Ah, it's not... I find that book annoying at times. Yes, but since I'd just tried to read the posthumous Clouscard, in comparison yours seems almost easy.
1:08 We'll come back to that, because I think there's a victim's point there. And I've always found that, as a thinker, as a dialectician, as a philosopher if you like, it's especially in the art of conversation, which in French history is a real art. That's where you excelled the most, and where you were often more convincing in that relationship than in a formal lecture, in a conference.
1:38 And ultimately, there too, in the history of philosophy, it's something that can bring Socrates to mind, who didn't write and who thought that it was by going to the agora that you managed to convince people, to make them think, to astonish them. And that's what you do all the time, for decades now. I lived my whole professional life off my talk. Either as a philosophy teacher, or later as a consultant, I mean, I sell wind, I sell hot air.
2:09 So I mean, without the handling of my tongue, I wouldn't have had a career. I'm not from the working class, I'm not a craftsman, I don't know, anyway. Maybe it's my biography that meant the few skills, I'm not speaking in professional terms, it's not a value judgment, but the marketable ones I have were instilled in me by Africans for whom French wasn't even their mother tongue. So school, for me, is important. My father was in the colonial administration, that's all, so as a kid, these were Beninese, Dahomeans, as they were called at the time.
2:40 Well, of course, Dahomey wasn't just anything—at independence they had a thousand high school graduates, whereas the immense Belgian Congo only had one. So we were the Latin Quarter of French West Africa, I was raised in that, with the French flag raised every morning, flag-raising ceremonies, etc. I left teaching to work elsewhere—that was my first betrayal of my teaching vocation—to go, as they say, into the private sector to earn money outside the civil service. At Hachette, so a publisher with no scruples, a muscular one, a muscular private operator, the octopus, as Hachette is called.
3:11 But Hachette, textbooks, specifically—I was in charge of designing new collections for my former classmates, the students of the African school. So I began my relationship with Black Africa at school, as a student, in primary school, a bit in secondary school, then as a teacher, then as a schoolbook publisher. And then as project manager of a music center funded by your taxes. No, you're Swiss, because it was the myth. It was funded by the European Commission, I was about to say by your taxes, thank you, I never earned such a good living.
3:42 But dare I say it, I who denounce Brussels' policies, well, I never earned such a good living. But I mean, I've always been in transmission and in didacticism, that is, in the didactic relationship. Even now, I see an African minister being interviewed, his level of localized French would put a Poujadist to shame. I had a friend, Mamadou Seck, who told me, we are more anciently French than Nice and Savoy. Well, he was right. It's true, he says that, it's re-historic. Right. Senegal, you recognize this French identity predates Nice and Savoy, which date from Napoleon III—that's recent.
4:15 The Senegalese are proud. It's no accident, it's the Francophonie, it's Senghor, it's people like that. Yes, yes, agreed, agreed. But then, the whole decolonization period creates such feelings... Ah, that's not the same thing, that's a bit more recent. One of the biggest blunders of the Sarkozy era was his Dakar speech. I'll leave aside the thesis that Africa hasn't entered history, and Guaino said other things too. But you don't say that, you know, wherever in Africa, but not in Dakar. The most refined country, the most, you see, the most anciently French.
4:48 I'm a bit racist on the edges, I love Black people. Right? There, I don't much like West Indians, I like Africans, everyone has their thing, it's my biography that made me that way. It's my classmates, it's my teachers, well, the Africans. I love Africans, yes, they're Black in both cases, but I mean, I love Black Africans more than Black West Indians. Yes, you make a distinction. I'm being capricious. Well yes, you talk like Black people do, because it's true that we don't tend to make that distinction. Spontaneously, frankly, I pull back. Yes, when you know them. West Indians, fine, I acknowledge. In Senegal, I don't quite feel like I'm in Africa—that's how far my racism goes.
5:21 That is, Africa there is still a bit too far north, still too Europeanized, almost too close to the Maghreb too, a bit of that side... It's not quite Africa yet, the deep jungle, it's almost too refined. It all depends where you go, if you stay in Dakar, yes, but if you go to Casamance or even up north. Because there, you know it. There, for me, deep Black Africa begins south of Senegal, that is, in Casamance. Even if you go up north, if you go to Casamance... I know that for me, Black Africa is more to the south than... Because Dakar is a big port, so there too there's been enormous cultural mixing, but if you go to the small villages...
5:56 That's true. I'm in favor of this decolonization process, because I think everyone, like us, should have their own sovereignty. And I can accept, even if it doesn't thrill me, that this decolonization process goes through language. It doesn't thrill me, because obviously, as a French speaker, I worry about the future of our language. And if I learned that a number of African countries were claiming the use of this language, I'd be very happy. But I can understand that suddenly there are identity movements, sovereigntist movements, that want to draw on their own roots.
6:28 That's what, what's his name, at the United Nations, Doudou Diène, said—that by 2050, if demographics continue to evolve this way, most French speakers will live in Africa. So that means, if we want the language to persist... So I don't know if it's good or bad news, but it's a fact. We have to deal with it. So that means the media, the publishing houses, the authors... They'll need to be able to emerge there. I can't interrupt you, David, it's precisely to illustrate your thought. The country with the highest birth rate in the world is Niger.
7:00 Yes. French-speaking. Right. Nowhere do you produce as many French speakers as in Africa. No, that's got nothing... So I have a small objection to what you're saying. Yes. That is, yes, maybe for the future of the French language, it's very interesting for the future of the French language that French-speaking African countries remain French-speaking. I don't really know what their own point of view is. Actually, I've really met... You see, you see, you see. That is, people... I lived a bit in Senegal. People who said no, the French language is a great asset for us because it makes us all bilingual.
7:34 And we have access to a language that is extremely developed compared to African languages, since ultimately, all the vocabulary of modernity there, since it was raised... And the relationship to writing, quite simply, because there is... And it went through French. That is, there are many words that don't exist. For example, in Dakar, they speak Wolof. There are many words that don't exist in Wolof. There's no Wolof word for computer. Well, there you go. For example, you get on a bus, you hear two students talking, medical students for instance, they speak French, you find. Because in the end, Wolof isn't enough for them as a language. Right. So that's interesting to see too...
8:05 So local languages haven't been updated, haven't absorbed new realities to find words for them. In politically correct terms, they're called national languages, but they're all off-national. As you just said very well, they're local. Black Africa is the continent of orality. It's the continent without writing. That's interesting. Less and less so, when you see the emergence of publishing houses, of authors, it's changing. Of course. As a countereffect. No, but historically, I mean, it's emerging on a base, on the part of the world that was the least literate, if you set aside Oceania, those little rocks scattered in the ocean.
Right-wing Francophonie, left-wing Francophonie, and Sankara's choice 8:35 Someone who's literate in Africa, they say he's got no roots left. If he's saved. There's a big investment in Francophonie among French-speaking African populations. But we mustn't misunderstand this investment. Because it's taken the wrong way, sometimes by excess, sometimes by default. By excess, that's the right-wing Francophonie. The Francophonie of the Foccart era and so on, which says that Francophonie is France. Which is silly, because Vietnam was French-speaking and they proved, by arms, that Francophonie and France, for them, were different things.
9:05 Right? And conversely, there's a bobo left-wing Francophonie. Oh, to stop bothering them with our language, they should have national languages in their schooling. French-speaking Africans hate that. Is that true? Because that's true. I know they tell you the opposite. I know they tell you the opposite. No, but I'm still speaking about the right. So I'm going to indulge myself a bit for a Marxist. I'm going to indulge myself a bit. I'll tell you a true story. I worked for Hachette. So, at the time, I had a stake in it for commercial reasons.
9:36 It was very much in my interest for a country to have French in its education system so we could sell our merchandise, our books. Our market's extent coincided with the French-speaking area. We didn't sell to South Africa or Ghana or Nigeria. So, I arrive in Sankara's Burkina Faso, which I knew. I even published his memoirs before he got shot—a Shakespearean story by handsome Blaise. And Sankara's first decision was to drop the reform that had introduced national languages into education and reintroduce French as the sole system.
10:14 The guy least suspected in French-speaking Africa of allegiance to French imperialism. It's strange. How to explain this... Ah, good question. I'll give Sankara's answer. Oh, it's a story about national languages. First, it wasn't us who decided it. It's a Canadian. It's a Belgian. I'm not sure it's Swiss. It's a Canadian. A Belgian—it's always a guy who comes from UNESCO who wangles a phonologist position for a buddy to make the new textbooks with diacritical marks, etc. Anyway, someone who fights French influence in Africa. Because the Americans deserted UNESCO for political reasons everyone knows, over their relationship with Israel, which is heavily criticized at UNESCO.
10:48 And they remain present through Canadians and Japan as proxies. I'll avoid, I won't demonstrate it, but when you know the field, it's 150% true. Why Sankara? I haven't finished answering your question. Why did he bring back French? He said it's a way of dividing us by ethnicity, this whole business. And of fixing people at home, in the vile localism that's now wreaking havoc. That means if the father is posted from the south of Burkina to the north, his son can no longer understand the language because we've changed ethnic group, so it's a new language. I mean, it's ridiculous.
11:18 As in Côte d'Ivoire, French is a way of opening things up. A way of overcoming ethnic fragmentation, I mean. There are 93 languages in Côte d'Ivoire. The further you go into the forest, the more they multiply. There are 8 languages in Niger, including Arabic. Among others, plus Tuareg, plus Fulani, plus others. These are official languages, I'm speaking administratively. In Algeria, the problem doesn't arise. Everyone understands Arabic. So in the education system, you can build an educational system, etc. In Black Africa, the problem does arise.
11:49 And somewhere, I'll stop there, but the African member of the intelligentsia will tell himself, I'm not going to drop the substance for the shadow. If I give up French, I'll be expressing myself in a confidential code. I'll rule over a radius of action of 125 km at most. Afterward, the only thing I might add is that the problem with French, at least in Senegal, in Dakar itself, is that school is only, exclusively, in French. And the problem with this exclusively French-language school is that ultimately you end up with kids who are 8, 9 years old who only have their teacher to speak French to them, but there are 70 or 80 of them per class.
12:25 There's no follow-up at home. So you end up with students who are 8, 9 years old who don't speak French, because concretely they don't speak French, or they say 3 words of French, who have all their schooling in French, and who ultimately end up unable to go to middle school because there are exams in French, taken by students who don't speak French. So ultimately, in the very, very working-class classes of the African lumpenproletariat, the fact that school is in French is actually a hindrance to the intellectual development of these very working-class groups. So ultimately, there's a double disadvantage and drawbacks to this language.
Mother tongue, koinè, and Corsican orality 12:59 At the same time, it's a language that lets you, just like English today. That is, a bridge language that allows communication. But it's often said that Africa, by default, contemporary Africa, is multilingual, that almost all African peoples are bilingual or more. In fact, most societies in the world—but I say that because France is not, France is one of the few exceptions. Switzerland is different. But it's really where bilingualism, multilingualism seems to us like something special, whereas many peoples switch from one language to another, from one register to another.
13:36 With incredible skill. There. If I were minister of education in those countries, I'd say: mother tongue for the first two years of schooling. Period. That's fundamental. In every country, wherever it is in the world, you have to start with the mother tongue for the first two years of school. After that, you move to French. I'm neither for excluding French from the start, nor for making it the sole language, as you say. Yes, or else a kind of education. Which you were denouncing so well. Because, echoing what she said, I had students.
14:07 They told me, a bit provocatively—they like it, students like it. They provoke too, in philosophy class, etc. I only had older students, but in the final year, it's rowdy. "Sir, starting tomorrow, we're doing the class in Ivorian." I say, fine, no problem for me. And why not start today? He got a bit embarrassed. Let's discuss it. What language do we do the class in? Senufo or Bété? Oh, well, Senufo, I don't want that. Oh, well yes. Clearly. The Bété speaker doesn't want it in Senufo. The Senufo speaker doesn't want it in Bété. He can't forget it. Well, I'm not the one dividing the ethnic groups. They're so divided among themselves there's no need to add to it.
14:38 It's a matter of old grievances, which aren't ethnic grievances. They're economic grievances, you have to look closely. I'll tell you, I'll make a confession. What do we speak in France? We speak a language where the main contribution, lexically, comes from our former colonizers. It's Latin. Then there's the Germanic contribution, which is the most important. There's even an Arabic contribution. What there's the least of is Gaulish words in French. If you look closely, there are a few place names, river names, things like that, trousers, the barrel.
15:10 But I mean, it doesn't go very far. It'll be the same for you. One day there will be an Ivorian... Yes, but there was already a moment... who will speak a mix of French and Dioula, a fairly widespread language there, a sub-Bambara from Mali, spoken by merchants, so a koine, a bit like among the ancient Greeks. There, it would happen like that. You can't legislate a language into being. Are you rather optimistic about the survival, or even the development, of Francophonie? No, no, good that you ask that question.
15:40 I'm not very optimistic because, look, I just spoke about Africans' disposition, but is it up to them to decide? No. It's the Anglo-Saxons who fiercely fight it, on one hand. It's UNESCO, where there's an Anglo-Saxon majority fighting for that, well. I had a German ambassador who liked me because he knew—he was quite the Francophile by culture—and he told me, I don't understand, this was regarding Nigeria to be clear, I don't understand how they still have French as the official language of instruction.
16:10 Everyone fights that, all the other Europeans fight it, we never say that. We pretend that Europeans are all united like that, especially abroad. No way! I mean, it's a war against France. I'm not a flag-waving chauvinist, I'm not jingoistic, that's not the point, but I become very close to France on this. In France, when you see, ultimately, how French became unified—it's around the time the Académie française was created, because before that there were still, in the villages... A bit through cunning, a bit by fire and sword—I'm thinking of the Cathars—the south was attached.
16:40 There was, at some point, a policy of language unification, deliberate at the time. Yes, but that was during the Revolution, that was an extremely deliberate policy. Yes, but that's under the power politics of one of the kingdom's components. Because besides the foreign contributions, that kind of thing takes time. The extension of the French of the Île-de-France—because roughly that's the one—to the whole territory. And it happened rather forcefully. It happened little by little, but there was also a deliberate will, it wasn't spontaneous, it was aided. I gave a talk on colonial orality at the Congress on Corsica-Colony in Corte.
17:10 I was invited along with François de Negroni to give a talk on why Corsicans did so well in the colonies. I said there's one reason among others, and it's this: in regions where writing isn't the medium, where orality dominates, Corsica comes from orality. It's a shepherd country, my aunts... It's a country of oral mnemonics. And when writing happens, it's written in Italian, Tuscan, and that's late. That's what I mean. It's no accident. Is Corsican a language that isn't written?
17:40 Yes, exactly. But does it have a spelling system? Now, if you go to Corsica, you see diacritical marks, as linguists call them, where Corsicans try to transcribe their specific pronunciation. They have to try to find something specific. But seriously, it's an Italic language, to speak like linguistic historians. Like Sardinian, like... I'm not calling it a dialect. If I said that in Paris, I wouldn't get blown up. In Bastia, I couldn't say it. But yes, I can say it, it's an Italian dialect. Is there Corsican literature?
18:12 In Corsica? Contemporary, yes. But your questions are interesting. Because pre-war written literature was all written in Tuscan Italian. It's recent, the desire to create something typically Corsican with its own terminology. Well, I wrote the preface. I was commissioned, at the request of those involved, to write the preface for the Materia Scripta editions, where Negroni was also involved, for the project of a constitution for Corsica—I'm thinking of Rousseau. The Corsicans decided to make a bilingual edition of this emblematic text.
Clouscard is not a killjoy 18:45 He's still the greatest intellectual of the era to take an interest in the island, all the same. And in The Social Contract, I recall the line: one day, this small island will astonish Europe. There aren't many citations of particular cases in The Social Contract. And there, suddenly, Corsica is cited by Rousseau. When we articulate a critique of libertarian liberalism, as is increasingly being done, and it's true that I take part... Like Clouscard was the first to do. There. A critique that's well received by part of, notably, the youth.
19:17 Because I understood what you publish, and which I've cited myself. We had that dialogue with François de Negroni in Éléments, for example. But often, among the people who receive this discourse, who understand the philosophical, economic and cultural critique of libertarian liberalism, they get the impression that what one might recommend against it is a form of rigorism, a form of austerity. And yet both Clouscard as an individual and Michéa as an individual show—if you know a little about their life, their way of life and their way of living—that they weren't monks, and that their hedonism, in the good sense of the term, didn't contradict their thesis at all.
19:54 I can allow myself to say Clouscard even less than Michéa. So, I hadn't acknowledged it, but... I'll make a confession. We were buddies with Clouscard. He came to my place all the time when I was with my wife back then. I'd say we were a bit like his household, since he was a bachelor. He hadn't found his Thérèse Levasseur. He often said so. He wasn't the kind of person like Rousseau who married an illiterate girl. He used to tell me, you should come to Spain, the prostitutes there aren't expensive. He was the exact opposite of a moral watchdog policing manners. Or he'd call me up and say, I'm in front of the TV and there's the Luis Mariano retrospective for the Christmas Eve show.
20:30 You see, he wasn't into elitist culture. Between the racing odds, the horoscope and Luis Mariano. It's extraordinary. It works out fine that I listen to The Art of Fugue, you see, or Monk's solos, you see, well, soap in the nukes—I listen to Luis Mariano, a bottle of Pommard, you see, some Pommard, I don't remember. Pommard, Pommard. I watch, waiting for the final of the Five Nations. But if I mention Michéa, it's because Michéa himself, as he's talked a bit about himself, has always said that... He's the guy from Montpellier. There, also, and he's always said that his own ideal wasn't to write—he was pushed a bit into writing—but that he liked playing pétanque and watching girls go by from the terrace.
21:09 So, when you have a personality like that... And the pastis, between 11am and 1pm, the pastis. There. So, obviously, he's no Robespierre. And even then, I have nothing bad to say about Robespierre, he's a figure I find sympathetic, but let's say, on this front, ah yes, but on this front it's different, he's someone who doesn't resemble me at all, but who, for that very reason, seems superior to me, but that's another matter. That would be the perfect misreading. Invoking Clouscard as the moral watchdog who's going to come and lash out at liberal-libertarian excesses—Clouscard was a bon vivant.
21:44 He's the exact opposite of a puritan. He was the first to indulge in unbridled libertinage. That's nobody's business, that. Well, that's the achievements of modern civil society. Not modern in the current sense, this dates from the French Revolution. From the Enlightenment. But we mustn't limit this to the Marquis de Sade, to Count Almaviva. Hence the critique made by our friend François Negroni of common decency, which could give rise to paternalism.
22:18 We praise the virtue of the poor so that they stay in their place. Which isn't the point at all. This author is more complex than one thinks, because François has the genius of doing this in minor genres, making people believe he was a light author like all aristocrats. The fact that young people, suddenly, when there's a political awakening, for example, say Clouscard—the problem, and one can understand this misunderstanding, is that they tend to politicize everything. To politicize everything they do, and that's where the error of overvaluation comes from, giving meaning to something that shouldn't have any, because if you give it that meaning, either he's a hypocrite or dialectically he's saying the opposite of what he means.
22:57 Absolutely. No, no, we agree on that. So we agree, understanding Clouscard properly means admitting that a large part of our existence escapes political interpretation. It's not about moralizing at leftists. It's telling them: you're fools. He likes that word, fools. You're to the right of De Gaulle and you present yourselves as to the left of the Communist Party. You're mocking me. You do what you please—me, I won't say it. You cheat on your wife, well, that's your problem. That's one of the slogans, that's exactly it. Everything is political. It's not only there that you're revolutionary. There you go.
23:28 And it's not by not doing it that you are one either, simply because you're in a posture of neutrality. We agree on that. And that's why he writes that incredible title, Treatise on Mad Love, or rather, never should there be both treatise and mad love on the same side. What a revolution exogamous monogamy is. Tristan, notice, for him, that's history. There you go. I don't like talking about it. You guess why—it caused problems for the publication. The re-edition. Yes. It sold well.
23:58 Because for the first edition, I was even the one who chose the cover. I chose the Tristan engravings. You see King Mark and Iseult arriving. Yes, from the 13th century period. You see Mark, Tristan with the sword separating them. Tristan and Iseult. Do you know that edition? I seem to have seen it. Éditions Sociales de Messidor, that's the first edition. It's quite different from the gothic feel of the other edition. Yes, I like the illustrator who does that. It's a kind of floral game.
Onfray, Soral, and the misreading of consumption 24:29 I must admit that if today there's a renewed success around Clouscard, it's partly because there's perhaps a reactionary reading of Clouscard, whereby his theories are accepted but without that nuance you just mentioned. That is, people say: if you've understood Clouscard, if you're a true revolutionary, a true anti-liberal-libertarian, you must be a monk-soldier, you must be... This misunderstanding, that is, the idea that when you deliver an anti-liberal-libertarian discourse, you're necessarily...
25:01 Moralizing. This misunderstanding is often the doing not of Clouscard's opponents but of those who think they've understood him, especially among the younger generation. I'll take both of them together. That's where I wanted to get to. I noticed this and told Onfray. For once, I wrote it—I who have written nothing. I wrote it in a short text serving as an afterword to Delga's re-edition of one of Clouscard's masterpieces, Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire. I wrote a little afterword at their request called 'Should We Save Private Onfray?'
25:35 Right? So, do we keep him if we're Marxist, Communist, or do we ditch him? Basically, I said, broadly speaking, politically I keep him—he's good, he opposed the European treaty, he opposed this. Fine, there are positions I can co-sign as a Leninist. Ah, but tomorrow he'll denounce us all too, once he's left. We understand each other. As an anti-Atlanticist, I can co-sign. And yet philosophically, on the other hand, I mean, since he fancies himself a philosopher—I'm not disputing that he has the right to be a philosopher, I mean, he's entitled to. But I mean, he invests in a philosophy—Spinoza, Deleuze, etc., liberal-libertarian, Foucault, etc.—which is exactly the opposite of his political choices.
26:14 And I say, and he makes the same misreading as Soral—now this becomes interesting. Onfray and Soral, the far right and the far left, they can't stand any compromise—the far right, Onfray. Well, actually, both of them. That's why he was singled out, unfortunately he knows himself, so he's more vulnerable. Anyway, Onfray. And I say, but both make the same misreading, it's curious. They're opposed, Soral and Onfray, but both use the argument that Clouscard is someone who criticizes consumption.
26:46 He criticizes consumerism. When it gets excessive—no, he says we don't consume enough when we read. And that if there really were a consumer society, I'd run to it immediately, Clouscard said, that would mean communism achieved. No, there's a class that consumes, there are milieus that consume, I've never seen a society that consumes. Yes, but when he talks about the development of the libidinal economy with his analysis of Fordism, that's still a consumerist critique, isn't it? No, you're not talking like an ecologist, excuse me, this is a 'you' addressed to—we'll get there. It's a 'you' addressed to the dominant ideology to which of course we all lend ourselves one way or another, but especially your generation more than mine.
27:24 No, I'll be serious. What I'm saying is there's no critique of consumerism—on the contrary, what Clouscard says is that there's a playful, libidinal, marginal consumption, the three poisonous ones he condemns, but which are reserved for a social elite. And he protests when people say that the working class in '68 supposedly sold itself for a mess of pottage and gained access to that kind of consumption. And I owe him—because he dedicated to me, he was kind enough to dedicate to me, sorry, The Capitalism of Seduction. He writes, 'To Dominique Pagani, to whom this book owes much,' whereas he owes me strictly nothing, if we're really to speak in terms of debt, which is already ridiculous in itself, but anyway, it's nothing compared to what he brought me.
28:02 For me, he brought me—I was a bit cut off, given my colonial childhood and all, French from Algeria, I mean—but he brought me the distinction between capital goods and consumer goods. It's an extraordinary theoretical acquisition. He told me, no, there's an order. There are collective goods, collective infrastructure. That's the invisible, that's the most important. It's the sewers underneath, it's the gas, it's the water, it's the electricity company, it's collective infrastructure.
28:32 So we consume after the effects. Then, coming into the household, there are household equipment goods, the washing machine, the fridge, etc., which appeared in the '50s, etc. And you don't consume a fridge, he says, that's not consumption, you consume what's inside it, it's a capital good. And last of all there's playful, libidinal, marginal consumption, reserved for a small fringe of the population. That's what he says—he doesn't say our society wallows in consumption. No, at one point, he does talk about the middle classes though, it's not just that...
29:02 Middle strata. Yes, sorry, yes, that's true, middle strata, that's a nuance—he's touchy about it, he says the Communist Party never did that analysis. He refuses the term 'middle class.' There you go, there you go, no, if you'll allow me, I'm not splitting hairs, it's because these are distinctions he holds dear. Yes, yes, I was just trying to be accurate. If I understand correctly, in fact, ultimately, the critique Clouscard makes is that we don't consume enough, and that ultimately, the consumption claimed to be universal has actually been the preserve of a tiny fraction of the population. That's what he's criticizing, in the end.
Scarcity, ecology, and regression 29:32 It's the fact that we talk about... We were talking about Africa earlier, you and I, on a planetary scale. What is it? You explained to me a Chinese person consuming too much? Yes, you'd say to a Chinese person that if they get a washing machine, it would take ten planets to... That's a monstrous line of reasoning. We had our fun for a century and a half, but you don't have the right because... That's monstrous. Let's go explain that to the Chinese. It's immoral, sure, but is this discourse still tenable today given resource limitations? Now I'm not being Clouscardian at all in asking this. I'm playing devil's advocate. I'm voicing modernity, that is, a modernity conscious of the limits of resources.
30:06 I just did a little interview in... What's it called? Ah, in Le Comptoir. Le Comptoir, right, on that subject—a part that got censored, so I see this can be unacceptable to some. I'm not going to censor you, but I'd like to understand. I'm not playing dumb. But I'm answering you sincerely, these are lies. We are not in scarcity. We're constantly made to believe there's scarcity, that resources are limited. That's not true. Even in the Neolithic, when there were no more shellfish in a pond, people just went further. There were fewer of us in the Neolithic. We've never produced so much food.
30:37 There is less famine now in Europe than there was when there were ten times fewer inhabitants. What do you think of Jean Ziegler's idea, my fellow countryman, who said... A Swiss above all suspicion. He was in charge of world hunger issues and said, about ten years ago, that the earth's natural resources, especially agricultural ones, though limited, should still be able to feed 12 billion people. And at the time he wrote that, we were at about 6 or 7 billion.
31:07 So he concluded that anyone who dies of hunger is a victim not of fate or accident, but of homicide. I agree with him. I've always liked Ziegler. There are anarchist sides to him that don't quite match my sensibility. But it's remarkable in its lucidity and documentation, outside the European bubble we confine ourselves to when it isn't purely Franco-French. Besides, he's someone who knows the state of the world. There you go. Yes, but this problem of resource limitation isn't just about food consumption, it's also about waste produced, for example.
31:39 That's a big part of it. Are you thinking of nuclear waste or waste in general? Nuclear too, of course, but waste in general. With ecology, you never get out of it. Coal has this drawback, so if you eliminate it and the ozone layer is fine because there's no more carbon, then it's nuclear—ah yes, but then there's the waste. It's deadly. You never get out of it. That's already a sign there's something else going on. I don't know, because there's no solution. There's something else at stake, more than the economic issue and all, it's not scientific. We claim to speak in the name of science and technology.
32:09 Actually, it's indifferent. I mean, it's a hatred of the modern world. That's all. And that's as old as modernity itself. Modernity is always trying to escape from itself. Investing in ecology, in an archaic world, in a world—I don't want to caricature Michéa—in a world where things were better before. That's not really Michéa. Let's not reduce him to that. But still, there's a lot of Michéa-ism that ended up there. There's a nostalgia. There you go, there you go, there you go. That's why we speak of postmodernity more than modernity. Postmodernity is much more reactionary—in the indefensible sense, there are defensible senses, of reference—than modernity when modernity is regressive.
32:46 I'll use a Freudian term. A regression is always condemned to fail. It's going back to the oral stage or the anal stage or the... It's always an earlier stage of the libido. Nerval has a magnificent line: 'Ignorance cannot be learned.' Nerval forbids himself any regression. We're talking about him, the madman, the depth of wisdom. He's crying because he's having a delirious crisis. He sees seven moons in the sky without blinking. He has a hallucinatory fit and all that. He rushes into Notre-Dame-de-Lorette to say a prayer. He hears choirs and hears that they're Arab choirs.
33:16 Anyway, he's in full delirium. And he says, I was trying to reassure myself by thinking of my religious education, going back to the catechism. And then, I was raised on the ideas of the 18th century—delirium. Ignorance cannot be learned. And that's where he quotes it. You can't act as though you're returning to former beliefs. I say, you're now saying the Earth is public—you mean, don't take me for a fool. You see what I mean? Yes. But do you think that ultimately this regression we're talking about today in postmodernity, that is, the incapacity to...
Progress, generation, and unemployment rate 33:47 Ah! Well, the fact of going backward, 'it was better before,' is perhaps linked to an incapacity to conceive of a future, actually. Because maybe, well, for example, in the 19th century, there was the idea of progress. And history, the future would always be better than the present. You're speaking of progressivism in the past tense. What? No, no, but I notice you speak of it in the past tense, like Foucault, of progressivism. That's true, well yes, spontaneously. No, but... But you're right, nobody defends progress anymore. No, but it was an ideology, we believed in it. Today, we have the impression that... Yes, you speak in the past tense, I still believe in it. We're a more skeptical generation than yours, I'm not sure that's globally true.
34:19 I don't think it's a problem of skepticism. I'll come back to it. I'm trying to be, in the end, the champion of the discourse. Yes, yes, exactly. Isn't that, in the end, linked to the fact that today, precisely, we no longer believe in progress. That is, we think that... If it were about progress... But you're so right. We're incapable of conceiving a future that's different, actually. It's only a triangle being fought by postmodern thought. The three values to combat are: man—humanism, that's Foucault; the universal—Lévi-Strauss. But no, that's just for our own culture, among the Bororo it's different.
34:50 Already, there's no universal. There's no universal, there's no man. Burke, the first of the great counter-revolutionaries, the Englishman, Burke—me, I don't know man, he says, the rights of man, the French Revolution, I don't know that. Me, I know the English, the Italians, that's de Maistre, I believe—there's Bonald too, de Maistre, Europe, but it's the same sensibility. There you go, I don't see 'man.' It's very Aristotelian. Aristotle said, we don't shake the hand of man in general, but of the singular man. For Aristotle, there's existence only of the individual and knowledge only of the general. He hadn't understood Plato at all. Yet he spent 30 years at the school.
35:21 We must talk about this, it's the reign of the individual. What I'm saying is, it's the same battle, a battle that appears when capitalism can no longer fulfill its contract. I'm speaking as a bridge player here—in the '70s, there had been the Marshall Plan, we thought everything was possible, and suddenly nothing was possible anymore. Production was cut back before there was any ecological discourse. And ecological discourse came to prop up, to serve as promotion for a productivism that capitalism had just abandoned and reversed.
35:52 We're not hiring you anymore, folks. We have too many jobs, etc. Progress is over. And bang, you're put on unemployment, and so a fashionable ecology emerges that criticizes progress, criticizes full employment, criticizes industry, criticizes smoking chimneys. You find yourselves back in the world you live in! No, precisely not anymore, because the postmodernity you're talking about, Foucault's, deconstruction—thankfully, we're already coming out of it to become something else. There's something not more progressive for all that, though. But I mean, that ideology is the one that created deconstruction, as they call it.
36:24 And all that still reigns in part of the academic world, but it's being heavily contested. No, we agree on that. More than 30 years ago, and thankfully so. You're paraphrasing Clouscard, fortunately, who says, yes, but the crisis. There's the liberal-libertarian strategy that collides with the crisis. And so, indeed, with the crisis, for me, hope is reborn. But hope for what? That is, the paradigm is in serious trouble. That's basically what you're saying. Yes, exactly.
36:55 Yes, exactly, the question I was asking you is, I'm entirely, I mean, on the contrary, I think we need to turn back toward something positive, actually. Our generation... We need to rediscover man, progress, the universal. Our generation too, the generation we belong to, him and me, that is, we grew up in this kind of, as you say, skepticism, almost pessimism. I understood, but I'm going to surprise both of you. The very act of speaking in generational terms is already regressive for me. It's not about saying what objectively belongs to one generation or another, but about the feeling of a generation.
37:25 Because the truth, the objective, doesn't depend on who perceives it. But whether we believe in progress or not, that can be generational. Because opinion changes, objectively, people's opinion. Clearly, first of all, I don't like the word 'believe,' because the establishment of progress, the fact that it has faded, that the notion of colonial progression has diluted. So in that sense, we can date it and say it's the generation of my grandfathers, my father, and me, roughly speaking, I mean, from the 19th century, from positivism up to, roughly, I mean, we can trace it back to the 18th century, roughly, with happiness.
38:03 It's funny, because between you and us, there's Foucault, not in generational terms, of course, but philosophically, in a way. You're from the pre-postmodern progressivism, and we're already in post-postmodernity. Yes, but that's where I find you blinded by the notion of generation. That's where I'm Marxian. I won't say Marxist so as not to be polemical or dogmatic. But that's where I'm Marxian. It's not that it's been that way since—and that's since the unemployment rate rose. That's where I'm Marxian. That's quite possible.
38:33 It made us gloomier, more pessimistic, you no longer believe in progress. All it took was lowering the full-employment rate—Heidegger replaces Hegel or Marx. Nietzsche replaces. All it takes is lowering the employment rate by three points. I'm more Marxian than ever because that's the discourse that accounts for your generation. But it's normal that there's also anxiety. Well, there's anxiety too. But we shouldn't confuse subjective anxiety, that is, the unhappy consciousness, to speak in Hegelian terms.
39:05 The unhappy consciousness is not the lucid consciousness. No, that's not what I'm saying. Well, to use those words, one can't deny that even if it's subjective consciousness, there is indeed, in our generation, a kind of disenchantment. Ah, but there's good reason! You've been struck, you've been battered. We're determined to think what we think, and it's not because we're determined... There, we agree. Then the question is how you ultimately overcome this too. Of course, now I'll spare our audience, but as far as the three of us are concerned, I agree with you that it's merciless. I mean, I left teaching just like that because I had a girlfriend who thought I traveled too much, but suddenly I went into consulting, I found a job as soon as I left one.
39:44 I claim allegiance to Hegel. Hegel said, 'You can never be more than your time, but at best, you will be your time.' In philosophy one must try to understand at least the era one lives in. And what characterizes it, for me, is that it's dominated by a power whose distinguishing feature, compared to old Europe to which we belong, is being without history. The United States of America. But in the sense in which Marx said there exist peoples without history? Exactly, being deprived of history. In a relative sense, every people has a history. I'm not trying to counter—I'm not being Sarkozy, who says Africa hasn't entered history. But I mean, there, that's interesting.
40:15 And that culture, Anglo-Saxon, essentially trans-Atlantic more than English, tries to educate the world through Michael Jackson, into a society without history, into a culture that is amnesia-inducing and amnesiac. That accounts for a lot of what I'm saying. I recently heard, I didn't know, that there's a filmic equivalent of what I lament in music. Namely, there are young people making 6-second, 10-second, 15-second films, played on loop afterward. Ah, but those are called Vines. There you go, there you go, there you go.
40:45 There you go, there you go. That can produce a case. It's always about limiting every genre. Me, I'm... We talked about genres earlier, you can make masterpieces in every genre. I have nothing against any genre. I love bel canto, as much as Wagner even. Thanks, but that's not the question. But still, all else being equal, I mean, it's still significant of an era where a film is already too long. I've seen 17-year-olds for whom already a film is too long, so they watch series instead. But a series is too long, so they watch a clip. A film is too long.
41:15 Yes, except that in cinema today, films are much slower on average, especially in the Hollywood industry, than films from 30 or 40 years ago. I think the average length of films has actually increased rather than decreased. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I'm subtracting the special effects, which for me are... Ah yes, if you... There's nothing left. If you do the subtraction. There you go. Well, anyway. Similarly, in music, if you remove all the passages expressed in terms of timbre by the amplified string. I'm being a bit ironic there. There's nothing left.
Middle classes, separation of genres, and Rousseau 41:47 At the moment the middle classes emerge, well, are about to assert themselves, it's often been said that it's a bourgeois revolution, the French Revolution, after all, the bourgeoisie. What is it in Hegel? It's the middle term between the family and the state. Between the two, there's civil society, called bürgerliche, as they say in the German language. Plus it's bourgeois society. There's always an ambiguity in the French translation. You'd better use 'civil society' since 'bourgeois' is connoted differently in French. But it means the middle classes between the aristocracy and the proletariat. There's still the bürgerliche Gesellschaft. There you go.
42:24 I'm not speaking ill of it. We're all in it. Lenin belongs to the bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Die Gemeinschaft. That's also what makes the distinction—between community and society. I see you know decisive distinctions. That's very important. I wrote my thesis on Hegel so I had to read in German. And me, I'm Corsican. You don't see the connection. No. I'm fed up with communitarianism. When I'm back home and there are signs saying 'French, get out' and below 'Arabs, get out,' only Corsicans are good. If you're not Corsican, you're a fool, in a way. I get it.
42:54 I'm not even considered Corsican back home even though I'm Corsican on both my father's and mother's side. Just because I've lived abroad. Ah yes. No, but community is poor compared to society. I know I'm going against the dominant current today. Not necessarily. But it's the passage from organic society to society... That sounds a bit Jewish. That sounds a bit multinational. There's the old world. Before the French Revolution, there's the separation of genres. We learn that in school. Classicism separates the genres. Romanticism fuses them. But we fail to see that it's not only Romanticism and Classicism.
43:24 This is the old world and the new one in which we live. We've been modern ever since genres... ever since the boundary between genres blurred. Ever since Baudelaire wrote prose poems. Monsieur Jourdain, he writes either poetry or prose. It's quite clear. What isn't prose is verse. Where do people write poems? Starting from the French Revolution, that is, from the moment they force the king to wear a red bonnet on the balcony, all of that, it mixes. I'm doing it on purpose, mixing social classes with literary genres.
43:56 There's a deep connection. Things are separated in periods of social hierarchy, caste-based periods, if you like. Yes, because in a way, classicism is an art that comes from above. Well, there you go. Whereas with the French Revolution, the hierarchical system is more or less destroyed. There you go. I thought you were going to say "from below" for contrast. Actually it comes from the middle, between the two. The middle classes, and it's the reign of the middle classes that begins. Right. In French. Well, since I'm speaking to a Swiss person, there's a birth certificate for this fusion, from someone I keep wondering how he managed to escape madness.
44:32 I'm talking about the madness that gets people locked up, because he was a bit neurotic around the edges. I'm thinking of Rousseau. I find it miraculous that he escaped madness. He was headed straight for complete madness. Yes. Déclassé as he was, on the border between two worlds. Yes, and with raw, exposed sensitivity. There you go, with a paranoid streak. There's an obvious paranoia at the end, but it's not just paranoia. But partly justified, it seems to me. Oh, I'll agree with that gladly. No, no, because I'm one of those who rebel against the reductive way the word "paranoid" gets applied to Rousseau.
45:03 Imagined redoubts, imagined dangers, imagined threats. Except that when they burn your major books in the public square, when you're issued an arrest warrant by the three greatest powers of your time, Prussia, France, and Austria, not everything is in his head. Let's not kid ourselves. He had reason to be a bit worried. And when he has to move house every other month... And without even getting into the question of physical dangers, there are intellectual cabals that are undeniable. Starting with Voltaire's. Voltaire's. When you have the prophet of tolerance writing the Letter to the Citizens, where Voltaire practically demands Rousseau's head on a chopping block, roughly speaking, after Rousseau had refused a theater, which was itself a provocation against Voltaire.
45:45 Jusqu'à... would have said... And he attacked "Le Mondain," Rousseau did. And Voltaire couldn't stand it. The seizure of power by the middle classes, as you said, corresponds in many fields to a mixing of genres. And that's... And there, allow me to insist, because I don't like insisting on my own originality. I don't have any. I'm a transmitter. I'm a guy who transmits. I'm a teacher. I'm not a creator. Otherwise I'd write instead of talk. But there's a theme that obsesses me and that isn't dealt with. It's precisely that of fusion or separation. What's current in modernity is the fusion of genres, of forms of expression.
Two fractures: romanticism and a disenchanted world 46:18 Modernity, for me, appears from two great fractures: the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, at about the same time, roughly the 18th century. I mean, we are the products of those two great fractures. That happens maybe once every 20 centuries, fractures like that. I mean, it's enormous. Now, at that moment, Romanticism appears. The first ideology, but in the Marxian sense, serving both in literature and in aesthetics — that's not at all pejorative. I mean, the first form of expression of the middle classes.
46:49 Romanticism, I sound a bit reductive. But that's it, Romanticism, it's amazing on that level. It's modernity. When Hegel, since you know Hegel, says, right, there's the Orient, symbolism, there's Greece, classicism, and then there's modernity, Romanticism, the Christians. We don't even find the same logic elsewhere. He saw it well, Hegel, in a way, because he steps back, he makes... those are the right divisions, the operative ones. "Christian" here doesn't mean holy-roller, in the sense Nietzsche criticizes.
47:21 No, he's talking about Germanic-Christian civilization, which is Western civilization. There you go. That means Descartes. That means there are no longer nymphs and springs. There's H2O, we are materialists, and springs are just springs. That means it's water, H2O, there's no divinity, no immanence. If there is a god, he's transcendent, we never encounter him. So if there's a technological Europe, a West with a technical relationship to the world, it's because it was culturally Christian, and it has a demystified world that can be worked on — there are no nymphs to respect or anything like that.
47:51 At the spring, you build a dam, and that's it, that's all. There's no divinity. Since the Protestant Reformation. Protestantism believed that and went back to the sources on that level. It's a bit more Christian than Catholicism. I'm Corsican, I'm Catholic through and through by my origins — my aunts prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua to find their rings when they'd lost them. I've lived in Africa long enough to see that that's animism. That's what existed before Christianity. I kiss the crucifix and the ex-votos. That's Catholicism. Catholicism, they're clever, they're political, the Jesuits.
48:21 They reconciled those who claimed Christianity with the good old habits of the common people, who need the here and now. The people need immanence. They built all their churches where there had been a pagan temple before, like that, a cult of Diana. The Jesuits aren't stupid. They knew how to organize. There's a compromise. The first quantified, modern sociological study is Durkheim's Suicide. It's well known. It's the first one where he shows that it's in Strasbourg, in France, that there are more suicides because it's Protestant. And that if you're an unwed mother there, if suddenly you're pregnant without a determined husband, you can shoot yourself because you can't be reintegrated into society.
49:00 Do you think Catholicism is a bit more flexible? Wait, I'm Corsican. They'll tell you "you have a child," with the scandal, and then afterward there'll be tears at the first child, the bambino, there you go, we work it out. Because there's the Virgin Mary. With her, she understands everything. The bearded guy, the Father, let's not even talk about him, he doesn't listen to anything. The Son, he's nice but a bit weak. There's the Virgin Mary, to whom you can tell everything. Catholicism is the master of easing things. You know, you attribute it to a kind of syncretism. But of course, but it's a syncretism for political reasons.
Hölderlin, Nerval, Wagner: madness and fusion of genres 49:31 For men of culture, it's the only way to connect with the problems of people who have no culture and reconcile them with those who do. So there's a problem of the fusion of genres. And the first time this happened, it produced madness. Hölderlin's madness was to have tried to reflect on genres. No one took the distinction of genres as seriously as he did. The alternation of epic, lyric, dramatic genres within the poem, for example. Nerval, in his novella Angélique, which I place above everything, even though it's said to be a somewhat minor work — the novella that opens the sequence Les Filles du feu, no less — comes from a verified historical anecdote, an amendment that was lost at the time and that forbade authors from doing serialized novel-history.
50:16 Either you write history, or you write a novel, you don't do both like Dumas, where you never know if you're in fiction or not. And like Nerval, Dumas, Gautier earned their living to begin with, or Eugène Sue, with the serialized novel, in magazines — it appeared in newspapers for real. The novella I'm talking about appeared in Le National as a serial. Before being integrated into Les Filles du feu. I mean, it was killing them in their mode of expression. And Nerval raises the problem. Suddenly he goes far beyond the anecdote that was at the base of his novella and asks: from what point is it a novel, from what point is it history.
50:51 He realizes the problems had never been raised. It's characteristic of modernity that the boundary blurs. It's the moment when, in Verdi, the aria is clear, it's identified, it's so-and-so's aria. Or Figaro's aria in Mozart, that's quite clear. Whereas in Wagner, a kind of permanent melisma — if there even is one — you're never sure whether you're in recitative or in aria, because there's a fusion of recitative and aria. Not just of words and music, that's all of opera, but of recitative and aria.
51:24 We have what Wagner calls the endless melody. One mustn't be too metaphysical about it — it just means indefinite. Permanent modulation, there's never a final cadence. In Tristan, it's striking. That's what fascinated people. I wonder if to some extent we're not coming back a bit from that. Because all this mixing of genres is, in fact, an expression of freedom of something. And now, where things are tightening up a little... The fusion. Sorry, yes. Yes, excuse me, the fusion. Now things tend to contract again... I'm using the river metaphor. I'm thinking of the literary example, the novelistic example, where, depending on the subjects treated by literature, authors are much more careful to clearly label things "novel."
52:02 Of course. "Novel" became necessary to avoid legal trouble. A few decades ago, the fusion of genres was more thoroughly achieved than it is today. No, but already, not only with regard to stylistic critical analysis, but truly political critique. Because a novelistic narrator can say whatever he wants. An author, insofar as he expresses... Yes, exactly. It's theater, novel, all at once... I think it's trickier to write that kind of text today.
The piano, the baroque, and the Germans according to Nietzsche 52:32 And if you do it, you really have to barricade yourself behind the label "novel." And there, it's a return to genre. You're quite right. He echoes that rightly, and I notice it empirically too. And the regressive effect. From the standpoint of music, since you're both connoisseurs, the development of music during the Revolution, like many other things at that time, does draw or try to draw on a classical ideal, which is the ancient ideal. Of course. Like David's painting. Should we hear that, then, as a step backward, a continuity, or still as a rupture and a mixing of genres proper to this modernity it inaugurates?
53:07 In France, it doesn't amount to much. I'm stating a banality. Because we're talking about which... it's not musical. At that time, Germany takes over. Music, up until then, had been Italian or French. But suddenly, Germany, that's its great era. It will reign over music from Bach practically to Schoenberg. I mean, well, that was enormous all the same. Passing through Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, that's quite a lot of weight. Anyway, aside from a few exceptions like Chopin, everything happens in Germany.
53:37 We should be fair. Then there's Italian opera. Let's start with the productive forces since we're talking music. The piano. It was new, the piano. The transition from harpsichord to piano. Right. Bach was paid as a consultant to try out and test the first pianos. Right? Yes, yes. He found flaws, his improvements were taken into account. That's interesting. He was paid as a consultant. Its development coincides with the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the French revolutions, the middle classes. There's a piano in every bourgeois household. The little girl is going to take piano lessons. The little boy is going to take piano lessons. It's a way of having an orchestra. What does that mean? As an object, was it more accessible than the harpsichord?
54:08 That is, the interiorization of the public. What was public at court becomes external to my home. Yes, because the piano already existed among people. It's not at my place. It happens at court, culture does. Or at the Théâtre de Bourgogne, that's not a home, not a household. With the bourgeoisie, the piano would allow you to have an orchestra, because with a piano you can do everything. You can do a Beethoven symphony by reduction. You can play chords, so you can reproduce any music with the piano. One of the greatest pianists of this century, Sviatoslav Richter, for example, did his whole training period as an opera accompanist. It costs too much to pay an orchestra for opera rehearsals.
54:40 It's a pianist who accompanies the singers during rehearsals. The piano can do everything. It can do the horn, the oboe. No. Because the harpsichord doesn't depend on the strength of the touch. That's where the word "piano" comes from. It's short for "pianoforte," soft-loud. You can play loud, you can play soft, you can refine your touch. The harpsichord, you strike it this way or that way, it's the same sound. It's like a synthesizer. If you have a synth, whether you hit it hard or not, it's not you making the sound, it's the computer. For the harpsichord, it's a bit the same. It's a plucked string.
55:10 When you press a key on a piano, it strikes the string. It's a struck string. When you press a key on a harpsichord, it's plucked, like a guitar. There's a little quill that comes and plucks the string like that. It's a guitar with a keyboard. A lute with a keyboard. So it's not just that the piano as an object was, at a given moment, economically more accessible? No. That's not it. It's also that. It's true they mass-produced it. That corresponds to the industrial revolution. It's not about the price of a harpsichord. It's the real marquetry work. Yes, but the harpsichord could also have been taken up by the industrial revolution.
55:42 Absolutely. But the piano matched the feeling, as they say in jazz, the perfect feeling of music inside my home, my family, my household. A figure like Chopin, who is emblematic of piano writing, for instance, who wrote only for piano. That was unique in the history of music. A guy who devoted himself to a single instrument. Chopin used to say: "I don't much like, like Liszt, playing in a big hall in public. For me, I need to play for a small audience in a salon." The piano, that's it. That's intimacy. It's the first home stereo system. Yes.
56:12 It's true that it's a revolution comparable to that. The piano is also, on its own, an orchestra. But of course! That is, to get that on a violin — aside from Bach's partitas — or on a sax, it's one note or two notes at a time. Whereas a piano, you can play ten. You can't do that with instruments, if we want to be rigorous, philosophical, linear — instruments of succession. The piano is also an instrument of simultaneity, of harmonies, and not only of the succession that is melody. There you go. So you can do everything. What is anti-modern?
56:43 The vogue for baroque music. There you go, that's what music reigned over Europe before the French Revolution had. We're right in it. Music with the same steady isometry as rock. That's why I say baroque, B-A-R-O-Q-U-E — I say rock. It came at the same time. The revival of baroque music, Albinoni's Adagio, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, that came in the 1950s at the same time as rock was coming. It's curious, but that's how it is. I'm not inventing anything here, quite the opposite. Why the connection?
57:13 Because it's a music that evokes a world where there's a place for everything and everything in its place. The world of La Bruyère's Characters, a timeless, structuralist world. A world of synchrony, not diachrony. Lévi-Strauss used to say, "I spent my life studying societies without history." I'm running through a series of puns that go in the direction of what I'm saying. It's not entirely ironic. It's serious. Modernity doesn't like itself. When we've understood that, that the vogue for baroque music is typical of modernity — the first people to rehabilitate the baroque repertoire were the Romantics.
57:48 Whereas generally the baroque aesthetic is opposed to the Romantic approach. The first time the St. Matthew Passion was performed after the day it was created, for Bach it was an event, it was an Easter, there you go, full stop, then you move on to something else. For us, it's one of the greatest masterpieces, one of the crowning achievements of the entire history of Western music. For him, it was the cantata of the day, that week's cantata. It's Mendelssohn. It's Mendelssohn who brings the Romantics together and who, in Leipzig, by founding the Gewandhaus, which remains one of the best orchestras in the world, suddenly revives the St. Matthew Passion.
58:18 It's the Romantics who rehabilitated the baroque repertoire. Beethoven always kept the Well-Tempered Clavier on his piano. That's interesting. One of the most beautiful pages Nietzsche ever wrote — if all classical music liner notes were written like that, it would be wonderful. It's his account of his first contact with the overture to Die Meistersinger. That famous page found in Beyond Good and Evil. "I heard yesterday, as if for the first time, the overture to the Meistersinger." What sap, what climates, what force are mingled in this music. In short, it's a magnificent text.
58:49 And sometimes this music seems to us outdated, heavy, and pompous. Sometimes, extremely youthful, capricious, harsh; at times it has the flabby side of fruit ripened too late. And the ending is magnificent. I come back to the Germans. This music expresses to perfection what I think of the Germans. They are of the day before yesterday and of the day after tomorrow. They are never of today. Yes, there you go. There you go. Because France has problems. I speak German — I said "problems." Problems. And Germany is a problem.
59:20 He's the best historian of Germany, and he begins his history of Germany like that: France has problems. Germany is a problem. Isn't that still relevant today? We'd have to ask them. It hasn't aged a day. France has problems. It hasn't aged a day. Oh, well, no. Germany is a problem for the Greeks, for Europe, for everyone, for Ukraine, for Russia. Germany is a problem even for the United States. They're starting to have doubts, their most faithful ally, their best friend. The three greatest madmen of modernity, in chronological order — Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche — it's disturbing, all the same.
The three madmen of modernity, opera, and Racine 59:50 are haunted by this problem. What's Nietzsche's first work? It's a tribute to Wagner, to the one who wants to achieve the fusion of word and music, yes or no, of the sung genre and the played, instrumental genre. Already, opera lies at the heart of this impurity. In Monteverdi's time, the founder of opera, they spoke of parlando cantando. Speaking while singing, we'll find out. Nowadays there's slam or rap, which might be something like a modern equivalent of speaking-or-singing.
1:00:22 The question deserves to be asked; it's practically insoluble. Rap, at its origin, proceeds from a mixing of genres. Of course. It's the problem of classical recitative versus aria. There's the recitative where you say what's happening, Count Almaviva and so on, and then suddenly it stops and there's Rosina's aria, the countess's aria, etc. Wagner will do away with all that by fusing recitative and aria, making a kind of continuous melody that is at once recitative and melody. And yet Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy, already raises the question, even if he raises it not for his own era but for ancient Greece, since he places the boundary — in a spot where it's hard to know exactly where to place it — within the history of tragedy and the music that accompanies it.
1:01:06 Can we also speak of a mixing of genres in that transition? I'm in the process of illustrating this. But I wouldn't want the trees... for us to lose sight of, to muddy the waters, or to forget the forest before diving into the branches to answer specific questions. Let me recall at the outset that if we're talking about this, it's because I'm saying there's a mortal danger. Nietzsche's madness, Nerval's madness, Hölderlin's madness are not unrelated to a concern common to all three. And yet all three are different.
1:01:36 Extremely different psychologically, in profile. But they have in common an obsession with the problem of the fusion of genres. There's a danger. I'm not denouncing it. I am modern. I have no choice. I am in favor of the fusion of genres. But somehow, from the moment you put a red bonnet on Louis XVI on the balcony of Versailles, everything becomes possible. I come back to my parallel. Mixing of classes, with the middle classes — what are you? We all dream of being aristocratic. There has never been such a cult of roots as since the bourgeoisie came to power, for example.
1:02:08 Yes, it's performed practically all year round. That's clear. That's true. It's rather aristocratic and royalist par excellence. Racine, who goes so far as to say in the preface to Phèdre, justifying why he modified Seneca's tradition somewhat — Seneca who put the slander in Phèdre's own mouth, whereas Racine puts it in the servant's mouth. He says: I thought that a princess of her rank could not lend herself to this appalling thing, slander. I thought it more fitting in the mouth of a servant. Socially, it's chilling, but at the same time it was common at the time.
1:02:41 We're at Versailles, so to speak. A princess cannot slander. It's vile, that's for a servant. There you go. Well, he's Proust's favorite author. Look how he trembles with emotion in his narration when the narrator learns for the first time that he's going to go hear Berma recite Phèdre. Well, I mean, it's... There you go. So these middle classes emerging from the French Revolution are somehow condemned to the fusion of genres. Theater is the worldly genre par excellence. I don't mean that pejoratively, it's the genre where you need an audience watching you, it's recognition by the crowd.
Nerval between two graves, mediator of Germany 1:03:15 Today, that's showbiz. Nerval always dreamed of writing the play that would captivate people, like his friend Dumas. Everything Alfred de Musset too. He fails completely. Musset's great disillusionment at not having succeeded... He's sometimes a Wagner, in the sense of being unique enough to say not only will you listen to me, but I will build a temple where only my music is played. Nerval is very conscious — his father is in the Grande Armée and he himself wasted his time in cafés — of the relationship, like Kafka's to his father.
1:03:47 He sees this son writing poetry, nonsense like that, and it served him somewhat during the cholera epidemic in which Hegel died in Berlin. He writes to his father, timidly — he's not the type to pound the table — and says we should have gone to Germany because over there everyone is mad, I'm not mad there. Germany, our common mother. He knows his mother is buried now — it's in Poland, in Glogau, not far from there in Silesia — she had been imprudent enough to follow her husband on the Napoleonic campaigns, and she died catching fevers on a bridge loaded with corpses during the retreat from Russia, and so we understand better Nerval's investment in the East, in journeys toward Germany — the quest is a quest for a tomb.
1:04:32 All of Nerval unfolds between the mother's tomb, which he was never able to reach, and Rousseau's tomb, near which he was born — and so he speaks of, in which novella does he speak of Ermenonville? Almost in — I take Sylvie, Sylvie, which is his best-known work, with a beautiful passage from Proust where he speaks of that purple color in Sylvie — which has an autobiographical, Romantic side that Nerval loves to slip into conventions, that's the trap that made it take so long to recognize him as a first-rank author. He's the complete opposite of a Baudelaire, again, who pounds the table, of a Rimbaud who innovates from his very first words, I mean he's less of an avant-gardist — no, on the contrary, he's someone who wants absolutely to fit into what's already working, so much so that, being somewhat on the margins, he has a literally suicidal discretion. Baudelaire, in the most beautiful tribute ever paid to Nerval, says: a year ago, to the day, sorry, a man resembling — a man sought out, in the night, the most infamous part of Paris to loosen his soul there, the blackest street he could find, with a discretion that resembled contempt. Nerval understood Baudelaire — a discretion — Baudelaire understood Nerval, sorry, Baudelaire understood Nerval, I can't manage to say it.
1:05:42 and because often the revolution of modern literature that's said to begin with Baudelaire is roughly, statistically, correct — everything begins with Baudelaire, even Rimbaud, who's uncompromising, who's sharp with all these young poets — Baudelaire, for whom form, so vaunted in him, is petty, he had everything, in too artistic a milieu — yet he still says he's the first "seer," king of poets, a true god — it's still with Baudelaire that it really starts, the Mallarmés, after Baudelaire, need no mention — and we forget that Nerval had already started that. Baudelaire is the first to acknowledge it, but with such a suicidally discreet manner that it went unnoticed. For example, he's the first to speak of Wagner — people think it's Baudelaire who pays tribute to Wagner, well, tributes to Fauré etc. — no, it's Nerval. So I return to my parallel — Nerval, yes, quite by chance, it's May 22, 2016, and for you, does that date mean something? Oh my goodness, well yes, yes, indeed, May 22, I recall two things: it's the birthday, the anniversary of the births of Nerval and of Wagner. One might ask what the connection is between the "sursum boom-boom," to speak like Nietzsche, of Wagner — sursum boom-boom, the big effects, the Valkyrie.
1:06:52 Let me digress for a moment: there was a time when the Olida sausage brand did its advertising with a Valkyrie recording herself on stage, opening her mouth to let out the Valkyrie's cry — it was horrible, you'd see a string of sausages coming out of her mouth. Well, that's a bit like the Wagner Nietzsche portrays at times, even if in my view Nietzsche died of his love for Wagner. On May 22nd there are these two — Wagner's death, which is a death well known to filmmakers. I don't know if filmmakers think of it when they watch Visconti's Death in Venice, but Wagner did die in Venice, he managed to arrange that, showman to the very end — "me, I die in Venice," not everyone can say that. Venice matters: that's where Tristan was composed, that's where modern music was born, modern harmony, the harmony that would give rise, in classical music, to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, the Vienna School — this is banal, well known in the history of music — or, in jazz, to jazzy harmonies, Bill Evans and all that. Debussy, all of that would have been unthinkable without the harmonies of Tristan, and all of that was born in the lagoons of Venice. Anyway, it took a Boche in Venice for all that to happen, and there you go.
1:08:03 May 22nd, curiously, is also Nerval's date — Nerval, no doubt the greatest translator of German Romanticism in France, so there is a certain continuity after all. I seem to be opposing Nerval and Wagner — true, we picture a little dreamer, a fantasist, a lightweight, a typical Frenchman. "Oh, is that how you see him?" No, but that's how he was seen in his own time, let's be clear. Nerval has only been recognized as a first-rank writer for a relatively recent period — this isn't widely known. For instance, a work which for me is one of the most important — the novella that opens Les Filles du feu, Angélique, right before Sylvie, which functions as a screen memory. Sylvie has such a reputation, was considered such a masterpiece, such a gem — Proust praised it to the skies, Proust dreamed of writing half as well as the author of Sylvie, he noted in a notebook that he was trying to go further than Gérard — well, I'm working on memory, Gérard de Nerval, that must have fascinated Proust, this masterpiece for which Sylvie serves as a screen memory — and we tend to pass over Angélique, which for me is perhaps the longest work ever written since Homer's Odyssey — Ulysses, who is named at the end of Angélique, in passing, in Nerval's manner, discreetly, not like in Joyce, you know, right from the emblematic title.
1:09:13 we know we're going to be talking about Ulysses. No, no — in 1851 he had just come out of yet another crisis of... I'm no specialist, I'm no doctor, but it resembles manic depression, basically cyclothymia as it's called now, the polarities, swinging from total depression to mystical euphoria. But anyway, each time, this recovery, this cycle — he comes out of a crisis, he travels, his friends find him some official pretext: "you're going to go police book forgeries of French books in Holland, with help from the ministry." Nice friends — Théophile Gautier, who never took him seriously as a writer, a good pal with a wonderful pen who writes you the best reviews of minor plays, but they never took him seriously as a great writer — they're the great writers, not Nerval, second fiddle. So it's better to be unknown than misjudged — unknown, you can always benefit from rehabilitation, a sudden discovery, whereas misjudged, you have to overcome prejudices, and Nerval has always been the object of prejudice. Sorry, I'm talking about Nerval because it's the 22nd — and nothing, the anguish of madness, and I escape from it.
1:10:23 through travel. Travel makes him creative again, because his madness often came from a doubt about his ability to write — interesting, don't forget that Proust, right up until the beginning, the point where he starts writing the Recherche, he doesn't move forward, he thought he was a mediocre author, that everything had already been said before him, and much better. Well, Nerval was troubled by this too, but here, travel fertilizes him, and so he writes to Jules Janin: a marvel, last night, touching the banks of the Rhine, I found my voice again, by the same means I wrote a sonnet while going from Strasbourg to Baden — and he makes the Baden-Strasbourg, Strasbourg-Baden trip five times. Here's someone for whom borders were more spaces than lines, he delights in the in-between — that's it, the translator of Germany into France, I say that on purpose, it's a permanent mediation. "You should come to Spain, the whores are cheap there."
