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Mafia Trece's theatrical rap 0:00 The petit Chablis, we had a coffee. And a coffee. Did you have a double and me one just now? You see, I'm already going to forget, you see. But me, I'll have a coffee. But I drink so many coffees that I forget. So, I'll ask you again for a double, please. It's a very... It's a city... UMP, well... Yes, I don't speak so wrongly. I had a UDF mayor. That's on the right, you know. I had a UDF mayor who was delighted with my presence because I kept the housing projects from exploding, you know. It was de Caïra because the youth center was mediating between the young rappers.
0:33 That was my mission, you know. I brought my son over with his group, from Paris. Come on, I'll transport you, I'll house you, but there's no fee because I'm not allowed to pay one. This group, for those who don't know, because everyone knows it's... Mafia Trece. I've talked about it to friends since you told me that. Does anyone know it? Of course. Well, then... Friends my age. Obviously, sure. In the '90s, not the very young ones, but people in their thirties who listened to rap when they were 15-20, know a bit about that.
1:07 No, because they nearly went gold with their first album, actually. There was an article about them in Le Monde des débats because they had inaugurated a genre called theatrical rap. Yes, yes. Rap with a sketch, for example. They were long tracks. There was the bailiff. That was my son. He was the only white guy in the group. So, it didn't miss. He played the bailiff, Maître Kobayashi. Maître Kobayashi. Yes, yes. I remember it very well. It's one of the songs I remember. Me, who denounces binary metric music and drum machines, I produced James and their group. Mister Kobayashi, I'm fed up, it's young, consoudo pavachi.
1:41 And then, he adds, much to my regret, the immigrants are living the easy life in this country and our true France is crumbling despite a helping hand from Mégret. That's my son saying that. Yes, right, I know, because that's the role of this Maître Kobayashi. Well, I'll tell my son, that'll make him happy. I'll say, I met a friend who quoted me passages from the album. What he did was narrative. And then, theatrical, because each MC, each person... Was in their role. Ah well, a role, a theatrical role, without necessarily having to carry it in oneself. And Diam's sometimes played a role.
2:12 She played the role of a bourgeois woman, actually. She wasn't well known at the time. But she already had that edge. Yes, it was even better back then, I think. But well, that was an issue. You're better placed than me to judge that. I found her very nice, very energetic. There's a Togolese guy, a Cameroonian guy. Yes, but there's a song in which she's socially demoted. I don't know for what reason. Then she has to move to the suburbs when she was in the center. She doesn't manage to fit in at all. She tries to buy hash from everyone as soon as their skin is a bit tanned. As we arrive.
Rousseau the pleasure-seeker: the Confessions 2:53 Rousseau to Lenin. If I were a writer, I'd have made an Opus Magnum with that title. Passing through Rimbaud, through Wagner, Nietzsche. That's an interesting sequence. A pleasure-seeker too. Really? You read the Confessions, he's a guy who never stops seeking pleasure. The scene with the two girls. The cherries. Yes, Madame de Graffenried and Madame what's-her-name. I defy the whole of libertine literature to unleash the libido like those few pages do.
3:26 But we're more in the pastoral than the libertine with that scene. In what sense, if he doesn't work? First of all. One doesn't exclude the other. First, if we see the countryside, it's to sleep with girls. Come on, the pastoral isn't the real countryside, it's not the countryside of poverty. Yes, but there's not that bawdiness. It's Virgil's countryside, the Bucolics. It's a title from Virgil. Watch out, there are girls. But bucolic doesn't necessarily mean chaste. But it stays wise. It's a corset in which cherries are thrown down from the tree. Yes! Cherries of love. Madame de Graffenried and Madame Galley.
3:56 De Galley. Yes, it's one of my favorite passages. Very apt. It's extraordinary because I mean... Who arrives on horseback. And that comes back all the time with him. What he enjoyed on Saint Peter's Island. There, it's not the casual hookup. It's more precious idleness. As he says, it's a corset where one talks. When he says, I would put to shame all the men of this century regarding pleasure. Every time, he knows well he's going against what's called pleasure. Yes, or else in his boat with his rabbits.
4:26 There you go. That is, in a way, he's a guy... That's why I always draw a parallel between Clouscard and Rousseau. Both have exactly the same position relative to the intelligentsia of their era. The Huron who suddenly shows up with his accent. No, but it's a pleasure, I'd say, almost Epicurean in the philosophical sense of the term. That is, a pleasure that remains austere all the same. Because, unlike some of his contemporaries, among the encyclopedists, for example, for whom pleasure is aristocratic pleasure, it's the orgy, it's excess of wine, of meat.
4:57 He, not at all. It's a temperate pleasure. Be post-Freudian about it. You know well that's what you call, how did you put it, puritan pleasure? A pleasure, how did you say? Me, I was saying Epicurean, because, contrary to what people say, Epicureanism is a pleasure of measure. Yes, yes, yes. There's another word for a pleasure that's connected almost to scarcity. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Well yes, it's... Well yes, ataraxia... Wait, but we know well, since Freud, that all that is sublimated libido, sublimated sexuality. That's what Rousseau demonstrates at every moment. When he's finally in pleasure, then, in the sexual sense, with the Italian woman, I don't know if you recall in the Confessions...
5:29 The prostitute. Yes, yes, yes. Zulietta. Why doesn't it go very well? She's the one who advises him to go back to doing accounting. Yes, yes, forget about women. Underneath his paranoia, what remains is that as soon as a girl, as soon as it works well sexually, erotically, there's Madame de Larnage and this Italian prostitute. I'm giving examples where visibly it was a good hookup. And he expresses, there are pages where he expresses his gratitude toward these two women, which are very touching in Rousseau's writing. But every time, he has the suspicion that if they're that nice to him, it's because they have a vice, a flaw, one nipple missing.
Nerval at Chaalis: Rousseau, Henri IV and Gabrielle 6:05 Yes, yes, yes. I won't remind you. Yes, yes, I remember. It's venereal. It's an extraordinary fantasy. It's the ultimate immanent punishment imposing itself. Except for Madame de Larnage. He doesn't find that kind of thing in her case. There, it's truly, it's sacred, it's fabulous. Maybe that's where he was most sensual, where there's the least sensuality. It's complicated. It's modern. I want to tell you, because I say, listen, if only one thing were to remain of our conversation, it would be that. And I'm glad to be talking to a Swiss person, since I owe Rousseau to you, and I owe Nerval to you.
6:35 Nerval wanders through Angélique. He manages to find a pretext to arrive at his place, in the Valois, near Rousseau's tomb. There's always a reason to get there, even if one set off from Frankfurt. And there he arrives in Chaalis, 3 km from Rousseau's tomb, the Abbey of Chaalis. There's nothing there. It's written in big letters, that, because I say, today, there's nothing. There's an abbey, there's a castle where Henri IV sheltered his affair with Gabrielle d'Estrées. It's important for you to understand what I mean. And there's an extraordinary chapel in late Gothic style. It's quite wild.
7:05 There you go, there's no crowding. Overall, it's magnificent. And so, that's part of the same setup, Ermenonville, all that. There's even a bust of Rousseau by Houdon at the Château de Chaalis. And Nerval says this. The gatekeeper's son, who was showing us around the estate, tells us. Here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle, Gabrielle d'Estrées. Here is the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle. Every evening, Rousseau came to play guitar under her window. And the king, who was jealous, ended up having him killed. It's a nice bit of montage.
7:36 And Nerval, like us, like you, like me, starts off laughing. At the ignorance of the good peasant. He says, there you go, he says how legends are told. The popular voice mixes together three centuries apart. Henri IV. Is everything alright? Everything is just fine. You're kind, thank you. Henri IV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, it all gets mixed up. And then, he stops being ironic. He puts a period, he goes to a new line. He says, this legend is perhaps truer than one might think. By refusing the hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour, after Le Devin du village, Madame de Pompadour, won't you grant Rousseau a pension?
8:06 Yes. Rousseau ruined the edifice founded by Henri. Everything collapsed. His immortal image standing over the ruins. And what does he show? There's a very Marxian analogy between surplus value, extortion, gold, money, possession, and the pleasure of the favorite, Gabrielle. Gabrielle is nothing but the symbol of centuries of extortion of surplus value. That's what Nerval shows in this anecdote.
8:36 It's extraordinary. There's a Lacanian triangle right there. There's Henri IV, Gabrielle, possession, usufruct, pleasure, as we were saying. Pleasure, the quintessence of pleasure, usufruct, and Rousseau, the challenger who comes to play the guitar. I love the popular montage. Rousseau, he's a Casanova, the silk ladder, a bit of a swashbuckler. And the king who was jealous ended up having him killed. It's extraordinary.
9:06 That's how legends are formed. And this legend is perhaps truer than one might believe. I love Nerval's commentary, which ends up vindicating the myth. Which found a justification. Yes. That somehow, the popular poem is profound. How history turns into myth. But somehow, it's Lévi-Straussian, it becomes a truth on a second level. It's true, in a way, that the king enjoys the surplus value extorted from us. And so we can challenge him for it. After all, Gabrielle belongs to us too.
The fifth walk and the birth of poetic prose 9:36 It's magnificent. I love Switzerland because we always come back to Rousseau. And what's more, to Lake Biel. That is, when I was 17, my first big hitchhiking trip, when I was able to travel freely, away from my parents, it was to go to Lake Biel. I was coming from Africa. It's funny. It's not well known. My exoticism is the fir tree, not the palm tree. I know well. I mean, well, I'd been a bit frustrated by those landscapes. I knew them only from books. So I could roam the roads. I went. And I took the boat from La Neuveville.
10:08 A quarter of an hour. And we land, at the time you could, on the island, there was a little jetty, before Erlach, a small jetty, and I noticed that in La Neuveville, we're in full French-speaking territory, and in Erlach, we're in German-speaking territory. There, we're at the... But it turns out that this fifth walk, which inaugurates the fusion of genres, literary modernity, the pre-Proustian, pre-Flaubertian, pre-Chateaubriandesque sentence, the ebb and flow of this water, its continuous sound, but swelling at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes without relent, supplied the internal movement that reverie was extinguishing in me, it was enough to make me feel, with pleasure, my own existence, without taking the trouble to think.
10:49 Sentences like that had never been seen before, never. As much as he's a poor writer at the start, the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, it's stilted, full of oh's and ah's, big antitheses, so much here it's become fluid, it's become the magic of the modern, you know. Poetic prose, there it is, it appears. Right up to Proust, we're going to keep digging that furrow, I mean, up to Gracq, and beyond. Did you mean that this fusion corresponded to a linguistic fusion on this route between La Neuveville and Erlach?
11:21 Yes, but well, that's an interpretation after the fact, it's a coincidence that fits well. It's a coincidence that fits well, but is there such a thing as coincidence? I end up noting it, I'll risk the paranoia on purpose. But still, the fact that it's, and I'll be serious now, right at the geographical boundary between the French Enlightenment and the German Romantic night, oh yes, well, it's more about gold because the German Romantics, that's the Hymns to the Night of Novalis, that's not the Enlightenment, right, it's intuition, it's dream, it's the oneiric, it's night, you know, it's Tristan, the great second act, the night, may day never return.
11:56 Rousseau, that's this synthesis, it's neither one nor the other, he didn't become psychotic, he's not Hölderlin. I admire the fact that, despite his paranoid tendency, let's say, tempered by what we said earlier, fairly justified by reality in part, I mean, still he saved his psyche, whereas he had everything it takes to become a Van Gogh, a Hölderlin, a Nietzsche, a Nerval. It's true, it's true that it could have... He's the first to inaugurate this fusion, and he pulls through. I'm fascinated by this mastery, somehow.
The collective saves Rousseau; Musset and the end of cycles 12:27 There's still a possible balance at that time, because to my mind, the primary value is still the value of happiness. Happiness was therefore not a new idea in Europe, as Saint-Just said. What is it that makes a Rousseau pull through and a Nietzsche not pull through? I'll tell you, it might seem reductive and Marxist to you, but it's because Rousseau remains a holist, somehow, he knows that it's the collective that's decisive. He's the only guy who wrote both La Nouvelle Héloïse and The Social Contract, the fifth walk and Emile. He's the only one. The others will later have a choice, either you're Zola, a progressive, or you're in escapism, or you're in hermeticism, you'll set the naturalists against the symbolists.
13:07 But it's precisely in that he's not Romantic, and it's in that he survives, whereas a Nerval, for example, because he's not in self-lamentation, because the collective comes first... Absolutely. I'll even grant you that. That's why Nerval keeps coming back to haunt Rousseau's tomb, because he knows there's a solution, that regeneration, the Mussets and so on, the children of the century, that escaped them, that Rousseauian solution. Yes, because they're disenchanted, because it's through the Revolution. But yes, ironically, Musset had himself called the coffee prince. But Musset's poetry is a bit underrated.
13:40 It's funny to see, when you take stock of the era, Musset is often seen as a slightly saccharine romantic, whereas when you read his theater, it's much more Gothic. That's Rimbaud's fault. Yes, but I don't understand that judgment. Rimbaud had the nerve to say that Musset was fourteen times execrable, because he was elegiac. And Baudelaire says that all elegiac poets are scoundrels. He suffers a bit from that, Musset, that languorous poet side. Whereas, as you say very well, he's the best analyst of postmodernity. The first one. Confession of a Child of the Century. It's the analysis of what we are.
14:11 Thanks to my gray hair, I can say that when I was 13, he was an author as important as Hugo. Right, yes. Now, nobody talks about Musset anymore. He's right to go. Me though, I who studied literature, this Musset, I heard about him all the time. Because it's on the curriculum, maybe, I don't know, Romanticism was on the syllabus or something like that. But I mean, nobody knows Musset. Is there anyone young, in that generation, who reads Musset? He's not as sentimental as he's made out to be, because that's what's surprising. It's almost, it's almost Gothic. Because we mentioned Hegel earlier, who studied all this well. He knows his contemporaries well.
14:41 He cut his teeth in Jena when he stopped being a Romantic. So he knows them well. Well, the Greek aesthetic cycle ends with Aristophanes. It's humor and irony that end every aesthetic cycle. That's interesting. Right. And everything ends, not with songs, but with laughter. Now, Musset is one of the first of the whole Romantic movement in its terminal phase. We laugh with him for the first time. Sometimes. No, but with Lamartine, that never happens. The moon like a dot on an i.
15:12 That, that's Musset. There's a whimsical, ironic, biting side. The Heine side, precisely, which wasn't there before. Yes, no, but Lamartine is more solemn. Yes, it's more elegiac. That's Jocelyn, and so on. Yes, that's elegiac. Yes, but when I was talking about a darker Musset, I meant the Night of December or the great poems. That's grand Romanticism. But still, there's also that vein of Spanish and Italian tales. There's this slightly, not comic, but I mean, somewhat ironic and biting side. There are common situations.
Lenin's testament and his reading of Hegel 15:42 Still, yes. The Heine side, which always signals the end of a cycle. German Romanticism starts with Hölderlins, with Novalises, with Jean Pauls, first-magnitude stars. It ends with Mörikes. Well, the French know that. So could we say that in literature, as in history, once things repeat, it becomes farce and no longer... Well, as Marx said. For me, there's a sequence running from Rousseau to Lenin. I identify with that sequence, passing through Kant and Hegel. There you go, and Marx. I identify with that. I get called a Trotskyist by your Gaullists.
16:12 I won't say by whom. But by people who are supposed to be close to me because apparently I'm not Stalinist enough, whereas I've been called a Stalinist my whole life by the other side. So, I'll say... There you go. Why? Because I identify with a sequence running from Rousseau to Lenin. Not before, not after. Lenin, in his testament, says there are two who need to be removed from the Central Committee. Do what you want, he says. I'm not telling you who should succeed me, but there are two to avoid, Stalin and Trotsky. And there, we learn with astonishment, when we see that the Trotskyists only had the word 'bureaucracy' as their critique of the Stalinists.
16:45 Lenin says, because, first, Trotsky is too attached to the administrative side of things, it's written in black and white. Stalin, of course, too brutal with the comrades. Both need to be removed. In other words, if Lenin had been listened to, both protagonists of the future '68 would have been sidelined. In '68, you've got radicals who'd be Stalin's followers and vice versa. You've got Trotskyists against Stalin, is that it, in '68? Yes, yes, but they became reference points in '68 because they had been figures of power. If they had been set aside, we'd be talking about others, we'd be talking about Kamenev or...
17:18 Well, I don't know who... Yes, Zinoviev and company. And others, that's what it became. Of course. But look, I look at Lenin, the difference in approach is that Trotsky didn't want to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I know, however, that Russian soldiers switched to the Bolshevik side because they were promised peace and they had been sent to the slaughter in appalling conditions. Lenin, you see, under Stalin, he would have been shot for less than that. Lenin, not only turns him around, ends up convincing him that peace must be made, even if it means giving up parts of the territory, but tells him, you're the one who's going to go sign it.
17:53 That's not quite the same approach as Stalin's. And to show that I'm not only about morality and human rights, at the same time, he's the only one who makes the theoretical detour in Switzerland. When he's in exile, etc., he says to himself, let me make use of the time, since I've always been a militant, I've spent the time, what do they call it, Hegel, I need to take a closer look because up till now I've just been going through the motions. And that's where this reading of a reading comes from, the famous Philosophical Notebooks, where we're astounded. It's rare for a reading to completely transform someone. He's a prodigious reader because he starts out with all his prejudices.
18:23 Yeah, Hegel, not bad, but well, there's God, mysticism, that stuff, the deist thing, there you go. And then, the more he progresses, it's a reading of a reading. You see, his comments in the margins. Excellent. Whereas at first, it's, yeah, there's God making an appearance on the third line. And then, excellent, bravo, bim bam, and think of the adversary. There you go, to be remembered, neo-Kantianism is a formalism, he grinds through it. Logic is hard. It's not the Phenomenology, there's no existential tremor. It's hard, it's not Reason in History.
18:53 It's really, it's thankless work. I admire Bernard Bourgeois for devoting his whole life to the Encyclopedia and the Logic, such tedious works. Well, and at the end, so let me get straight to the point. He arrives at what's called the absolute idea, what a program for a guy who claims to follow Marx. The absolute idea. And there's a passage underlined, boxed in by him, this passage on the absolute idea, truly remarkable. Colon, it's the most idealist and the most materialist. It's contradictory, but it's a fact. And, second aphorism, he writes, aphorism, colon, all those who have read Marx for half a century have understood nothing because you have to read the whole of Hegel's Logic to understand the first section of Capital.
19:31 I have no wish to give a paper on Hegel and Lenin in front of an audience of agrégés. I mean, well, it's interesting in itself, but I mean, it brings me nothing and it brings nothing to humanity. I mean, it stays confined. Hegelian studies have never been in better shape. There are translations that never existed before, I'm the first to say so. I don't hold it in contempt, but these are little colloquiums where academics please each other. It doesn't reach out to anyone, whereas Socrates risked his life by confronting people in the street. There you go. And Clouscard, since he risked staking his entire solitude, he died of loneliness and abandonment because he could have been the official philosopher of the Communist Party if he had gone structuralist.
Clouscard, Sartre, Alain de Benoist and Negroni 20:11 That's what surprises me actually. I noticed, I tried, on your advice actually, to read that posthumous work, Les chemins de la praxis. I found treasures here and there, but it's difficult. Yes, yes, yes. And then, the first thing that surprised me is that this is at least the third time I've seen in the preface the elogious quote from Sartre. Well, it's fine that Sartre said good things. It's the publishers trying to say, we're not the only ones saying Clouscard is good. Not only that, there's a touch of pandering in always saying that. That's true. And what's more, that it's Sartre, a bit of consistency, please.
20:41 Did Clouscard really expect to receive laurels from Sartre? Should he have accepted them? Well, I know that's the publisher's choice, not the author's. He came back from Sartre's place the first time, we had arranged to meet at the café after his interview for his thesis, precisely, for the committee, etc. It's a bit like that, I told him, I won't be able to be there but I'll do something for you. He asked me strange questions. He said to me, is the Church a social class? Oh, listen, I was left dumbfounded. What would you answer? That's a strange question. Well, Sartre is interesting. Is the Church a social class? Yes. And secondly, he told me this with a burst of laughter, Clouscard, all the talk, he told me, don't go thinking I'm a Stalinist.
21:18 It was Sartre who founded Libération and the Gauche Prolétarienne, you see, he had to justify himself to Clouscard for being taken as a Stalinist, probably because he had to defend the Church a little, you see. To be serious, what Clouscard thinks of Sartre, Sartre, he says, Sartre's problem is how to be left-wing without being communist, that's simple, that's all there is to it. Of course he wasn't a Sartrean. Now, to say, ah well yes, listen, still give some credit to Clouscard since Sartre spoke well of him. No, no, I agree with you.
21:48 Sartre, that's everything he fought against, he's the left-wing intellectual. I could have written something about this book, I didn't, because I admit this book kind of fell out of my hands. No, no, but you're being honest, you're honest, how could it not fall out of your hands? I talked about it to different people and indeed everyone tells me it's indigestible. And without there having been the slightest consultation, Alain de Benoist reviewed it in his latest book. I don't even know. So he had a much more attentive reading than I did, I'm reading it, it's brief. One could wait with a certain impatience for the posthumous publication of this text by Michel Clouscard, the last one he wrote before his death in 2009.
22:21 An impatience that was rather disappointed: one wonders first about the necessity of providing ontological foundations for Marxism, here arbitrarily reduced to a mere philosophy of praxis, a genesis of the process of production. The text, moreover, appears very dated. Clouscard's favorite target is the improbable pairing of Lévi-Strauss and Heidegger, the disturbing restoration of Being and structuralist ethnology. Heidegger's ontic and Lévi-Strauss's structural invariance, same fight. Clouscard concludes from this that the rejection of subjectivity was one of the reasons for the failure of Marxism-Leninism. Ah, he spotted that passage. And it's a quotation indeed, which leaves one pensive.
22:52 Did you see that passage in the book? Ah, I hadn't noted it, but I don't know if I went that far. Ah, that's huge. I pulled it out at Delga, I'm on bad terms with the Delgas. What follows is a vast, abstruse fresco where the author opposes original man to natural man, the origin of man being posited as a donation of meaning according to the process of production. Along the way, one notes a few apt remarks on neo-Kantianism, which is the ideology of liberalism. All of this ends on the idea that dialectic is Promethean and that the Promethean power to transform the empirical, the multiple and the diverse according to a universal measure is the philosopher's stone of humankind. We're far from the dazzling reflections of The Capitalism of Seduction, or even of Neo-Fascism and Ideology.
23:23 But there you go! It's Soral disappointed by Clouscard. No, isn't it a bit... I don't think that's it. I only know it's from de Benoist, it's not Soral. But there is a common point all the same, which is that Clouscard is good when he's on the right, that is when he criticizes the leftists, but when he's a Marxist, we don't like him. Ah, there you go! Yes, I don't think he's on the right, Clouscard, in this instance. No, I don't think that's it. It's disappointing that it's the process of production. So what? What else do you want? Man is a production. It's not enough to be born in order to be. Well no, exactly. I don't want to get into an argument with de Benoist, but it doesn't surprise me, if you will, without, how shall I say.
23:56 It's good that he feels it. Yes, yes, yes. That's already progress. He was superbly ignored both by the reactionaries and by the revolutionaries, Clouscard. So there is progress. Of course. And there, there's the cunning of reason in the fact that Soral sells him... Yes, one could say it's a cunning of purchase. No, but really, it's the reactionaries who are advertising Clouscard, I mean, who are using him against his own meaning. But why not? I mean, in a way, it falls... I trust people in the long run. There are readers who must surely notice, once in contact with the text.
24:28 There's no manipulation. Of course. In a way, ah, but that's not quite what I was told. What I liked in Negroni's book on Clouscard was that episode where the two of them go eat, I don't remember if it was a young... At the youth hostel, at the hostel. And then this young man is completely shocked by the language... The nephew is Bali. The very racialized language. Yes, yes, yes. But not mean-spirited, but... Racialized. And if we went, what's he going to say? It's terrible. Yes, he was talking about a foreign restaurant. It's worse.
24:58 "Ratons, ratons..." That's it, "what if we went to eat at the ratons' place." That's it, ratons, by the way, the expression has somewhat disappeared, I think, because I don't know if it's familiar to you. It's not far from the "ratonnades" [anti-Arab pogroms], moreover, historically. Oh yes, on top of that it's linked to that. Oh yes, that's ugly. Whereas him, I knew him, Michel, it would come out just like that. "What if we went to eat at the ratons' place," you see, and François, admirably, in a passage, saying, but that's joking kinship, as they say in ethnology, it's poor people, among themselves they talk like that. And you, the Rital [Italian], at the factory. But of course, it's not mean-spirited. And you, the Polak, that's what you'd call a German, a Pole. We go to the restaurant, we smell a nice little working-class restaurant. And I say to him, are you only drinking a quarter-liter of red?
25:28 Me too, I say, let's have a half-liter. He tells me, hesitating a bit, a half-liter would shortchange you, better if we each take a quarter. I think to myself, he knows better than I do, this is working-class France, I don't know it. Is there a millimeter or two more the other way? I don't see how. Anyway, he must know. It took me years to understand. In fact, he was afraid that I would shortchange him. Because as the son of colonials that I am, in his unconscious, that you'd drink more than what's in the pitcher. You understand, he hadn't yet noticed that I had already downed two-thirds of the pitcher. Oh dear.
25:58 And afterwards he made me notice, after the fact, lots of reflexes we have that are ingrained. They're part of the constellation of origin. I keep the public man and the private man well separated, coming from these determinations. I really like a book by François which is remarkable. Because it's not a biography of Clouscard. It's part of François's biography starting from the point where he met Clouscard. Yes, it's at once a biography, it's at once a society diary, it's at once a collection of anecdotes that concern the author more than the subject. That's clear. There are still a few philosophical demonstrations.
26:29 It's a genre... Well there, the fusion of genres, we're right in it. With a lot of subtlety. Yes, yes, yes. I admire François's pen. But it's funny because you get the impression... For example, he talks a lot about his own love and sexual adventures. You get the impression that... Self-mockery, you noticed, the Mexican woman... Yes, you get the impression that out of humility, because it might be a bit embarrassing to devote a whole book to that, one hides behind, I won't say the pretext, but saying, right, we're going to make a book of memories about Clouscard and then, on the sly, we're going to tell two or three little stories.
Sollers, porn and class obscenity 26:59 What I liked in the book was the anecdote, when Georges Marchais lands in... I think it was Marchais. Bastia. That's it, to campaign, he goes to the markets and then a fishmonger offers him a copy of Being and Nothingness by the fishmonger's company. Look at the Philippe Sollers types, the guys of that era, you've got to screw, you've got to stop being romantic, idealist, guys, the libertines, the post-Sadeans. Good. The dream for all of them is to have a romantic affair in Ireland with a France Culture journalist.
27:31 Full stop! Ah yes. That's the erotic accomplishment, that's it. Otherwise they're bored. Because otherwise you're not going to bother, I mean, it's just a fling. What's obscene to me in X-rated films, I film, I speak of it a bit as a connoisseur because with Negroni, we had a project at one time, there was Belfond, the publisher who has now disappeared, a big publisher, even you must remember Belfond, that was the name, yes, that's right, even your generation, I mean, who had offered François, whose pen had a reputation, 400,000 francs at the time and even the equivalent in euros, as an advance, which is a lot, now there's no financial director left who'd grant you that, to write a book, taking a concept of François's, on "sexpatriation," sex tourism in Thailand, well, but that was before Pattaya, it's a subtle subject, let's move on, so, that was the project, and François, like all libertines, is a hyper-serious guy, that is, he did a lot of research, when he wrote his book on intellectual savoir-vivre, he even watched interviews with Sartre in Playboy, he found some pretty rare stuff, he said, yes, because there, he lets loose, he says things
28:41 and he says nowhere else, so, he had done his homework, he noticed that the products sold in Thailand to passing tourists are always, two-thirds of them, products for couples, he says, it's not as a couple that you go bang the 14-year-old girl, it's not when you're with your wife and all that, I mean, it's not, so pedophilia, the whole shameful sex-tourism business, is mostly the doing of those who reside there permanently, it's at the Red Cross, among humanitarian organizations, it's an investigation, but yes, it's true, it's verified, I saw it in Africa, when we were supposed to make this film, they gave us a bunch of VHS cassettes, at the time, it was vile, there wasn't even the wide range of choice there is now, where there are things properly made, but it was abominable, and above all, the main obscenity isn't what men and women do, we've known what they do for 10,000 years, it's obscene to show it, it's not obscene to do it, what was obscene, truly in the moral sense this time, not in the visual sense, what is in front of the scene, what is shown, what is most obscene, the most unjustifiable thing in these films, is the three S's, sex, sun, money ["son"], it's that we make immigrant workers who are jerking off in front of the X-rated film understand, you'll never make it, you need cash, we're going to see a girl like that,
29:51 you need the glass of champagne, like in rappers' videos, you've got three blondes in bed with a magnum of champagne, you see what I mean, that's the absolute, that's the glamour element of porn, so an element of class, that's it, and it confirms Clouscard, that means that the senses of possession, in the material and financial sense, is precisely eros, when Sollers says you must, you must, he is precisely in this politicization of sexual practice, he wants to dissuade you and me from having jouissance, in order to keep it for himself, you understand, true jouissance, you understand the feeling, the thing, modernity, the romantic, the psyche, in Clouscardian terms, the psyche, praxis produces the psyche, that's Clouscard, laying claim to the psyche, thus rehabilitating a certain romanticism, and this is where the current use of Nietzsche goes astray in my view, there is also a Nietzschean critique of romanticism, but the real Nietzsche, for me, the one of the texts, is a romantic to the core, a Christian romantic, nobody has been as much a Christian romantic as Nietzsche, you really have to read the extraordinary letter to Malwida, that posthumous text of 1888,
Nietzsche as romantic Christian, Wagner and Corsica 31:01 we're a few weeks from the collapse, when he had just heard, for the first time, the music of Parsifal, the most, holy water, seen from outside, when he had seen the text, speaking of the libretto, that famous text, he says but what, the guy's gone senile, well, there's Rome there, it's over, Wagner, he can't take it anymore, there was rigor, he used to pound the table, he created new values, but this guy here, the idiot, you slap him on one cheek, he turns the other, Parsifal, this doesn't work, well, he hadn't heard a single bar of the score, he had only seen the text, and it's not sad, the text, it's a piece of pathology, something between Dostoevsky's Idiot, anyway, and suddenly, he hears the music, he says, there, Wagner touches chords in me that are mine and that I cannot see, there is a greatness, a depth in Nietzsche, somewhere, that tries to escape the gaze of the crucified one, like Kundry in Parsifal, a fraudulent use of Nietzsche that dates from Heidegger essentially, I mean, which is rather recent, diverts us from a tragic, suffering Nietzsche, whom I love very much, the one who says, I am weary of all the poets, they trouble their waters so that they may seem deep,
32:12 that Nietzsche, who is not an aestheticizing Nietzsche, on the contrary, we just saw, from that phrase, that he still held on to lucidity, and somehow, that matters, in what I'm in the process of saying, we have the right, that's in order to rehabilitate, a certain romanticism, which of course is not the romanticism, which is not that of French romanticism by and large, which was, France is so marked by the Grand Siècle, that its romanticism, as Rimbaud saw very well, is strangled by the old form, Lamartine is closer to Racine, in expression, in a way, in the alexandrine, than Rimbaud's "I is another," yes, of course, the German romantics are much more modern, in 1801, I'm thinking of Hölderlin, not only him, than the generation of French romantics 30 years later, there's an interesting time lag, it's interesting, because, Hölderlin, Jean-Paul writes his novels in 1795, at a time when Mozart is still alive, whereas, in France, romanticism, officially, academically, begins with the publication of Lamartine's Poetic Meditations in 1821, it's an interesting gap, I'm going off on a tangent, but it also explains a lot of things,
33:22 we can say, for example, you find the whole theory of correspondences of Baudelaire already in Tieck, in Wackenroder, to each flower a sound, to each sound a color, you already find that in German Romanticism, it's very precise, my parallel is that the modernity Baudelaire is supposedly the first to inaugurate, rightly so, I mean, it is expressed, for the first time, in the explosion of Nordic, Anglo-German romanticism, he's not stupid, Nietzsche, he sees clearly that Wagner has a side that isn't German, a universal side, a protean side, a side, he's far less German than Brahms, who took a long time to travel beyond the borders of Germany, Brahms has only been famous since Françoise Sagan, among music lovers, I mean, he didn't cross borders, but Nietzsche himself doesn't find himself very German either, so, it's homage to Wagner, yes, that's it, it's homage, and at the same time, a dig, to say, you think you're the incarnation of Germanness, my poor fellow, it's in Paris that you found your style, not bad, and then you married Cosima, Cosima who gives Nietzsche, for Christmas, what a strange Christmas present, the Essays of Montaigne, the great culture of the French moralists, that comes from the Wagner couple, you know that Wagner was caught with powder on his hands, on the sticks, 37 years of exile, yes, he was, in fact, they found him with explosives,
34:33 something, if it hadn't been for his father-in-law, Liszt, providential, with his connections, throughout Europe, I mean, who got him a fake passport, he was going to be shot, he had the image of a terrorist, with his big mouth, he was a barricade-fighter, he used to have lunch with Bakunin at the time, oh yes, yes, and he even, I believe, fell out with Gobineau, who was his friend, the day Gobineau started speaking ill of Bakunin, he said no, that's not acceptable, so it's not the image we have, it's really the ambivalence, Wagner, since he's a complex character, in some ways, more of a Marxist than you'd believe, in other ways, you see, and at the same time, he's hyper reactionary, that doesn't fit with the far-right thing, it's not, he's very strange, Wagner, a cumulation, as you say, from anarchist to royalist, but Bakunin ended up crying, kissing the tsar's hands, but still, he had a good rhythm, Nietzsche, winter, summer, the upper Engadine, and in winter, Turin, Nice, Genoa, and then I think, in Corsica, his dream, when he was in Nice, was to go to Corsica, he said this magnificent phrase, I sense, and I have it in my nostrils, only between Nice and Corsica,
35:43 he never made it there, it was already complicated to go to Corsica, but he writes to Peter Gast, and says, we'll go to Corte, because according to my calculations, there are, well anyway, they use terms, that's where Napoleon was conceived, that fascinates him, it's not only Hegel who was fascinated by the great man, we'll go to Corte, that's where Napoleon was conceived, in short, there's a fascination for the burning plain, the Great Noon, no but we go from one side, an exaltation of Germanness, which he comes back on, because he cannot incorporate himself into it, and then it ends up, well, he who loves well chastises well, it's not that he fell into anti-German bashing either, he likes what there is, there's still the Polish, or Hungarian ancestry, but then, in the end, there's this dream of the Great Noon, already the expression is very evocative, there's a problem, to add to that, he says, I hadn't finished my sentence, between Nice and Corsica, I feel that the African sphere begins, which goes even further, and he saw it very well, when he's in Corsica, do you know Corsica, maybe you've been there, yes, I went, passing through Nice, sailing from Nice, there are vaults, it looks like a mosque, it smells of the Maghreb world, it smells of the Arab world, it smells of the Orient, and at the same time, there are the Genoese towers,
36:53 there's a mixture, it's the Shore of the Syrtes, it's the boundary, between a world where it's about, it's the world of deserts on the other side, and here, it's Christendom, but it's a bit borderline, that's a bit what Corsica is, my mother was born in Hanoi, my sister was born in Hanoi, I was born in Hanoi, my brother is the only southerner, in Nha Trang, there's even barely, la Vergès, yes, that's the Corsican misery, fleeing at once the poverty, of pre-tourism Corsica, of the vendetta, of pregnant girls, and now, better to head elsewhere, there's all that, which meant that expatriation, in the colonial Empire, was a godsend for Corsican poverty, like the Chileans, sorry, like the Basques who went to raise sheep in Chile, and the Irish, to do a bit of mafia in Brooklyn, the Corsicans, they had found it all, it was Bamako, Hanoi, Dakar, and everywhere in the colonial Empire, you see, in every Corsican village, there's a retiree in the sand, with his cane, telling of his colonial campaigns, it's by far the most widespread expatriation in the colonial Empire, and Africans know it, when I arrived in Niger, they told me, ah you're Corsican, eh, when I introduced Clouscard to Corsica, the tiniest part, he'd go back every year, in the end, it was from May to November, it was a land of milk and honey, I must say he'd fallen right into it,
38:04 a restaurant owner who jealously watched over his "pépé," as he called him, and his bottle, and his crab rice, and all that, he was well looked after, and it was touching, he was adopted by the fishermen of Calvi, ah you're back, Michel, you're here, that pleased him somehow,
