English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Clouscard, the liberal-libertarian, and life as part of the work 0:00 Its publication, which is in itself quite an event — a publication is always an event — but especially in this case, as far as our friend Clouscard is concerned, because François de Negroni and I myself had the good fortune to know him during his lifetime.
0:30 Insofar as this thinker, who was superbly ignored during his lifetime — well, ignored in the sense of "I'm ignoring you," that is, people knew he was there, but those who knew and could have given him media resonance were careful not to do so, we'll certainly come back to that — now his books have never sold so well, now he appears more and more; if you look at the many blogs and forums about him, you'll see he is universally recognized, both by those who take up some of the fundamental threads of his thought and by those who criticize him.
1:17 He is recognized as one of those who, with unequalled lucidity as far as I know, foresaw the crisis — not at all in a prophetic way, but in an extremely analytical way, which is even more striking. About forty years before everyone else. I should recall that it was Michel Clouscard who coined the notion, the term — how shall I put it, hello and good day — of "liberal-libertarian." People are only just beginning to popularize this expression over the last few years; well, it was he who coined it almost a generation ago.
1:58 So about forty years ago, two words were linked together, as if it were essential: there was the libertarian Cohn-Bendit versus the liberal Pompidou. Whereas Clouscard showed, with his striking shortcuts — that was his secret — that May '68 is a kind of tragicomedy, I choose my words carefully — what did I say? Yes, that's it, a tragicomedy. Or comi-tragedy. No, actually I prefer to say tragicomedy, because it seems to start well — it begins in celebration, in 1968 people are having fun — and then it ends as we know.
2:30 That is, through a social and economic counter-revolutionary wave unprecedented since the 1930s. Which, as Clouscard's phrase sums up, means everything is permitted but nothing is possible — everything is permitted but nothing can be done, if you prefer. Or as he also puts it, what distinguishes the liberal-libertarian from old-style capitalism — capitalism of papa's day, which was liquidated fairly quickly after the war by the Marshall Plan; we'll come back to that too — but as he puts it very well, what distinguishes the regime we live in, this liberal-libertarian regime, this sacred union of Cohn-Bendit and Pompidou, of high finance if you will, and its supposed libertarian contestation, is that it is repressive toward the producer.
3:19 It's very topical — right now they're attacking pensions, the healthcare system, and so on. Repressive toward the producer and permissive toward the consumer. Repressive at the social level and permissive at the societal level — that's the whole secret, you see, of this new... Well, I don't want to dwell on this too much, because tonight's event is the appearance of a book about life, about the man himself. And in that sense it's a first, because, given the speed at which Clouscard's ideas are now spreading...
3:54 We owe this mainly to Éditions Delga, who have courageously undertaken to publish or republish, as the case may be, several of his works. And now that his work is being properly circulated, people are discussing his ideas a great deal, but the man himself is not well known. Now, you might say, what does it matter — when you know the life of "old man Corneille," as they say in literature textbooks, old man Corneille, whose life was completely ordinary — knowing his life doesn't add anything to Horace, or Cinna, or La Place Royale.
4:29 But, on the other hand, in Clouscard's case, we should think instead of Rousseau — that is, of those writers whose life is part of their work. As you can see, Rousseau's life would take forty filmmakers, forty different directors, to tell, with quite extraordinary twists and turns. Well, Clouscard could have had the same motto as Rousseau — I mention Rousseau a second time, because he was one of the rare thinkers in whom Clouscard identified an ancestor, a foundation, if you prefer.
5:05 That is, Rousseau's motto was: "Vitam impendere vero" — to devote one's life to the truth. Well, and François Negroni's book — forgive me for speaking behind his back, but you'll express it yourself in another way — is not a biography, I want to stress this, of Michel Clouscard in the classical sense, that is, from his birth to his death. No, it's a work that begins with the author's first meeting with Michel Clouscard, a professional appointment between publishers, and shows how, from that meeting until Clouscard's death, their almost daily relations, or in any case very frequent ones, gradually changed the author's point of view on things, on people, on being, on history, on what surrounds us and on people. That's it.
6:04 So it's... forgive me for putting it this way, it's a part of François Negroni's own biography from the moment he meets Michel Clouscard. Now, for those who don't know him well — because I say his works are starting to circulate, but I mean, he is still a victim, in a way, of the media hounding he suffered, especially during what he himself called the "forty shameful years," the period running from the 1970s, which saw the simultaneous explosion of financial capitalism, the progressive decline of industrial investment, and liberal-libertarian ideas — as it happens, including in philosophy.
6:51 And it's the period when Nietzsche replaces Marx, when Céline replaces Aragon, when Heidegger replaces Hegel, and so on. And... how should I put it... the development of this thought is, for Clouscard, inseparable from a certain discipline he imposed on himself in his relations with people and with everyday life.
The break of the 1970s: Trente Glorieuses and forty shameful years 7:21 So, as for his thought, I'll summarize very briefly some of his basic ideas — it will necessarily be abstract, not in the sense of being hard to grasp, no, but abstract in the sense of being a bit too general. And I do so with all the more ease this time, summarizing his thought in a dry, general way, because François Negroni's book is the ideal complement, adding the particular, the concrete, the flesh and meaning, if you prefer, to these ideas.
7:51 But we can of course go into detail during the discussion. So, for Michel Clouscard, there is a real break starting in the 1970s, of which '68 is only one aspect, because it's much more global. It's not just the events of '68 during the 1970s. There's... The two things seem independent of one another at first sight. There's the famous Nixon shock of '71, isn't there?
8:23 When Nixon announced, right in Tokyo — very topical, you know — right in Tokyo, the decoupling of the dollar from gold. The great events that inaugurate the period we're living in begin in the 1970s. That's a good cutoff point. Good ideas are those that make good divisions. Some divisions are more convenient than others. Some divisions allow us to better account for the truth around us than others. A division that involves what's called the postwar period — a period running from '45 to the '70s.
8:54 You know this period; it's nicknamed the Trente Glorieuses, roughly speaking. It's marked, on the right, by the dominance of Gaullism, and on the left, by that of communism. Which makes me think of Cohn-Bendit, who during the referendum campaign on Europe said, "We've had enough of Gaullo-communism." Which worried me a bit, because when you're anti-Gaullist, you can have excellent reasons. I myself voted against de Gaulle all my life. When you're anti-communist, there can be excellent reasons too. One can be anti-communist for religious, spiritual, or moral reasons, whatever.
9:25 When you're against both, the first thing that comes to mind is Vichy. It was Vichy that was against both at the same time, for instance. You see, being against both is already more suspect. And I'll close this parenthesis with the statement by the number two of the MEDEF, who almost became its new president, Kessler. Denis Kessler. Denis Kessler, that's right. Order Chalou, one of the pillars of MEDEF, and a former Maoist, of course. You see, that's already a confirmation of Clouscard's liberal-libertarian idea.
9:56 who also said, we must put an end to the ideas of the CNR. He said that three years ago. That is, the Conseil National de la Résistance, to which we owe pension by distribution, social security, and so on — the French social system. The "shock absorbers," as economists call them. Well. So, that's it. His essential idea is that there are two periods in this periodization, or rather, this division. The one covering the Thirty Glorious years from the Liberation to the early 1970s, and then the second, which he called — he's quite alone in this — the "Forty Shameful Years," in an article he managed to get published in L'Humanité.
10:40 We can come back later, in the discussion, to Michel Clouscard's intermittent relationship with the PCF. He was always a fellow traveler, but never a member. He always defended the Party against its adversaries, but was never a member. What he calls the "Forty Shameful Years" corresponds precisely to the rise to power, as the dominant ideology of course — I don't mean exclusive, when we speak of a dominant ideology — of what he himself calls liberal-libertarianism.
From papa's capitalism to permissive capitalism 11:14 What are the few key ideas that emerge from this term? What characterizes liberal-libertarianism — I mentioned one aspect earlier, and that's why it's hard to grasp dialectically, because it has contradictory aspects — is that it is repressive toward the producer, the creator of value, and on the contrary permissive regarding morals. And moreover, and above all, he carries out an analysis here — he's the first since Marx to take up the pen, that is, to present a debate of ideas not in terms of the ideas opposing each other, but in terms of the historical conjuncture to which they correspond. All Marxists agree with this general idea, but no one puts it into practice — he's really the only one, at least in such a global way — and so he makes the old capitalism, what I call papa's capitalism, the pre-war one essentially, correspond to values you know well: saving, work, effort — it's in all the old textbooks, the civics lessons of the time, the cross, right down to the denunciation of alcoholism, etc.
12:24 Yes, exactly, and that kind of capitalism could no longer hold up by 1945. Why? Because in the meantime something had happened that we tend to pass over rather quickly: the 1930s, the great economic crisis — you see how topical all this is — it's the only one which, in scale and importance, can serve as a precedent when trying to analyze the one now befalling us, though of course there are always variations; history never repeats itself identically, except, as Marx says, in the mode of comedy — parody, buffoonery.
12:55 But in this case, why could it no longer hold up? Because the crisis of the 1930s was above all, as you all learned, a crisis of overproduction — to put it quickly, an economist of the time described the stupid spectacle of starving crowds in front of overflowing granaries, milk being poured into the gutters in New York, coffee burned in locomotives — a crisis of overproduction. So if we stick with papa's morality — save, don't consume too much, etc. — it's over, capitalism is finished; on the contrary, we must consume, have fun, we need a complete 180-degree turn and encourage the permissive — you see what I mean regarding morals. That's Clouscard's analysis: he understood that this wasn't merely a debate of ideas, it was a historical mutation — that if capitalism had stuck to the old archaic ideas of work, saving and effort, where the essential goal was to conquer the French market — when a railway company, there was no SNCF yet, there were several small companies, when a railway company had, I don't know, say 35% of the market, that was already enormous for the national market — from the moment you wanted to conquer more, you had to export, you needed another logic, another capitalism, hedonistic, transgressive, post-Nietzschean, neo-Nietzschean, whatever you want to call it — you see why these values came to replace Marx.
14:05 There, I've roughly said the essential of his thought. It's hard to grasp, not because it's more complex than any other, it's no more complicated than Plato's Republic or Descartes' Meditations, but simply because we have trouble — there's an inner resistance to taking as a homogeneous whole things that the media have rather taught us to oppose. It's not like the '68-style libertarian facing a rigid, sclerotic power, etc.
L'Être et le code, master work 14:37 showing that all this is really the same complicity was quite a tour de force. What's more, the proof is that if you ask today's high-school students about their dream, it's exactly what was considered a nightmare by the '68ers. The Napoleonic lycée, that was papa's world, that's what had to be destroyed. Now people dream of having a lycée that functions properly with good teachers. Yes, how things have changed. Right, so much for Michel Clouscard's work. Let me quickly remind you of the milestones of this body of work in terms of publication. First there's what, in my opinion, is his masterwork — I believe François agrees too.
15:09 The capi... Being and the Code, that's his doctoral thesis, published by Éditions Mouton in '72. Because in France, publishers refused to print it. It was republished by L'Harmattan. In Belgium. L'Harmattan. And it's now republished by L'Harmattan in two volumes. Sorry? No, there's an excerpt. There you go. An excerpt. And it's an immense... not an overview, because it's very detailed, but it's a...
15:42 How can I put it? A saga, so to speak, of... of course, within a field of study then called "French Society," he studies a process running from the heart of the Middle Ages practically up to the eve of the French Revolution, to show the evolution of morals, of literature, of sensibility, of what he himself calls the psyche — the inner dimension — in relation to the historical mutations happening in parallel.
16:15 It's a monumental work. Sartre, who rarely agreed to sit on thesis committees, was present and wrote an extremely laudatory article, whose only reservation was that the project was almost too ambitious, with a kind of excessive hubris on the author's part in undertaking it alone rather than as teamwork. I'll give you this as a scoop: I remember Michel Clouscard confided to me, when he saw Sartre's comment, "I'd be only too glad to be given collaborators, I'd be only too glad to work as a team. But given the isolation I was kept in, it's difficult."
16:46 I'll now hand over to François for what concerns the book that interests us tonight, but I wanted to recall these broad lines of Clouscardian analysis, to which we'll return through your questions after our presentation of his book. There. Yes, the presentation is a bit tricky. I'd like to come back to one thing: Sartre was not on Clouscard's thesis committee, despite the legend. No, he wasn't present. He couldn't be, because he didn't have the doctorat d'état required to be...
Presentation of the book and first meeting with Clouscard 17:16 He had agreed to the principle. He had read the manuscript, he had indeed reviewed the text you're talking about, but it was... this involvement came from the meeting that took place at Sartre's place in Montparnasse. Of course. Right. So now, on to "With Clouscard." Yes, with Clouscard — well, indeed, as Dominique said, I tried to write an auto-hetero-biography starting from when I met Michel, and all the years we saw a great deal of each other, etc.
17:50 So it's a string, both of anecdotes and of situations which, I hope, give a perhaps surprising picture, for some at least, of Clouscard the intellectual, compared to the typical figure, let's say, of the establishment of the time. No, no, but compared, let's say, to the intellectual environment of the time — that is, I met him in, well, exactly 1976, under particular circumstances, since my thesis advisor at the time was Henri Lefebvre, the Marxist philosopher, who had asked me if I saw a way of publishing "Le sérieux et le frivole," a manuscript of Michel's that he couldn't get published.
18:37 And I, at the time, always kept company with respectable people — I mean, I knew a lot of people, Jean-Edern Hallier among others, and I even worked with his publishing house — so I suggested the text to him, which ended up being published after quite a bit of resistance, and that was the start of our relationship, and at the same time of his relationship with people who were in fact quite the opposite of him, since the first time we met, we had an appointment near the former Maspero bookshop, which was "La Joie de Lire," which had become the headquarters bought by Jean-Edern Hallier, and so we had lunch with Jean-Marie Benoist, whom some may remember, who was the reactionary philosopher of the time, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who wasn't yet but was about to become one, plus other people, and Michel Clouscard right in the middle of it all.
19:23 So I tell that story in the book, better in writing than aloud, because it really was a rather explosive encounter, and he handled himself so well that it amazed me, because with his attitude of "I don't give a damn." Let me make a small remark here — when I read the pages François devotes to this meeting, and then the anecdotes that follow in the book, I can't help thinking of the Rousseau case again, because each time I try to imagine, good heavens, the effect Rousseau must have had with his Swiss accent arriving in the Parisian salons, at a time when wit, salon wit, quickness — in fact François managed to say, I think he invented the expression, "staircase wit" — that's him, he says he laughs once he's on the stairs, an hour after everyone else — and so I come back to imagining the reactions of the fashionable set, in an era when worldliness had reached perhaps its perfection, whereas now it has become a caricature, worldliness has become bling-bling, and reading François's book,
20:35 I somewhat made up for that frustration — you get a sense of the impression Rousseau must have made in the salons; it's a bit of a parallel, a bit like the impression Michel made. In any case, he owned it fully — anyway, there was no way to change him. So, are there any questions about the ideas, the strong ideas, for you, about the father — yes, go ahead? First, about the ideas — Michel Clouscard produced, then, in private, a substantial body of work from a conceptual point of view, and I've always wondered — I don't know exactly what his conditions of birth, of life, of development were, sociologically, economically, etc., or even from the point of view of the psyche — but what was his view on — I don't want to use big words — the proletariat; but at the time there were Maoists, Trotskyists and Communists who spoke of "the people of France," and others — what was his view on ordinary people in everyday life, since he clearly set himself apart from the fashionable world and the rest?
Popular origin, accent and the discovery of class struggle 21:42 Yes, I don't know, one of the two. I'm not sure I follow your question — let me clarify. It's simple: what was his view of the people he evokes in his books, in fact, that is, ordinary people, the proletariat, people in everyday life? Right, there you go. Right. Yes, he was in total immanence with them, I mean, he himself lent himself a bit to the fashionable comedy, and even then, well, with a lot of awkwardness actually, because he didn't have all the codes of high society — that was one of his problems of recognition within the Parisian intellectual milieu.
22:22 So yes, indeed, you're talking about his social origin — indeed, he came from a very humble background, a working-class father, a schoolteacher mother, so indeed that reinforced this sociologically atypical side within the Parisian milieu. And at that first meeting, what drew you to him? Well, at that first meeting, it's just that... well, I already had some idea of him beforehand, through mutual friends, so he himself didn't surprise me, except that he did rather play it up — we were talking about his Gaillac accent, since he came from around Gaillac, a very strong accent, which he hadn't tried to hide, unlike Pierre Bourdieu or others — Bourdieu, who came from regions...
23:11 Not very far away. Not very far away, and who had gone to great lengths, when he was in khâgne, to completely erase his accent, which pointed back to origins he considered — well, later on with mixed feelings, but at the time he considered them more or less demeaning or disqualifying. Clouscard, he didn't care. Which makes me think — it's not an obsession, but since it was the tricentenary of Rousseau last year, I can't help coming back to this parallel, but I maintain — I'm not saying Clouscard is Rousseau — I'm saying that Clouscard's position with respect to the Parisian intelligentsia, going by the impression François just described, is exactly the same as Rousseau's position with respect to the salons of the Enlightenment when he arrived in Paris.
23:53 I'm certain of the analogy. It's not a resemblance, it's an analogy. That is, A is to B as C is to D. But precisely, in several passages of La Nouvelle Héloïse and of Émile, Rousseau — and this is rather rare — speaks about accent. And he analyzes very well, in terms of class as we'd say now, indeed in class terms, that mockery of an accent stems from a class position. It's not the fishwife in Marseille — I'm thinking of Honorine in Pagnol, the seller with her little fish stall — I mean, the great Marseille doctor or the great Marseille lawyer can afford not to have an accent.
24:37 For the fishwife, that's unthinkable, you see — I mean, these are things we can't forget. In the eighteenth century, certainly, but even in the nineteenth century — think of Rimbaud's trouble when he arrived in Paris; when he recited "The Drunken Boat," everyone burst out laughing because of his Ardennes accent. They're not exactly refined, of course, of course. Quite so. Yes. It's not really a question, but well, it's also a kind of testimony related to that. It happens that I took Clouscard on many walks in the countryside around Véronay and so on, and we'd talk a little.
25:10 Sorry, Edmond Janssen, Clouscard's publisher... Yes. Who is part of... Clouscard's publisher, spent time with Michel in the last years of his life and gave him his last joy with the walks he loved so much. Oh yes, he loved walks, and indeed, during these walks, he told me a bit about the story, because in fact he told me a bit about his childhood, etc. And he did say, indeed, that as a young teenager, Clouscard was someone who loved sports a great deal and wasn't a very good student.
25:42 Not brilliant, in other words. Well no, he wasn't a very good student, especially in mathematics. So he told me in particular that he had cheated — in the southwest they say "tusté" for cheating — on a math exam. And how — so I asked him — but how then, what explains, well, how do you get from this teenager, an average student who loved sports, to this philosopher who produces a total anthropology? And so he answered — because in fact he didn't talk, well, he didn't talk just to say nothing, and generally he told me, one day, I understood what class struggle was — that is, indeed, and for him it was total, I mean, what followed proved it, since when you read Being and the Code, especially the part on the genesis of the subject, it really is a total anthropology, and ultimately also a total history, since Being and the Code is something totalizing — so, in fact, it was really this understanding of class struggle, at a given moment in his life,
26:52 that indeed shaped him into the thinker we know — I think — as for why, I have no idea, but indeed, there's a real enigma there, because, well, you knew him better than I did, but indeed, not a very good student, despite having a schoolteacher mother behind him, well indeed, for a long time, through an autodidactic process with regard to philosophy — I loved you, but say, I myself started as an autodidact with Nausea, going through the novelists alphabetically starting with A, and — no, I have a question, because I don't know much about the author, I don't understand what it represents, Being and the Code — could you, without me putting you on the spot, comment on that, following up on what was just very pertinently said by my colleague.
The code precedes being 27:41 I'll take this opportunity to say, for those who don't know Mr. Clouscard at all, that besides this work which has just come out on the man, on his life, there's an excellent work on his thought, a synthesis, sorry, one that will make you blush, Aymeric Monville, present here, who devoted a work to him that really says the essential in very few pages, I think it's 80 pages, something like that. No, no, it's the tour de force, 50 pages, absolutely tight. There it is, so it's available here.
28:12 Well, so I'll answer your question, it's a very, very good question and it makes me pick up on the notion of class that Edmond Janssen just introduced, as opposed to sectarianism. It's not just a matter of saying there are rich and poor, that's not what social class means. Those of us who, if we have white hair like me, might remember the time when Paul Getty's son was kidnapped, Paul Getty, the oil magnate at the time, because he was living in Paris in a bohemian apartment, a bit broke. Well yes, he's broke, but he belongs to the hyper-dominant class, Paul Getty's son.
28:44 You see, it's not just a matter of instantaneous income, and conversely, someone might earn a lot of money tomorrow or the day after, but we'll laugh at their habits, at their way of dressing, we'll immediately say "nouveau riche." The classes are there. It's not just a matter of instantaneous income, in any case. That's the first thing, but above all, in Being and the Code, to answer your question precisely. Social classes are in the word "code." That is, without our noticing it, just as I'm speaking to you right now and using a code through which we understand the French language, and I'm not at all conscious, nor are you, of everything I'm doing metaphorically, etc.
29:18 Linguists have shown this very well, without our knowing it. We think according to the way we speak, more or less, we understand each other. And class struggle is the same thing. Class struggle, rather, we should speak of it in the singular voice, it's the same thing. To simplify it enormously, but without falling into simplism, there are two social classes throughout history. And on this point, Clouscard is one of the first to take up Marx again. There are 10,000 of them, if you like, a bit refined, we could talk about South American mercantile capitalism, but generally speaking, so the trees don't hide the forest.
29:57 There are always two. The class that produces more than it consumes, and the class that consumes more than it produces. This definition has the advantage of lending itself to measurement. You know, when Hegel—you'd see someone who didn't understand what negation or negativity meant—he'd say, you know, it's very concrete, put in front of someone everything they've consumed, even just at the nutritional level, over a lifetime, in front of them. And the number of cows, the number of steaks eaten, the number of liters of milk, etc. For one person.
30:27 There, you see the concreteness of what negation means. Class struggles—I'm alluding to that analogy with language earlier—I'll say, Clouscard went so far as to say, this will answer your question, the code precedes being. One might think there's first nature, the real, being, what is, and then afterward, men codify. No. I mean, it's so deeply in our unconscious that within us, the code—that is, the social relation of servitude and domination, to speak like Hegel, since that's the matrix that Marx will take up and which leads to Clouscard—the relation of servitude and domination, I mean, precedes our relation to the external world.
31:13 We suck it in at the cradle, if I may say so. We suck it in with our baby bottle, metaphorically speaking. And to give a very quick demonstration of this: if I have a bouquet of artificial flowers at home and someone feels the need to say "Oh, they look so real, I thought they were natural flowers," if the distinction exists between natural flowers and artificial flowers, it wouldn't exist if there hadn't been artificial flowers. We wouldn't feel the need to specify that those ones are natural.
31:44 If we feel the need to say "natural," it's because we've already gone beyond nature. That's where we see that the code precedes being. In other words, we only speak of nature from man's standpoint. A being had to oppose itself to nature for us to be able to speak of nature at all. You see, I'm saying this because people often confuse—sorry, what I'm saying is a bit technical, but it's still accessible to everyone. People, most of the time, the way thought is mediatized tends to make us confuse nature and matter.
32:18 Now, if you take a pot—I go back to my example—of natural flowers, and you throw them out of the sixth floor, and you throw a bouquet of plastic flowers from the same floor, both will fall according to the same Newtonian law of falling bodies. Those aren't laws of nature—artificial flowers aren't natural. They are laws of matter. This matter can be either natural, that is, owing nothing to human intervention, or human, when there is, of course, what Clouscard, following Marx, calls a praxis, that is, a real appropriation through labor, of course, and the production of nature.
32:50 There you go, I hope I've answered your question, but it's very interesting because the code is my relation to the other, and it's a relation that isn't keyed, that isn't contractual from the start, that isn't of the order—neither of the natural order, of course, nor of the order of contract in the sense of having signed a clear agreement. No, look at how you learned to speak, me too, and everyone—we never learned to speak by asking our parents, "and what does that mean?" Well, that's a noun of the class of nouns, we just jumped in, it's a bit like that, isn't it, when we discover the idea of class from our own positioning, the division, the division of society into classes, since that's what codifies, isn't it, our relations between subjects, intersubjectivity—the division into classes goes back to the dawn of time, since Marx says that the first social division is between man and woman, in the 1844 Manuscripts, from the moment a hunting party had to be organized, especially for the big game of the time, you know, a woman who was 8 months pregnant wasn't going to follow the men with a spear, chasing the mammoth, so I mean, there's already a division, and since it's the social division of labor, as soon as a society becomes even somewhat complex, but as early as the Neolithic it does become complex,
Division of labor and Zola's lesson in anthropology 34:00 it's the social division of labor which, in pure Marxist orthodoxy, produces social classes—we mustn't forget that it's in our code, not our genetic code, it's in the code, not our heredity, but in the code of our heritage, which is not quite the same thing; the first, natural heritage, the second, cultural and historical—the division into classes is part of our heritage-code. There you go. But of course, it wasn't in order to perpetuate it that Marx's thought, in the form Clouscard gave it, came about, because after all, the goal is a classless society. There you go.
34:31 To put things in historical context, and to answer the lady's question more fully, it might be useful to recall, at the moment he was writing Being and the Code, what the dominant trend was in what we'll call from this point of view—yes, that's very right, sorry for... There were very dominant currents, it might be good to recall what he's breaking with. It's a historical approach that's valuable here, indeed, at the time Michel was publishing, in the late 60s, early 70s, we're at the height of what was then rightly, or not, called the structuralist wave, if you remember, which placed linguistics at the heart of the human sciences, structural linguistics, hence code effects, quite simply.
35:09 This is to explain properly why he chose precisely this theme and these terms. I had a philosophy student colleague who went to Copenhagen to a linguistic research lab to work on analogies between the transmission of the genetic code and the transmission of linguistic speech. You see, it was really fashionable at the time. So there was a certain irony on Michel's part in putting "code" in the title, but in the sense—we mustn't forget his fundamental proposition if we want to understand this title and a fortiori the work that follows, of which François, in his book, rightly says that all of Clouscard's subsequent works only elaborated on the rich material, the profuse material found in Being and the Code.
35:47 We have to follow Being and the Code with this statement, which I have from Clouscard, which he repeated often, moreover, to everyone who studied with him: the code precedes being. The relation between subjects, in man, precedes the relation to the object. There you go. I'll give you one last example. Hello Catherine. I'll hand over the floor right after. Take a proletarian from Zola's time. I'm doing this on purpose, to have a wage that at the time barely gave enough to survive in the biological sense of the term.
36:20 When he received it, the day he received that wage, what does Zola's worker do? If he were a being of nature, as people try to make you believe—that what's determinant in man is his genes, natural determinations, everything that is animal, very fashionable now. All that. Look at ethology. Now we have to look at jealousy between dominant males, territorial marking, to understand man. Well, no, not that. But if that were the case, the worker should rush immediately to the corner grocer to buy the quantity of lipids, carbohydrates, proteins absolutely necessary for the daily reproduction of his labor power.
36:52 Is that what he does, according to Zola? He's a good observer of reality. Not at all. Where does he go? To the tavern? To drink with his mates? Well yes, it's a great lesson in anthropology he gives us. That means that we don't notice the problem posed by the example I'm giving, because fortunately for us, we always have both the necessary and the superfluous. We must eat to live, that's the necessary, and then we eat Vietnamese tonight or a little couscous. That's the superfluous, that's culture, that's fine.
37:23 But when, by chance, let's say, a contingency of biography means I'm unfortunately condemned to choose, as has happened, under dramatic conditions, between the necessary and the superfluous, what's extraordinary is that Zola's worker chooses the superfluous—he gives us a lesson in humanity. I'm showing you that in man, the code is more important than being. There you go. Thank you for your question, I made you go on a bit long. No, but it's interesting. Yes, Catherine, sorry. Regarding what Dominique was saying, to situate it historically, what you were saying reminded me that there was quite a massive ideological campaign to oppose the individual and the collective.
38:04 Yes, sure. It was still part of, in the years... the first class division is man and woman, as in the 1844 Manuscripts. I think that would need to be developed a bit because... There, that's Marx, that's more Marx than Clouscard. Yes, that's more... what...
38:36 I think the division of labor, yes, but the relations of exploitation between classes, I don't think we should situate those between man and woman. No, no, that's not all Marx says. That's not all Marx says. It's the division of labor that produces the division into social classes. That's not all Marx says. I think he speaks more of complementarity than of... Quite. No, no, it's not at all within a feminist or contemporary framework, it's the opposite. Another question about Clouscard, this time.
Combat texts and the unconscious of the unconscious 39:06 I want to mention that Isabelle Chazot has just arrived, who greatly contributed to Clouscard's renown in an unexpected magazine called 20 ans, which at the time was about the only one talking about Michel's work. There you go. Well, she might speak up later. I want to mention that at the time... Sorry, Isabelle, you're going to blush. Isabelle was editor-in-chief of 20 ans and she made it her concern to instill in her readership, which I believe, if I remember correctly, were young girls around 16 years old.
39:36 No? At the time? It was older. All right. To instill sometimes something other than problems about cosmetics or fashion tips. I wasn't giving 20 ans credit for that. Is that also a magazine from the 70s? I don't know what year, 20 ans. That vaguely rings a bell. That was the 90s. All right. The 90s, yes. It had started well before but lasted until the 90s. I told you once, Isabelle asked us, François and me, to devote even an article.
40:08 How so? Because there was precisely the publication by Senga of Clouscard's edition, to devote an article in 20 ans to Marx's thought. You see, what Libération wasn't doing, 20 ans was doing. With Alain Soral, it should be noted. With Alain Soral, quite, who at the time was a member of the Communist Party and hadn't yet taken the turns we know today. There you go. I'm not disputing whether we found or discussed it. François mentioned the primal scene of the encounter with Clouscard. In fact, it needs to be put back in its full symbolism to understand.
40:41 It's not simply that Clouscard finds himself by chance with BHL and all that. It's that in the 70s, among Marxists, there were two camps. There were roughly the Communist Party and the leftists. And the leftists, at the end of the 70s, started jumping on the Mitterrandist train while it was already moving. And precisely the encounter is entirely symbolic because [someone] gets off that train at the very moment he meets Clouscard. Now, Clouscard hadn't yet been published by Éditions sociales, no doubt because he was too communist, but well, that's part of the tragedies of many communists who are certainly often more communist than today's holders of the name.
41:19 But well, there you go. That's exactly what happens. Clouscard, strengthened by all his research called Being and the Code, starts writing combat texts. So there's Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire in the early 70s. It will culminate around Le capitalisme de la séduction, which will be published by Éditions sociales, and which actually goes through a book called Le frivole et le sérieux, which is in fact almost preparatory manuscripts, and which will, ironically, be published by Jean-Edern Hallier, who at the time was on the lookout for Marxist authors.
41:49 Ah, there's an irony of fate. Not really on the lookout for Marxist authors, not so much, but rather... Well, he's... No, no, in any case, you managed to make him... That surprises me, you know. But well, including for Le capitalisme, I think you weren't uninvolved in the success at Éditions sociales either. Well, more so. No, but... Including the appearance on Apostrophes, I don't know. Yes, no, no, no. He did appear on Apostrophes, yes. The most surprising thing is another clip you can find on YouTube.
42:19 The most surprising thing is Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire, published by Denoël. That has always surprised me too. Because, well, up to a point, Le frivole et le sérieux, he had a connection, in my case. But at the time, a bourgeois publishing house like Denoël, why would they publish a text like that, so much at odds with the ideology of the time—Deleuzian, Foucauldian, etc. But there, there are clues, as in your sociological life, that you're there. We're not going to list all the people who cross paths and are sometimes fleetingly mentioned in your book, but he impresses them all, nonetheless.
42:55 And so, maybe sometimes it can go as far as this paradox you just mentioned. That goes back several years earlier, when he wasn't at all introduced into fashionable society. He was never really, actually, except through you. Thanks for me. He got you out of society, actually. I got him a prize, he got me out. I'd like to say a little something. Yeah, actually, well, there'd be tons of things I'd like to say.
43:26 I'll focus on the essential things. A brief remark, first, to underline, for people who don't know Clouscard's work, the emancipatory character that reading it can provide. That is, when I discovered Clouscard, it made me... Cathartic. We could say it in a cathartic sense. But where I'm going, and it will also end in the form of a question, is that... I don't have the answer to this question.
43:56 I'm really asking it. That is, there's... This emancipatory dimension is also bound up with a difficulty of recognition, a fortiori fashionable recognition. Because with Clouscard, you shouldn't imagine an author competing with the master thinkers, the mandarins, Foucault, Deleuze, and who else... Derrida. That is, when you read the text, you see we're not on the same plane. We're not fighting for the fashionable mastership.
44:27 That's not at all the level we're operating on. We're really engaged in a struggle for the broadest possible emancipation. What we might even call today the emancipation of the proletariat. But it's true that would require explaining the terms. It's not general fun and games. So it seems important to me to remember that. And it seems to me that ultimately, Clouscard's writing project, in spite of himself, came into contradiction with the desire for recognition he might have had within the intelligentsia.
45:02 Because that's possible. There's a sort of impossibility, it seems to me. The possibility—but I'm bringing it up not to talk about the anecdote concerning a man, etc., but really to highlight it and to encourage people to read his work, which is not a work aiming to, how shall I say, legitimize one totem in place of another. I mean, we're not in that territory at all. One of the key stakes, in my view, in Clouscard's work, is a battle over science.
45:32 What is science? And the way he puts it into practice is through the production of concepts. I mean, only he expressed these concepts in this particular way. So we've talked about liberal-libertarian, but for me, there's a fundamental concept, that of the unconscious of the unconscious. And once you've understood what he's talking about, it's not just that you've understood something intellectually, but I'd say it does you good. That is, we're really in the human sciences at a point where they concern us directly in our daily lives. As you say, to understand what that means, as you were saying, for those less familiar with this fundamental point of Clouscard's, who introduced it—generally, when we think of the unconscious, we think rather of psychoanalysis, of Freud, rather than the idea of class, of Marxism, etc.
46:15 with the unconscious. Now, what Clouscard says is that the Freudian unconscious, which we all have, personal, psychological if I may say so, within the psychic field—this unconscious is itself worked upon, in depth, by a historical unconscious. We are even less conscious of it than of the sexual unconscious, and believe me, that's saying something. I come back to what was said earlier. It has nothing to do with the unconscious in the sense used by Freud's adversaries. No, no, we're far from that. Because there, we leave rationality completely behind, and Clouscard is a rationalist.
46:46 There's a censorship against precisely acknowledging this class unconscious. I mean, when Marx says—in the text that contains the most Marxism in the fewest lines, for those who want to spare themselves, we don't have nothing better to do in life than read books, after all, I don't know, Mr. Livraire, all the pages of Capital—there's still that famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written a year before Capital appeared. So it's definitive Marx, in his work, so to speak.
47:17 And Marx says, this is the first sentence of that famous passage, it's a summary in a few lines of his entire thought: in the social production of their existence—if all alone, individually, I carve into a tree a heart with "Dominique loves Josette" written on it, I mean, I've worked, but it has no value because it isn't social production, it only interests me and I can exchange it for nothing. In the social production—you have to read it while marking the emphasis—of their existence, men enter into determinate relations, necessary, independent of their will.
47:48 The notion of the unconscious is right there, in 1859. There you go, I'll give you the floor, sorry to interrupt. No, that's to say, there you go, it's Leibniz's perception. There you go, yes, I said it. Leibniz's, the small perceptions, the... Yes, exactly. People have often drawn the connection between Leibniz's small perceptions and the unconscious, quite. There you go, you're showing how many fundamental concepts this word brings. Well, I'll conclude very quickly, no, but it was simply to... it was a form of encouragement regarding this book, hoping it might be a gateway to something which is...
The desire for recognition, from Clouscard to Rousseau 48:23 which is thus a philosophical work. Yes. But actually, I'll come back to what he said at the start, which is that, in fact, Michel had a great desire for fashionable recognition. Of course, enormous. You have to see his preface to Le capitalisme de la séduction, his address to the honest man, encouraging him to recognize him. Pathetic, even. Yes, there was something pathetic about it. And how do we account for that, why? But why wouldn't he have that desire, we all have it, that desire for recognition? According to Hegel, it's even the first word of the human spirit. I mean as an author.
48:53 I think it's the desire to be published. At the time, it's very, very difficult. It's much broader than that. I have no desire at all to be published. We got that 100% more. Yes, that's true. No, no. It's something else. Wait, not everyone at once. Yes, yes, we'll let... Yes, yes, sorry. No, but what Aymeric is saying is true. At the time, it was harder to be published than now. So it was already like passing a great exam, to be published. But still, when he writes his preface to Le capitalisme de la séduction, his address to the honest man, that is, to Jean Daniel, basically. "Recognize me as a great progressive thinker." Well, there is indeed something like a little... quite pathetic.
49:25 And I, I remembered it. We all remembered it because he was ready, indeed, I'll tell the story in a moment, to write to all the great critics of the Parisian scene, the Poirot-Delpechs and so on, saying, well, I've written an important work. Recognize it. Well, there was indeed something in him, like with Rousseau, by the way. I'll give you the floor right away, following up on what François said, and it ties in with Samuel's remarks. Of course he had a desire for recognition, but Clouscard's greatness is that he never satisfied that desire for recognition cheaply.
49:57 He didn't cave in, because earlier he was saying you won't find fashionable poses in him, as you said, like there are with other writers, etc. He could have obtained recognition by being feminist, ecological—in the 70s, that's all there was, I mean, libertarian, transgressive, basically, sipping champagne in the salons. He was always fiercely opposed to that, and there again, I think of Rousseau. In Rousseau, there's an extremely pathetic need for recognition. Read the introduction to the Confessions, come on. It's not a protocol of pathos, I mean, in the grand sense of the term.
Recuperation by the far right and binary thinking 50:30 He needs to be recognized himself, but him, him, and not the character he would have become if, unfortunately, Rousseau hadn't been mocked in the salons, or if he'd been accepted, we wouldn't have had Rousseau. We'd have had one more society intellectual. What does... Sorry. It's a rather trivial question, but... He'd raised his hand before. What do you think, and what did he think, about the recognition of his ideas by part of the far right? He never thought about it, the far right recognizing his ideas.
51:03 I said earlier that Sartre had made an enormous eulogy of Being and Code. We're not going to accuse Sartre of being far right. So everyone does what they want with Clouscard's thought. We can't... Trotsky proclaimed himself a Leninist. I can't... Trotsky, sorry. Proclaimed himself... Positioned himself as a Leninist. I can't stop him. I'm not going to dispute it. Why not. I mean... You know? So whoever wants can seize it, if you will... I'll add that he wasn't unhappy that his thought was expressed through every possible current. Absolutely. And besides, he knew very well the political far right and the sociological far right.
51:36 It's very topical. Besides, you know they're doing polls these days about volatile electorates where there are poor souls, I respect them, but I mean poor politically, who vote in the municipal elections a bit to go along, then vote for the National Front six months later, then for the UMP, then for the PS. It's volatile. I mean, we mustn't confuse things, right? Among the millions and millions and millions of people, some tens of millions who voted for Hitler, they weren't all SS men. You see what I mean? People can be fooled.
52:07 You can't fool everyone all the time, like they say, you can fool everyone some of the time. What I mean is that the liberal-libertarian critique, we hear that from the far right. Yes, but I'll answer you very precisely: when you have binary thinking, as is often the case on the far right, not only there but often, you land on Clouscard. There, he attacks the leftists, so he's with us. That's binary thinking, I can't stop them. And did Lenin already attack the leftists too? That's simplistic. He'd forgotten that the first one to attack the leftists wrote 'Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,' signed Lenin.
52:41 Right? And who is, as it happens, the complete opposite of Stalin on this point, since I was talking about Trotsky earlier - these aren't scores being settled, they're profound symbols. Lenin was already in disagreement with Trotsky, well before the agreements with Stalin, Lenin was. Trotsky posed problems for Lenin. And for example, on one specific point, Trotsky didn't want to sign the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany. And Lenin, through long discussions, persuaded him that signing that treaty was justified.
53:13 The most urgent thing was peace. Russian, already Soviet, property. And he tasked Trotsky with going to sign the treaty himself. The historian won't contradict me on this - going to sign the treaty. Those aren't quite Stalin's methods. Stalin would have had him shot, but there, that's the point. We also mustn't forget that certain far-right circles, or those marked as far right today who claim Clouscard, were, at the time when they associated with Clouscard, in the Communist Party.
53:44 We mustn't attribute to Clouscard the drift of people who were influenced by him and who completely turned their backs. People who were never in the Communist Party - Éric Zemmour, who likes to quote Clouscard, but let's talk about Michéa too, I mean, well, let's talk about Zemmour - and Clouscard, he was still alive, I don't remember which popular show, something like Laurent Ruquier's, where Zemmour quoted Clouscard. I had called him, he said, well, delighted. My ideas are progressing. I'm going on TV.
54:14 There you go. I wanted to explain, it's binary thinking. A guy like Zemmour will say, well, he attacks the leftists, so he's on my side. Nothing could be further from the truth. The misunderstanding about this appropriation, the fact that Clouscard could appeal to some, or can appeal to certain far-right circles, is based on a misunderstanding. It's that Clouscard's critique of France disfigured by the Marshall Plan, in relation to what he might have liked - the France of before, let's say - for him, it's not simply 'the land that does not lie,' it's not 'work, family, fatherland,' it's republican France, it's liberty, equality, fraternity.
54:52 That's exactly what gets completely forgotten, precisely because of that binary side - it's that, precisely, that's the difference between Clouscard and Charmé*, that's the difference, it's the opposite. There you go, it's not the critique of the Marshall Plan in order to return to that old-fashioned France, it's to recover the very meaning of all the republican promises that still haven't been fulfilled. And that, I think, ultimately, what truly completely separates, even in our own country - we still have to go back to the fundamentals, the Revolution, the old regime - but that, Clouscard, he remains a republican to the end.
55:22 And what shows this well is that imperialism, as it was called in Leninist terms, with Clouscard, we move to another stage, a stage that goes as far as a colonization of souls, no longer simply of external countries, as it continues today. There's also something that annoys me, on the other hand, when it comes to anti-fascism - we must never forget that it's not simply some skinhead. What is it when a country like ours keeps carrying out raids at the global level? I'd like us to talk about Hollande too. What is the Mali expedition? What is Syria? What is Libya? I'm a bit fed up that when we talk about the far right, it's enough to have two or three drunks, as there certainly were in the beer halls of Munich.
55:58 I know that well, but that's not enough to make fascism. There you go. He had asked the question... Yes, I'll give you the floor right away. It's just to finish the answer about Munich, because I was going to anticipate on that. Sorry. Well, I'll give you the floor. Yes, there you go. Excuse me, well, this isn't to cut off the debate on the far right, but simply, I wanted to ask you, as an aside, because I'll forget afterward - who followed him at the time, even though he wasn't a society figure, even if he perhaps had the need for it like everyone, or the desire - and why don't we follow him?
56:31 And we can transpose the question to today with the far right, for example. Well, let's say the Soralians, because the far right, they couldn't care less about Clouscard - it's Soral who introduced him to Zemmour, by the way. So who follows him? Who follows him? Me? Him? I don't know. No, it's not just Soral. On the right, there's also the magazine Causeur, even people from the traditional right. He's really everywhere. It's typical of... It's like when Gramsci is appropriated by GRECE, Alain de Benoist, etc. That doesn't change the fact that we know very well how Gramsci was killed, under what conditions, and what his life was like.
57:04 That's it, that's the thing that popularizes his time. There you go, it's a notion of hegemony in Gramsci, it's unavoidable if you want to try to understand anything at all, notably in the West, because it's... The difference with the struggle, the struggle of light, the ideological struggle, is absolutely unavoidable, for any side. There are things... If you don't go through Clouscardian analysis, you understand nothing about the last 40 years in France, since '68. Since '68, that's why we must... I've lost my thread. That's why it's a classic. It's extraordinary that a thinker could be suspected of even the slightest compromise, however hair-splitting, with the far right, when he stakes his claim, and as early as 1976, and from the mid-1970s, publishes 'Neo-Fascism, Ideology of Desire.'
57:47 He's even the only one who warned our society against a danger of re-fascization, but one that doesn't come from the old far right, Poujade, roughly speaking. When you listen to Radio Poland, Radio Maria, excuse me, I don't know if this interests you, Radio Maria is one of the most listened-to Catholic radio stations in Poland, which is anti-Semitic, anti-Russian, anything you like, you'd think you were back in the worst of the 1930s. When you listen to Radio Maria, you come away, you get the impression that Le Pen is a left-wing radical by comparison. I know who Le Pen is. May I offer just one intervention.
58:18 Perhaps a general answer to all these questions. It's that what's happening currently with Clouscard's thought is that it establishes itself as a thought of truth. It's a heuristic that allows us, including people on the right, to recognize the part of truth, and which sometimes converges with the social critique of certain circles. But all that, the kind of universalism of Clouscard's ideas, which are clear today in the period of crisis we're living through, is obvious to everyone.
58:52 Including for certain circles and certain intellectuals such as those we've mentioned. Some who associated with him back when they themselves presented as Marxists, communists, etc., and have changed a great deal since, or others who never knew him at all, like Zemmour, etc. I mean that what's happening today is that we're in a truly Clouscardian moment, in the sense that everything that could introduce a smokescreen, a generalized confusion heavily fed by all the society figures and all the intellectuals of the era we've mentioned, some of whom are still very active, is collapsing.
59:27 So what's left? What remains indeed are things like 'everything is permitted but nothing is possible,' and now we're beginning to measure that. And that's in my view what explains the revival of Clouscard's ideas - their profound scientific validity, as Samuel said earlier. Why were these ideas silenced back then? Ah! They were inaudible. But what interests me - you're talking about the far right - what interests me rather is the Michéa case, someone who draws entirely on all of Clouscard's conceptual work and who cites him, at least he has that merit.
Michéa, Althusser and the weight of the Cold War 1:00:00 He cites him - well, he used to cite him, he cites him less now - and who has now indeed become the reference thinker for pretty much every establishment. Well, let's not exaggerate all the same. The liberal notion, I think already nothing. You should know that it's Clouscard who said... Jean-Claude Michéa - Michéa is Clouscard, me, the labor movement - yes, yes, it's a minor detail, he comes from the Communist Party of the '70s, Michéa, so he was trained - because there are things that are common now too, since it's Clouscard who emerged and who, we can say, was really the last, I'd say, communist thinker - well, today we have someone you know well, Bernard Friot, for example, as an economist - all right, that goes beyond mere economics, well, anyway, there you go - Michéa was trained by that collective intellectual milieu, so it's obvious, for example, the distinction between consumer goods and equipment goods is something that was circulating in the Communist Party at the time, so he takes what was there, that collective intellectual milieu, and then he simply comes to say it was better back then, you see, they were all craftsmen because back then we weren't in big industry, so we weren't
1:01:10 in totalitarianism, so we should go back - well, there we go back into all the fantasies of what's called feudal socialism, and there again we really see the dividing line. That's it, to answer the young man's question, there's a much simpler way of putting it - we recalled the historical circumstances earlier, at the moment when structuralism took hold, what happens at that point, I'll let Dominique and François answer - within the Communist Party, one name imposes itself, choices are going to be made, I'll even say within the Communist Party it's Althusser - normally Clouscard should have been the reference philosopher of the Communist Party, and Garaudy - well, it's Althusser who was chosen. Do we read Clouscard in the Communist Party, or not?
1:01:49 Of course you do - watch that very short video of Onfray, I don't know, often, I don't usually recommend anything by Onfray, but well, a small negative thing, I mean, or after a talk I'll make a parenthesis about Onfray, but let me come back to your question earlier - there, let's first answer the question because otherwise we lose the thread - we were talking about Althusser, yes, so Althusser and the thinker, and it's the Althusser line at that time in the Althusser-Clouscard relationship - back then there was a journal that had great success, which depended on the Communist Party, called La Nouvelle Critique, it was the intellectuals' journal - if you look closely at its vocabulary, its lexicon, its semantic field, it was Althusser from start to finish, there was a real takeover by Althusser's thought - Althusser who would later admit that he'd had to claim allegiance to Marx because he had a rebellious attitude, well anyway - but that's one way of answering your earlier question too, as François said, it was inaudible - we mustn't underestimate - I rarely use the generational argument
1:02:59 but you're too young to have lived under the weight of the Cold War, the ideological weight of the Cold War - it was completely inaudible - to recognize Clouscard was to compromise the immense strategy that was starting to be put in place and in which you're now caught up, which is precisely to pervert every political concept, and that's why I come back again to your question, because the two are linked - when you have an Onfray held to account over confusionism - because confusion, I have some too, we're never safe from confusion, we're not gods - but confusionism, deliberately maintained confusion, is different - when you see an Onfray who ends up making us understand that basically the communists were collaborators and that Albert Camus - I have nothing to say against him as an author, but well, I'll say that there were French Algerians who were, on the contrary, resistance fighters, I don't know anymore, that's where you end up - he acts a bit like Sarkozy who one Sunday, some day like that, wanted to explain to us that Guy Môquet was a collaborator - well of course, so we did well to shoot him - exactly, well there - when you reach that level of confusion, because someone passes for a right-winger, why not, I'll say - but I think of these young people, because I have sympathy for them, all these young people who in the confusion
1:04:09 are sometimes drawn to a Soralian discourse or something like it - I don't know, sophists have never been in short supply - I mean, these are unhappy consciousnesses, these young people, to use a Hegelian expression after all - it's that they're not satisfied with the discourse they have, with the dominant discourse. And they find in Clouscard something... He has great success with young people, that's interesting in itself. Now, that this success is experienced amid the confusion of young minds from whom the Marxist reference has been entirely stripped away for 40 years, treated as an old-fashioned thing, an archaism, etc. - well, there's a little something persuasive there...
The concept of the mondain 1:04:44 And here I come to the concept of 'mondain' [worldly/society-oriented], which Samuel raised, which is perhaps the most profound one in Clouscard. I mean, understanding what the epithet 'mondain' means for him is essential. I recall that it's a notion borrowed from the Gospel. The Gospel? Yes. 'My kingdom is not of this world.' On one hand, there's 'the world' that keeps recurring in the Gospel, and the devil is called the prince of this world. Don't forget that evil is identified as the prince of this world. On Holy Thursday, the prince of this world comes, but he is already defeated, etc. And 'my kingdom is not of this world,' as you know.
1:05:15 I mean, these notions of 'world' are important. There's a great confusion that ecology maintains between the world and the Earth. And how do you see that, world? I'm in the process of explaining. There's a great confusion between the world and the Earth. The Earth is a notion... I'm no specialist, I'll leave that to astronomers, to geologists. The Earth is a natural given. The world is what men have made of it. Besides, you know, when you say 'I'm going out into the world tonight,' the world is a matter between men. A world is something structured, something hierarchized, organized, like the Egyptian world, or the Hindu world, or the Roman world, etc.
1:05:47 So, then, first thing, let's really stress 'the world.' The Earth belongs to nature, the world belongs to history. Let me just continue on this point, because I don't want to lose my thread. So there's an evangelical notion. The world - entering the world is playing the game of that class struggle at the summit of which there is, I don't know, the only time, perhaps, that Christ is violent in the Gospels is when he drives the merchants out of the Temple, mustn't forget that, it's the only time. Yes, he's - well, in translation. 'Do not make my Father's house a den of thieves.' It's not said quite like that, it's usually translated only as a house of trafficking, in the translations.
1:06:19 There you go, so I insist on the first point, the world is not the Earth, and the epithet 'mondain' that you find - there's no evangelical reference there, he's perfectly atheist, Michel - but on the other hand, I mean, you find it in literature, don't you? You can't imagine the scene of the first meeting in The Princess of Clèves outside a certain notion of feudal or aristocratic worldliness, for example. Yes, yes. There you go, an enormous code, there, isn't it? Yes, yes. There's a Red and Black where there are 30 pages just for Julien Sorel to grab Madame de Rênal's hand.
1:06:52 I say that because Clouscard was wild about those 15 pages, saying, that's eroticism. That's something else than Bataille. That's something else than Bataille. It's like, well. And so, 'mondain' - I'm going to give you an example now to stop with generalities. You often hear it said nowadays, when someone has scored a point, an argument against the dominant ideology - 'it's more complicated than that.' I call that, or Clouscard, I call it, following him - there's something I owe to Michel - a 'worldly argument,' which has no theoretical value whatsoever but produces an effect on the audience.
1:07:22 Exactly like a bad lawyer will impress an audience, a sophist, simply, in the history of philosophies. Namely: you, you're on the side of simple, crude things. Me, I'm on the side of the complex. So obviously, for third parties listening, it's quickly settled - the sympathy goes to the one who's complex, because people may believe that complex means profound. If I come back like that, if I come back from the planet Mars as the first one returning from it, and I tell you, in my box I have an object you've seen nowhere on Earth - you don't even look in the box. But you all bowed your heads.
1:07:52 Well yes, the prestige of the unknown. There you go, I mean, or when someone says, well now that's enough, in the party, we're fed up with sclerotic things, we need new youth - those are worldly sentiments, what are they? But the Hitler Youth, they were young too. I don't see how youth is any guarantee of political soundness, any more than old age is, for that matter. That's quite important. These are worldly arguments, and Clouscard spent his life denouncing them - these worldly concepts that pass themselves off as constitutive, political, even historical arguments.
Social determinations, combat and mad love 1:08:24 There you go, that's just what I wanted to do. The notion of 'mondain,' we'll come back to it, but it's essential, because it also structures his whole analysis of the fictional/novelistic, which is extraordinarily rich. Yes, truly. I want to come back a bit to what you were saying, his need for recognition, Clouscard's. I find it rather paradoxical in relation to his profound knowledge, well, of his own social determinations. And in fact, I'd rather focus precisely on the profound knowledge he had of his own social determinations, and by extension of those that make us aware, that make us aware of our own social determinations.
1:09:05 I think that, well, I know Spinoza said one day, freedom is the understanding of necessity. Taken up again by Marx and Engels. And I think that's why Clouscard was a hyper-Spinozist, if you like, in the sense that he said, well, Clouscard's freedom is the knowledge of one's own deep social determinations. Being free is believing. It's not just that, it's that, precisely, the effect you were talking about, Samuel, the emancipation or the cathartic effect that Clouscard can bring us, is really there - it's this freedom, if you will, that he brings us, the knowledge of our own social determinations in life.
1:09:49 Concentrated through Samuel's knowledge. And in your book, indeed, he's still rather snubbed, all the same, in relation to that whole worldly environment. But I think he also has knowledge of it. And as for what you were saying, making his life depend on the truth, well, I think he doesn't play along with that game. So he has, he has, he has that knowledge and he owns it. He owns it, well, with the affect - well, the fact that he must be affected by it.
1:10:20 It's complicated to respond to what you're saying. Well, indeed, awareness of this determination, fine, I hope we're all there. But, but, in him there was still a lack of mastery of the codes of worldliness that he would have liked to have. And he needed to be assisted with that. Well, he'd write a letter, well, quite silly things, you know. Already, he had a handwriting like a primary school kid, well, so... In an exercise book. Yes. It's small things, you know, but I mean, all that, that, that, that, how to put it, that's not...
1:10:51 He couldn't care less about it deep down, but nonetheless, since he had a desire... But wasn't it above all the desire to make his ideas known? Ah yes, yes, yes. It was the desire for recognition. There you go, that's it, but I mean, I agree, it's inseparable, but let's not forget that it was above all that. Of course, we must encourage - no, no? But wasn't it also a desire in him to take revenge? Sir... I understand, you know, not in the sense of a little boy who wants...
1:11:23 To pick a fight, who wants... No. It's that, as Samuel said earlier, I think from the outset he engages in a titanic body of work, that's been said, but also on substance, completely, radically, he opposes everything being built in the field. Obviously, it's also been said regarding the economy, but above all, what accompanies all that. And he, he takes... From the start, he positions himself against...
1:11:58 So he has no chance of being recognized by those who denounce him at every turn, every line. His paranoia is part of his desire for recognition. The two are linked. Yes, yes, no, but that's why... We're talking about grudges, not about us. I also wonder whether, out of a kind of mischievous pleasure, he didn't also want, at some point, to prevail - that is, to have genuine recognition. Not just recognition, obviously. There's a small pleasure in going on the radio. But him, having known him a little, I sensed in him also a need for...
1:12:34 He came from Gaillac. He was in Paris. And then, there's a bit, like rugby matches, which he loved a lot. Well, it's... It was... It's a bit... Well, I often saw him as someone fighting. There's a fighter dimension to him. Even if it's said with humor, constantly, it's not the... It's not... Well... It's a fighter which is the complete opposite. That's always true. It's a dubious fight with people whose codes he didn't fully master.
1:13:06 Yes, that's why I wanted to clarify that for me, there's... Of course, but I think he'd accepted it... Well, in a way, he'd internalized it. I don't have the codes. And that's why, moreover, I keep my accent and I don't give a damn. I don't give a damn about them. So I don't give a damn about them either, above all. No but, there you go. So there's a kind of dialectic too. He'd accepted that in order to go beyond it. And perhaps... Well, did he hope to be recognized for the content of his work? For what he had... Of course.
1:13:40 Of course. No, but it was to rebalance things a bit in relation to worldliness. Do I have something to say about this? Clouscard is the author of Mad Love [Treatise on Mad Love]. Yes, that's true. Treatise on Mad Love. What he wanted was mad love, that is, to be loved for himself. To the very end. That's it. It's the same thing. It's not... Of course he minded those codes, but at no point was there ever any compromise in Clouscard, from beginning to end. Of course he had to go through certain cliques to be published back then. That's inevitable.
1:14:12 A book cost five times more than it does today. We must never forget that. That's the key point. But for him, in any case, he had so thoroughly internalized the class struggle. Because for him, class struggle wasn't simply one party among others. I'll speak about the party, but for him, it started as early as Althusser. For him, Althusser was the class enemy, even in a past sense. And that's why he had a kind of... Unlike all the people in Badiou's portable pantheon, for him they were class enemies. That's it, that whole French philosophical moment, etc. Maybe that's a bit of a... Sometimes it's perhaps a somewhat sweeping judgment.
1:14:46 There's the whole record. He's right today. That's what strikes everyone. We can clearly see where we've led this portable pantheon, as you put it. And we can see very clearly the relevance of Clouscard's ideas today. That's it. That's what he would have been grateful for, everywhere. It's tied to that very intransigence. And that's why, moreover, he theorized mad love. And besides, this is another paradox of philosophers. Just as Rousseau wrote Emile without ever having taken care of children. He couldn't do it. Or Schopenhauer talked about the need to accept death, and yet moved away...
1:15:16 He chose cities according to the mortality rate. But Clouscard wrote a treatise on mad love. And as far as I know, he was never married, or that's what he legitimately arrived at. What he wanted was that very intransigence. Because it has a lot to do with — I agree with the intervention that was made — it has to do with the very idea of revolution. That is, the day I will be, I will be read. It's very personalized. He somewhat personalized revolution. He carried it within himself. That's why he is himself a kind of synthesis, since he comes, after all, from a rather proletarian background.
1:15:47 Even though his mother was a schoolteacher. And he was convinced that he had so thoroughly integrated this Marxist discourse that he carried it within himself. He had appropriated the great means of production and exchange of the mind. He truly believed there was a kind of parousia. That's literally what he saw. So indeed, he saw things in an ultra-personal mode. I think there was an enormous solitude there. I could see it clearly — I knew him at the end of his life, in a publisher's relationship. I could see it clearly.
1:16:17 He thought that there would indeed come the moment, the revelation, the apocalypse. The writing. Because he had so internalized, carried so much within himself, in an immense solitude. He thought it would happen almost immediately through the recognition of the text. Of course there are all sorts of mediations. Of course it doesn't work that way. But if he hadn't had that madness, that mad love, if he hadn't carried that, he never could have written. He wrote every day. I knew him very little myself. I knew him at the end of his life. But I can tell you that day to day, he was a nice old gentleman who wasn't given to flights of rhetoric.
1:16:54 He worked all the time. As is often the case, when you're in a friendly relationship, of course there were witty remarks, things like that. But people who work hard often don't have much to say. They didn't try to impress the room. In the years when I saw him, he was writing. Later I worked abroad, so there was a pause before I picked it up again. But he wrote every day, every single day, several pages every day. We have piles of it, the writing. I calculated that he must have spent 80 months in Corsica over his whole life, since he came every summer for two months, from 1964 on, and every morning, in Calvi or elsewhere, he wrote his ten schoolboy pages.
1:17:34 So in fact, he wrote a large part... well, this is just for the precision of our island, but he wrote a large part of his work in Corsica. This island for which Rousseau drew up a draft constitution? Let me come back to the Treatise on Mad Love, because there's a little anecdote that will make you laugh, because you see, at once, this somewhat naive desire for recognition — I remember at the time we had put together the press mailing together, and he insisted absolutely that it be sent to all the editors of women's magazines, saying it would appeal to them. Moreover, regarding certain categories, certain codes he was interested in, could you tell us a bit — on an Apostrophes program he talks about the sociology of clothing through jeans, and also music, so all these aspects that are eminently Marxist in a way, that are concrete aspects of everyday life, and on which he had something that perhaps speaks a bit to young people, to those of my generation, who aren't so young anymore.
Consumption, music and praxis: the "baroque" 1:18:28 Which is entirely to their credit. And then we'll wrap up, because time is flying, and we need to leave a bit of room for the book signing. I don't quite know how to answer that, because at the same time he wasn't doing a Baudrillard-style analysis, you know, consumer society, in... Did you have good discussions together on this? Yes, well... As he says, moreover, on Apostrophes, he says... In fact, Pivot says to him, but you're wearing jeans, and he says, well, I follow the customs of my time — when he answers it's like Descartes, I mean, for him it wasn't such an important phenomenon.
1:19:02 It's not a marker. I mean, consumerism as we understand it today wasn't at all his way of thinking. That's also one of the misreadings that young people often make when they're receptive to Clouscard's work — they take him as an ally in the critique of consumerism, which is a fundamental misreading, because Clouscard says: if there is a consumer society, well then, sign me up right away. That's the dream. That's realized communism. A society where we no longer produce, where everyone just consumes — do you want me to tell you? And as he put it very well, there is no consumer society, there are classes that consume, there are milieus where people consume.
1:19:33 A society that consumes — I still have yet to see one. A society that produces, yes, because most of the time people talk about users, consumers, forgetting that these same people are also producers of value, after all. And with a sociological eye on clothing. I'm going to answer you precisely on another question that is nonetheless very concrete and interesting, but difficult — well, not difficult, but requiring quite a few mediations, in any case. But one might be surprised that before Clouscard there hadn't been, as you rightly say, a Marxist approach to the elements that seem most resistant to economic categories, so to speak, to put it crudely.
1:20:10 I'm thinking of music consumption, things like that, as developed most exhaustively in Capitalism of Seduction. What was his biggest bestseller? I believe around fifteen thousand copies at the time. Among his body of work, there are many. In Capitalism of Seduction, you have a clear explanation of this: there's already a denaturalization of the problems. He's not going to reduce music to cosmic rhythms.
1:20:40 From the outset — this ties back to the discussion about code earlier — there is a properly human time created by history, created by praxis, and which is very well expressed in musical meter in any society whatsoever. It's likely that in prehistoric societies music was mainly metric. But that time is a profoundly human time in which we find all the moments of society. There is recurrence, regularity — I'd rather say regularity — the repetition of the same meter, especially in the most worthless music, by the way, where there's nothing left but repetition.
1:21:16 But it's an essential moment, it's a moment of security — that's important for man too — the security of having something, a determination, a precision. And then there's the moment of melody, of subversion, of harmonic enrichments, which is the moment of difference, as opposed to identity, to repetition. There, very quickly — it's a bit technical, but I'm sure we understand each other. And he's the first to analyze this. No, not only in formalist terms, as I just did, as you could find in any aesthetics textbook, what I just said, but by linking it to praxis. That's what's remarkable.
1:21:46 It's no coincidence, to answer your question, that it's in the same period, the 1960s-70s, that we see the explosion of musical styles. I say style, to avoid genre and form, to be more comprehensive. Style music, that's rock in the broad sense — not rock and roll only, rock in the sense of an aesthetic, in the sense that it's a way of making record covers. Rock and the baroque, among the classical composers. What's the connection? The connection between Vivaldi and the Sex Pistols is nothing. And I have a reference I can give — excuse me, I'm old.
1:22:16 And the reference is musical. It's that it's the same meter. Regular meter, beat, off-beat, it swings. Isn't that right? As he used to say all the time in his book, at one point — I'd arrive at a restaurant and he'd say, it's good, it swings here. And so it's very important to see that. It came about at the same time. Why? Because it was the first time that society, made possible economically and financially by the Marshall Plan, entered into everyday life.
1:22:48 Life is less bleak. But yes, I'll give you a very simple example like this. But there — someone might dream, generally, that people who listen to recordings of Monteverdi, of Vivaldi, look down on young rockers, and vice versa. For rockers, classical music is intellectual posturing for the rich. In fact, in some way, it's not the same musical need. There. Perhaps a conclusion, from our author of the day, François. Excuse me, I'm running late — I call this phenomenon B.A.
1:23:18 R.O.C.K. So, to come back and conclude on 'Avec Clouscard' — I don't know, what do you feel like saying? Let's say the title, 'Avec Clouscard' (With Clouscard), means with him — we accompanied him and at the same time followed him ideologically. I try to put both components into that expression. There. I have a small conclusion, just my own. No, no, but even shorter — mine is to advise everyone interested in Clouscard's work to go back and forth constantly between the man Clouscard as he appears in this concrete book and his theoretical works.
1:23:56 There. Well, thank you both. Madam, sorry, madam. I just wanted to — I don't know the author at all. Please, go ahead. Which book should one start with, then? Is it 'Être et le code'? Let's take three questions, the publisher will answer, and we'll answer too. Yes. I would say 'Être et le code.' Well, I'm sorry, but that's the biggest one, the longest. It's exhaustive. Well, you should know it's still a fairly dense work. It's not the easiest one to start with, let's say.
1:24:27 No, let's be clear: if it's for the study of manners, of music and clothing consumption, 'Le Capitalisme de la séduction' is a masterpiece; if it's for the properly theoretical, philosophical, critical analysis of libertarian liberalism, which is broadly a portrait of French thought from Sartre to Derrida — that would be my choice. You put it well, invoking that. I would also say 'Le sérieux et le frivole.' Because you were the one who published it. Does the publisher have a recommendation from his own list?
1:24:57 'The Treatise on Mad Love.' A statement of conscience published back then, though I have the old edition. And 'Neo-fascism and the Ideology of Desire,' because there you see it in situ and you see what it's opposed to. There, you're not much further along. There. Thank you all.
