English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Toward an English translation of Clouscard 4:56 England, United Kingdom, and the United States. But when a Chinese student learns a foreign language, there's a good chance it will first be English. So this is a considerable widening of the audience given to our friend Clouscard's thought. I notice - is this some mischievous intention on Pierre-Alain's part?
5:28 That he prepared a nice card, well anyway a double photo, but where he's rather reversed the roles, hasn't he? The one Clouscard used to call very affectionately "the lustique," that is your humble servant, because I used to suggest shortcuts through the Corsican maquis, and one often ended up a bit bloodied - in the photo, the lustique looks serious and Clouscard is laughing his head off.
6:00 Thank you very much Pierre-Alain for this lovely card. I thought this might be the occasion, not just to go back to Clouscard - it's not a matter of going back, it's a matter of showing how, more than ever, I mean to what extent, he accounts for current events, even the most immediate ones. And that's why, as a starting point, because we're going to stay on this subject for at least two sessions, let's say, and maybe three, but in any case at least two.
6:33 And I'll add, regarding what's moving in the right direction, that the Anglo-Saxon correspondents - I say this every time because there are English and American people, but there are more and more Americans - who are the correspondents of Philippe, of Niaud, of Edmond, of myself.
7:04 I don't want to name them all, but there's one whom our whole team fought to make Clouscard known to, and who has significant social standing, in the best sense of the term, in the American intelligentsia - that's Fredric Jameson.
7:35 Edmond Janssen had the excellent idea, because he was asking to be sent documents to familiarize him with Clouscard's thought, and he's going to mobilize for this publishing house tied to a university - I won't say which state is involved, because, since things, the cement is still wet, half out of superstition, half out of operational discretion. I'm waiting for confirmation, but Fredric Jameson is going to say, if he bangs on the table, publication won't be a problem.
8:15 And we agreed with our Anglo-Saxon friends that we would start with this short work, The Metamorphoses of the Class Struggle, published by "Le Temps des Cerises" - what a beautiful imprint, isn't it? And whose director, the one who ran it, who founded it, who led it for a long time, is one of the most poetry-versed Marxists I've ever had the chance to meet.
8:52 I'd refer you moreover to the relevant publications, in particular French translations of Heinrich Heine, whom Marx prized so highly, didn't he? And so, this little world, by pushing in the right direction, one should expect - we have the money for the translator, we also have, if I may finish, an excellent - well, I'm delighted to have met him, because he's a very pleasant person, of Iranian origin, who lives in Canada, who speaks I don't know how many languages, who speaks admirable French, and who is anglophone by function, so to speak.
9:53 So, it's a genuine setup, and there's a consensus that has circulated through all these teams. To begin with, then, I come back to this title that could be found, even on the internet, and I thank Edmond Janssen again, because I no longer know who I'd lent it to - my son often points out that I always forget to note down the names of people I lend books to. Let me take this opportunity to say to everyone that I despair of finding again a book that was given to me at the association, I dare admit, it's the correspondence between Nietzsche and Peter Gast, his musical correspondent so to speak, the one with whom Nietzsche - a mediocre composer - used to vent his moods, and there are admirable passages in that correspondence, including the famous accounts of his first hearing of Parsifal in Monte Carlo, which I used to quote often.
10:58 "If anyone among you is one of those, or knows the one to whom I lent it, it would do me a great favor." There you go, correspondence between Nietzsche and Peter Gast. So I come back to this short work. I thank Edmond Janssen, who by some miracle had four copies, and I told him how much I appreciated him making them available to me.
Reading of the introduction to Les Métamorphoses de la lutte des classes 11:31 And at one point, I hadn't reread it. I should note that it's, you see, I pick these two pages at random, you see, that it's in the form of theses, which is very practical, you see, it looks discontinuous like this, yes, thesis number 60, 61, and so the text is fairly elliptical - that's the term Clouscard himself uses in speaking of his book - sometimes terse.
12:01 So why come back to it? Because, listen, you'll guess right away why I'm reading you the beginning of the introduction that the author wrote himself, which illustrates this book's position relative to the rest of his work. I'll skip the first page, where he's ironic about those who say the class struggle has also disappeared.
12:35 Let me read you the first paragraph anyway. "The single, dominant way of thinking certainly permits writing about Marx, but only insofar as Marxism is set aside." That's a good start. "It may even allow one to deal with Marxism if the class struggle is elided. And it may even recommend evoking the latter, but in order to note its disappearance." There you go. "Galileo's famous formula will be the answer to this new and very learned cultural terrorism: and yet it moves" - understood, the class struggle.
13:12 So there, he presents his book. "This updating of the class struggle will be presented in the form of theses," as I just showed you a sample. "These merely take up again, in a different order, what has been devoted to this research on this engine of history which, in Marx's writing, is the class struggle, across the eight preceding books."
13:42 So you see the importance of this book. It allows for a transversal reading of everything Clouscard had published before. Since, in particular, in 1972, the publication of his magnum opus, Being and Code, of which a fine reissue was made, as you probably know, some time ago, by Delga. "First of all, an investigative work was needed" - that's an allusion to the previous books - "an analytical one, to acquire the materials of knowledge."
14:20 "One can then reconsider these acquisitions in a synthetic manner." You see, this book - "situate them in a homogeneous whole and no longer in scattered order. Thus one moves to a new order of knowledge, to a logic" - it could be the logic of the class struggle. "This is a step that is at once banal and relatively innovative."
14:51 Banal and relatively innovative. Every line is dialectical with Clouscard. "A researcher, at an advanced point in his work, may want to offer a summa, that is, a work that treats in condensed form" - he takes the word "summa" back to its origins, the first occurrence being the famous Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
15:21 "This is a step that is at once banal and relatively innovative. A researcher, at an advanced point in his work, may want to offer a summa, that is, a work that treats, according to the dictionary, the acquisitions of his investigation in condensed form - a simple summary. But what matters most, what is most determinant here, is the logic of the whole. The materials acquired will arrange themselves and take their place according to the dialectical and historical movement of this whole, which is none other, let us recall, and forgive me, this historical whole, than that of the development of French society from the Liberation to the present day."
Clouscard unclassifiable, Rousseau his only precedent 16:06 There, that's clear. How did the class struggle undergo profound metamorphoses from the Liberation to the present day? So, from there, I'd like to allude to another book that I know few of you are familiar with, which is, in a way, in any case, Michel's most properly philosophical work.
16:41 When I say properly philosophical, I mean that if I were a bookseller, I'd be at a loss with my merchandising to know where to shelve Clouscard. Being and Code could be placed under history - the history of a precapitalist mode of production, a precapitalist whole from the High Middle Ages to the French Revolution, not included. But it could also be, couldn't it, an essay on manners in the sense of the French moralists.
17:18 "Moral" and "moralists" come from "mores," manners. And just as in French one says "other countries, other manners," in German one says "andere Länder, andere Sitten." "Sittlichkeit," fashioned from the word for manners, being what is called in Hegel objective morality - law, for example, as opposed to the rules, the kinship systems, what one can observe in a given here and now, as opposed to the morality of "you just have to..."
17:57 subjective morality. But let's leave these reminders - still, we're circling around it a bit. When I speak of a properly philosophical work, I'm alluding to Critique of Libertarian Liberalism. I mean, that's where Clouscard takes stock of the relationships his thought has with the main philosophers of his time. And not only of his time, since I'm getting to it - a long first part, dozens of pages, is devoted to the one precedent Clouscard never recognized himself in.
18:40 I mean Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yes, everyone has more or less fixed ideas about him in their heads. Ah yes, what a genius, what a jerk, what importance. Here, he speaks of them himself - I mean I'm talking about Jean-Jacques Rousseau's texts, and Clouscard speaks of these texts. And that immediately connects with the excerpts I just read from The Metamorphoses of the Class Struggle.
19:10 There is a proposition, a proposition that recurs throughout this treatment of Rousseau's work in - let me remind you - Critique of Libertarian Liberalism, the title of the Delga reissue of a book that, in its original edition, was called On Modernity: Rousseau or Sartre?
19:40 Question mark. There you go. So, yes, there is a statement that recurs, and that is the fact that Rousseau is an immense dialectician. Now, the word "dialectic" never appears in Rousseau. So what did Clouscard mean by that? We need to dwell on this a bit, because as I said, we're going to stay for at least two sessions on this return to Clouscard, thanks to this great movement of generosity you took part in.
20:19 And I thank you very sincerely, deeply. When I see the photo, and when I see the beautiful smile Pierre-Alain captured, even bordering on laughing his head off, I can't help imagining it's because we managed to close the last gap we had set ourselves to reach our targets in the fundraising pot. There you go. Forgive these rather grocer-like considerations, but still, it's pleasing.
20:53 Yes, thank you all. But this last gap has been closed, and I credit it to our counterpart, if I may put it that way, and if he'll allow it, the tutor - we have at least this in common, that we both care about transmission, and he discharges that task admirably. Because the thoughts to which he devotes - the authors to whom he devotes - sessions, segments on his YouTube channel, it's rare to see such objectivity.
21:30 There is also as little distortion as there is a great deal of clarity, without that coming at the expense of the richness of the content. I don't want to give the impression of laying it on thick, but I'm very personally touched, as Clouscard's friend, by his gesture. Even if it's very much on the margins, of course, of the objective and happy consequences of this gesture.
The philosophy of the French Revolution, from Rousseau to Clouscard 22:03 So I come back to Rousseau's dialecticity. You'll see the connection, and how we find almost a mimicry, the same phenomenon in Clouscard, because I said he's the only precedent he recognized himself in. Now, Rousseau is the first, and until Clouscard, the last - even if I count Kant, Marx, and Lenin.
22:34 What have I just unrolled there? Good grief! But, in the history of philosophy, this lineage, this unfolding that goes from The Social Contract to Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, passing through Capital, through Engels's Dialectics of Nature, Engels's admirable pedagogical efforts.
23:04 and of course the Hegelian Himalaya. It's a lineage that Clouscard forced himself to characterize, and that calls to mind - and he is the only one, because he's a specialist in the history of philosophy, a specialist in ancient philosophy, in Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the atomists, the skeptics - there are specialists in medieval philosophy.
23:40 I salute Mr. de Libera here, whose publications are very precious - specialists in so-called classical philosophy, the one in the Cartesian wake, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, etc. Of course, critical philosophy, Kant, and then the modernity that follows - but Clouscard brings forth a new concept, because it is a concept: the philosophy of the French Revolution. And who initiates it, if not its author?
24:21 So, I was about to say - in your mind you were expecting me to say the author of The Social Contract? Yes! The author of The Social Contract, but not only. I haven't yet confirmed Rousseau's dialecticity, but it's the same author who wrote The Social Contract and Reveries of the Solitary Walker - but listen, the solitary walker, that's not the most social of postures.
24:54 So how does one get at this dialecticity? There is a prodigious synthesis in Rousseau. You know it, I've had occasion to formulate it several times: a synthesis between everything that belongs to the order of praxis - to use a term Marx favored, especially in his early works - and the psyche. Now, if Rousseau dared to write both, I don't say at the same time, to avoid confusion, but both, The Social Contract and The New Héloïse - The Social Contract, where there's a Rousseau at the opposite pole from the Reveries or the Confessions, a Rousseau of implacable objectivity and logical rigor - and The New Héloïse, which is a torrent of passions reaching a paroxysmal level.
25:56 Think of the scene on the lake facing Meillerie. Michel Clouscard is, in the contemporary world, the only Marxist philosopher to have written a treatise on mad love at the same time as a Critique of Libertarian Liberalism or Being and Code.
26:28 So you see, I'm speaking here of the most concrete dialectic there is. And these two apparently contradictory aspects, solitary walker and social contract, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Reveries of the Solitary Walker - I'll take them in reverse order now.
27:01 Clouscard, isn't it, The Metamorphoses of the Class Struggle, Treatise on Mad Love, most of whose pages are devoted to a passion - I said paroxysmal - regarding The New Héloïse; it's a paroxysmal passion if ever there was one, that of Tristan and Iseult.
27:33 This dialecticity is summed up by one of the milestones in this unfolding that runs from Rousseau to the Metamorphoses of the Class Struggle in Clouscard, passing through, following chronological order, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and up to Clouscard. When Clouscard speaks of the philosophy of the French Revolution, he doesn't include himself, out of modesty, but still.
Hölderlin: having reason and heart 28:08 Now, there is a member of this unfolding who is often placed in this lineage with us, even if he's being reassessed in recent times, in Hegelian studies - which, let me note, have never been in better health, no doubt because they remain confined to a rather closed academic world, which is - I'm paying a compliment here - never have reissues, even discoveries of works we didn't know, or previously unpublished French translations, been in such good health.
28:45 But still, I mean, it no longer grips the general public the way it did at the time of the Liberation, when events, explosions like those produced by Jean Hyppolite, Kojève, weren't they - but... Eric Weil, in works where he wrote Hegel and the State - it's of prime importance to remember that in contemporary Hegelian studies, we're rehabilitating the influence, since it is indeed him, of Hölderlin, whom I usually cite as a poet, but who also wrote essays, the most important of which are translated in the fine Pléiade volume we owe to the late Philippe Jaccottet, whom I had the good fortune to spend time with in the Drôme, and even to play early music with, alongside his wife, who was an excellent recorder player.
29:47 philosophical, yes, I'm talking here about the philosophical influence of Hölderlin on Hegel. Now, why am I bringing this up? Because there is a formula of Hölderlin's that sums up what I was calling earlier the prodigious synthesis initiated by Rousseau and taken up again only by Clouscard.
30:19 A formula that serves as the epigraph of our site. How everything suddenly comes together. Yes, our site, Joseph — Dominique Pagani, dominiquepagani.fr — it begins with this quotation from Hölderlin, which is like a maxim by which he chides himself, doesn't it? If you have reason and heart, don't show them together, no one will ever believe you.
30:52 I bring this up because this apparently very clear but not simple way Hölderlin phrases it has this negative background, this danger of remaining in isolation when one wants to show — when one wants to be eminently dialectical. Because it's a matter of holding together, how does he put it, Nerval? I'm quoting madmen.
31:22 To make the griffon rise from the sea and make the crane descend from the sky — a prodigious attempt at balance. I say "prodigious" twice because what charioteer in the ancient world could hold the reins of two horses pulling in divergent directions? I'm drawing on Plato here, of course, you know. In the Phaedrus he speaks of these two horses, one black, one white, going in different directions, driven impetuously by opposing ends.
31:59 What strength must one have to hold together these opposites that unleash themselves one-sidedly? Einseitig, as they say — a very pejorative term in Hegel. It's not the least anti-dialectical word, one-sided, if you prefer. There. I wanted to recall that the connection between Rousseau and Clouscard, which can be drawn on many counts — Rousseau's so unworldly side, the way people mocked his accent in the Parisian salons, Rousseau going so far as to say that mocking someone's accent is a class reflex, though he doesn't put it that way.
32:49 He does say that when you mock someone's accent you're mocking a milieu, an origin, a social background — you know, that wasn't a trivial thing to say at the time. Not when you imitate it, when you mock it, which is different. I come back to this dialecticity — it's a word that seems so worn out, dialectics, it's all so simple, matter is dialectical, and there you go, we're done, we have the word, so we have the thing, etc.
Dialectic is not a compromise: the two rivers 33:24 When two rivers — one flows perpendicularly, like a tributary, into another watercourse, while another, opposite it, empties into the same watercourse — you see the two perpendiculars in opposite directions, in relation to dialectics — because there are those who think, I interrupt myself on purpose because we need to reflect here on this term dialecticity, there are those who think that with dialectics you take a bit of this, you make attiéké as they say in Côte d'Ivoire — I salute my African comrades, those familiar with Ivorian cuisine, attiéké, which is a little stew — you take a bit of this, a bit of semolina, a bit — no, dialectics isn't a bit of the thesis, a bit of the antithesis, you make a mouli-mouli and there you go — no, it's not that either, that you send them back to back, ciao, and we don't talk about it anymore, we'll take a third solution — no, you take both of them, that's the difficulty, even though they oppose each other.
34:36 you take water and fire — and what was I going to do with that — it's found again, isn't it, eternity: it's the sea gone with the sun, as Rimbaud says in one of his last poems, which is not yet a free verse poem, is it — the embers raining down in gusts of frost, the embers raining down in gusts of frost, that's still Rimbaud — the winds, the rain — sorry, yes — the winds, the rain, diamonds cast off by the earth's heart, eternally charred for us in the world — you'll find these metaphors in that strange poem from the Illuminations called "Barbare." The difficulty is that we don't send thesis and antithesis back to back to make a compromise, an extreme-centrist synthesis — you know what I think of the extreme center, that they are among the worst extremists — no, you take both, but you sublate them.
35:46 and I come back to my two rivers, I interrupted myself — the two of them abandon the orthogonality they were in and merge into the flow of the main watercourse, that is to say the resolution of the contradiction is a movement — it will take many years, sometimes millions of years in geology, or simply thousands of kilometers — I'm thinking of the great river here that inspires the most beautiful — for one last one, the last, isn't it — we'll have to wait for the river to reach the sea for there to suddenly no longer be this movement oriented in one direction but movements in every direction, where all the forces are here preserved and sublated at every instant in as many waves or currents as you like — the waves rolling far off their shivers of shutters — there, we have to relearn
36:56 how to use these terms that seem so familiar to those who situate themselves more readily within the Marxist field than in another — not out of sectarianism, but on the contrary because it seems to them that with Marx or Hegel or Clouscard, nothing is lost of all the others, but the reverse isn't true. What does Marx say — that he stands at the confluence of the English economic tradition, the French political tradition, and the German theoretical tradition, that is of course Hegel but not only him, he knows quite a bit about the history of German thought, our friend Marx — you see, the very opposite of sectarianism, a thought that contains all the other theses — so again, you see, we haven't sent them back to back, greeted them or rather thrown them in the trash, no, each one—
38:07 how does Hegel put it — all the great systems in the history of philosophy are so many moments of truth, so many stages. There, I wouldn't want, at this start of the season, to stray too far from Clouscard's thought, but I wanted to recall — I repeat the reference — that in his critique of libertarian liberalism, published by Éditions Delga, he insists for dozens of pages on the immense dialecticity of Rousseau in the sense I've just developed, as having both reason and heart, to borrow Hölderlin's phrase, isn't it — something you don't see every day at the individual level, yes, but developed within a thought, within a system, as two inseparable moments of truth — that's much rarer. There, I'll still take a look
Sahra Wagenknecht and the dismissal of extremes back to back 39:18 I should put up the — not the comments part but the questions part, all right — I don't want to sacrifice too much, as I too often do, carried away by my own remarks — there's a question, a very very long one, sorry, there's a question but it's very long, so I think we'll need to — all right, but I don't see the questions section on the screen, you need to put it back smaller — ah yes, yes, that's true, sorry — I can still put it up because — am I ready — very well — and my comments, that's it, right — it's Mylène, that's it, all right — ah but it's telepathy because I was thinking exactly — well, I'm not the only one, given current events, isn't it, to be thinking of Madame Wagenknecht-Kutscher — that means, word for word, Wagen is the car, Volkswagen is the people's car, isn't it, Knecht is servant, slave, the one who opens the car door for you
40:28 yeah, well there she's opened the door of the paddy wagon — and I don't see the question because Gérald told me it's long, but I don't want — ah no, it's not that one, there's one that's rather short, this one, can you read it — ah all right, all right, so I'll read it, Mylène: "What do you think of Sahra Wagenknecht and her party in Germany, especially since I see the DDR flag behind you, and Sahra is one too" — ah, here's someone who knows the code of our friends across the Rhine, to speak like the journalists — well, not like her — I'm very glad Mylène asks this question — well, listen, first of all I think I'm scandalized by the way our media talk about her, because they talk about her to say, yeah, she's both far-left and far-right — it's well known that all that's the same thing, isn't it, it's exactly what Macron said, I'd take anyone as prime minister
41:38 well, I'm really out of touch, except for what comes from the far right and the far left — and I won't repeat myself, I devoted, at the time of the two rounds, isn't it, "Entering a Zone of Turbulence," that was the title of that video, Entering a Zone of Turbulence — I did recall, however, that there were some strange invitations and dinners at the Élysée hosted by Monsieur Macron's best friend, Thierry — I insist on forgetting his name — Solère — I insist on erasing his name from memory, I must have my reasons, not all of them bad — yes, right when Macron had just said that, we learned there had been this dinner with the former prime minister Philippe — but of that, oh no, that's nothing, you haven't seen the half of it yet, for those who might not know already — but Marine Le Pen and Bardella in person, oh yes — so we send both of them back to back, just like the German-Soviet Pact
42:48 we always forget to mention that it came after Munich, when the most important diplomat in the Western world at the time, Mister Chamberlain, prime minister of Her Gracious Majesty, came back from Munich, savior of the peace, in '39, having saved the peace, saying "Mister Hitler is a gentleman" — and people always forget to tell you how many treaties were signed by Western countries, starting with Great Britain — the famous naval treaty — well before the German-Soviet Pact, which was never a treaty of alliance, not even of non-aggression — there's a negative word in the title — a pact isn't a treaty, it isn't an alliance — a non-aggression pact means: listen, you troublemaker, you incendiary, you want war — I'm thinking of Hitler, it's an expression of Clouscard's, of course — if you want war
44:00 I can't stop you, I'd love to, but you're not going to start with us — and that's what gets pointed at, to say that the main victims of Nazism, in numbers, along with the Jews — well, I'm not putting the Jewish victims on one side and the Communist victims on the other, I recall that in Nazi discourse it's the same thing, the Judeo-Bolshevik peril — I'm not inventing anything, I'm restoring historical documents, you can open any German newspaper from the '30s and you'll see all the curses raining down — if it were only curses, but the repression, the internments at Buchenwald, there were prisoners well before Auschwitz, isn't there, political prisoners, of the Judeo-Bolsheviks — well yes, it's all the same — Marx, isn't he a Jew?
44:57 and Christ, because there are still people who believe, I swear, the same ones who are neo-naturalists, neo-pagans, you see, follow my gaze, my voice, what's left of it — yes, the goddess needs blood, yes yes yes — who believe the Nazis were choir boys, whereas they made use of the Christian electorate, the Gott mit uns and all that you like — no no, it's the music Hitler preferred, it's Wagner — no, in his rhetoric, yes, because Wagner, glorification of the Germanic gods, of tin-plate mysticism as someone else, a German, put it — that's the rhetoric, but him, what interests me is what he went to listen to at the concert — Viennese operetta — but yes, The Merry Widow, it's pretty, that's not the point
46:07 the operetta White Horse Inn, why not, Viennese operetta, light Austrian music — but trust me, whoever put more into his hat, is he a lightweight, who let loose more than the stiff Prussian officer — beware of images, the Austrian heritage — there, Austria is admirable, Mozart too, don't make me say what I didn't say. There, I know it's a bit long, my answer to Mylène, but still, I'm scandalized because they're furious not to say — only the far right opposes our colleague, our ally, the biggest supplier of weapons — not to the Ukrainian people, it was supposed to be for the Ukrainian people, you know a good part of these weapons end up in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent — no, to the clique in Kyiv, for whom there are never enough Ukrainian dead on the battlefield, and above all we must never
47:17 make peace, because otherwise — otherwise I'd have no more money — there's another 150 billion that's just been released there, there, there, the day before yesterday, sorry — how nice, from someone who doesn't quite know whether he should go left or right after his interview — let's not conclude, one never knows which way it'll turn — so I'm scandalized by the way she's treated, in general, by the way everything is done so that there's no other alternative, no other opposition to capital, which reigns unchallenged over the world — which used to reign — ah yes, that's shifting, that's shifting, we'll talk about it another time, but since it shifts every day, there's a new country tipping into the BRICS every day, every day there are new products, new exports from countries agreeing to be paid in yuan or rubles, so that decreases demand for the dollar — let's not waste time, these things are happening, but anyway
48:27 since Waterloo the Anglo-Saxon world has ruled the planet — at what price? Ah yes, yes, they tell you about, I don't know, the Tiananmen massacre, they never tell you about the millions of deaths from famine in India — a famine caused, maintained, planned by Her Gracious Majesty — well, not the executive of Her Gracious Majesty, let's not personalize the debate too much — we don't talk about the United States of America and its executive, probably the bloodiest of all, no country has surely been at war for so long since its founding as that one — well, I insist often enough on the fact that at nearly 80 years old I have never seen us so close to the worst war imaginable, which doesn't mean it will happen, I'm no prophet, but statistically, unfortunately, I'm less and less the only one saying so, I would have liked, as it's said—
49:38 think again, there, one last piece of information — no, no, this is serious, this is serious — did you see, the day before yesterday, what he said, that we need to supply weapons that can strike Russia in depth — why not, they're being attacked after all, let's not reopen the debate over who attacked first, we're not in a schoolyard, it's already begun — but I will nonetheless recall that this is a proxy war — when you do that, the United States will never say "we want to strike Russia in depth," since it must absolutely be proven that Russia is the aggressor — I am not defending the Russian regime, the Russian regime is anti-communist, that's not my position, he says it's Lenin's fault for having given independence, autonomy, whatever you want to call it, to Ukraine — and yes, we often forget, when drawing the parallel between the far right and the far left, to look at how Madame Meloni
50:48 who is not particularly far-left — I come back to Wagenknecht — if you look closely at her position toward the Russian regime, she's dead set on the Ukrainians against this crook Putin, who is not my cup of tea, I have to specify that every time, but who I'd still defend against something far more harmful in planetary criminality, that is, NATO's forces, the most formidable armada of all time — so I'm very glad that a citizen of the former East Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the DDR — yes, I have that flag over a 45 rpm record I don't play much anymore because it's scratchy and now I can listen to it more comfortably by streaming, which wasn't the case back then — I had gotten hold of this little 45 with the admirable East German anthem, oh yes
The memory of the GDR 51:58 which was composed by Dessau — it's rare for great composers to write national anthems — from the same musical circle as the one who was Bertolt Brecht's companion, Kurt Weill for instance, and so many others — it's a very forgotten Germany, that one — so I'm glad the memory of that Germany survives through a Madame Wagenknecht. There — and yes, I come back to the France 24 comments, the last one I heard — she's like the AfD, like the German far right, which doesn't mince its words — no, watch out, it's heavy stuff, as they say — I come back — when I hear, yes, but the proof she has a far-right side is that she's against immigration
53:08 just as much as saying Marchais was against immigration — but at the time nobody said Marchais was far-right, because he said it's scandalous that profit can be made from a labor force that has survived drownings in the Mediterranean, the crossing of the Sahara, being cast out into the desert by North African countries — I won't name them all, the most well-known being Libya, I'll only name that one, because the regime there, which restored slavery and all that, is the one that succeeded Gaddafi thanks to Sarkozy, to Bernard-Henri Lévy, to the Socialists, to NATO — well, anyway, you know all that, but we forget so easily what we know when the memory isn't kept alive by the social frameworks of memory. There.
54:19 and I won't dwell too much on that, because I'm still answering Mylène — the memory of what the Deutsche Demokratische Republik was — I recall, because I think I mentioned it in a video some years ago, that there's an article in Le Monde Diplomatique that ran on the front page of Le Monde Diplomatique — I'm not talking about L'Humanité, still less Pravda, Le Monde Diplomatique — in the '70s, the headline across the front page was "The real German miracle happened in the East." So, still, to fight the amnesia attributable to the social frameworks of memory that rule the world, as they say — ah yes, free, sorry, no doubt by antiphrasis, Le Monde Diplomatique has never been so consensual in its foreign policy, has it, and yet it's called the free world — you have to hand it to them — I recall
55:29 that the region of the Reich before the war — not just the Third Reich, the German Empire in general — that was the domain of the Hohenzollerns, the part corresponding to the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, produced only 13% of the Reich's economy — first of all, that's what had to be dealt with when the DDR appeared on the smoking ruins of the Third Reich, in the part that had suffered the most destruction — I recall that the entire rail and road communication system had to be completely redeployed, since under Hitler it ran east-west, since one went from Germany to Germany when going from Lorraine to Poland — von Maas zu Memel, as the Deutschland über alles anthem says
56:39 von Maas zu Memel — Memel is in Russia, it's Kaliningrad, Königsberg, Kant's city — but von Maas, that's less well known — Maas is the Meuse — from the Meuse to Russia, if you follow — I recall all this, the north-south rail and road axes had to be redeployed, a port had to be created from scratch that's now among the most active in the northern seas, the port of Rostock — I recall that not everything was rosy, that I heard, only from the East, with a freedom of speech I hadn't expected, someone say "we export everything from our country except the potholes in the roads" — I recall that, in application of the Potsdam treaties, again on the smoking ruins of the Reich, the country that had most
57:49 contributed to the Reich's defeat and the one that had suffered these appalling tens of millions of dead — tens of millions of dead — is the only one that strictly applied the Potsdam agreements, because it was stipulated there that Germany's industrial potential should not be rebuilt as it was, still less its military potential — it wasn't exactly the time for that — it was even forbidden to make four-stroke engine cars — I'm saying things we've either completely forgotten or never knew, because once you start erasing memory at the time it's being talked about, afterward there's no more need to erase it, you just have to not talk about it anymore, it's as if it never existed — a ban on four-stroke engines, people laugh at the Trabant, cars which alone are a metonymy for the Ossis, to use Mylène's word — that means, when there's an "i" in German
59:00 it's a diminutive, isn't it — when Wagner finally had his first child with Cosima, Siegfried, he was called Fidi — Waltraud, a Valkyrie name, becomes Vali, I had a friend named Vali — Ludwig becomes Ludi — there, Ossi means the familiar name for East Germans, those from the Ost, the East — yes, I recall that everything produced, everything that ruined, devastated Germany, hungry Germany, painfully managed to produce — because it's the civilians, how does the song go, La Butte Rouge, you know that song about the Commune — "for the bandits who cause wars never die, only the innocent are killed" — La Butte Rouge is its name, and so on, that's the refrain — yes, that these civilians didn't even have string to tie up parcels
Die Aula by Hermann Kant and the vote for Wagenknecht 1:00:10 there was nothing — I'm thinking of a novel I've already cited called Die Aula, The Auditorium, written by Kant — Hermann Kant, not the philosopher of course — this novelist who wrote a novel that is such a masterpiece it became — it wasn't trivial — a novel by an East German author, translated by Gallimard for NRF, under the title The Auditorium — the author is called upon by the party to give the closing speech at the ABF, the Arbeiter- und Bauern-Fakultät, the Workers' and Peasants' University — and yes, we must recall that the period — sorry, geographically, the region corresponding to the former East Germany — was far less industrialized than regions like the Ruhr in the West, or Silesia, which is now in Poland
1:01:21 but which was part of the Reich in the east, it was far more rural, with in particular vast latifundist estates of the Jungherr, the young lords in the master-slave sense, Junker, of the far North, the land of Brahms, of Mendelssohn, and of Thomas Mann — it's a way of never forgetting the beautiful formula that opens the best pocket-format history — at least of that size — of Germany, by Gilbert Badia, published by Éditions Sociales, if you can still find it, and in the very first sentence: "France has problems, Germany is a problem" — and these northern regions toward the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, but above all the Baltic, these regions like Pomerania, Pommern, or Mecklenburg
1:02:31 it seems — I'm always amazed, because he wasn't reputed to be the sharpest of the sovereigns Germany had — but it seems Wilhelm II used to say, about these regions, these vast regions stretching all the way to immense forests along admirable beaches on the shores of the Baltic Sea, it seems he used to say: "If the end of the world is ever announced, I'll withdraw to Mecklenburg, because there everything happens later than elsewhere." The phrase is so beautiful — anyway, it's a rumor circulating, attributed to him, why not — and this novel's hero must give the closing speech at this school made specially for those who never had the chance — agricultural laborers, virtual Knechte, virtual slaves on the great agrarian estates, and so, he had never
1:03:41 been to school — it's not that he stopped at a school certificate, he simply hadn't been schooled at all — and here the new regime, despite the shortage of everything, decides to open for them a Workers' and Peasants' University — you had people of 30 discovering history, literature, mathematics for the first time — and it's the hero of this novel who's tasked with giving the closing speech, because we're in the '70s, because East Germany had produced this miracle Le Monde Diplomatique speaks of — to sum up, we no longer need a separate university like this now, everyone can go to university, peasant, worker, engineer — and his arms fall, his pen falls from his hand, because he remembers — I was just at that point — that there wasn't even string to tie up parcels, he remembers the hardships of the early days, the East Germans
1:04:52 haven't forgotten — I'm now answering Mylène more directly — hence the success, over 15%, of Mrs. Wagenknecht, in a region where it was only enough — finally, a region, in a country with barely a pinkish tinge — I'm not even a communist, no, let's not even go there — lieber tot als rot, rather dead than red, lieber tot als rot, it's not only the Nazis who had that slogan — well, they haven't forgotten, you know there are neighborhoods in Berlin where, in elections now, but well before today's rise of the extremes, there are young people — nearly ten years ago, it rose to close to 50% of those who retain some sympathy for the former regime. That's what I'll allow myself to answer Mylène — that's what I think of a person I don't know well enough, Madame Wagenknecht, but to whom I wish
Immigration, development aid, and Palestine 1:06:02 fair winds, pushed along by the Mecklenburg breezes. There, thanks for the question. Now there are a lot of questions since — sorry, there are a lot of questions since — you'll see, yes, I see — I'll start because I see "CNR Soviets, Thalaria School: as much naturalize the foreigners in a regular situation as those in the wrong" — well, me too, I'm for regularizing undocumented migrants who are exploited by employers, and especially thank you, CNR Soviets, because I should have followed up earlier — as an old African, so to speak, resident, over 30 years anyway, in sub-Saharan Africa I mean — it's extraordinary, isn't it, that those who did everything to prevent development, isn't it, under the guise of development aid, my left hand not knowing what my right hand is doing, are the very same ones who cry fascism
1:07:12 when Marchais says the real development aid would have been to help these countries achieve industrial development — nearly 60 years after independence, it's only now that Russia has just offered Burkina Faso a nuclear power plant — I recalled that Niger, which helped us have nuclear electricity, have the most profitable electricity distribution for a long time, isn't it, before the scandal denounced by Proglio — well, I don't want to be too long, isn't it — that Niger, for over 40 years, isn't it, but they've been mining for more than 40 years, half a century, uranium, which was the main fuel for nuclear power plants, a bit less now because it's
1:08:22 more diversified now — I recall that the Nigeriens themselves, more than 80% of them, don't have electricity at home. Ah, development aid, that's been going on for half a century — no, my Marchais wasn't racist, an electrician — there can be flaws, I'm not unconditionally loyal to anyone, starting with myself, but I've already said I'm not Marxist, nor Clouscardian, nor Hegelian, and even less Paganian, but I do have a consistency in these ideas that I share, I'm not the only one — but Marchais was right to say it's scandalous to push them into it by denying them development while disguising it as development aid, to push the young people there, and alas even the not-so-young, and women and children, into an appalling emigration that often ends 2000 meters deep in the Mediterranean — all to lecture us, madam
1:09:32 Wagenknecht — they say she's a fascist too, since, as Thalaria School put it so well, she wants to regularize immigration. There — so you were looking at some questions, I'm trusting your guidance, the question from CNR Soviets, that's where it started, right — yes, I'm putting it up for you — ah yes, it's going to be hard to develop Africa without a transfer of nuclear technology — but yes, I put that up on the screen too, it's there — it's going to be hard, development, under your image you can see, I'm putting up "being against immigration" — ah yes — does that mean against immigrants necessarily — ah no, wait, let's nuance, to be clear — I think it is clear, actually, afterward it's written, especially within the capitalist system — right, of course, it's a discussion, I can see it's from an air soviet, I can see that's not his case, but one can be
1:10:42 against immigration because one is against immigrants — that's right-wing anti-immigration — ah yes, not only far-right, all across the right, they're all like that — if it were only the right — but one can also be against immigration, well, against this form of unchecked immigration, out of respect and concern for the immigrants themselves, which is quite different. "Monsieur Pagani, what is your position on Zionism, on you, and on the peoples who are victims of Atlanticist wars?" — sorry, Amy — if I don't develop a full answer to this question, it's because I'm reluctant to get drawn into the kind of questions that clog up TV panel shows — I don't say that with contempt, I say it with weariness — all right, I've already said — I've said it before, repeated it, it leaves traces on the internet so it's easy to check — that very often
1:11:52 anti-Zionism is a pretext to conceal antisemitism — well, I didn't invent the wheel when I say that, it should be obvious to many — on the other hand, some say the very idea of Zionism, isn't it, is pernicious — I won't settle that, I look at the conditions under which the Palestinian people had to endure the installation of Zionist ideas, which may contain some good elsewhere, but the conditions under which these ideas — as long as they remain ideas, you know, they do neither harm nor good to anyone, Plato's kosmos noetos — but when it gets inscribed in the hic et nunc, in the here and now of our shared reality, it does more damage — there, the scandalous conditions under which the Palestinians suffered the trauma of expulsion, and above all, above all, the scandal of scandals, the fact that it's been more than half a century, well more than half a century, seventy, three-quarters of a century
1:13:02 ...soon, aren't they in camps where polio is coming back even though it had disappeared for more than 25 years, because it comes from wastewater, and when there are 12 people in a tent meant for 4, with wastewater flowing between the tents — right, I'll stop my answer there. And we're treating this a bit too fast, if you like. Can you advise me on questions, because I've noticed you often make relevant choices? Sorry, that's my Corsican side, I rely on other people's work, but I can't talk to you and look at all the questions at the same time. No, no, it's in case you've spotted, as sometimes happens, a question — no value judgment, but what mistake is there — John Wick has a question, a bit — can I — yes, John Wick, that's it — right, Jacques Bidet again, yes, I'll show it to you if you like, so...
Marx dead at the task, an undogmatic thinker 1:14:13 Is it legitimate to think that Marx was never able to fully grasp the science he created — for example, his flirtation with Hegel's terminology? That's someone who's read Althusser. I'll give you the second part of the question, go ahead. It pushes him toward a method of exposition from the simple to the complex, the problem being that there's a kind of deduction of all the categories of life starting from the simple. Now the economist Duménil, or indeed Jacques Bidet — I know them well — have shown that in the economic content this is problematic: the famous problem of the theory of value, or again the relegation of competition to Book 3 of Capital. Well, now we're pulling out the theological dossiers of Marxism. Yes, I'm saying that with a touch of irony because I know where all this discourse comes from — no, I don't mean that against John Wick, quite the opposite, this is someone who does read the Marxist bibliography. That said, if I had stopped at...
1:15:24 ...the beginning of his question — is it legitimate to think that Marx was never able to fully grasp the science he created — I'd say: yes, not only is it legitimate, it's tragically true. What I mean is that Marx died at his task. Marx never settled into a system he was satisfied with, into a dogmatic systematics, if you prefer. He was satisfied — yet that's a word his adversaries who accuse him of dogmatism like to use — there's no one less dogmatic than Marx. Sorry, yes, that's it, there's no one less dogmatic than Marx. I mean, don't forget he dies just when he had gone on to the unfinished volumes of Capital — unfinished volumes with a title, The Social Classes. We were finally going to know what Marx made of it in a developed way, if not fully — one is never fully done saying what needs to be said about a concept anyway...
1:16:35 ...in a more detailed way than he did elsewhere, than he so often did elsewhere when he spoke so often of the class struggle. So, alas, he was not able to grasp it — in any case, I repeat, he died at his task, and he constantly reworked the expression of his own advances, but he never stopped advancing. That's why I prefer to be more often with Marx than with anyone else, because, I repeat, with him I have the others too — including those who are against him and those who are close to him — whereas the reverse isn't true. If I have Leibniz — that's immense, Spinoza — that's immense, but I don't have Marx with Marx I have Spinoza, I have Leibniz — Leibniz who said that if the compass needle were endowed with consciousness, it would have the illusion of believing it was heading north, that it wanted to head north.
1:17:45 The denunciation of illusion — not far from religious illusion — and the trap in which consciousness gets locked up, well before Marx or Freud expressed it, was already in Leibniz. And yes, in Marx and Leibniz, but without the fantasy-making. But as for the rest, the details, I don't dismiss them out of hand. I note that these French Marxists who so superbly ignored Clouscard — apart from a few rare ones, including Gilles Questiaux, who said he was by far the greatest Marxist thinker of the postwar period — it took time, but I do pay tribute at least to Questiaux for that statement. Once again, I'm neither the flatterer nor the accuser of anyone — of no one at all, that's it. Yes, I have another question, not from Jacques Bidet but from Oikonomia — ah, but here's someone who knows their etymology. Economy comes from Oikos, and Oikos — you all know it — but no, we don't know — but yes you do...
1:18:55 If you knew everything you know — ah no, no, I'm being very Socratic. Sorry, Oikonomia, I'll take a bit of time, but we're doing philosophy and this is crucial, maybe the most important thing philosophically speaking. What did Socrates say — that he didn't take his own ideas and stuff them into someone else's head, but rather that he helped the other person give birth to ideas they already had without realizing it — maieutics, that's what it means. Maia is the midwife — the midwife doesn't create the child, she helps it come into the world. Ah, I love helping you give birth to everything you know but have forgotten that you know. Yes, Oikos — go ahead — Oik — but yes, there are many French place-names ending in this root, it means 'place,' and by extension the place where one has settled, the house — originally it's the domestic economy, Oikos, the economy of Oikos.
1:20:05 Yes, you find it in -wick, don't you — -vic, there are so many, aren't there — the French place-name from north to south of France, in fact, isn't it, the Indo-European root, as we say, meaning 'place,' and hence economy — the word that means economy comes originally from the transactions of the mistress of the house, or of the master of the maigida, as they say in Niger, in Zarma, in Songhai, if you like — of the master of the house. So then: in Refondation progressiste Mr. Clouscard lists the key works on friendship and love for each era, leaving a gap where the contemporary era should be — works yet to come — on what foundation? I don't know if I understand the question correctly, but it's interesting anyway — this is clearly someone who has read Refondation progressiste closely. But as for the contemporary period, we never have enough hindsight to speak of it with pertinence — let alone objectivity, that would be saying far too much.
The nineteenth century, century of revolutions 1:21:15 But even just the pertinence one might have — I've already pointed out that even without going as far as the 21st century, if we stop at the 19th, which isn't far from the contemporary world, which will end with the first world conflagrations — the 19th century has no nickname because we lack hindsight, whereas from a distance we can decide that the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment, with this agitation, this great stirring of ideas, this churning of ideas — or that the 16th century is the Renaissance, after nearly a millennium of the Middle Ages — well, nearly, yes, it's not a century, the Middle Ages, fine, and the least well known — or that the 17th century can be called the century of Louis XIV, the century of classicism, the century of the Sun King, the Grand Siècle as it's so often called. But we could also decide, like the historian Michelet in the 19th century, when he said 'the great century,' meaning gentlemen, the 18th — but for the 19th there isn't one, because we don't have...
1:22:26 ...enough hindsight — the number of events there are, the end of the First Empire, the various returns, the Restorations, then it collapses, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Paris Commune, soon Napoleon III, the coup d'état, the war, the colonial conquest — the unity of all that is lacking, lack of hindsight. As for me, what I propose — those who follow me should remember this — is to call it the century of revolutions, because that's all there is: 1830 — no, sorry, 1815, Waterloo, the Anglo-Saxons begin their reign over the planet, first the English, soon the Americans — and bang, here comes the revolution again in France. Well now, we thought we'd gotten rid of all that, and here's Louis XVIII booting out the one who had come back to power in the baggage-train of foreigners. Well, anyway...
1:23:36 ...again a Restoration, a new king, the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe — no wait, the bourgeois king, he used to walk to the Élysée like Giscard with his umbrella, on foot — the middle class, not yet the 'middle strata' Clouscard talks about in The Metamorphoses of Class Struggle, a complex notion — and then bang, there's 1848, and that's more serious, because it's the first proletarian revolution, careful, oh la la, that was close, we came pretty near — but well, when you have National Guardsmen with well-loaded rifles and bayonets, you end up getting rid of it. And then there's the Paris Commune, then afterward there's 1917, the admirable film — good lord, now I'm forgetting the name, I'm going to get scolded — by Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky, sorry, the greatest Soviet filmmaker, in any case his masterpiece no doubt...
1:24:47 This film is called October, the storming of the Winter Palace — it's extraordinary. Well, it doesn't stop — then afterward there are the revolutions that will decolonize Indochina, then Algeria, Cuba — it doesn't stop. So it's hard to talk about the contemporary period. So, simply, on what foundation — even why not on this one — on the fact that we come back to the fact that, from the French Revolution onward, it's been hard to perpetuate the status quo, whereas — listen, from Saint Louis, what am I saying, from Saint Louis, I won't say from Charlemagne, because everyone believes Charlemagne was part of the French monarchies, whereas his capital was in Germany, and it's still in Germany, it's Aachen, Aix-la-Chapelle — no, but let's say from Clovis or from Saint Louis, well, go on, from Philip Augustus to Napoleon III...
1:25:58 I believe he's the last explicit monarch — because there have been monarchs since, and then one that drags on, it's long, as if the monarchical system were something perennial — and before that, look at Egyptian power, the power of the pharaohs, that lasted millennia, it's unique, our history is a rapid sequence by comparison. So what may be characteristic of modernity is the difficulty there now is in perpetuating an unjust power — that is, one that hasn't resolved the problem of the social contract or the social pact — you know, I'll come back to that distinction, which I care about a great deal, especially when I don't want to speak the language of perpetuating...
Transitional morality and the parliament of the collective worker 1:27:09 ...powers, there — that's a proposition, it's too difficult a problem for me to settle in passing. So, on what track — I won't say foundation, but on what track — would I commit myself to answer the question, for which I thank Oikonomia. I'll put up another question — I've put up another question, thanks. So, Laurent Angot, who still knows that — no, no, I'll allow myself to say this because I have a lot of admiration and affection for Laurent — first, he's been following us for a long time, I hold it against him for having shown himself so late, because he's someone rather self-effacing but who, despite having a scientific background — sorry, Laurent, I'm embarrassing you — but who, despite having a scientific training and a literary culture that many literary people should envy him for — so, where are we with the 'transitional morality,' Clouscard's call to bring about the fruitful alliance of the proletariat and the middle strata toward the solution of the collective worker? Answer: we'll talk about it again...
1:28:22 ...next time, and maybe even the time after that. In The Metamorphoses of Class Struggle it's not the first time he talks about the collective worker — it's in Refondation progressiste, which we owe — I'll pay tribute again to Marie-Antoine Rieu, who came to interview him to produce that volume, at the time when Clouscard was starting to have health problems — and in Refondation progressiste he actually raises the hypothesis of bringing into being a parliament, a third chamber if you will, unless the Senate is abolished, so remaining the parliament of the collective worker, which would come in here to balance the arbitrariness of the power relation — the mere power relation, because it's fine for justice to exert force, but the mere power relation that rules only by force with no other justification must always remember this passage from The Social Contract: 'The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master' — there, that's an instability I'll come back to...
1:29:32 ...to always be it — he wants to be it for the length of a coup d'état. 'The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master' — here we leave natural legislation, don't we, the hard sciences — 'unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty.' So, where are we?
1:30:04 We're at the stammering stage, Laurent, we're stammering. First we have to recall the existence of Michel Clouscard, his work, and as for these programmatic proposals — can you imagine, before getting there, one perhaps first has to immerse oneself in these analyses from which the programmatic only follows — the analysis and the outcome. So, a big thank you for Laurent's loyalty, there's his relevance. Paul Gédère: I was moved to hear you speak a while ago about Charlotte Delbo — ah, that pleases me, since I consider her an absolutely major author and poet. Would you like to talk about her a little — unfortunately too little, not because I lack time, I could give it plenty of time, but because I knew her only briefly, when I attended Henri Lefebvre's seminar, of which she was, at that time, the general secretary, so to speak — an admirable secretary, but...
Charlotte Delbo and Henri Lefebvre's seminar 1:31:14 ...an immense Resistance fighter, an immense writer, someone scandalously forgotten — thank you, Paul, for coming here to revive her memory. So, since you're putting me a bit ill at ease, because I'd like to say the little I remember of her very concretely, but since it works a bit in my favor — well, too bad, so much the worse for my false modesty — I had just given a presentation at Lefebvre's seminar on the theme of integration — a sociology seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, at its annex not far from Saint-Germain-des-Prés — and there were absolutely unknown people there at the time, Baudrillard, Tonka [?], a few people who went on to have careers, anyway. And so everyone gave a presentation on this theme of integration — ah, I won't say 'the integration,' I don't know, let's say a yogurt...
1:32:24 ...in a meadow — a yogurt set down in a meadow, with the brand — let's say Danone, that way — no, I shouldn't name names, but whatever — but wait, at the beginning of the 20th century, a yogurt in a field, but that's discontinuity, that's avant-garde painting, now it's an advertising banality. That's what Henri Lefebvre, very rightly and very pertinently, with his usual flair, called integration — the power of capital to be able to integrate everything that claims to be new, everything that claims to subvert customs or rules. That's already very Clouscardian as a line of thought — don't forget that Henri Lefebvre — that Clouscard was, in his beginnings, a protégé in the stable of the late Henri Lefebvre. So, back to Charlotte Delbo — your humble servant decides to give his presentation on a subject he knows a little less badly than the others: musical consumption. I won't dwell...
1:33:34 ...you know my themes — I didn't yet have the phrase 'sonic ghettos' in which mostly, but not only, young people are locked up, to the point that, in the music segment now — we'll talk about this again in relation to The Metamorphoses of Class Struggle — 'and here's our music segment' on a TV channel is nothing but the most worthless music imaginable, for about the last 70 years now — that music, I've said, hasn't moved. I won't dwell on it, I refer you to the little clip we'll put on our channel — sorry, our site — a rather nice film by Aliosha, short but dense when I say 'nice' I don't mean that dismissively. So I give my presentation on musical consumption, and first there's an uproar of protest in the room — but what, 'injection of meaning,' you see, structuralist insults, yes, I had said there was...
1:34:44 ...still, though, I had an approach — we were in sociology, not in philosophy, this seminar — I respect the discipline's rules, I come armed with quantified data, a survey on musical consumption. You'll have noticed that the more regular the metrics, the rhythm of a musical work — like a TGV, say — the greater the sales spread, I no longer have anything left, except when that metric is compensated by an extraordinary enrichment, harmonic and melodic complexity — that's another debate. And then Lefebvre, with his stentorian voice, interrupts this uproar, and, in a great silence intimidated by his loud voice, he says calmly: 'The questions raised by Dominique Pagani are very little known to the French public, who don't know a thing about music.' I was almost embarrassed — only I learned afterward from Clouscard, who stayed on for the cocktail reception after that evening — I had to be elsewhere, I couldn't go...
1:35:54 ...that Charlotte Delbo — sorry to specify this, but I say it affectionately — who, apparently, after Clouscard, was relaxed after the seminar, a little tipsy, raising her glass and saying: 'Henri Lefebvre, who is about to publish a sociology of music in the Idées collection at Gallimard, has just had the wool pulled from his eyes by an unknown young man.' So how could I forget — the hearing I'm proud to have gotten in the ear of such a great lady. My God, how I would have loved to spend more time with her, and have her tell me about the hardest years of the times she lived through. Thank you very much, and for GDR, I'll take the opportunity to say — look it up, google whatever you like, Charlotte Delbo, everything is worth learning. Thanks again — we probably shouldn't abuse the time...
1:37:04 You want one last question? Yes, very well — maybe some questions require a bit of time, but go ahead, there are two, I need to send you one of the two. Yes, sorry, Pierre-Alain is doing a pre-selection for me. Claude Debris: good evening and thank you, sir — is it 'l'être' [being], a verb is missing — is it me who's missing a diopter — for you, is 'l'être et la valeur' [being and value] a title, an announcement that makes sense? Ah yes, undeniably — well, we're in the thick of philosophy, it's very 'philosophy department,' but that's not pejorative, yes, because I'm not the one who said it, but I repeat it because it's a truth one can never repeat enough: the best philosophical advances come from good cuts, good distinctions, and 'being and value' is a good distinction.
Being and value, a fundamental dichotomy 1:38:14 There are so many distinctions that are false antinomies, where nothing is really distinguished, where it's almost the same thing with a play on words, where we're made to believe there's an opposition where there is none — whereas here, either we're speaking of what is inscribed in being and in the materiality of being, or we're speaking — as Baudelaire puts it — of 'an idea, a form, a being that left the azure and fell into a muddy, leaden Styx, where no eye of heaven penetrates' — well, value, for good as for ill, as I often say, and that's why I thank Claude for his question, because it's a fundamental dichotomy — if philosophy has a subject matter of its own, it's precisely because it's not only being, with 15 dots, 15 circumflex accents, in the field of the little French Heideggerians — it's not only being...
1:39:24 The sciences have a relation to being — science concerns itself with what is, not with what ought to be. It would be nice if value were the object of a science — that would mean value had been reduced to the status of being. That would mean — as Plato put it — at the summit of the sciences of value, the true and the false govern the path, the scientific inquiry, the economy of the true and the false, but not that of the beautiful and the ugly, and not that of good and evil. How many times must I repeat — and I repeat it again tonight — that one can be a Nobel-worthy physicist, even a Nobel laureate, even one of the greatest physicists of the contemporary era — I'm thinking of Heisenberg — and be a political scoundrel — well, a scoundrel — he had trouble hiding his sympathies for the Third Reich.
1:40:34 There's no contradiction — I don't see any contradiction between non-Euclidean geometries — I know nothing about that, or between — in Heisenberg's case it's rather the uncertainty relations in physics — and good and evil. Yes, but it's obvious once you give an example, and yet I've noticed that people spontaneously believe that because someone is highly competent in one field, they must necessarily be competent in the domain of values. Family doctors, at a certain time — I'm not attacking the category, but still, many family doctors, often in a fairly conservative milieu, why not, I mean, I'm not putting anyone on trial, but what I reproach some of these conservatives for — not all of them — is that, after treating someone on a farm who had digestive problems, I don't know, say the doctor said to him...
1:41:44 'By the way, who are you planning to vote for next Sunday?' — and he spoke with authority, because he had moral authority, because — well, that sort of thing — I always think that when there's competence, when someone is a learned man who knows so many things, like the doctor — 'doctor' comes from a Latin word, doctus, which simply means learned — we know what Molière thought of that, I mean the doctor of his time, 'ignorantus, ignoranta, ignorantum,' as they say in Molière — it's illegitimate, this passage from what is legal — not legitimate — in being — Newton, Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg — to what is legitimate in the domain of values. And I continue my progression: the ugly and the beautiful, morality, hence good and evil, right...
1:42:54 ...the just and the unjust — careful, because here we get to more concrete matters concerning communities, though morality for Robinson Crusoe alone on his island, I'm not quite sure, well anyway — and as Plato said, the royal science, the one at the summit of the edifice, 'royal' in the sense that it dominates all the others, is politics — if it were a science, which is roughly what the whole immense effort of Platonism strives for, and no doubt, more or less consciously, every philosophical attempt — and I recall here Plato's admirable Seventh Letter, where he tells his family and those close to him about his misadventures in Sicily, and when he says: 'and thus, while my eyes were — while my soul was turned toward politics, I was as if forced to turn instead toward philosophy' — there, yes, Claude, one absolutely must...
1:44:04 ...establish a disjunction, at least an initial one, even if it means reconciling it afterward through some extremely complex, learned circuit that I would be the first to be interested in following — but it's good to start, because this is what's most underestimated, most ignored: the fundamental dichotomy, that is, the disjunction at the outset, the total independence of what is relevant at the level of being — science — and what is relevant at the level of value. So then, how to treat the one in relation to the other — I think I've made the embryonic development of what is called for — would that even be possible? There, the question is well put, almost a bit redundant, linguistically speaking — but it's good to be redundant, because it's not obvious at all — possible, real, the modal postulates: possible, real, necessary for the progression. There, thank you, Claude — yes...
1:45:17 Yes, there's just a small answer, and then — ah, three — I've noticed that, for laughing, men say 'ha ha ha' and women — maybe I'm wrong, it seemed to me, maybe not systematic, but I don't want to be sexist — so, thank you for that wonderful account, I'll just lay the groundwork for the answer to a very pertinent question. I recommend everyone read Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz and After, published by Éditions de Minuit — yes, exactly, very good reference — and there, Éditions de Minuit [Midnight Editions] has unfortunately never so deserved its name, that tremendous night that Charlotte Delbo knew so closely. Thanks again, Paul, for reviving her memory — but listen, we haven't gotten back together this fall just to part ways so soon, so I'll let...
1:46:29 Pierre-Alain go off to his shady activities in Great Britain soon — no, no, I'll keep it mysterious, you'll find out in due time, but I'm certain that as soon as he has a free moment he'll think of me — that is, of you. So, thank you, thank you a thousand times, Pierre-Alain, thank you everyone for your questions, and see you very soon, next time in any case we'll talk again, at least, later on.
