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 through your questions; Henri Lefebvre, his teacher 1:00 Good evening everyone, glad to be back with you after a few days' delay. Sorry, it wasn't my fault, nor the technical crew's for that matter, it was a signal issue. I have several preliminary points, if I may put it that way, to make.
1:32 By way of preamble, as you know, this is going to be a Clouscard special, sorry, that's a bit of a trivial way to put it, but he's going to be the focus of our conversation tonight. On the other hand, I'm keeping and continuing the format I started last time and intend to follow, as I told you, until June, which consists of revisiting all sorts of themes and problems we've already discussed, or newer ones, but each time starting from your questions.
2:19 That's what won't change. And that's why I said, Clouscard by yourselves, via yourselves, since I'm going to start from questions that, directly or indirectly, point back to Michel's works. I say directly, that's obvious when someone asks me, naming him explicitly, about a passage or theme, or an excerpt from one of his works, or indirectly when the topic concerns an eminently, let's say, Clouscardian field.
3:05 And in fact, I'll start right there, without further ado, if I may say so, with a question from Pauline—well, it's not even a question, it's a long quotation—from Pauline Sailly, who has been following us for quite a while, and I'm a bit embarrassed to give compliments to people I've never met, but she shows exceptional philosophical insight.
3:44 I've seen her comment on extremely difficult passages, whether from the Phenomenology, or even the Science of Logic, or quotations from Marx, etc. And this time, what's the connection with Clouscard? She gives a long quotation from one of the rare pillars of the university, very Marxist of course, and belonging to the Communist Party at the time, even if he had an on-and-off relationship, so to speak, with the Communist Party.
4:31 And it is of course Henri Lefebvre. At the start, Michel Clouscard was one of his protégés, so to speak, in sociology. And let's not forget that at the time, the distinction, or even opposition, between philosopher and sociologist didn't exist. Philosophy, sociology—yes, the debate was in full swing right from the start of the postwar period, but not among individuals, not among actual people, insofar as there wasn't yet a sociology degree, let alone an agrégation in it.
5:09 You had to have a degree in philosophy before specializing, if that's the better word, in this or that human science, here anthropology or sociology. Anyway. So Lefebvre had a strong philosophical background, and he authored several classics. He took on, as you know, the critical apparatus of fundamental works of Marxism—Marxism-Leninism, I mean—in the Éditions Sociales.
5:43 I refer you to those, and then, of course, he was also, at one time, the darling of the Situationists, which means he's one of those figures whose rich diversity can be branded by some as a leftist deviation, or by others, on the contrary, as Stalinist—since having been a pillar of the Éditions Sociales at the time, he could be treated as Stalinist by those in ECF circles.
6:14 So Pauline Sailly had the excellent idea of quoting an excerpt, perhaps from Lefebvre's most Clouscardian work, his famous Critique of Everyday Life. This excerpt is from the third part, if you will, of this work, which is a summa. And I take this opportunity to say that Michel never denied the debt he owed to Henri Lefebvre, and in particular, he said that the concept of French society, which is at the origin of several publications of which Henri Lefebvre was the editorial director, so to speak, and he always felt at home in that lineage.
7:12 I'm thinking of monographs by Henri Lefebvre, like La vallée de Campan, and Pyrénées, which examine, over a long temporal span, through historical and anthropological materialism and all that, a here-and-now, particularly geographical and historical, developed over the long term.
7:46 You can already guess, for example, that it's no coincidence that something like L'Être et le code would emerge from Clouscard, which is nonetheless his major work, subtitled 'Process of a Precapitalist Whole,' that is, roughly, the history of France from the early Middle Ages up to the French Revolution—not included—that is, an immense fresco of the Ancien Régime, which deals with many aspects of the Ancien Régime.
Lefebvre's seminar on integration 8:24 So, there you have it—I won't elaborate too much, because one could fill several volumes on the Clouscard-Lefebvre relationship, not to mention—I'll finish on this—at the time when Michel was writing, as the writing of L'Être et le code was nearing completion in the late 1960s, we used to go together to our headquarters, which at the time was a tobacco shop where you'd find a good chunk, a concentrate, of the fashionable world of cinema and Parisian philosophy—not pejoratively nor laudatorily, just as it was—from there we'd go, it wasn't far, to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, one metro stop away, to attend Henri Lefebvre's seminar on the theme of integration.
9:33 The theme, roughly, was—let's say you see an advertisement on the highway or on a Parisian wall, whatever, at a bus stop, you see a yogurt in a field, no matter which brand it's for, that everyone thinks of. Let's not even name it, a yogurt in a field—if you did that in the nineteenth century, people would say it's a collage of extraordinary boldness, even more shocking than Cubism, it's crazy, what does it have to do with the Surrealists—and it's become an advertising commonplace.
10:19 So you see, Lefebvre, very subtly, had shown the integrative power that capital, that capitalist society, exercises over whatever claims to be avant-garde and transgressive. There you have it, at least in the communication of capital. And often, what people call transgressions—I say this because it's the best introduction to what follows, to conclude my preamble on Henri Lefebvre this way—what's believed to be a transgression is often the high points of promotional discourse, promoting new products, new behaviors.
11:06 There you go—whose task, of course, is to bolster the enterprise of seduction; I won't say more, everyone knows the major work, one of his major works anyway, the one that had the most public success, it's about the capitalism of seduction. But let's get back to Henri Lefebvre, and you'll see how he never really leaves Clouscard. So this is an excerpt, pages 116 and 117, Pauline tells us, from the third part of the Critique of Everyday Life.
Reading the Critique of Everyday Life 11:46 So, I might need my little computer, perhaps, there, if I can. You want what? No, because I have… Phew! I wanted to read a few pages of Lefebvre that come before, that aren't here, but that come before the excerpt Pauline gives. So, it's… Yes, very good. Let's go… Can I have the mouse?
12:16 Or you could click, it's the two little ones with the globes, there, like that, grey, there, on the left. There, that one. There, but we need to go to the page—yes, we can move forward quickly, on the right, there, because it's page 99. There. If my memory is correct.
12:48 There, very good. Thank you. So maybe we can scroll down a bit, there. I say that. Yes, more, more. There. That's odd. I am indeed in the third part. Yes, more, let's scroll down. I think I started from a bit too far back.
13:19 There. So, all right, let's not waste time. I'll first read Pauline's text, and then, retrospectively, we'll come back to it. Sorry, Pierre-Alain. Thank you very much. So here's the excerpt. 'It is all too true that the values'—I'll read it first without interruption. 'It is all too true that the values and signs thus promoted as principles and criteria of distinction serve the disintegration of the social, its reduction.'
13:58 'This appears in Pierre Bourdieu's book on this theme, Distinction, describing it in a remarkable way, but without critiquing the process, viewing it positively, with the trained eyes of the scholar, consecrating this process through the scientificity of his exposition—this scientistic sociologist not only ends up liquidating difference and differentialist thought, he flattens social reality, that is, the reality of the social, by setting aside several dimensions—the historical, first of all, but also the values attached to the works themselves and not to the groups, values that this sociological description detaches and kills.'
14:52 'By defining these values solely through their social relation, viewed as a factor of distinction, knowledge abolishes them. The one-dimensionality dear to Herbert Marcuse is thus realized unexpectedly both in knowledge and in reality. And this in France, no longer only in the USA.'
15:22 'There is no doubt that this flattening does not occur only in a work claiming to be scientific, it occurs in the reality described, namely the middle classes, or at least part of them. Such works perpetuate the most questionable aspects of knowledge in general, of sociology in particular, and of Marxism itself, reduced now to sociologism, now to historicism, now to economism or philosophism.'
15:58 'The reduction of the social to interests and class ideologies, even if it's not those of the bourgeoisie but of the middle classes, tends to destroy the social. What emerges from this reduction is either a more or less abstract essentialism—distinction taken as a criterion generates, for certain strata, an essence attributed to them, to which they are tied, and which, along with these distinctive procedures, is maintained come what may, against everything, against the whole.'
16:34 'It also happens that ambitions and pretensions disguised as distinction with respect to so-called lower social strata give rise to political wills that fall in line with the game of those who dominate.' If someone prefers the Duck from Vienna, this will be my only interruption, it's not a duck but a carnival, it's a piece by Schumann called Carnaval de Vienne; it's a typo or a mix-up.
17:08 'If someone prefers the Duck'—so, the Carnaval de Vienne, and Schumann's music, to the songs of Sylvie Vartan or Sheila, that would be to distinguish themselves from the petty bourgeois who adore the latter, and also to cancel out the distance by which the bourgeois elite distinguishes itself from other classes. Intrinsically, Schumann and his music have nothing to do with it. The aesthetic value of the music no longer comes into play.'
17:38 'Of course, without saying so, one tends to make it disappear. What a reduction! What an impoverishment compared to Adorno's remarks, to name only him, on this relationship between the musical, the social, and the ideological. The accumulation of facts, data, even figures, proves whatever it wants to prove and yet proves nothing. On the contrary, this accumulation testifies against the realism of a thesis that destroys the virtual in the name of positive knowledge.'
18:13 'This thesis positively supports a mystification that starts from the real and consecrates it uncritically, abolishing what Hegel rightly considered to be as real, and more so, than accomplished facts—namely, the possible.' There, this appeared in '81. Well, well, isn't that something? When Mitterrand enters the scene—well, enters the scene at the Élysée, he'd had a career for a long time already, starting at Vichy.
Between structuralist formalism and empiricism of figures 18:51 So, let's go back over this from the beginning, there's still plenty of material, all the same. So, most of you have seen that the critique here focuses essentially on Bourdieu's Distinction, of which he says that he described the processes of distinction, in the Bourdieusian sense, in a remarkable way.
19:22 His critique doesn't target that approach as such, but the way it reduces what should precisely be the object of the disciplines involved. You see, I'm deliberately saying neither sociology nor human sciences, on purpose, so as to leave, for now, the full scope our problem deserves. So, let me go back to the beginning: 'It is all too true that the values and signs thus promoted as principles and criteria of distinction—'
19:58 I'll stop before the verb. Values and signs—we're in the great structuralist wave. So don't tell me, 'but Bourdieu isn't part of that, he's not structuralist'—it's not about judging an individual by the idea he has of himself. Simply, it's the era, that's undeniable, isn't it, when problematics were divided between either a formalism—that's why Lefebvre's analysis is so pertinent—a formalism, according to some, or on the other hand, according to others, that retains only the structural framework of the real, or, on the contrary, isn't it, recourse to empiricism—I'm alluding to surveys and the deluge of figures and statistics of which he says, a bit bluntly, but it's a somewhat polemical text, that they claim to explain everything and don't explain much.
21:08 —which is inevitably unfair. There's always some quantified data that needs to be provided, but of course without reducing the content to the immediate data. So, let me pick up and continue the sentence: 'It is all too true that the values and signs'—it's especially this word 'signs' that evoked structuralism—which was in so many titles of the era in the so-called human sciences, social sciences, beginning with semiology, semantics, semiology of cinema, of dreams, of sexuality, whatever.
21:48 'The values and signs thus promoted as principles and criteria of distinction serve the disintegration of the social, its reduction.' So, you see, I don't want to give a literary, line-by-line reading of what I just said in one go. That would do justice neither to Lefebvre nor to Bourdieu. I'll jump straight to the illustration of what we've just seen in this opening stroke, in this beginning.
Schumann versus Sheila: sonic ghettos 22:19 It's that one claims to be doing sociology while actually undertaking the disintegration of the social. Let's skip—let's jump a bit past the end of the excerpt, if you would. Yes, there, let's scroll down further to the point where he talks about Schumann. There, stop, thank you, it's a bit above. There, thank you. There, you see, at the top: 'If someone prefers'—so let me repeat, you need to read 'carnival' in place of 'duck'—'if someone prefers the Carnaval de Vienne and Schumann's music to the songs of Sylvie Vartan or Sheila'—well, there you see, you can guess that Pauline could not have pleased me more than by choosing the page with an example drawn from musical repertoires, an approach to musical consumption—I'm not even talking about production, about the composer Schumann, but about the fact
23:30 that one examines those who go listen to Schumann at the Salle Pleyel and those who go to the Olympia to listen to Sylvie Vartan or Sheila, like Romans and Gauls—yes, I was 14 when the yé-yé craze was in fashion—so, 'if someone prefers the Carnaval de Vienne'—ah, it's been corrected, bravo—'and Schumann's music'—thank you, Pierre-Alain—'to the songs of Sylvie Vartan or Sheila, that would be'—implying, for those who limit themselves to establishing distinctions between social milieus that interest them—'to distinguish themselves from the petty bourgeois who adore this'—that is, Sheila—'and also to cancel out the distance by which the bourgeois elite distinguishes itself from other classes.'
24:27 I'd like to point out how much this echoes something I keep hammering home to those who, in order to finish stripping in particular the young—not a very precise notion, but we understand each other, 'the young,' I trust you to fill in the nuances—of their heritage, I don't mean their heredity, mind you, but their cultural heritage, in order to strip them and rob them and lock them into what I call sonic ghettos that haven't moved in about 70 years at least—not about, at least 70 years, I mean since the very first recordings of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, etc., who are far better than what would follow, just so you know—musically speaking, I mean, we're not even at disco yet—but in order to strip them and lock them in there, they're told, 'oh, classical music is for old people, it's for the rich, it's for rich old people,'
25:38 'for opera subscribers'—since you're a bit intimidated by opera, let me take the opportunity to tell opera lovers, and those too intimidated by the social pretension and the prices, that if you come at the last minute to the opera, or at the Opéra Garnier, there are student seats capped at 10 euros, since seats generally run between 60 and 150 euros—it's worth knowing, if you come in the last half hour before the show starts. Closing that parenthesis.
26:10 So you see, I keep hammering home that one can't go pay respects at Mozart's grave, because he was thrown into a common pit. So much for 'music for the rich,' isn't it? The rich made sure this music was reserved for them, less out of love for Mozart's music—there are some among the rich who know Mozart's music well, a few connoisseurs—but there are so many who go to the Salle Pleyel, to keep using my examples, to the Opéra Bastille, to the Opéra Garnier, simply because they're subscribers, so they can get their money's worth out of the subscription.
26:54 Why not? So, there, Bourdieu's framework is operative, of course, but still, to go from there to saying that the works performed there—that's what Lefebvre says, isn't it? Let me read what he says: 'Intrinsically, Schumann and his music have nothing to do with it. The aesthetic value of the music'—which is, after all, the essential thing when talking about Schumann—'no longer comes into play.' Not to mention that Schumann, I'd add, is one of the rare German Romantics—well, yes, I'm going beyond his musical work here—but even as a man, because generally one can be an excellent composer and a political scoundrel.
27:35 But Schumann, for example, is one of the rare ones to have come to the defense of Heine, who was hated by the German reaction, not only because he was Jewish—that alone was reason enough—but on top of that, to make matters worse for him, because of his irony and sarcasm against the excesses of Deutschtum—it's a pun that Hegel liked to make between Goethe and himself—Deutschtum, with a T, meaning, if you will, Germanness, or Deutschdumm, dumm meaning stupid, German stupidity.
28:15 There. And against which Hegel had good reason to be ironic. Well, Schumann also dared to set to music—many of Schumann's lieder, in particular, the admirable cycle Dichterliebe, the poet's loves. But let's leave that, otherwise I'll go on forever. But on top of that, among these lieder, there's the setting to music of Heine's poem called 'The Three Grenadiers'
28:51 where it's about three French grenadiers returning from the collapse of the Empire. And at the time, that was an aggression. The values of the Revolution and the Empire, you see, were the worst thing possible at the time of the Restoration, at the very moment Heine was writing. Anyway, all that has been forgotten, and what's left of Schumann is the fact that a few subscribers go to hear, for the umpteenth time, these Scenes from Childhood or his Carnaval, played by the fashionable virtuoso.
29:40 And that's good, one has to go there. One of the best, among the best interpreters of Schumann nowadays, is Chinese. It's been Chinese for a long time. Yes, well, people have tried to defend themselves against this Asian onslaught by saying, oh, they're robots, so it's just technique, that's terrible. Those are forms of racism, this business about technique. In China alone, there are more than 60 million classical pianists.
30:11 I'm talking about classical pianists here. Virtuosos, top-level, 60 million, as many as there are French people. Things are moving around us, in our graves, so to speak. And it's not nothing, on March 16th you'll see how much things are moving south of the Sahara too. There, I worked for music. Let's get back to our text. You see why we're going back to the beginning of the text. I wanted to illustrate it, let's go back to the beginning of the text, to Pauline's question.
Science and scientism, distinction and difference 30:46 But, Pierre-Alain, if you'd go back, just to... There, there. What appears in Pierre Bourdieu's book on this theme, Distinction, describing it in a remarkable way—I myself often use it, I say, well, that's distinction in the Bourdieusian sense, it's operative. But without critique of the process, as Lefebvre puts it so well, considering it positively, and you see, a whole semantics comes back under Lefebvre's pen showing that there's a neo-positivist side to this approach.
31:25 So, I want to be fair, it's also a quality of Bourdieu compared to, you see, the other extreme of the spectrum I alluded to earlier in the human and social sciences, that is, those who are in formalist delusions, or in games—if they're not delusions—in the sterility of formalist games. I have nothing against the importance of form and the formal, you understand. But formalism is something else.
31:56 It's the same distinction that has to be made between the real problems of the environment—well, ecology isn't my field, so I have nothing to say either for or against it—and ecologism, which is a set of discourses, most of the time delirious, paranoid, or else very clever—it's not contradictory. Playing on people's fears doesn't require being very clever, does it? It's the same distinction as between science and scientism, for example.
32:26 There you go, so here he pulls Bourdieu—for my part, I pay tribute to Bourdieu's demand for rigor, I pay tribute to the fact that Bourdieu says: you mustn't look down on things just because you belong to a tradition—not merely a philosophical tradition, because I don't see what's pejorative about that, but a philosophistic one—by saying that anything quantitative, all that, is good enough for the plodding masses. No, but it's not enough to constitute material, a here-and-now, as Henri Lefebvre did in the Campan valley, which I mentioned earlier among a thousand examples in his work, but without drowning us in tables as if that replaced reflection on concepts.
33:19 So, the distinction, the description are remarkable, but without critique of the process—that's as far as conceptual development goes—considering it positively with the trained eyes of the scholar, which is a bit ironic, of course, you see, he's pulling it toward positivism, by consecrating this process through the scientific character of his exposition. This scientistic sociologist, there we are, doesn't only end up eliminating difference and differentialist thought. So there, earlier, I apologize, I apologize to Pierre-Alain for making us lose a few seconds trying to go back a bit upstream in this text, which I like very much, from Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.
34:04 In fact, the whole excerpt Pauline quotes starting from page 116 extends a line of thought he's developing, a praise of difference. So let's say it's the somewhat libertarian side of Lefebvre, why not? Why not? It's the same as when I put on trial—and I often do—the liberal-libertarian, well, the liberal-libertarian I always do, but the libertarian can also be positive, just as I clearly distinguish the anarchism that underlies capitalism and underlies the MEDEF—nowhere does one spit as much against the State, regulations and other constraints, you know, as among employers.
34:53 I'm speaking on the economic level, because when it comes to security, it turns out there aren't enough constraints there. Let's be serious: I do pay tribute to a certain anarchist tradition that has never disowned its solidarity with the struggles of the working class. There are the illustrations of the Paris Commune, not to mention Louise Michel and many others. There, so that I'm understood.
35:24 But so, there is a side—yes, it's true that's why he was very much in vogue among the Situationists—Henri Lefebvre, he was always very peripheral compared to those who were more, that's not my vocabulary, but I was going to say apparatchik, though even though he held apparatchik functions, it would be hard to reduce him to that. That's the least one can say, but I tell you, he's someone whom, depending on where you stand on the political chessboard, you can call a leftist or, on the contrary, a Stalinist.
36:00 It's amusing, which proves the character is interesting. Now here he praises difference and he contrasts—and this is where it gets interesting, and thanks again to Pauline for isolating this excerpt so meaningfully—he exposes the abyss between drawing our attention to the distinctions that Bourdieu is about, and the differences.
The historical set aside: from the gigue to the griot 36:34 Which is far less formal. And so this scientistic sociologist doesn't only end up eliminating difference and differentialist thought, he flattens social reality, that is, the reality of the social, by setting aside several dimensions. The historical dimension first, but of course, because if we only keep, well yes, we're going to like this. Now, listen to this music, because it seems bourgeois, because it seems, or on the contrary, seems working-class, and so it distances us from our subscriptions to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées—it's a concert hall, not the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, but it's an excellent concert hall with very good acoustics.
37:25 Where are we? Are we in the psychological field, are we in the social field, are we... This becomes blurry. And not... And that's why he puts it so well: by setting aside several dimensions, the historical dimension first, the history that produced the fact that the same rhythms that made a peasant dance the jig at a wedding—where you get the impression you can hear that jig when you look at a painting of a peasant wedding by Bruegel the Elder, Dutch painting, you're really in a rural setting.
38:03 And with what vitality, and the rhythm of that jig! Yes, why was I pointing this out? Bach, who is the opposite of popular music in the anthropological sense and who epitomizes learned music—Bach wrote a countless number, so to speak, of jigs, of bourrées with rhythms the peasant knew well; they didn't listen to Bach.
38:40 But when they listened—if by chance he happened to be delivering something in a salon, in a setting where Bach's music was played, he'd say, look, that's a polka, that's a Polish popular dance, and so on. So why not lay out the history through which we went from popular musics, then through successive fields of grinding and dividing society into classes, the repertoires became isolated from one another.
39:25 On the contrary, when you go back to the origins of a figure—I'm staying deliberately in the sonic field, I say sonic and not musical because you'll see it's even more extensive—I'm thinking of the griot who, in traditional African society, is at once the musician, the poet. Now there, it's the complete opposite of the compartmentalization between those who listen to learned music and popular music. The griot is very popular, one couldn't be more popular in one's society, to the point where he's allowed, like the court jesters with our kings, to allow himself exceptions, you know, to etiquette, where he's practically the only one who can do so with impunity.
40:13 The griot who is the poet, the musician, the historian, the genealogist, sorry, and so on—now that would be interesting: how these differences, these distinctions Bourdieu talks about, are produced by history, in other words that these differences are not—that's why his critique is excellent here, Lefebvre's—the philosophical stake is that: whatever the injustice, moreover it's a polemical text, so necessarily, as it happens to me too certainly, regarding this or that aspect of Bourdieu, it remains that—and here's the stake—beyond Bourdieu, in the structuralist field, on this structuralist background, to which of course it's not a matter of Bourdieu's own structure, but without which Bourdieu's discourse wouldn't have reached us in that way, it's carried in its time by this field, what Lefebvre calls
41:23 differences are like the difference of animal species in space, in zoological space, whether they're animals, you know, from the equator, from the pole, or from our countryside, or marine or aerial animals—in short, species, side by side, with a relativism that isolates them from one another, when we say, yes, but that's valid for us, but it's not valid for the Bantu, as if—no, humanity was divided into species like that, no—yes, I can feel some of you have the word 'race' rising in your throat, but yes, that's exactly where it comes from, from that distortion, of course, it's not a question of Bourdieu going down that slope, I'd even say, to balance out a bit my reading of Bourdieu via Lefebvre, that Bourdieu wrote one of the best texts ever written on Heidegger's Nazism, so it's not about that, but you see, once you're on that slope,
42:36 I haven't yet mentioned the positive part, by which these distinctions must be replaced by the differences Lefebvre speaks of, but these differences, they're no longer parts scattered in space—I come back to it—they're moments in time, and that's exactly the philosophical stake, isn't it? And when Lefebvre insists on reinstating the historical, in short the genetic concern which doesn't exist, or which is, whether through indifference or through hostility, disavowed in structuralism—there are structures, that's it, there are structures, you have to learn to decode them and combine them.
43:22 And a bit like Kant—it's often been said that there was, I refer here to Simon Verdun's approach at Éditions Sociales, on the importance of neo-Kantianism, which is much further from the French Revolution than Kant was, what is neo-Kantian in the structuralist wave, for example, namely—it's one of Kant's weak points—to explain why we grasp reality through the categories or the a priori forms of sensibility.
43:58 Kant says our reason is made in such a way that, our knowledge is made in such a way that—there's no genesis, there's no historical path leading to the reality being discussed. Ah, well yes, Marxism had to be liquidated at that time. So, by setting aside several dimensions, the historical first, but also the values attached to the works themselves. No, but let's not make the same mistake.
44:28 Values don't come alongside the historical the way birds come alongside fish. Let me take up my comparison again. No, precisely, when you start from the historical process, you arrive at an extraordinary explosion of differences and not a reduction. All that abundance which makes up the richness of human societies, precisely those differences which must not be hidden, still less suppressed.
45:01 But what must be suppressed is the alienation that consists in interpreting them in an ontological way, as though these differences were due to a natural or religious already-there, servile in themselves. As though it were there before man acted, before history operated. As though it were in nature or in divine creation. Or in both, 'Deus sive natura,'
45:33 and 'everything is already decided.' Isn't that so? So, an interpretation—here we recognize one of my recurring refrains. I say it, I repeat it, this refrain, because there are many newcomers and it's—I'd say it's more necessary than ever since afterward I'll get to a question from Clomissi, there, I say it in advance, who tells us—so I never know whether to say 'she'
46:06 and anyway it's none of our business, but 'they,' 'he'—she says she's lost. When I spoke about Wagner's rhythm, I'll come back to it. You see, I'll be answering questions that sometimes go back to 2021, and even earlier questions. I'll take up my refrain: when you're confused in philosophy, and God knows it's a discipline that doesn't lack occasions for getting confused, and it's not with my digressions that it's going to become less frequent.
Naturalist, supernaturalist, anthropological 46:44 Let me recall something to help you land on your feet: all philosophical viewpoints, which sometimes seem to swirl around and get tangled up, can be divided into three great groups. The naturalist viewpoint, the supernaturalist viewpoint, and the anthropological viewpoint. The naturalist viewpoint, to recap, is that nature makes man, heredity. I'm not concerned with history, with heritage, but only with heredity.
47:16 Why not? Very fashionable, I look at this ‘jiot' where people try to explain the origin of races starting from the chromosome, etc. Fine. In fact, when you look closely, because these are still serious people, I'm not saying they're cranks, but as soon as they leave their test tubes, their numbers and their sequence chains—which I respect, it's not my field, but I can guess—based on the lab they work at, I'm thinking of the Max Planck Institute, for example, that's serious stuff.
47:46 I guess it's serious stuff, but as soon as they leave that to talk to us, to popularize things for us, then they fall back into ideology, inevitably, with the words of the tribe, to speak like Mallarmé. I mean that in the end, one realizes that all this has been so mixed, stirred together, that it's not through genetic origin that I'm going to recognize what I am or what my neighbor is, because all this has been thoroughly mixed.
48:19 And fortunately—let's think 'fortunately'—never forget that ancient peoples were wiped out, without war, without weapons, but by a cold or bronchitis brought by a missionary into the jungles of the Amazon, and that was enough to decimate tribes that were too isolated, that hadn't been mixed enough, that were too pure, in a word, biologically, and who therefore, faced with the first viruses, were absolutely defenseless. So it's better, thanks to mixing, to get vaccinated against this and a bit of everything.
48:58 It's mixing that makes the richness of humanity. But yes, I know that's not fashionable. So, these values attached, as Lefebvre says, to the works themselves and not to the groups—it's not because it's bourgeois people who go listen to Schumann that Schumann is bourgeois music. That means nothing. Marx and Lenin are neither workers nor peasants.
49:29 That means nothing when you stop there. Marxism is not mechanism. By defining these values solely through their social relation—careful, Lefebvre knows very well that the social relation is determining—but by defining these values solely, mind you, through the social relation viewed as a factor of distinction, knowledge, so-called knowledge, this positivist and scientistic knowledge we spoke of earlier, abolishes them.
49:59 There. One-dimensionality, according to Herbert Marcuse, thus comes about unexpectedly both in knowledge and in reality. If it were only in the intellectual's head, in knowledge—but unfortunately it takes hold in the most vulnerable circles for this kind of discourse, and this in France too, not only in the USA from '68 on. Look at the importance of the Californian model in the hippie wave, for example. There's no doubt that this flattening doesn't happen only in a work claiming to be scientific, it happens in the reality described, namely what I call the classes, the most vulnerable milieus, the middle classes, or at least part of them—I think we need to go down a bit, Pierre-Alain.
50:43 Thank you. Such works perpetuate the most questionable aspects of knowledge in general, of sociology in particular, and of Marxism itself. And yes, this hasn't spared certain circles that call themselves Marxist. Reduced now to sociologism, now to historicism, now to economism, or to philosophism. So, since—I'll interrupt myself—since I told you that tonight, and until next June, I'm taking up themes I often address without limiting myself to them, but always—whether it's new or rehashed—I'll proceed from your questions, I'll take the opportunity to answer here someone—I don't have the question in front of me, you didn't ask for it, but never mind, since it's very short—someone asking me about the famous phrase often quoted, Marx's, saying 'I am not a Marxist.'
"I am not a Marxist" and the 1859 preface 51:43 'What I know is that I am not a Marxist.' Of course, it's the enemies of Marx and of Marxism who quote that. So of course they'll say, 'oh no, no, we're the enemies of dogmatic Marxists, we like Marx precisely because he doesn't call himself a Marxist.' Ah, what would Marx be worth without Marxism, that's clear. Wait, Marx is quite right not to want—he, who died at the task, who never stopped putting back on the table his prodigious theoretical elaboration, and who dies just as he was finally about to develop the concept of social class, which he had considerably enriched by linking it to the ownership of the means of production and exchange.
52:30 in the wake of Rousseau. Well yes, so when this Marx says 'I am not a Marxist,' there are some who take advantage of it to make us believe that Marx is, like his enemies, a relativist. Well, that's how I put it. In short, they turn Marx into café-counter talk. 'Me, I'm not a Marxist,' there you go, and then he says he's a feminist, but actually he's a proletarian feminist, not a bourgeois one, or the other way around.
53:09 You see, here we dissolve the man-signature. Now, when Marx says 'I am not a Marxist,' that doesn't mean that only one authentic Marxism exists, the one enclosed within the biological individuality of Karl Marx. Readers shouldn't be taken for fools—it means above all that Marxism must not be reduced to whatever point I've reached now.
53:42 It has to be developed. It's a development over time that Marx then thought through. When he says 'I am not a Marxist,' that means 'I have never stopped at a fixed system.' But there is a progression. Marx never said he'd been wrong to oppose superstructures to infrastructures. On the other hand, from the 1859 preface to the Critique of Political Economy onward—that famous preface which I say contains the most Marxism in the fewest lines, and which I therefore recommend to those who'd like to be introduced to his work in general—I recall that in this preface, after having opposed pure superstructure, had he put a period at the end of that paragraph, well then, that would be a fixed and mechanistic Marxism.
54:37 But no, he moves to a new line and suddenly the second part of the text begins. So, it's only a page and a half, this preface, where he says: at a certain point in their development, at a certain stage—if it's translated correctly—of their development, the productive forces enter into contradiction with the relations of production within which they had moved until then. From forms in that relation which they were, they turn into fetters. In other words, Marx, who had just said that the superstructures—everything that's in the head, roughly speaking, put very crudely—can be found in Friday's ideas, in religious, philosophical, ideological, political, legal discourse.
55:25 In short, it's Marx who says in the text 'in short,' in a word, there's an extraordinary category common to all that. Yes, the ideological category, that's where he says 'in short,' ideological. So don't go saying that Marxism is just one more ideology, right? It's a permanent denunciation of ideology. No, ideology isn't the other person's discourse. It's what is produced by the economic base, it's what is produced, but not mechanically, for—I repeat—at a certain stage of their development, the productive forces enter into contradiction with the relations of production within which they had moved until then. Since there are new arrivals for whom this seems like Chinese, it's really not that complicated.
56:18 When the steam engine was invented, and when what would soon be called the industrial revolution began, it was an upheaval without precedent in the productive forces. It's not just moving from animal traction to the steam engine, that's going to change—the tractor is not the plow. And even less the combine harvester, but one must not think that mentalities produced by millennia of history are going to change as fast as the equipment, the hardware of the productive forces, as the technology.
56:55 And this is where Marx says that the forms they were, the ideologies in question, the forms they were, of relations of production which in this case were feudal. When an industrial revolution appeared, they become fetters. The feudal, monarchical relation of production in the eighteenth century becomes a brake on the prodigious development of the new productive forces. And Marx says it: then an era of social revolution opens up—this distortion, you see, is going to cause a historical upheaval.
57:34 But what must be retained is that there is no reflection in the mechanical sense of the term, of what is below by what is above. Sometimes the superstructures reflect the infrastructures, sometimes, on the contrary, they oppose them. What a dialectic! You see, one must have a sense of historical materialism in order to be a bit more nuanced than structuralist formalism or positivist empiricism. I'm summarizing Lefebvre's approach here a bit.
Essentialism, Adorno and the destruction of popular music 58:08 So, once again, the reduction of the social—I'm getting to the end of this page—to class interests and ideologies, even if it's not those of the bourgeoisie but of the middle classes, tends to destroy the social, to mask it, that's understood, right? Let's scroll down the text a bit, Pierre-Alain, and out of this reduction comes either an essentialism, right? That means that bourgeois, proletarians, become essences. We're no longer in movement or in history.
58:40 We come back to my geographical metaphor, like animal species, so to speak, that distinguish themselves from or fight against one another. More or less static, or else a more or less abstract voluntarism. The distinction taken as a criterion generates, for certain strata, layers, an essence that is attributed to them, to which they are attached, and constitutes, with these distinctive procedures maintained come what may—in fact, against the totality of what needs to be grasped. It's also a way, isn't it, of masking the forest by dint of scrutinizing the branches.
59:14 It also happens that ambitions and pretensions disguised as distinction with respect to so-called inferior social layers give rise to political wills that fall into the game of the dominators. Now, this is a bit clearer than it was at the time, but he shows with great lucidity here to what extent power, capital, is going to make use of the opportunism of the so-called human or social sciences—when I think we discussed for hours to find out whether—for hours, for years, and we still discuss whether one can say human sciences or social sciences, if someone claims that social sciences is more left-wing than human sciences—anyway, anti-humanism was already underway.
1:00:01 If someone prefers the Vienna carnival and Schumann's music to Sylvie Vartan's songs—so there's the passage we saw earlier, right? And I'll take the opportunity, I didn't say this earlier, to say that—ah, but I am going to talk about myself after all, I mean biographically, but yes, I'm talking about Lefebvre and Clouscard. With Clouscard, as I told you earlier, we went to the seminar that Lefebvre held on integration at the annex of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, located roughly opposite the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
1:00:38 A building that belongs to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. And this seminar's subject was therefore integration, as I told you earlier—yogurt in a field: at one time it's transgressive, revolutionary, at another time it's an integrated banality co-opted by capital, an advertising banality. Well, each person gave a talk to illustrate this concept of integration by capital of whatever claims to be transgressive, and there were people who were unknown at the time, like Baudrillard, who asked me for the manuscript of my talk.
1:01:20 Yes, I gave a talk on musical consumption, on how capital proceeds to integrate whatever claims to be transgressive—rock, there was Vince Taylor, whom I didn't know but who was one of those rockers who went up on stage with bicycle chains, trembling, roaring, anyway, I called it the integration of the hymn through rhythm—it was a bit precious as a title, but I was young.
1:01:52 And be that as it may, a few months later Henri Lefebvre published a sociology of music—that's what I mean, we talked a lot about music, then in the evening after that seminar session, with his admirable secretary, a great résistante, a great sociologist, a great writer, Charlotte Delbo, to whom I pay homage here.
1:02:28 The aesthetic value of music no longer counts, aesthetics, all that is relative, that's for us but not for the masses—yes, there are 60 million Chinese who play Schumann admirably, who don't tell themselves, but that's music for Westerners. Of course, without saying so, there's a tendency to make it disappear. What a reduction, what an impoverishment compared to what Adorno says. Adorno is, among philosophers, one of those who knows learned music best, to put it quickly.
1:03:01 He missed the most learned of popular musics, or the most popular of learned musics—you guess that I'm alluding to what he says about jazz. I'll take the opportunity to react against the enormous misreading by poor old Bégaudeau, as he calls himself, who, when reading—because someone told him, you should read what Clouscard or Pagani say about musical consumption—apart from rock, he clearly doesn't know much, because through me, he confirms it.
1:03:37 And he says that our critique of rock is as stupid as the critique he's right to make of Adorno, saying that jazz is nightclub music. I'm going a bit fast, but I think Adorno missed jazz, which calls into question some of his privileges as part of the great German intellectual elite.
1:04:10 But Adorno is a great thinker. So, yes, back to Bégaudeau. It's not only these differences—it's that we do the opposite of Adorno. We reproach this music for not disturbing us enough, for not being popular enough, but for being 'people.' And I repeat—I repeat it because it's inaudible, so it's better to repeat it so that it begins vaguely to come back as a distant echo—that people-music has been made in order to destroy popular music.
1:04:47 The short film that Ali Ocha was kind enough to film, to make, with Pierre-Alain, whom I met on that occasion—indeed, I begin my talk in this short film by saying that for the first time in the history of world music, we hear the same refrains everywhere; I'm telling you, the destruction of an extraordinary richness.
1:05:28 You see, to illustrate everything we've seen about Lefebvre, that distinction has come to occupy the place of difference—the differences that existed between musics: tango was listened to more in the southwest, in the France bordering Spain, the Iberian countries, and the accordion more in the Ardennes, near Belgium, and bal-musette, and all that profusion of different musics has been levelled, flattened, as he said earlier, flattened by Lefebvre, in favor of the same refrains you hear between 11pm and 2am in Tokyo, in Brasília, in Abidjan, in Paris, in the same clubs.
1:06:17 No, in different clubs, but you always hear the same references that you know, even I know them. That's what you're saying. So, I'm interested in everything, and I look for novelty, I have trouble finding it there. You really have to search far to find it. I've never found it in China. So, you see, what a reduction, what an impoverishment compared to what Adorno said, to name only him, about this relationship between the musical, the social—which tends to preserve itself—and the ideological, the accumulation of facts.
1:06:58 Earlier I said it was good on Bourdieu's part not to have the laziness—I don't know—of the philosopher who looks down on the laborious work of those who do surveys and quantify data, but still, still, that doesn't replace a conceptual and historical development. The accumulation of facts, of data, even of figures, proves whatever one wants it to prove and yet proves nothing. A bit terse.
The possible: Lenin, Marx and Hegel's Wirklichkeit 1:07:28 On the contrary, this accumulation testifies against the realism of a thesis that destroys the virtual in the name of positive knowledge. I say this to make the fact understood, because those who know his thought poorly—he always defends the virtual and above all the possible, because it's on this notion of the possible that this text is going to end. In other words, what belongs to the order of the real but is not yet realized.
1:07:58 But it's not the unfeasible. It's not something that can never happen. Ah, does that remind you of something? Yes indeed, I had devoted an analytical reverie to Lenin. Who would have thought? Lenin in the reverie. Well, yes, commenting on a magnificent text by Lenin at the end of 'What Is to Be Done?' So not something I dug up from a correspondence with his grandmother.
1:08:31 A fundamental text that ends with this injunction from Lenin: 'Dreaming is necessary, one must dream!' And he mocks, doesn't he, the terror aroused in some central committee or political bureau by the fact that someone who claims Marx as his own, like me, Lenin, encourages dreaming. And there Lenin makes an extraordinary distinction between the dream that never leads to anything, to any reality, because it's indifferent to the spatial and temporal conditions—that is what makes the virtual, his wish, his desires, his projects, in short, what makes—as Marx says, and yes, I'm moving from Lenin to Marx—what immediately distinguishes the most expert bee, the bee, the mason wasp, he's alluding to, which admirably builds hexagonal cells, what distinguishes it immediately from the most unskillful architect is that the architect has his house in his head.
1:09:41 before producing it in reality. And this 'in the head,' that's the virtual, the possible, that dear Henri Lefebvre spoke of—but not just any virtual, not the imaginary, imagination in power. Look carefully at the great Nazi rallies in the 1930s, look carefully at Nuremberg, the nights with torches and the neo-Roman tin ornamentation, the legions with eagles and all that pageantry—imagination was in power, because it's the imaginary, far from the real, from the reality of Germany.
1:10:18 It's the imaginary—the great danger threatening Germany is not capital, it's Judeo-Bolshevism. So, this thesis then, which liquidates the virtual—I'm summarizing—under the pretext of establishing a positive knowledge, figures, surveys, this thesis positively supports a mystification that starts from the real, fine, and consecrates it uncritically, without examining it, without its dialectical genesis, by abolishing what Hegel rightly considered as the real—God knows how much Hegel fought against the romantics on this point, he held to the real.
1:11:08 I'll take the opportunity to recall that there are several words—I was going to say two, but essentially there are two—that keep recurring in Hegel's pen when he speaks of reality; one must clearly distinguish, even oppose them. There's 'réalité,' where he borrows the root from Latin languages, from the Romance languages—reality in the ordinary sense, what surrounds us, the sensible, which is far from being reality for knowledge, which is only reality for opinion; for example, if I trust this reality, I am motionless and I have under my feet the solid ground that doesn't move, whereas I am actually moving along with the rest of our planet at 30 km per second around the sun.
1:11:53 But it takes millennia of scientific development and many abstract equations, far removed from the sensible, to arrive at this true reality. And this, this true reality, you see, this reality accompanied by a discourse that speaks the truth—which is not the case when I say everything around me is motionless—this reality, he no longer calls 'Realität,' he calls 'Wirklichkeit.' And in 'Wirklichkeit,' you find again—to speak German—to arrive at notions that are familiar to you, 'wirken,' which gives the English 'work,' except it's W-I-R-K, not O-R-K, 'wirklich,' that is, coming from action, which is the result of a becoming and not situated in the static timelessness of structures.
1:12:43 So, in abolishing what Hegel rightly considered as real, as much as and more than accomplished facts, namely the possible—thanks to Pauline for having been so close to Clouscard and to 'Clouscardité' by recalling what, in Lefebvre, is perhaps closest to Michel Clouscard's approach. Do we have time to move on to the following questions? Yes, yes, we have time. Well, then, wonderful. We've only done an hour, there's a small question that might help clarify things, well, that we've just received.
Audience question: Bourdieu, Althusser and fields 1:13:17 Gladly? Just to, precisely. So, Guillaume Storer, delighted—unless I'm losing my memory a bit, no, it's not only a physiological degradation, that exists too, but necessarily, in addition, the longer one lives and the more time passes, the more one has things to store and the less room there is. So one has to sort things out—if I've already seen this, forgive me, but I don't think so.
1:13:47 What does Lefebvre criticize Bourdieu for? Not having done interdisciplinary work—one man can't do everything, that's quite right. Bourdieu's statistical data support Marxist theses. Well, I know very well that Marx serves many purposes. He especially served to de-Marxify the university. No, not Marx, no, not Marx. A certain use, isn't it, of Marx, opposed to everything that is real communism—well, anyway, Marxism has every quality as long as it's not in power.
1:14:20 as long as it's neither Castroist, nor Maoist, nor Leninist, nor Stalinist, nor... Then it has every quality. So, I'm not saying Guillaume falls into this, I'm saying one must not let oneself be influenced by that kind of discourse, and one must not hand out certificates like that, giving Bourdieu a certificate. I respect Bourdieu, he's a serious man, and you'll have noticed that in my commentary I tried to correct whatever might have been unjust, excessive, or even terse in a text that I keep saying also has a polemical function, not only a theoretical one.
1:14:58 It's Lefebvre's text. So, in that case, I'm on Guillaume's side. On the other hand, I mean, Bourdieu's statistical data support Marxist theses—I'm not at all sure of that, because by dint of multiplying—I come back now to Bourdieu—fields, habitus, in short, everything that divides the real and everything that sections it, everything that compartmentalizes it, a bit like Althusser.
1:15:30 There, I'm squarely in the field that claims to be not only Marxist, but the most orthodox Marxism. But when Althusser says, 'Yes, the economic, of course we must talk about it, but in the last instance,' while respecting the autonomy—there I am with Bourdieu—the relative autonomy, of course I said relative, it's the relative autonomy of the aesthetic field, of the religious field, of the economic field, of the literary field, why not the erotic field?
1:16:04 And by dint of saying that the economic only intervenes there in the last instance, that's a way of making sure it never actually happens. And we will never know what the link is between Schumann's music and the level of development of the German economy compared to the English and French economies, when Schumann and musical romanticism in general—which is a prodigious wealth—occupies the summit of musical creation.
1:16:37 There. What he reproaches him for, I think I've said it enough, is replacing the unfolding of differences in time with the distribution of distinctions in space. Here the proletarian, here the bourgeois, here the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and over there, the little suburban nightclub. That's not how it works. Once and for all, in any case.
Sublating relativism: the African example 1:17:08 Thanks in any case for seeing that it's not obvious, and for asking the question. You were talking about relativism, just one small additional question. Yes, of course. So, we're staying on relativism. ZA. Good evening, ZA. Good day. I'm new to the channel. So I'm surely asking a question that's already been addressed here. There's someone humble. That's better than modest. But I personally run up against relativism in my discovery of philosophy.
1:17:40 How to get past it? Listen, that's too big a question for me to answer off the cuff, that is, at the start of the end of the session. But I will still say, I'll try to say what seems most important to me in the little time I have to devote to this question, because there are others that I've prepared, that I've addressed. So I'm now refocusing my answer on this aspect.
1:18:15 We never realize the benefit we can draw, in order to answer ZA's question, precisely, to understand what relativism means here and the critique of relativism, and therefore the need to overcome it. The importance, if I may, of the distinction I tried to make between differences in space—for example, animal species on Earth, for example, in nature—and the unfolding of moments—I no longer say parts in space, but moments in time.
1:19:01 Thus, like Marx—if I'm not a Marxist, this is where I'll speak about relativism. It's not to say each to his own opinion, after all, well, in any case, if there's someone who calls himself a Marxist, I am not one. No, no, Marx is not at the corner café. He is at a moment in his journey. For example, when he realized how important economics was for understanding, not only the economy, but everything it can determine in the world around us, he was at a moment already different from his first moment when he was a disciple of Feuerbach, who did not yet maintain that it was happening on the side of the English factory—the key to what was happening around him in Germany, that behind the German dream, the setting of the German dream, endured, I think, romantically here, which unleashed a creativity of the imaginary, well, for example, of which there's little equivalent, to the point that much later, the French surrealists paid it homage,
1:20:11 even the symbolists in between. But he saw that behind the setting of this imaginary, there was the calculation of the English factory. And yes, that's how one must overcome relativism. It's by bringing in the temporal dimension. So, when we're going to say—I'll give a second example, I'll stop at this example—to thank ZA for asking such an important question.
1:20:51 Because for someone who calls himself a beginner in philosophy, he immediately starts sniffing out what must not be let go of as a question. I thank him for it. I'm going to talk about myself again, but well, on a very external level. If I may say, when I was—when I worked in Africa, in the field of development, I recall that I never saw one country help another become its competitor. And so this field is somewhat questioned, but I'll come back to that on March 16th at the café, the Spoutnik Marxist café, at their invitation.
1:21:30 I'll invite you cordially. When I was over there, many businessmen I dealt with, sometimes at a cocktail party at the French embassy, because I worked a lot with the cultural attaché of our embassy, since he was the one in charge of school textbooks. I was working for the Hachette group at that time, on the design of school textbooks with educators from various African countries, the pedagogical institutes, the IPB, the Pedagogical Institute of Burkina, and the equivalent in Mali, in Côte d'Ivoire, etc.
1:22:07 When I used to meet big shots, they say, don't they, VIPs, we'll call it whatever you like, but I'm thinking here especially of businessmen, I'd been introduced, and you know it's not just an African life I've gained, I quote an African proverb, that a tree trunk can stay in the water as long as it wants, that's not what will make it a crocodile, the Africans say. But anyway, when businessmen were introduced to me like that, they would question me, they'd say to me, you who know Africa well.
1:22:47 I say that because I know people who've been in Africa far longer than me and who never understood anything, who never even wanted to understand anything, for that matter. As for me, I've been mixing with black people for 40 years, and I can tell you it's always the same banalities, the same stories about tanned skin and so on. But they'd ask me practical questions, should I leave a tip, how should I speak to their wife? And I'd answer them - ZA, don't be impatient, we'll see that we're right at the heart of his question about relativism and how to get beyond it.
1:23:25 I'd tell them, 'Africans, I'm going to give you a scoop.' Then all of a sudden they'd listen, because that's why they were questioning me, they wanted to know more about a new market they admittedly knew little about. They want their children to go to school, bring home good grades, earn money, and be healthy - and the more I talked, the more disappointed they got. They wanted me to talk to them about negritude, and I'd tell them, 'They're just men.'
1:23:57 We're no longer in relativism. There you go. I give this example to illustrate what I said in a way that might seem a bit abstract, the difference between the distribution of animal species in space and human moments in the temporal unfolding of history - differences produced by this development. Well, I'm saying that often what's presented as a deep African identity, like group solidarity, family solidarity, etc., is exactly what people used to say where I'm from, in Corsica, three generations ago, because it still goes on in certain circles.
1:24:37 And throughout Western Europe, in all the most developed countries, going back a bit in time, it's rural society that is more substantial, more solidary, more bound together, where individuals are less isolated than in the big city of the industrial era. So what we think is a difference in space is - it's much clearer now - much more a difference in time.
1:25:07 That doesn't mean I'm imposing on Africans the same stages we went through, because there isn't just a different way or several ways - there's an infinity of curves for moving from underdevelopment to development, from rurality to the city. Yes indeed! And it's by reflecting on this difference that we could achieve a globalization of differences rather than a globalization of a single model, which is in fact an attempted globalization - one that's failing - I won't even say Western globalization, that means nothing, but Atlanticist globalization.
1:25:49 which either fails or leads to war, that is, to everyone's failure. Thank you for the question, ZA. I hope I've been a bit clearer. Now I'll go back to a question that I believe dates back to 2021. I'll read it without interruption, as I did earlier with Henri Lefebvre's text.
Question on the dialectic of nature in Gastaud 1:26:31 So, two questions, perhaps they're really the same one twice. In the introduction to L'Être et le Code, Michel Clouscard, following Hegel, denies any dialectic of nature. Georges Gastaud, from the PRCF, in Lumières communes - an enormous work by Georges Gastaud in several volumes, one of the most powerful philosophical contributions of recent years, at least in the French-speaking field - following Henri Lefebvre, makes a great deal of it.
1:27:01 Since this dialectic constitutes the ontological basis of Marxism, what do you think? So I'll read the second question - page 148 of volume 4 of Lumières communes, Georges Gastaud gives his vision of the Hegelian philosophy of history. It doesn't seem to me to match yours, which strikes me as rather a philosophy of the growing awareness of freedom in history, passing, among other things - I'm wondering about the 's' - through the overcoming and even the victory over natural determinisms.
1:27:36 In that sense - a very rich question - the Hegelian philosophy of history would have no reason to culminate in some Prussian state. There was a time when Hegel was so little read that, I don't know, people stayed stuck in the still anti-Boche view, if you will - not anti-Boche in the sense of the last world war, which was in a rather simple sense, but in the sense of the 1914 war, when you had to 'eat some Kraut.' In that sense, the Hegelian philosophy of history would have no reason to culminate in some Prussian state, a Fukuyama-style end, or a Holy Alliance.
1:28:09 Again, what do you think? Can you go to the end of the article? There. I read Ollier-Roland, with two L's, but I don't know which is the first name and which is the last name - may he forgive me, but I don't like reading a question in anonymity. So let's say Ollier-Roland, who asks me again, 'What do you think?'
1:28:42 I want to - let's finish - thank you, listening to you it's hard to fight against Foucauldian, Deleuzian, liberal, Medef-style, Macronist, American, stale-aperitif, etc. There. Thank you very much for the question, which is extremely rich, and since the second one contains basically the answer to the first, it contains an answer to the first by bringing in the concept of determinism, and it makes me think of another question - I don't know if I kept it for tonight, I don't think so, but we'll see - where someone asked me, isn't there such a thing as determinism as a genre, you see?
1:29:28 We'll go down, even worse, there, we'll go down because it's when Ollier-Roland - there, thank you, thank you - before that, when he talks about determinism, precisely, there, thank you, the overcoming and even the victory, it's natural. So, yes, another question asked me, isn't the problem common to all these questions precisely to examine, in a generic way, the concept of determinism?
1:30:02 I'm all the happier to be asked this question because my answer is yes - there is a difference between... it's the term ontology that marks the difference between the positions that - I'm not talking about an opponent here, I'm talking about comrades, aren't I - but there are nuances, aren't there? I said I have immense respect for Engels's talent as a pedagogue, for example, didn't I?
1:30:33 But still, he's much more naturalist than Marx. There's his Anglo-Saxon side - forgive me for being racist, no, apparently so, it's a joke, isn't it? But I'm saying that these German and English origins - at the time, that's all people talked about, races and so on, which isn't the case with Engels, of course - but it shows just how much he was, in some way, haunted by that basic cultural soil that was his own origin, in that nature holds more importance for him, doesn't it?
1:31:12 Look at the greatest literary successes of English literature - and I'm the first to admire them - I'm thinking as much of Robinson Crusoe as of that old colonialist Kipling's Jungle Book, aren't I? Or his admirable Kim - notice how, each time, nature has a presence you never see to that degree in Mediterranean countries, I mean. And besides, Romanticism, which placed nature above all else - at its beginnings, at the start, that's what Madame de Staël used to say, didn't she?
1:31:48 Light comes to us from the North - it began in the North, because that's where the industrial revolution began, and it's when nature starts being pushed back by industry that it becomes an object of worship. How right Hegel was to say that it's only at the fall of dusk that the owl of Minerva - that is, philosophy - takes flight. Come on, let's stop setting up oppositions and get to what's the real problem in Ollier-Roland's question.
Ontology, ontologism and becoming 1:32:24 It's the term ontology that separates us. Ontology is the science of 'on' - 'on' is 'being' in Greek, quite simply, it's the verb 'to be.' Now, I'll go quickly, on the side of Clouscard and myself, we're more on the side of becoming than of being. Now, becoming isn't the antithesis of being, it's the synthesis of being and non-being. I'm recalling here the very first sub-chapter, aren't I, of Hegel's Greater Logic, which I'm reproached for not talking about often enough.
1:33:01 even if I plan to devote a whole cycle to it, but still, once again, we know this famous sub-chapter where Hegel begins by positing being - but being, being, being in the most ontological sense, being, full stop, not French being or German being or human being or animal being or sporting being or musical being, being, with no further determination than the fact of being, of existing.
1:33:39 Ah, but in that case, if there is no other determination, Hegel says - I'll go quickly - he himself says that in that case, being is nothingness. The absence of all determination is as unpronounceable, as unattainable, as the God of transcendence, and that's why ontology, most of the time, drifts into onto-theology. All of that is well-documented territory, look it up. I'm not saying this to Ollier specifically, it's a genuine recommendation in general.
1:34:15 Never does an Aristotle - who is a philosopher, not a theologian - come so close to theology as when, starting from the fourth book of his Metaphysics, he finally poses the question of what he calls being qua being, and not being in motion, which is the object of physics, not being in motion possessing a soul, which is the object of psychology or biology, because for the Greeks it was the same thing.
1:34:49 And psyche means having a soul, everything that is alive. No, but being qua being - that's the point at which he moves toward the distinction between the passive intellect and the active intellect. I won't explain all these notions, but you don't need to be very sharp to hear that the active intellect - all of a sudden, form informs, the brick is the matter of the wall, the wall is the matter of the room, the room is the matter of the house.
1:35:22 You can guess that each time, we move toward forms that are increasingly developed, and then, right at the top, there's form without matter, the form of forms. We're not far from God. That's what I wanted to say. So every ontology tends to move - tends to, I don't mean it necessarily goes that far - but tends to move toward an onto-theology. What I reject in ontology - not in ontology as such, but in ontologism - is the same distinction I made between ecology and ecologism, and discourse about the environment, discourse that's anything but scientific, which isn't the case with ecology, which combines several disciplines, from glaciology to climatology by way of the life sciences.
1:36:07 That's a lot for one man. It's not very serious to want to combine all that in a single 'ecologist.' So I make the same distinction here between ontologism and ontology. What I reproach ontologism with is the already-there. The already-there. There's an already-there of history and of God before man even begins to move.
1:36:37 The game is already fixed, either by natural, biological determinism, against which nothing can be done. You see, it's good to talk about natural determinism, victory, because someone could say, 'You will never escape nature. You will always have to eat to live,' which is true. Even though those who say that forget that here we eat with chopsticks, there with the three fingers of the right hand, and elsewhere with forks - that man doesn't content himself, as nature dictates, with merely eating, but wants to have a meal.
1:37:16 And just as eating is an instinct, the meal is an institution. That's where you see the gulf separating nature from history. So there, that's what... At the Toulouse conference we found this same distinction again. I allowed myself - I think between philosophers one can - it's legitimate to raise the question I allowed myself to put to Georges Gastaud after his talk.
1:37:54 It was a conference that brought together philosophers from several countries, above all from... from countries, sorry, Iberophone countries of Spanish-speaking and/or Portuguese-speaking America. So, since the term 'nature' kept recurring very frequently in his talk, I allowed myself to ask a question that seems quite simple and that strikes me, at least, as legitimate to ask between philosophers - I asked him what the concept of nature adds to the concept of matter.
1:38:35 It annoyed him a bit, it's true. It wasn't a trick question, good grief. It seems to me that among Marxists, it has never been so urgent and so important to ask this, at a time when we're being fed nonsense in the name of nature, in the name of Mother Gaia, and told that every time there's now a natural disaster, instead of saying, thankfully there are countries - I'm thinking of the earthquake in Japan, where you see 200-meter-high skyscrapers swaying like that but not falling, because they have the good fortune of being an industrially developed country that knows how to make earthquake-resistant materials - whereas at the same time in Pakistan, there's an earthquake where everything is made of brick, a material much closer to the natural, to clay, and there's a million deaths.
1:39:27 There have often been such disasters but we don't talk about them. We don't talk about them anymore. Now, when there are three deaths, we make a huge fuss, but when there were a million deaths, no one cared back then, it was far away. 'The Pakistanis, why would we bother?' That's how it was. Now, we talk about it to say that nature is taking revenge. You see the return of the religious - nature takes revenge, we personify it. What a regression. Now, Gastaud doesn't fall into that kind of thing. Never. That's not his style. But, for me, he doesn't constitute a sufficient bulwark against the naturalist offensive that capitalism unleashes by endlessly repeating its ontological references.
Rousseau and the two determinisms 1:40:09 There. So, I come back now. I don't want to stay stuck in this debate of opinions. One might think we're at the corner café. This is what I think, this is what Gastaud thinks. I get now to what's most philosophical in Ollier-Roland's question. It's when he talks about determinism, about victory over natural determination. And there, I'll conclude, and it's to stay with Clouscard - don't forget that's our thread tonight, I'm the last one to forget it, watch where we're getting to.
1:40:41 Because we arrive at Rousseau. The only great predecessor in whom Clouscard recognized himself. When in Émile - someone might say, 'I've already heard this example.' Yes, but I never use the same example for the same demonstration. Here, it's precisely to answer this question from Ollier-Roland. Yes, there is determinism in general. There is natural determinism, heredity, for example, and there's historical, cultural determinism, which explains, as I said, why Germans eat dinner at 6pm, much earlier than the French.
1:41:26 And then, they have a much lighter meal in the evening than we do. Whereas they have a much more copious one than us for breakfast. Those are the differences that last. They're not biological differences that push things this way on this side of the Rhine. It's not that. My former German father-in-law used to eat 7 or 8 eggs at breakfast. I'm only talking about eggs, because there were also spreadable sausages, German-style. There. It's just on the other side of the Rhine, by the way.
1:41:57 So there are only these two determinisms. Except that there's one against which I can do nothing, the law of falling bodies - it's not for man to change the law of falling bodies. He won't manage it, even if he wants to. That's a natural determinant. The law of conservation of energy, take any physical law you like, biological, that acts upon us. What does Rousseau say in Émile?
1:42:29 Everything that men have made, I quote him word for word, men can un-make - no, he says destroy. Everything that men have made, men can destroy. There's something ineradicable, that can't be undone, can't be destroyed, and that is what nature imprints. Now, I know someone will say, but that's a proto-naturalist point, this, Rousseau. Yes, but wait for the rest of the sentence: 'and nature makes neither rich man, nor prince, nor great lord.'
1:43:00 There are differences against which we can do nothing, and differences that can be changed because, precisely, they don't come from nature. And so, the great political stake is to see within myself what I believe comes from nature - when that's true, I'm alluding, I don't know, to genetic diseases, for example, illnesses that run in families - but there are also things in me that come from, that are the cultural habits of a certain milieu, whether a certain economic milieu or the combination of an economic milieu and a regional tradition, the two being hard to separate, moreover - Corsica had more shepherds than industrial bosses in the 19th century, you can well imagine, for example.
1:43:49 So the two determinisms merge together. But that determinism - a child of French parents, but who, I'm making up a story, who, for obscure reasons, disappeared in a shipwreck at birth, whose parents died, and who was raised by Chinese parents in China - well, will speak Chinese just as quickly as any little Chinese baby would, if the baby arrived there as an infant.
1:44:21 There are no languages that are harder or easier for babies - human beings all learn their mother tongue at the same speed. Because there aren't French-language genes in us, and there aren't Chinese-language genes in the Chinese. There are indeed things that don't come from nature and that have an enormous influence on us. See the relationship between language and thought, look at the classics in the history of philosophy on this. There. So, thank you very much. Rousseau taught us - yes, that there is a determinism, but we, we want to concern ourselves, we, with philosophical reflection, that is, first and foremost with answering the question that Kant formulates as the question 'What must I do?'
1:45:04 and not merely 'What can I know,' which we share with scientists, though not applied to the same objects. So true is it that the philosopher wants, aims, seeks to know what makes it possible to answer the question 'What must I do' in a way that isn't merely a matter of contingent opinion, but in a more rigorous and scientific way. We're getting there - in order, finally, to ground the human or social sciences, call them what you like, which need not be ashamed in terms of rigor compared with the hardest sciences - that's the aim.
1:45:40 And for that, we must strive to fight against the alienation by which I attribute to nature within myself, to an already-there, what has in fact been produced by history. There. Not everything has been produced by history. The need to eat in order to live is not at all a historical determination, it's natural. But that applies just as much to the most prehistoric men there ever were.
1:46:14 So that's not what explains the political stakes of the moment. You see? Historical determinism - the more you reflect, the more you analyze, the more surprised you are by the part that man takes on within man. In other words, earlier I told you that you're confused, and I'll conclude on this: you always have to ask yourself whether the viewpoint you're examining, or your own, falls into one of the following three, the naturalist viewpoint. It's nature that determines man, his heredity, the cognitive sciences.
1:46:49 There's a whole chapter on this currently which, for me, belongs to ideology. Not in the experiments and all that, but in the conclusions and the way of communicating it. It's nature that determines man. Antithesis, completely. It's supernature, it's God, it's religion that determines man. The naturalist point of view, the theological point of view. Thesis, antithesis. Synthesis, the anthropological point of view. It's not nature that makes man, it's not God that makes man, it's man who makes man.
1:47:20 But that takes time. The patience of the concept, as someone said, which became a title. One of the best essays on Hegel. There we are. Well, thank you for these questions. Do we have time for another one? Perhaps we could take a question from the audience to finish? There's the question from our friend, short for Wail.
The eternal feminine; the middle classes and progress 1:47:54 Ah yes, all right. I'd like to, because I set it aside. Yes, so, I never broadcast compliments that I'm delighted to find and that flatter my vanity, but I don't like to make a show of it. But yes, I'll allow myself to mention this one, because it's addressed directly to the production team. I like making Pierre-Alain blush, but he's certainly the rightful recipient of this tribute.
1:48:24 There we are. So, if the course of our friend Wail's life — I hope I'm pronouncing it right, Abdel Wahab — has been changed, it's because what I say passed through the work of our production team. There we are. Come on, let's be serious, let's get to his question, which is very important. Mr. Pagani, the chain of concepts was intelligible to me up until the moment you made the connection with the eternal feminine draws us upward.
1:49:00 Goethe's quotation, which is the final conclusion of a work he spent decades completing, his famous Faust, isn't it, which ends with that mysterious conclusion 'Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan,' 'the eternal feminine draws us upward,' seems to me contradictory with the indistinctness, the indetermination of the musical spirit. And yes, because I was saying at the end, in my commentary on what Wagner says about this quotation from Goethe, that the eternal feminine is what music expresses.
1:49:40 In Wagnerian androgyny, the fusion of text and music, the text is the masculine element — that's not me, it's the anthropologists who took this approach — the text is the masculine element, speech, and music is the feminine element. So, how can music, which is precisely the undetermined — because a pear, a banana, a piano, a computer, fine, words allow us to create distinctions, determinations. That's when we speak: this is a sheep, this is an ox, but that thing there, it does something to me, but what is it?
1:50:22 Where is the determination there? So, is it not contradictory, isn't it, to say the eternal feminine draws us upward, which seemed to me contradictory with the indistinctness, the indetermination of the musical spirit, since sex or gender is clearly defined? Well, listen, I take this question so seriously, it's going to make us revise so many things, that I'll put off the answer to next time. There we are, and otherwise, I'd like to conclude — Pierre-Alain is offering me a contribution for this evening — so I say again to our dear Abdel Wahab that I'm very happy about his question, not just his compliment, it's his question that's going to take us far, for which I thank him, and it's because I don't want to botch it that I'm putting off the answer to next time.
1:51:09 So, there are three questions that are more or less the same, it's one question and one in two parts, so let me give them to you. So, it's hard for me to pronounce, but it must be deliberate, SBCL: Clouscard and his critique of one of the... — isn't it outdated today when the middle classes no longer believe in progress, but fall into reaction? A misreading, I say this in a friendly way, I mean, why not, I mean, who isn't surpassable, starting with me.
1:51:39 Simply, Clouscard never wrote for people who believe in progress; he knew very well, he even devoted the bulk of his work to those who fight against the notion of progress. We saw one kind of that earlier, either in the name of structures, who fight against the notion of historical genesis, precisely, or — look at how the greatest names in postwar French philosophy, that is, Cold War philosophy, from Sartre to Derrida, are marked by the shadow of Heidegger — who believe in progress, like me, in mirrors, in fool's gold, I mean, so the question doesn't arise, since Clouscard never — first of all, the term 'believe' is a religious term, isn't it?
1:52:40 Right? The fiercest opponents of social policies are very careful not to give up, aren't they, their family allowances, their paid holidays, their reimbursement of medical expenses, and their pension rights — they're very careful not to give those up, because they know full well: they argue against progress, but they don't believe a word of it.
1:53:11 Come on, let me turn the question around. And then, the middle classes fall into reaction. First of all, I'm not so sure, when I see what's happening in the world, isn't it — that in the world, which journalists and the media insist on calling 'Western' the better to mask it, because — I've said it, I'll say it again, I know we've already heard this refrain of mine, but apparently, since there are plenty of newcomers, they haven't heard it enough yet — the West doesn't exist, or it's wherever you want it to be.
1:53:46 The West, where is the West on Earth — thinking about it, it's wherever you want, the Earth is round, isn't it? Come on, stop splitting hairs, Pagani, it means the Europeans, you know that perfectly well. Oh really? I thought it was the United States, the leaders of the Western world. Oh darn, that doesn't work either. So it's not the West, it's not Europe, but of course you know very well — this is turning into hair-splitting, cutting hairs into four, and I'm being polite — you know very well it means the developed countries, the industrialized countries.
1:54:20 Oh really? Isn't Japan the world's second industrial power, and a Western country? And it's not in the Far East either — that doesn't work either. Oh, it's not the... You won't manage it, because this isn't a concept made to say what is, but to hide, within what is, something called the capitalist, imperialist, Atlanticist countries. When capitalism becomes imperialist, when it's not content to develop capital in its own little environment, but wants to globalize the model it represents, aggressively, by sword and by fire, and the millions of dead — I'll take the first two, in the 1950s: 3 million in Korea, 3 million in Vietnam, because they had the audacity to hold options that didn't suit capital.
1:55:12 I'm not saying Uncle Sam, that didn't suit capital. Immediately, they said, 'But how atrocious!' So it's in order not to name these horrors that the term 'Western' serves as a fig leaf. I now go back to my point, and I say that it's not today that the middle classes no longer believe in progress — it's within this increasingly confined, increasingly shrunken space called the Atlanticist-imperialist world, or Atlanticist imperialism, into which France falls into line more than ever.
1:55:58 France was one of the few European countries, wasn't it, especially under De Gaulle, that opposed Atlanticist imperialism — not to affirm its allegiance to the adversary on the other side, which was the Soviet world, but on the contrary, to affirm the independence of the nation-state that had entrusted it with its sovereignty, well, the direction of its sovereignty. So what a regression, since as of the day before yesterday, it's not out of the question that we'll be sending our young people to get shot up for a country ranked among the most corrupt in the world, in which all the money that has already been given to arm it — I'm not judging whether it was right or wrong to help — has...
1:56:46 You see, I'm being honest. I don't jump from one feeling to the other. But I note that journalists who specialize in finding out what became of that money say it evaporated. So you're being asked to cough up again and, on top of that, send the flesh of your children, or of our friends if I'm talking about young people. There we are, so it's not that the middle classes no longer believe in progress.
1:57:16 Everything has been done, especially since the fall of the Wall — which was not due to NATO tanks rolling into Moscow, contrary to what what's called the Western world rather hastily forgot, and so, as I just said, it's simply the Atlanticist world, which can be found in Africa just as much as in Europe. There are countries — resolutely, I'll come back to this on March 16th — resolutely maintained by NATO to be Atlanticist, which nearly went to war against the poorest countries in the world just a few months ago, in Niger and Mali, simply because those countries had refused to keep being dupes of this Atlanticist neocolonialism.
1:58:05 So it's a world which, you see, is struggling — in the Far East, look how the whole world stood behind Israel the day after October 7th, faced with the horror of what had happened there, and how almost the entire world now, or at least the vast majority, is outraged by the way the clique in power in Tel Aviv is reacting — a clique whose own most fervent supporters no longer even bother to hide the fact that it's a far-right clique. You see how quickly one says people no longer believe in progress — resistance is organizing at the planetary level, and it's Africa, of all things, that's saving honor; it had to be South Africa that summoned the Israeli executive to appear, not the Jewish people, heaven forbid — most of the Jews I know are outraged by what's happening in Gaza. It had to be South Africa, worthy successor of Mandela, isn't it, that summons...
1:59:15 ...the Netanyahu-style executive to appear before the Court, the International Court of Justice. Do we need to believe in progress? No, we don't need to believe, we need to know — it's not the same thing. I believe... I know that if A equals B, B equals A — that's not a belief. Science broke through, long ago, in a place where at the corner café people argued over beliefs. As for me, it seems to me personally, in my opinion, as for myself, that... no — when you start like that, it means you're expressing a contradiction. You have to stop talking if all I can say is what holds for me alone; in that case, you shouldn't speak, because speaking means communicating, and when you communicate, there has to be something in common between us. That's what progress is: continuing to explore what we have in common, not what opposes us and kills us and makes us slaughter one another. There we are, very quickly — thank you for the question, which allows us, you see, to go deeper into some very topical matters, and I'll finish with two questions
Critique of Foucault and the neo-fascism of the ideology of desire 2:00:25 which extend that one — yes, gladly. It's a question in two parts, Socrates — forgive me for saying it the German way — hello: some on the left say that the period Clouscard describes, that of the liberal-libertarian, is outdated, that this narrative is therefore no longer relevant. Definitely the same question — no, it's not really a question, I'll move to the next one — yes, of course. In other words, criticizing Foucault and co., broadly postmodernism, would be a strategic error, even an absurdity, still according to this left — what do you think? Well, I don't know in what way it would be an absurdity — I won't say I disagree, I'm not sure I understand — it's according to a certain left, yes, that it's outdated, if you like, to criticize Foucault and co. — yes, we shouldn't be doing anything else now. Ah, well then, I disagree. I agree that a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since Foucault and co., as Socrates rightly says, held the high ground, but first of all they're still extremely influential in universities
2:01:36 and not only in France but in the United States, where what's called French Theory and French Doctors play a considerable role, Foucault in particular. So don't execute — I was about to say the corpse — it's far from being a corpse, it's even far from being sick, isn't it? And on that point, one will always be grateful to Foucault, in the world — not the Western world, I just corrected myself — but in the Atlanticist world, for having done everything possible to de-Marxify the university. He wasn't the only one, there were others at the same time, there were even some who de-Marxified Marx from within. Would it be an error, or even an absurdity? No, because you're acting as though they were on the left, whereas they are just as modern as the right — even the far right, you see, I'm trying to nuance things, I feel like saying the far right, you can guess it and I think it too, but since I don't want to lump things together, the far right I was alluding to, which, like Macron, now wants
2:02:47 to flatly not rule out sending troops, now that he sees the disaster and the rout of that Russian army — I'm specifying this because there are still newcomers — I'll specify that Putin is an anti-communist and an anti-Leninist. I don't know if he's on my side, but I'd always side with him against NATO, and if there were no NATO, and if I were Russian and lived in Russia, I wouldn't vote for Putin. Am I clear?
2:03:19 That's where I stand on the matter. Now I can say quietly, without anyone nitpicking at me, that this Russian army that people said was in rout — what was Ms. von der Leyen saying, that they were digging through refrigerators and washing machines for electronic components because it was so backward? Well now, I don't know, we're learning it's rather the Ukrainians who are running short of equipment, isn't it, and that the Russians who were sending their young men in waves to make 'waves of meat,' as it was called, but with a contempt and a racism that echoes a discourse we've always heard in the West about the 'moujiks,' the subhumans, as they used to say in a certain era — and now it's the rout, it's whole units of Ukrainians revolting, to the point where I think it's not out of the question that this ends badly for the Ukrainian regime, and that it's the Ukrainians themselves who settle the score on this bloody farce, if it were only a farce
2:04:29 there would only be laughter, but here there's plenty to weep about, and it's causing far too many deaths on all sides. So I give this example to say that those who are, for me, the far right — that is, you understand, I name it, I don't use a concealing concept like 'the West' — the Atlanticist imperialism that concocted every one of the bloodiest dictatorships for half a century, in Latin America, in Asia — look into who Marcos was in the Philippines, who Diem was in South Vietnam back when there was still a division between North and South Vietnam, look into Chiang Kai-shek and his troops who threw communists into locomotive furnaces as fuel — the communists thanks to whom Japanese fascism was expelled from China, at the cost of 17 million dead. Those who are
2:05:44 partisans of that camp, who keep bashing Russians and Chinese — that hasn't changed much across many generations — keep insisting on passing themselves off as people of the left. So it's not outdated to criticize this fake left, because it doesn't present itself as right-wing — it understands that, and Clouscard helps us understand it when he says that neo-fascism — and he says this in '72, in Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire — he says it while it's still embryonic, this strategy that has now reached its pinnacle, that's starting to throw off all its masks. On Clouscard — I'm glad Socrates helps us recall what is perhaps the most topical thing in the problematic Clouscard raised — he foresaw, as early as '72, what's happening before your eyes, and which you confirm quite rightly with your question, and rightly so, I agree with you, that the new right
2:06:56 as it's called, which I myself call fascism — it's fascistic, it's fascism in the process of completing itself, it will be total fascism once we're at war, and we're getting closer to that at a horrifyingly accelerating speed — it's the most immediate current events that illustrate what I'm saying, so I won't dwell on it. This capitalism continues, to win you over, to seduce you — the capitalism of seduction, and that's the turn that — what we had understood is that he said neo-fascism would come not from the traditional far right, from the era when the Le Pens, the father Le Pen, never even got 3%, I'd even say not even 2%; the royalists, all that was finished, the naturalists who put heredity above inheritance, back when he wasn't even skulking along the walls, when he talked the way he did — Mme Le Pen, those were small, marginal extremes — it went
2:08:06 to almost 30% once they did what Hitler did, well, what the NSDAP, the National Socialist Party did, once they made sure their nationalism was tinged with socialism, the better to eat away at the communists, to steal from the Spartacist electorate and the German Communist Party — one of the most powerful in Europe, and therefore in the world, at that time — to steal its electorate and to absorb unemployment, which they managed to do, but thanks to the war industries and to building strategic highways and other ways of spending public money, and other ways of ensuring 'progress.' There we are, thank you to Socrates and his predecessor — what was his name, his name was hard to pronounce — thank you for allowing me to come back to the most burning current events, Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire, one of Clouscard's most important titles — look at its latest edition, from Éditions Delga, in which
2:09:17 he says clearly that today's fascism comes from what presented itself as left-wing, and which continues to, whatever you may say about it — and there you're right, they're having more and more trouble passing themselves off as people of the left when they want to declare war on Russia, aren't they, in solidarity with Jadot, you know, they're the most warmongering, it's the Greens — whereas before, the Greens were, do you remember, the hippies, that's outdated now, yes, that left, the hippie one, 'make love not war,' that's outdated, they don't need that anymore, that was the era of peaceful coexistence, when the Soviet Union was powerful. Thank you again for your questions, and thank you all, and I don't forget my dear Abdel Wahab, that I'll begin by continuing my answer to your question next time. Thank you again to everyone, thank you to Pierre-Alain, and see you at our next edition before too long, we'll have...
