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Philosophy has always thought about desire 1:30 The letter D now, but let's maybe stay a little bit on this subject of consumption, because ultimately, isn't there also, behind consumption, this specter of desire hanging around, D as in desire, that has been hanging around, again, since the 1960s, when we supposedly entered a society of desire? So maybe my question is a bit more philosophical.
2:01 What is the precise place of desire, philosophically or anthropologically? We know this goes back a long way—philosophers have long questioned this notion of desire, since Plato, and through Spinoza too, of course. So what meaning can we give to this notion of desire in today's society? Since Plato, through Spinoza, it's worth talking about, because if I'm to believe—I won't keep hammering away at poor Lordon, again I want to succeed in connecting the dots—but there again, referring to Spinoza, he takes the opportunity to offer us, as is the case in his latest publication, a logic, a theory of affects.
2:51 We could take Lordon's terms, inspired by Spinoza, in the name of desire. Conatus, libido, as with his buddy Bourdieu, and so with illusion, well, all the same critiques. But as you put it so well, as if it were something new, he says a theory of affects—yes, that's it, we supposedly thought too long in terms of concepts, that's not true, as you said very well, philosophy has never stopped having desire as an object of reflection.
Nature and history, the two sources of desire 3:23 From Plato right up to today, passing through Descartes's Treatise on the Passions—of course I'll speak of Spinoza, that goes without saying—we do not desire things because we judge them good, we judge them good because we desire them. It is desire that comes first, including for knowledge. A pre-Freudian sentence: we judge things good because we desire them, so it is indeed the libido that comes first, and our judgment finds itself somewhat determined by it. So, there you have it, desire today.
3:53 If I reason in post-Hegelian-Marxist terms—I don't want to skip over that contribution—the content of human desire is supplied on the one hand by nature, on the other by history, in a way that's very hard to disentangle. What I mean is, and I'm taking the word in a broad sense, suddenly I'm hungry—that's natural, at least, I didn't decide it, it's not anthropology, it's not cultural, it's not a matter of contract. And, well, some will avoid the word desire and use the word need instead, which is fine, which allows us to make distinctions—needs, which allow the human animal to survive and reproduce its condition, until it has exhausted its strength trying to do so.
4:39 Some say the animal merely subsists, only man exists, isn't that so? And then there is this material added to desire, as history develops—I didn't say progress, I'm making no value judgment—as history develops and grows more complex, material that is supplied by history itself. That is to say, my desire for this drink isn't only about quenching thirst, it's the aperitif, it's the friends, it's relaxation, or it's the peace pipe being passed around—tobacco isn't just about tobacco's chemical composition and whatever virtues nicotine may have, or harmful effects, whatever—but there's also another reason, we remain in the symbolic field, as with everything cultural and historical, and here I refer to one of Clouscard's greatest masterpieces, one of the most overlooked, the famous Treatise on Mad Love, written toward the end of his life.
5:35 Few Marxists have written a treatise on mad love, in which he refers to the myth of Tristan, and I remember him asking me for the libretto, the text by Wagner—in Wagner's case we say the poem, since he wrote it himself—where he was stunned to see the anthropological relevance, just as Lévi-Strauss had seen the relevance of Wagner in the overture of The Raw and the Cooked, when Lévi-Strauss says that Wagner is the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths. And Wagner died of desire, in Venice, his hand trembling, a heart attack, but just before, he was preparing a final essay whose title was The Feminine in Man—you couldn't get more topical, with today's issues around gender, etc.
6:11 The Feminine in Man—he barely had time to write desire, love, tragic, and then, heart attack. You couldn't make it up, you really couldn't. And we know very well that desire plays a central role throughout the whole Ring cycle, right up to Parsifal, in short. So, once again, what is most overlooked about desire, especially by today's intellectuals, is its historical content. As La Rochefoucauld says—we must always refer back to what are called the French moralists, who are neither philosophers, nor professors of morality, nor preachers of moralizing—La Rochefoucauld says: I know some who would never have been in love if they had never heard love spoken of.
The historical content of desire, from La Rochefoucauld to Proust 6:55 That doesn't mean: I know a rare few who prefer words. No, it's a general rule. The proof is that, at exactly the same period, Racine, in Phèdre, when Phèdre makes her famous confession—perhaps the summit of our poetic language—to Hippolytus, evokes a kind of fantasy she might have had, that she might have met Theseus back then, when he was young, well, in short, the impossible, as desire always seeks the impossible, when he came to slay the Minotaur—she only knew an old Theseus, somewhat worn and graying. She says to Hippolytus, speaking of his father: 'When he crossed the waves from our Crete, a worthy object of the vows of the daughters of Minos—alas, what were you doing then?'
7:38 'a worthy object'—really? So the daughters of Minos, that is, she and Ariadne—there weren't 36 of them—were already in love with Theseus simply through the legend that preceded him. So, to answer your question, all right? That's all well and good for modern philosophy, I think there's some—I'll call it a stab in the water, because I repeat that desire has been at the center of philosophical inquiry ever since there has been a search for Sophia, that is, not only for knowledge—otherwise the philosopher would work at the CNRS as a research scientist, searching for what scholars by definition search for—but for wisdom, that is, precisely, for what concerns desires.
8:17 If I want to know something, I ask scholars—but if I want to know about the world around me, how many satellites orbit Jupiter, I ask scholars. If, however, I ask whether I'd be right to marry Annabelle, or whether I'd be right to send three ships to Asia Minor right now, whether now is the moment to declare war—then I'll consult a sage, not a scholar, and it's not necessarily the most learned person who will give me the best advice; it's not the one who knows exactly how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara who will advise me best on marriage or declaring war.
8:51 So desire has always been at the heart of philosophical inquiry—it's good, I'll grant modern thought this, that it has recentered itself on that, after the heyday of the French epistemological school, Bachelard and so on, when it was rather the scientific that was at the heart of the debate, after the war. But I note that this happened at the expense of the content that history brings to desire, because one had to be anti-Marxist at that time—it was the great era of the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution—and so it's a formalist philosophy of desire, necessarily; it's fine to talk about desire, but it's wrong to strip it of what constitutes its concrete content.
9:28 And I note, to finish—it may have seemed like a joke, but still—I note that there's more Marxism in Proust than in all this supposedly radical thought. Proust is a good novelist, he takes good note, he notes reality well, and in that reality he sees clearly that the complexion of the young girls on the boardwalk at Balbec—and here we're far from the working class—that fluid kind of beauty passing from one to another despite their distinct physical differences, somewhere he links it well to the new habits of sport and comfort spreading through the new layers of society, which can produce, in abundance, lovely legs, lovely hips—well, if you wrote that today, it'd be a collective outcry, I'm speaking a bit like the Africans do, using 'one,' we'd be taken for a mechanistic Marxist—and yet it's Proust who wrote it.
10:12 That's what I have to say in response about desire. Thank you.
