English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Dialectic is not the extreme center 5:46 work of letters and code, he says it's an honest and constructive critique, even if there are things in it that of course need clarifying, on which, of course, we're going to work. But Société Française was thus an offshoot of the Institut de Recherches Marxistes, that's the period, and so I finish my little aside, my little parenthesis, Clouscard had sent a text which itself has also just been, last year, and very recently republished by Delga editions, a text which had in fact never been published, "Open Letter to French Communists," in which I spoke of a very friendly and fraternal warning about the dangers of a drift, we'll see later, of a social-democratic drift, and there, of course, the political bureau of censorship immediately steps in,
6:58 who's going to say, there it is, the Stalinist is showing his ears, "social-democratic drift" sounds Stalinist, and no, too bad, Clouscard's originality — and that's why the text of the Reply to Morilhat is so important — is that he was never so clear about his political points. I'm starting with the political aspects, you see, I'm not being strictly philosophical, on purpose so things are clear. I say this because there have been quite a few comments on our first part, and the best-intentioned comments don't hesitate to say, for example, that they were sometimes confused by the complexity of these matters, so that's why I'm starting by clearing away the trees in favor of an overall view of the forest, the political forest, before going into the detail of the philosophical branches.
7:53 and ideological, and theoretical ones. Clouscard sets both back to back — that's one of the definitions of dialectic — he is not in a central position, not a happy medium, some kind of hodgepodge, a mush that takes a bit from extreme A and a bit from extreme B to make a so-called happy medium.
8:25 No, that's the abominable extreme center that has been governing us for so long, I already developed that last time, I won't go back to it. That center which inspired Arthur Adamov, unjustly forgotten, one of the greatest playwrights, one of our greatest playwrights of the postwar period. The title of that play, M le modéré [Mr. Moderate], isn't it, the extreme center, whether it's the center-left, Mitterrand, the center-right, Giscard, up to Macron today, navigating between the two, isn't that so.
8:58 From one to the other, in fact, it's an extreme center — I'll just recall, I'll stop there, because the rest I'll develop for the essential part — that all those who were compromised with collaboration and with the Vichy regime came back, after keeping a low profile in the postwar media, came back to the surface of political high society, precisely under this protective label. They were able to display, of course, their right-wing and far-right positions under this label of "various moderates," unaffiliated, center, center-left, center-right.
9:37 So that center is not at all a middle ground, it's an extreme, you need to know that. Clouscard sets both back to back, so not a middle position, but — and this is a dialectical definition, we'll develop it later when I move to the strictly philosophical part — that's why it's so hard to grasp and why some people get confused, it's a matter of holding opposite things together at the same time. In detail, so as not to muddy the waters, I'll bring out right away a small essential point here: if you get lost in the notion of dialectic, always think of what you do when you turn a door handle.
10:22 There is no better introduction to dialectic than this simple gesture, because you're activating what physicists call a couple of forces. You do this, there's a force going one way and another going the other way, a couple of forces, that is, two equal forces but in opposite directions. That's what will later define a moment, a moment of momentum, a couple of forces — that's dialectic. Simultaneously, the movement is produced by the fact that there are two forces which are not contradictory, but which go in opposite directions, which is not quite the same thing.
Two temptations and the primacy of form according to Hegel 11:00 There, I won't dwell on that, you're not going there, otherwise I'll fall into abstraction, and this isn't the moment — I'm staying in politics. Clouscard sets back to back — I'll come back to dialectic, you can be sure — the drift of the two great temptations of a movement, of an organization of parties, a movement claiming descent from Marx. Let's stick to the essential. The two temptations, apparently opposite, but which must be set back to back, so they must have something in common.
11:37 Because that too is dialectical, to see what is common in two positions that everything seems to oppose. Namely the social-democratic temptation, the drift that the French Communist Party underwent, even if it's more and more just a homonym compared to the one I knew, and at the opposite end, what Clouscard calls the dogmatic temptation, the one that refuses to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat and which explicitly identifies with a kind of neo-Stalinism.
12:34 There. When I say that I set them back to back, it goes without saying — it's not that I was called a Stalinist throughout the period I was active in the French Communist Party, and that I was called a soft social democrat when I... approve of abandoning a certain form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
13:06 In what... we'll see with Clouscard, in what he calls the so-called post-industrial societies. You see that we're really dealing with current affairs. There, I'm making this political start. Why? Because I've had quite a bit of mail, of comments. So, since the last video, some people persist — I'm very happy, it's not a reproach at all — in writing, not only to our site, to the email address with dume.gmail.com but...
13:52 or on Facebook, on social media, but... but on... but... for those who have my private contact details, which doesn't bother me, on the contrary. But... I should point out that among these comments, some that you won't find on social media but that I'm explaining here, converge on the fact that... some got a bit lost in my talk last time.
14:24 In particular, I remember a... I believe it's called a follower, under the handle "et nous mène," whom I only know through social media, and who's very faithful, even further along, and... who said that this time he'd somewhat thrown in the towel faced with the apparent complexity, the muddle of the talk.
14:55 So, to avoid that pitfall, I prefer to spell things out in advance — again, I prefer to show the forest before going into it, before getting lost among the trees and their branches and their leaves, and so to provide what looks like an outline, if you will. Roughly, I'll start by recalling what I dwelt on last time — not to repeat it, otherwise we go in circles — where I developed at length the semantic aspect of Clouscard's reply to Morilhat, that is, and this is rather unexpected, the fact that Clouscard spells out the formal problems posed by his work, the problems of expression.
15:50 It's quite rare for Clouscard to spell out his own signifier, or his own signifiance, as we say. And in doing so, one might think that this puts us a bit far from Marxism, with its semiological, semantic considerations — one feels more in the field of structuralism or phenomenology than in that of Marxism, and a fortiori of Hegelian-Marxism.
16:32 Major misreading. You find a sentence, the least ambiguous there is, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit — I'm thinking of Hegel here, of course — I quote it in Hyppolite's translation, to be quite clear, a sentence where Hegel rails against the tendency of the Romantics, of Romantic thought, which consists in saying that what matters is not the form, not what we'd call today the signifier, the literal expression, but the substance, the essence.
17:04 There. You know, essence is invisible being, it's the truth of what appears but does not appear. It's what is beyond, what is not sensible, what is not of this world. It's been said that Christianity is a religion of essence whereas Greek paganism is a religion of being, of the immediate, for example. And Hegel, faced with the danger that this sacrifice of the detail of form and of signifiance to the importance of substance, of essence, can represent, says the following — now I'll cut my voiceover and quote, word for word, in Hyppolite's translation, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, first volume: it is precisely because form is as essential to essence as essence is to itself, that essence must not be conceived and expressed merely as essence, but just as much as form, and in the whole wealth of the developed form.
18:12 I challenge all the structuralists of the sixties to have ever been as clearly in favor of signifiance down to its detail and in the whole wealth of the developed form as this formulation of Hegel's. So when I dwell on this, I'm placing myself within a tradition, I'm not indulging in a whim.
Clouscard's solitude and Morilhat's recognition 18:42 So I'll start with the developments Clouscard makes in his reply to Morilhat, of which I recall — continuing my first recap — the one that situates a bit Morilhat's contribution, that is, this journal Société française, an offshoot at the time of the Institut de recherche marxiste, which has since disappeared, and which had been the first within that Marxist current close to the French Communist Party.
19:18 It's entirely to his credit to have recognized the importance of Clouscard's work. I developed this sufficiently last time so I won't go back to it, and I have no intention of making people weep, it's not at all about dwelling on sentimentality — it's because it involves something existential, the incredible, the appalling solitude of Michel Clouscard, who never fell into line to the end of his life — not a solitude, and that's why I say it's not just imagery, it's not meant to give in to what we'd now call "affects."
19:57 It's not about indulging in that, because Clouscard was not at all alone, either sociologically or psychologically — he was surrounded by friends, excellent friends, and even acquaintances, colleagues; I'm thinking in particular of those he associated with at the Hegelian-Marxist Institute of Poitiers where he was a university professor, alongside Jacques D'Hondt, with whom he got on particularly well, by the way — the late lamented Jacques D'Hondt, the immense Jacques D'Hondt.
20:31 So, when I say alone, he also received academic recognition, having obtained the jury's commendation when defending his doctoral thesis, and having received praise — this thesis, of course, being the one since published under the title L'Être et le Code — praise from figures as different, almost opposite, as Jean-Paul Sartre and Vladimir Jankélévitch. So it wasn't at that level that he was alone.
21:01 One is alone only in relation to an expectation. I'm not the one who's going to teach you that when one being is missing, everything is depopulated. Whoever, in a romantic relationship, expects recognition only from a single being and doesn't get it, is alone. That's the solitude I'm talking about. And Clouscard was waiting. He was waiting for recognition. He was waiting for the recognition of his comrades. That is, for recognition from Marxist thinkers, from economists, philosophers.
21:31 We're not yet into the muddle between philosophy, humanities, social sciences, and the other secondary problem, a hazardous terminology. He was waiting — I use a generic term that was most important to him — for his comrades. That says exactly what it means. Friends, he had those. But he was waiting for recognition from the side of the organizations. And then in 1987, Claude Morilhat has the merit of being the first to publish an article recognizing the unavoidable — actually he says indispensable, I'm summarizing Morilhat's viewpoint for those who weren't here last time, so it's very short — Clouscard, in two words: indispensable and insufficient.
22:22 So that's for the positive side, indispensable, that's not nothing. And all the recognition lies there, and insufficient because there are points he disagrees with. And Clouscard doesn't hesitate, moreover, to say that this double designation suits him very well and that he accepts it. Let me quickly read here what Clouscard says about it. "I will even embrace his introductory judgment."
22:52 Clouscard: indispensable but unsatisfactory. "I could even say I'm proud of it. It's a perfect, and in my opinion laudable, dialectical positioning." You see right away his reflex. "My contribution to Marxist research, in particular to make up for the theoretical delay, so to speak, is recognized." Indispensable. Clouscard, indispensable. For the first time, the organization recognizes Clouscard as indispensable. "And that insofar as the critique of this contribution can allow for further progress in this research."
23:24 So that I have shortcomings is the case for all those who get their hands dirty, who take risks, or get their hands dirty, however you want to put it, and who have dirty hands, and so one can always do better. And for that, the continuation has to be made to do better. I put a small caveat here when I say Morilhat is the first to grant this recognition.
23:57 The first to publish a recognition. But I'm playing a bit on words: if we move from "publish" to "edit," it's not that great a shift in meaning. Still, there's a very special tribute to be paid here to the Éditions sociales Messidor of that time, and in particular to Richard Lagache, whom I salute here because he's also a friend, even if we've lost touch since. I pay tribute to him because he was the first, when he was, let's say, the right-hand man of Lucien Sève who ran the Éditions sociales at the time, to decide to publish a work by Clouscard, within an organization very close to the French Communist Party, at the Éditions sociales, in 1985.
24:50 It's no accident that Morilhat publishes this article two years after the appearance of the famous Capitalisme de la Séduction, which was Michel's biggest bookshop success. It's a bit as if the Institut de recherche marxiste had received a green light from the organization and could finally say, after all, this Clouscard might deserve to be read.
Against the nocturnal: Heidegger and the two meanings of dialectic 25:21 So there, I've finished setting out the context here, the context of the text Clouscard is replying to. I'm commenting on Clouscard's reply. I now return to the continuation of that reply and to my commentary — for those afraid of getting confused, I'm clearly thinking of ourselves. So I'll start with the problem of semantics, drawing authority from Hegel's formula which I just recalled, to show that form is not at all opposed to content — on the contrary, form is as essential to essence as essence is to itself.
26:02 One couldn't better show the intertwining and inseparability of form and content than by distinguishing them. Yes, thank you, Aristotle. Aristotle is a champion — Aristotle and Kant have one thing in common: pedagogically, they're the ones who gave us — it's not about distinctions. It's a Cartesian word, you know, clear and distinct ideas. It's easy to gain prestige by pirouetting in the darkness.
26:36 It's Baudelaire who speaks of pirouetting in the darkness, in a poem which, as it happens, insists on the meaning of evil, called "L'Irréparable," in Les Fleurs du Mal. It's easy to gain prestige — I quote a Heidegger title — by leading the reader down paths that lead nowhere. It's easier to play the nocturnal than the diurnal — that's what I'm saying here.
27:14 Because these paths that lead nowhere — we know all too well where they lead, especially for those who didn't wait for the opening of Heidegger's Black Notebooks to see the horror these paths end up in, and one understands that some would like us to believe they're paths leading nowhere in the beautiful German forest. You know, Marx had already warned us to avoid stirring up the Teutonic forests. So, in contrast to what Hegel had already seen among the Romantics — this first great offensive in the direction of what Lukács would later call the destruction of reason — Hegel had warned against the temptation of this night, I quote, "this night in which all cows are black."
28:04 I recall that during the war there was a division called "Nacht und Nebel," night and fog: move along, nothing to see. So there — nous-mêmes, he's going to say again that I'm confusing things, but no, I'm sure he's proven he has plenty of means to make what I'm saying intelligible. Apparently he knows the Art of Fugue, which is far more complex, isn't it, than what I'm saying here — namely, I'll stick to the Heidegger case — you know, if I set Heidegger aside for a moment, but I take the camp that used him, for whom he's an unavoidable idol, the camp during the Cold War, isn't that so — even the pope, the one before Francis, I've forgotten his first name — it's no accident, he was very close to Heidegger, was part of that same circle.
29:15 it's interesting to see a thinker so anti-Christian, so close to the paganism of Heraclitus and Parmenides, isn't it, or of Dionysus, rather than to the Gospel of John — well, it's been more than 2000 years and the Church isn't exactly free of contradictions. Heidegger — coming back to clear matters familiar to everyone — makes a fairly classic critique of metaphysics; yet apparently there's no connection — during the Cold War people started with this theme, which is more familiar to you — I say "you" addressing especially the younger ones, because it's their generation — namely that the Gulag was already in Lenin, it's not just Stalin as some kind of perversion, no, no, it was already in Lenin, and in fact if we look closely, it's already in Marx, the Gulag, and moreover
30:28 it's in Hegel — look at Hegel, the system, the true, the whole, totalitarianism, organicism, etc. — and moreover it's already in Descartes, and moreover it's already in Plato — no, no, but I'm not exaggerating, I'm following Heidegger's letter that we have forgotten Being for more than 2500 years, since Plato is the first forgetting of Being — what does that mean? What's left — and I'm not forgetting the continuity of my big parenthesis, I'm within Martin — sorry, Heidegger — my critique of the nocturnal, of the temptation of the night where all cows are black — what's left?
31:16 what's left are the pre-Socratics. Ah, well now, there Heidegger is full of praise — Parmenides, Heraclitus, ah, here are people who were still in contact with Being. Now, I have nothing against Heraclitus and Parmenides — Heraclitus, Hegel himself pays immense tribute to Heraclitus, for example, as one of the very first to point out that dialectic — second time I mention dialectic here, to clarify something, I'm addressing those for whom all this gets muddled, so there are connections to be made, I'm marking the point — it's through usage that we understand words, not through a definition. If it were enough to open the little Larousse to know what "democratic" means, or what "freedom" is, that would be well known. It's through usage. Now here is one of the uses that lets us get our bearings to understand what dialectic means — one, not the only one — one of the tributaries whose
32:26 watershed eventually forms a river, the river of dialectic, is that there are two meanings of "dialectic": sometimes it's a method for arriving at the true, at being, at the real, whatever you like — for now I'm not distinguishing — let's say if I'm in the Platonic scheme, to reach the sun from the depths of the cave toward the sun, for Plato it's dialectic, isn't it, which is the best way to get there, but Being itself, the sun, is not dialectical in Plato. That's the first conception: the contradictions inherent in the concept of dialectic, the oppositions, concern the road, the path, the difficulties one must struggle against to arrive at the truth, but once we arrive at the truth, what does Plato say?
33:24 one stops talking and one is in theory, in contemplation, and even — I've repeated this several times but it can never be repeated enough — in our workshops, not only in contemplation but in suckling, the last stage perhaps of closeness to Being and to the truth — I'm following Plato's letter here in speaking of suckling — I refer you to the end of the sixth book of the Republic, one of the most dizzyingly profound passages in Plato, forgive me for abusing the lexicon and the hyperbole here, but honestly, sometimes it's worth it — that is, the passage which precedes by a few lines the exposition of the famous myth of the cave with which the seventh book opens — so I'm at the end of the sixth book — when one is in contact with the sun, which here represents the absolute for Plato, the true, the good — especially the good; here I differ from Badiou, who translates "agathon," the good, as "the true" — for now this clarification isn't so important,
34:34 that I'm making — I won't confuse anything, let's assume it's the same — there's no more discourse, no more opposition, no more dialectic. Dialectic concerns the path leading to Being, but Being itself is not dialectical. Whereas in Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic — you see I'm not skipping over him, or the little we have of him — something is very clear: it is Being itself which is dialectical, contradiction is the very engine of Being, that's why he doesn't really speak of Being but speaks of becoming, and you find again my door handle: as soon as contradiction is within reality — the top going right, the bottom going left — that's the door handle — we're no longer in Being, in Parmenidean immobility, in the static, we're in Heraclitean movement, in the river in which one never bathes twice. There, I'm closing this little parenthesis for those who are getting lost.
35:44 sometimes people are confused - I remember that Bernard Friot, the first time I met him, at the Tropiques bookshop, took me aside once and said: Dominique, we should talk sometime so you can clarify for me exactly what dialectics is. So maybe this is a somewhat delayed, deferred way of answering him, because he and I are always caught between two doors, certainly for excellent reasons - but anyway, I speak for him, in any case I'm sure of that. So, obviously two meanings: the one to retain in a Marxist field is the one that proceeds from Hegel. Marx, God knows he didn't spare his criticisms of Hegel, always remained inflexible on one point: that Hegel is unavoidable as regards the use of dialectics. I don't want to develop this link between Clouscard, Marx and Hegel too much yet, since I'll come back to it in the philosophical part - I'm still in the plan
"With the axe": the great authors as major signifiers 36:57 of this semantic part, but I wanted to make this clarification. So last time I held that Hegel is very dialectical when he shows that essence and form are inseparable even though they seem to contradict each other, since one is visible, the other invisible, one is here, the other beyond, etc.
37:29 One is phenomenal, the other would be noumenal - so it is far away. As soon as one is not dialectical, one gets antinomies to infinity - Kant taught us to notice that. But I had read a passage where Clouscard justified himself against Morilhat, who had said about Clouscard's manner of expression, the way he wrote, that he worked a bit with an axe - that was the expression. I won't go back over the passage - I'll read it but without analyzing it. 'With an axe, yes, very often indeed, I only point out, designate, mark, I only take note, show the idea, the problem. I wanted above all to propose a work of global mapping, of situating, of delimiting a cultural field. One has to know how to designate' - inside there is 'sign' - 'the targets, to bring out very quickly'
38:39 the topics, the stakes, and this is partly, inevitably, a work of ideological warfare with an axe. So he owns Morilhat's formula. Then one might say, fine, we understand what he means: he says that in action, in political engagement, one cannot be as rigorous as in the great parenthesis, in the epoché as we say in Husserl, the great theoretical parenthesis, blah blah blah. It's not that at all, and we're going to see that - this is my own image, I say this so it's clear and there's no confusion. It's not simply that yes, he works with an axe, but it's a laser axe - that's what we'll see now, an axe that is as much a scalpel as it is a hatchet. Because - and here I'm now moving on to today - here's the first part of my outline, the continuation of last time. The author, says Morilhat, the author, that is Clouscard, often gives the impression of working with an axe, a broad-strokes drawing
39:52 that is hard to distinguish from caricature. So he reproaches Clouscard for caricaturing, for lack of the necessary cultural distance, and he's obviously alluding to the manner, the treatment Clouscard inflicts on the mentors of thought of the time, who for the most part are still the mentors of thought at the EHESS: Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Sartre - I just skipped the first on the list in the reply, which is Sartre, because you know that all those I've just named committed parricide against Sartre. But I developed that last time, I won't come back to it, I refer you to the first part - structuralism, in order to appear, sought to make disappear those who occupied the place before it. I'm in the worldly sense, in the Clouscardian sense, of what was agitating the world of philosophical worldliness - it was existentialism before structuralism, that's it, then afterward structuralism was knocked off by the new philosophers, and so on, leaving the world for now - and coming back to Morilhat, Clouscard replies as follows
41:05 'Claude Morilhat has also understood very well that these great authors only serve me' - listen carefully - 'as major signifiers' - not because one might think I'm dragging Clouscard toward Lacan, it's not me speaking of signifier, it's not me making Clouscard say it, it's he himself who replies to Morilhat - 'these great authors, their proper names are so many major signifiers' - signposts, look carefully - 'major signifiers of what?'
41:37 'of the phenomenology of the bourgeoisie.' I recall here that Morilhat's article comes at a moment when Clouscard had just published three works in a row, which are among the most read by this readership which, fortunately, since the time when Morilhat wrote this, has never stopped growing - and then, thanks to the crisis, the crisis of capital, gives a significant further boost to this return of Clouscard and his works. These three works that Clouscard calls his triptych are Le capitalisme de la séduction, so 1985, Le frivole et la bête sauvage, Le frivole et le sérieux - he had just published all three, and at the moment he learns of Morilhat's article, so in 1987, this time he has also just
42:47 published - but Morilhat didn't have it available, it was too recent - a work that I recommend above all, apart from this reply: Les dégâts de la pratique libérale. It's hard to find, but on the internet I think there shouldn't be too much trouble - Les dégâts de la pratique libérale, published that same year 1987 by Éditions du Pavillon, to which I want to pay tribute here. I'm thinking of the role played by Christian Riochet - I'm not... regretting the disappearance, in publishing, of this man, may the earth rest lightly on him in Africa, he who was born in North Africa. So these three works, Clouscard groups them under another generic phrase which he calls here the phenomenology of the bourgeoisie. You see, we're already deep in it
The shadow theater and the historical present 43:57 that's why there's reason to get confused, I reassure you, Noumène - he's not the only one, there's reason to be. But once you've got the hang of it, it's very simple, because one reason for the confusion comes from the fact that Clouscard takes a mischievous pleasure in using the phrases - the signifiers, if you prefer - of the adversary, and making an original use of them that often turns against the very person who uses that phrase. So since all this seems abstract, let me give an example - second part of my outline, which is this time the application of what I'm saying at the level of form and signifier, and which he dwells on in his reply to Morilhat. Morilhat reproaches him, for example, with speaking of the potlatch of surplus value. So to understand well what follows, I repeat the reply Clouscard makes to Morilhat on this accusation
45:09 of caricaturing the great figures a bit, of not being very rigorous in the way he speaks of them. 'But Claude Morilhat has also understood very well that these great authors only serve me as major signifiers of the phenomenology of the bourgeoisie. I am indifferent to their works as such - find me an author who has the courage to say that' - it's not the detail of their work that interests me, they only served me to designate again the radical sign at the heart of the word - you see, that's it, one works with an axe, but as I told you, it's a laser axe, it's precise, all of this is rigorous - 'they only served me to designate the articulations, the themes, the figures, the stages of this phenomenology' - here we are back in Plato, but yes, one thinks one is in Husserl - phenomenology, no: first of all, the first phenomenology is not, it's not neo-Kantian like everything that proceeds from Husserlian phenomenology, it is Hegelian first, and
46:19 here, the link Hegel-Plato in the political field. I know Hegel criticizes Plato on other points, in particular for remaining within a logic of essence - truth, true reality, is beyond, it's in the cosmos, in the world of ideas. That's not quite what Hegel says - for whom effective reality, the Wirklichkeit, you know, and not sensible reality - in physics there he agrees with Plato, that's what makes us say we're on the flat ground, motionless, whereas we're being carried at 30 km a second around the sun at every instant - this effective reality is in history, it's not in the beyond. Why do I go back to Plato here, because of this passage where Clouscard says these authors serve me
47:29 as major signifiers - Foucault, I quote, Barthes, Lacan, Bourdieu, Baudrillard - 'I've reduced them to being merely the bone that allows one to reconstitute the animal.' But what does Plato say in the allegory of the cave? He says that the shadows we see on the back wall of the cave are not the truth - he's not interested in the fate of these shadows either, and it's not for lack of rigor. Plato wrote at the entrance of his school that none may enter here who is not a geometer - he's not someone who holds rigor in contempt, as far as I know. But Plato insists, precisely in the name of true rigor, that the truth of what appears is not on the back wall of the cave but is behind the neck of the prisoners, who are chained in such a way that they can only see the back of the cave. I am saying that the worldly chatter into which these great philosophical currents are summed up - existentialism, structuralism, yes indeed - a masked game in a tradition established by Marx when he speaks of the poverty of philosophy - it's a theatre
48:39 of Chinese shadow puppets - existentialism, structuralism, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, Sartre - it's a theatre of shadow puppets. Maybe that's wrong, maybe Marx was mistaken, but in any case that's what he says, Marx - that is, that the truth is not in the succession of these schools but in the historical present which determines each of these schools behind their backs. When Hegel, in his youth, writes in his journal this imperative that holds for himself - you can never be more than your time - he gives up the hope of being a prophet, as was very often fashionable among German Romantics - he took part in his youth in that absolute aestheticism that German Romanticism practices, we'll talk about that elsewhere - he writes in his notebook, in his journal: you can never be more than your time, but at best you will be your time - that is, our historical present, for each of us and in each era, the historical present is the limit of our thought
49:49 at best you will be your time. We all have a horizon of thought - I take 'horizon' here in the relativistic sense, in the Einsteinian sense - I don't know much, I'm using it as a metaphor, if I'm wrong may my physicist friends forgive me, but I believe there is something like this: there's a finitude, a curvature, such that beyond the entrance of a black hole one cannot know very well what happens - there is a limit, a horizon, which is the historical present. The categories we use to imagine the future or to reconstruct a so-called past are determined by our historical present. Now what Hegel says - you can never be more than your time, but at best you will be your time - and Clouscard fits into this tradition - was deepened by Marx with the concept, because it is a concept, of the Robinsonade. I recall what Marx designates as a Robinsonade - he too is alluding, Morilhat
The Robinsonade and civil society 50:59 would have criticized Marx by saying: you take a notion that exists somewhere and then you apply it in a field that isn't its own, you take it from fiction, Robinson Crusoe, and you apply it to political economy. But yes, what does Marx say? He says that the classical economists, the bourgeois thinkers of economics, like to imagine that the first men gathered together and constituted society for a utilitarian purpose, in order to better hunt the mammoth, because it's more practical to be several - in short, first there are individuals, then afterward there is humanity. Ah no, says Marx, that never existed, we know of no individual society - there he takes up Rousseau's break, Marx, before the passage from the state of nature - here I go back to Rousseau, chapter 8, book 1 of The Social Contract - before the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, man is only, I quote Rousseau textually, 'a stupid and limited animal' - he only becomes, I quote Rousseau, 'an intelligent being and a man' when he passes to the civil state
52:09 let this be said and repeated, so that we rid Rousseau of the naturalist layer in which he is alienated, in which he is disfigured, and in which he is falsified. Rousseau has a cult of nature, but it is not at all the nature spoken of today in ecology - it's nature, I developed that last time, I won't come back to it - in the polemical sense, in the sense in which one says 'it's natural for me to go to the cinema on Saturday night,' whereas there's nothing natural about cinema, nothing natural about Saturday - these are human conventions, but it simply means: leave me alone, I'm free to go to the cinema on Saturday night. Here it's a polemical sense, which I respect, of 'nature' meaning liberty - that's what natural right meant in the 18th century, as opposed to positive right, which says that arson must be punished by death. So let's be clear: when Marx speaks of the Robinsonade, he says: we think we're imagining the past, and in fact it's - there, Marx makes an application
53:19 of his own theoretical detour, and in fact it's the historical present, namely the free competition unleashed between British companies, for example, because that was the most efficient model in Marx's time - today it would be the American world, it remains Anglo-Saxon today, soon Asian - unbridled competition, as they say, free and undistorted competition. Here we are fully within what is called in political philosophy civil society. We are no longer in the family, where there's a certain routine, an order, a tradition; we're not yet in the state, but we're in between, in civil society, where everything is permitted even though we know it's meant to end up with nothing being possible there - to borrow what has become a Clouscardian slogan, which has enjoyed, and I'm quite glad for him, a certain popular success: everything is permitted but nothing is possible. That's the society we live in - it's one of the great secrets, one of the great unspoken things - so that's it, the wild beast
54:31 where everything is permitted but nothing is possible. The present, our present, is English industrial society, for example, in Marx's time, where each producer has another producer as a competitor, and that's what is reflected in the way he imagines the past - the first men being isolated from one another and competing with each other, ending up associating - you reconstitute the whole problematic of Hobbes: it's a bit by constraint that men would have united, that's the supposed origin of the social contract - it's a misunderstanding of the contract, of course I don't want to develop that here, but I hope to have the chance soon, at the start of term, since we're going to begin a new cycle - I can tell you in advance, it's a generic title - dealing with the logic of the subject. There's a logic in the natural sciences, everyone comes to that in the hard sciences, as they're now called, and then there's
55:43 an attempt at an approach to the subject in the sciences of history, in the human sciences - the EHESS or elsewhere, I don't know, or elsewhere - but there there's no longer any logic, or so little that it's not worth talking about it, at least compared to the powerful coherence of the hard sciences, cohesion. So I'd like to try to build a bridge between the two, and to develop what a logic of the subject might mean, and a rationality applied no longer to things - physics knows how to do that far better than I do, I would be careful not to reproach it, we wouldn't be where we are otherwise, either of us - but the logic of relations between subjects is another matter, and the political is not - it's not a relation of subject to thing, to object, it's not the relation of the astronomer to the sun, it's a relation of the astronomer to his hierarchy, to his colleagues, to his readers, to his budgets - there we're in the logic of the subject. But anyway, we'll see all this throughout the coming year, we'll come back to it, so I can't
The potlatch: from Mauss to Gallic torcs and Fouquet 56:53 give away too much of the subject yet. So I come back to this example that Clouscard takes here, because Morilhat dwells on a particular case of this supposed lightness with which Clouscard takes concepts here and uses them in another field, in particular this concept - I come back to it - of the potlatch of surplus value. This might seem obscure perhaps to a younger generation who have forgotten the prestige that the research of a Marcel Mauss had at that time in anthropology. Marcel Mauss is the great turning point without which there would never have been a Lévi-Strauss, for example, to go very quickly. Marcel Mauss, whose most decisive publication is without question his famous Essay on the Gift - here, to condense it very quickly, it's - I'm not here to give the history of sociology or anthropology, but precisely in order to avoid going
58:03 into the detail of this history - and as I used my little door handle earlier to slip quickly past dialectics, but with a precise orientation that will always remain present whenever one wants to speak, without saying too much nonsense, about dialectics - in the Essay on the Gift, if you want to understand the essential point, even if it's not the example Marcel Mauss uses, think a little of children - the sugared almonds, the sweets, the presents - that's right, isn't it, children - we say 'poisoned sugared almond,' 'poisoned gift' - that's it, that's what Marcel Mauss points out in the Essay on the Gift: giving apparently is very generous, it's kind to give - yes, but that creates an obligation, as we say in French, 'I am your obligé,' I am your servant, I depend on you - so it's always a poisoned gift, because the gift presupposes a counter-gift. There, after the essay, Marcel Mauss - it's worth it - and then a particular form of this gift, an extreme form which was studied in the Amerindian societies of North America in particular
59:13 by North American anthropologists - hence the Native American origin of the term potlatch, which is why it sounds a bit strange to French ears - resting on a tradition well observed empirically, I mean it's a matter of fieldwork, among the 'savages' as they used to say at the time, namely that in order to consolidate the fact of being at the top of the hierarchy, a chief, a clan chief, a tribal chief, at the summit of the traditional hierarchy, would periodically tend to hold what we'd call today a great clearance sale, to show that he's above and to discourage others from trying to keep up with him in this sort of challenge - he might, for example, publicly burn, in front of the whole tribe, right in the center of the village, some fifty bison skins - in other words, one squanders part of the wealth to show that one is above. That's what's called the potlatch, which is perfectly well observed in anthropology. I dwell on this notion
1:00:23 of potlatch to show, even at the cost of gently criticizing Morilhat, whom Clouscard is the first to recognize offers a constructive and honest critique - so it's not at all to be ironic, but to point to a shortcoming entirely to Clouscard's advantage: it's proof that one can take this concept of potlatch and apply it elsewhere than in its Amerindian origin. I thought of this recently while giving a talk at Saint-Dizier, of which you may have seen some echoes on YouTube, on the film Young Marx. I crossed the Marne, the Haute-Marne, by train, and I was looking at this region which has been a privileged region for historians of Gallic things, to sum it up very roughly. Now there's a well-known custom among specialists of this history, which is that we find, in the Marne but also in the Garonne, in the southwest, among Gallic tribes - we find, I hope this will happen to you one day, you never know - massive gold jewelry
1:01:33 what are called torcs, T-O-R-Q-U-E-S - look it up, torcs, T-O-R-Q-U-E-S, I tell you, look it up because it's worth it - click on the image on Google, it's magnificent, you see the extraordinary fineness of the work of the jewelers, the goldsmiths, the working of the gold, the clasps, with fasteners that still work - you see the bracelet or the necklace, it's not just the clasp that's gold - yet gold is soft, you have to be a good technician, with oak leaves or roses, it's extraordinary the quality of the work in solid gold. Now periodically the Gallic chiefs would take several of these torcs, which represented the very essence of the fortune, of the wealth in their power since they were the chiefs, and throw them into the river - you see the parallel above, Amerindian origin, the term potlatch, application in the behavior of the Gauls with regard to the torcs that they threw into the Garonne, the Seine, or the Marne
1:02:43 and I'll leave it there - and third, I'll stop there, for all those who have had the chance to visit the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, a bit further than the suburbs, at the edge really, southern Île-de-France, near Fontainebleau. You know that this château was commissioned, was the residence of Louis XIV's finance minister, what was then called the Superintendent of Finances, Fouquet, and when one admires, when one visits the château and isn't quite versed in history, one might say, well, obviously he was inspired by Versailles, when one sees the gardens, the French-style garden and the right angles and the flowerbeds - it's the opposite, it's Versailles that was made on the model of Vaux-le-Vicomte as regards the gardens. I say this because it's the same gardener, the illustrious Le Nôtre, whom Louis XIV poached from the Superintendent of Finances
1:03:53 to make Versailles. Now what happened is that Louis XIV was received by Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte, and this is fairly well known, I think, even if one isn't a great specialist in history - it went very badly for Fouquet, because he received him with such splendor - you see how we're going to arrive again at throwing torcs into the river or burning bison skins - he spent such a fortune to receive Louis XIV, the Superintendent of Finances - he'll be pleased, Louis XIV, surely? Ah no, there can be no other master, there can be no other king. I'm dwelling on this a bit because in a moment Clouscard wants to speak about the pleasant anthropological concept of potlatch that I've applied in the field of surplus value, in the Marxist field - there's a struggle for recognition, I'll come to it, that Marcel Mauss and the anthropologists, and Lévi-Strauss even less, do not address - they're not Hegelian-Marxists, on the contrary, people made use - less of Mauss, but especially of Lévi-Strauss - to liquidate Marxism, people made use of them
1:05:03 I'm not saying that Lévi-Strauss bothered me a great deal, but that's not his main concern, he's a man very devoted to his subject and I always say he had one of the finest musical cultures in Paris at the time, that's no small thing. So it went badly because he received him with such splendor that Louis XIV had him arrested, dispossessed of a large part of his property, placed under house arrest, deprived of a large part of his property, and poached, I could say, his - I'll say, absurdly - his gardener, not Le Nôtre, whom he had make Versailles. There's a detail I find - this is the most important thing, this great detour through Fouquet, it's to tell you this detail - he had gone so far, I'm commenting on the potlatch of surplus value, he had gone so far, Fouquet, as to sprinkle the paving stones of the courtyard in which he welcomed the king with gold powder, gold enamel - well, we're in the very essence of historical reality, the potlatch of surplus value
The potlatch of surplus value, concrete universal 1:06:13 there you have it - as Morilhat says, no, it's perhaps not legitimate, even here - you see, I told you it's yes, work with an axe, the scholasticism of a laser axe, empirical reality, the here and the concrete now, not to make tableaux like Bourdieu, to say that we're not only in the theoretical, because there's always an anti-intellectualism in Bourdieu, a resentful side, to speak like Nietzsche, which is most of the time justified toward the cronies and rogues he alludes to - rogues and cronies, as a famous political expression once put it - but what use is empirical data if it lacks the essential modeling? Here we see Clouscard being within what Hegel calls the concrete universal - yes, the potlatch of surplus value is a concrete universal in societies, and this is the last example I'll give of this way of showing that one has money - let's be clear about it
1:07:23 now, of showing that one is in the ruling class, the upper class, by squandering, by throwing parties, by organizing great orgies - I sound like I'm getting worked up, but what am I alluding to? I no longer remember which year, but the obscenity of that party held in the premises of the French Communist Party, which at the time had wanted to open up to the anti-communist intelligentsia - piles of vomit were found on the carpets. When I speak of the potlatch of surplus value, we're in the concrete particular, we're not in the imaginary. So I can now read you, because it's much more concrete, the incredible analysis Clouscard makes in his return to his supposed theoretical lightness in expression - to say the essential in two words, for Claude Morilhat, indisputably, the success of Clouscard's stylistic exercise is achieved partly at the expense of depth of substance. He even writes: totem, another word borrowed from the Amerindian world, potlatch, reality principle
1:08:33 that one is borrowed from Freud, from the psychoanalytic field - the diversion of notions that had their heyday in theory, anthropology here, psychoanalysis there, is skillful, but extracting them from their field of origin is not enough to secure them a conceptual dimension. That means, in fact, more than - there was once a theoretical seriousness - that's not - but yes, but I don't know, good Lord - or else logical neopositivism, Wittgenstein - you see how we find again the contemporary divisions - everything Clouscard sends back to back - a conceptual dimension if they merely make an image - then he reproaches Clouscard - I dwelt last time on the fact that everyday language, 'the day breaks,' is imagistic, philosophy has used for 2500 years an imagistic language, and it does well not to do as mathematics does - mathematics does very well to have abandoned this everyday language, because mathematics had its own reasons, and excellent ones, for developing a univocal discourse
1:09:43 where signs have one meaning and only one, isn't that so, and it's not like democracy where one person understands one thing and another the opposite - fine, that's very good - and where there's no metaphor as in 'the day breaks,' even though the day hasn't set and, still less, risen. But in these metaphors - one can never insist on this enough - lies the very hollow of what interests the philosopher. He cannot abandon it as mathematicians do - the mathematician can and must abandon it, because it's an effect of a subject, the fact that there are metaphors in language, of desire, of unconscious formulation, whereas when an astronomer deals with the sun, for example, I mean, there's no unconscious of the sun, so he can and must abandon all trace of subjectivity - that's not the case for the philosopher. Philosophy begins - and Socrates alludes to this, Plato alludes to this through Socrates, in the Apology of Socrates - it is inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and Socrates alludes to it at his trial, saying: it is written, 'gnothi seauton,' know thyself, and not how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara, which may be useful for other things, I don't know, so
1:10:56 I take up again Clouscard's reprise - he finishes quoting Morilhat: 'but extracting them from their field of origin is not enough to secure them a conceptual dimension' - Morilhat is demanding, and he's right - 'if they merely make an image, they do not thereby permit a better understanding of capitalist society' - so the concept of the potlatch of surplus value would not help us understand capitalist society, that's a good one. Clouscard takes the floor again, and here I ask you to pay close attention, and that's why I'm dwelling on this text of Clouscard's reply to Morilhat: given an equal number of pages, of course - if you read Les dégâts de la pratique libérale, you have all this content, entirely unprecedented before Clouscard, developed over the whole length of a work, a book - but here it's a reply, it's the size of an article facing another article, isn't it. So I'm dwelling on it because it has never been said this clearly, and in a manner this dense
1:12:06 at an equal length as in this reply of Clouscard's to Morilhat. 'Yet doesn't the phrase potlatch of surplus value say the essential in two words?' So not only does Clouscard not acknowledge the fault here, but on the contrary he persists and signs: 'is there not almost an adequation of image and concept?' Has Clouscard ever been seen to be this much of a semiologist? After having prepared the reader - the image, you've seen, and the concept - those of you studying philosophy will recall that Kant said that concepts without intuition are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind - replace intuition with image, and concept - we don't need to replace it, since it's the same word here, isn't it - and you have the same dichotomy between empiricism and rationalism, and that's what antinomies are called. 'Is there not almost an adequation of image and concept?' - so here, not antinomy but adequation, synthesis
1:13:16 'After having prepared the reader by using the categories of the cultural-worldly' - preparing the reader, you see - 'I impose on him a rather surprising shift of meaning' - you'll agree, with the potlatch, it was rarely applied - the potlatch was applied to bison skins or to torcs thrown into the river, rarely to modern society and to surplus value, isn't it, and to the profit of General Motors or Danone - 'so I impose on the reader a rather surprising shift of meaning that he can no longer reject, precisely because we started from concrete examples' - starting from this pleasant notion from ethnophilosophy that is the potlatch, 'I come to say the very necessity that this kind of discourse allows one to conceal' - I keep telling you it's laser-axe work, I won't stop repeating it - 'my imagistic style,' he says, in quotation marks - that's what Morilhat reproaches him with, imagistic - 'is only the answer to the very question of pedagogy.' One is obliged to be imagistic when one transmits
Socrates's problem: from ideological language to concept 1:14:26 when one teaches, and that is indeed the lesson of Plato throughout 2500 years of philosophy in general. And he adds - that's why I come back to it - 'how, starting from ordinary ideological language' - everyday language, the one that makes us say the sun rises, isn't it, because there are some who find - I keep coming back to this example very often, you see why it's central, since one still has to fight to be understood, it's so obvious that we never think about it - 'how, starting from ordinary ideological language, does one arrive at the necessity of the concept, logical necessity?' There, isn't it, that's Socrates' problem - it's stated in so many words by Michel Clouscard in this reply to Morilhat: 'it's Socrates' problem' - it's not a flaw of Clouscard's, it's undoubtedly still a not-perfectly-resolved problem of all philosophy, which limps, as I recalled last time - it's an image I borrow here from that noble figure that was Merleau-Ponty, who said that from Socrates onward, in his relationship to the city
1:15:36 to the politicians, since Socrates is the scandal that redirected the political career of the young Plato, who had set out to be a statesman of his time, son of a great family, and who was traumatized by the fact that his master, whom he considered the most just man in the city, was condemned to death by the city - it's this political trauma - and David Chitrault has some very fine developments showing that it's no accident, it's not just Socrates or Clouscard - philosophy in general always has a double, a double tropism: it's attracted to mathematics because there's rigor and because there's the universal, because men agree there, which is the dream of politics. Great quotation from someone who stayed thirty years at Plato's school, great quotation from Aristotle on the problem I'm raising: mathematics unites men, politics divides them - Aristotle, this remains topical, so let's meditate well on this saying of Aristotle's, mathematics unites men, politics divides them - and it's not only for the sake of knowledge
1:16:46 it's not in a cognitive sense - ah, cognitive science, there are those who are under illusions - that Plato wrote that none may enter here who is not a geometer - it's also a practical intention in the Kantian sense, in the political sense. So 'my imagistic style is only the answer to the very question of paideia' - I'm the one saying the Greek word now - of pedagogy, childhood is paideia - 'how, starting from ordinary ideological language' - I dwell on this phrase, I come back to what linguists call natural language, which is much better named as Clouscard does, since it has, precisely, nothing natural about it - it is even, among all forms of communication - there are very developed forms of communication in the animal world, I think of bees, of dolphins, that was developed, that's not a problem, but it's not language precisely because there's no metaphor and image - we're at the heart of decisive problems here - 'my imagistic style,' in quotation marks, 'is only the answer to the very question of pedagogy, for pedagogy'
1:17:56 is no longer a subject that seeks, like an astronomer, to reflect on an object, but a subject that tries not only to know but to act upon another subject, the learner - and one learns a great deal in the act of learning. You can't imagine how much I learned from Africa by teaching in Africa, in particular the fact that one cannot count on culture, because it's rare, in the schools where I taught in sub-Saharan Africa - of course I'm speaking here of what I know - it's rare that the parents have at home, I don't know, the complete works of Proust or Aristotle, and so one is forced to lay out the concepts completely and to be much more rigorous than one can be when one can count on the pupil finding things out for himself - that's a matter of personal documentation - and it's a great school to teach in Africa. So I repeat
1:19:06 this crucial sentence: 'starting from this pleasant notion of ethnophilosophy that is the potlatch, the great clearance sale, I come to say the very necessity that this kind of discourse allows one to conceal - my imagistic style is only the answer to the very question of pedagogy: how, starting from ideological language' - that's much better than 'natural,' as I was saying, nothing is natural about it - 'the everyday ideological language, does one arrive at the necessity of the concept?' - the reverse, not the opposite, of ideology - 'that is Socrates' problem, that is the problem of all philosophy,' by the very fact that all philosophy, even when it seems abstruse, when the discourse is obscure - I'm thinking of Hegel, of course, of the great so-called metaphysical dialogues of Plato, the Sophist, the Philebus, the Parmenides, etc. - which are sometimes
1:20:16 very difficult - there you have it, the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment by Kant - I strongly recommend it, Kant's greatest text, in any case the most complete and the most pregnant with the future - it's nonetheless still language. As he says, ordinary ideological language - we have not left what linguists call natural language. When Hegel speaks of the pure porosity of matters - don't ask me what that means, that's not our subject - it seems incomprehensible, the pure porosity of matters, yet none of these words is foreign to the listener - porous is a familiar term, pure is a familiar term, matter is a familiar term - it's their combination that is a little rare. That's precisely where the philosopher, isn't it, uses everyday language, but to say things one doesn't hear every day - we agree on that - but the code is that of everyday language. So, this is the last time I'll quote it: 'how, starting from ordinary ideological language, does one arrive at the necessity of the concept' - I hope our friend
1:21:26 Noumenon is reassured, I haven't clarified everything, I'm in the process of saying that it will never be clarified in the sense that we expect in the hard sciences, like Y equals f of x, that's what's specified here and recalled by Clouscard, because there isn't only a cognitive stake, there is a stake of struggle between subjects, there are ideological obstacles, class obstacles, how do we get from ordinary ideological language to the necessity of the concept, that's Socrates's problem, I wanted to answer that too, the potlatch of surplus value, isn't there a good didactic use there that is justified pedagogically, didactically and even conceptually of the image, so far from opposing the concept and the image, intuition and concept, here they have been reconciled in an eminently dialectical effort, as always when we bring opposites closer together while moving forward and making this contradiction the very engine of the movement that allows us to progress. I'm going to move on to another articulation of Clouscard's response to Morilhat which is even
Socrates brings philosophy down from heaven to earth 1:22:37 more fundamental and even more topical since it will be about the relations between civil society and the State at a time of the Yellow Vests — it's no small thing to address this question, far from it — but first, regarding this necessarily pedagogical aspect, whether we like it or not, of philosophy's mode of expression, because philosophy uses everyday language. Let's be rigorous: every philosophical expression is a part — to speak the language of set-theoretic mathematics — is a part of the set of discourses using natural language, but not every discourse using natural language necessarily has a pedagogical-political aim. That is what is proper to philosophy: to use natural language but in order to produce, somewhere,
1:23:47 on the subject, on the receiver — for the sender, but on the receiver — an action, a praxis. Not often enough, but it seems fundamental to me, is this good Diogenes Laertius — you know, he's very well known in the history of philosophy textbooks for having made this incredible compilation, as we'd say today, isn't it: Lives, Doctrines and Sayings of Illustrious Philosophers, thanks to which we have something of a survey of the thinkers of his era, the Hellenistic era, not later than Plato — and so he has a reputation, he's not really popular among philosophers, he's not very sharp, not too bright as we'd say colloquially, since sometimes he reports uninteresting anecdotes and sometimes he makes extremely important developments, and in any case it is thanks to him
1:24:57 for example that we have quotations from pre-Socratics whose works have been entirely lost and of whom we have a few fragments precisely developed by Diogenes Laertius. So why am I talking about this? Because when he gets to Plato, it's one of his most important chapters — we're quite surprised, because he places Plato not only within the history of thought and knowledge, in the proper sense — here was someone who stopped questioning the stars, who did not mix philosophy with physics and astrophysics, but who asked his interlocutors: by the way, how do you plan to raise your son? Should he be taught gymnastics? Should he be taught music? What is courage? He asks the army general. What is beauty? He asks the craftsman in the street, his everyday interlocutor. Socrates brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth. That means this too: it reminds us that there isn't
1:26:07 only the theoretical in philosophy, there is the political in the proper sense, what happens in the polis, in the city. And so, reaching the sun is all very well, having gone all the way up, having gotten rid of all the illusions that were burdening the eye of the mind since the depths of the cave, but it's nothing, it's a nothingness, if one doesn't come back down to the depths of the cave, where the community of chained prisoners is, in order to free them and tell them: all that you're seeing is nonsense, that's not how it happens. And if one finds a way of addressing them — you see how pedagogy, the paideia, is linked to politics — that is a bit different from Socrates's way. Socrates put us on the path, being the first, he must have been rather clumsy, since he annoyed those he questioned so much that they ended up seizing him and killing him — all this is stated in so many words in Plato's exposition of the allegory of the cave, and you can well imagine that when he comes back from his sojourn towards the sun and the good, he staggers
1:27:18 when he comes back into the darkness, because his eyes have seen the light and have trouble adjusting to the shadows, and so he will walk like a drunk man, like an inebriated man — that's Plato — and so the others will say: ah well, it was really worth going that far just to walk like a drunkard, and if they could get hold of him they would kill him, wouldn't they? Yes, they would kill him, says the interlocutor. So the problem remains — it's such a struggle to go from the sun down to the depths of the cave, to irradiate the community, what Kant magnificently calls the intelligible community, isn't it?
1:27:56 through the good, inseparable from the true, because otherwise it's moraline and it produces millions of deaths. But let's move on to criticisms that seem more important to me. So, as Clouscard takes up the floor again — I told you that compared to last time I would be more continuous in my reading of Clouscard, so I'm following his chronology, from the criticisms that seem least important and least serious to me to those that seem most important. We started with semiology, and now we come to what seems most important to me. Claude Morilhat makes another, much more serious reproach against me, regarding my schematism and lack of rigor, which even become theoretical laxity, and first of all on a fundamental problem for Marxist thought — and here is my new chapter: the problem of the State. Claude Morilhat reproaches me for an instrumental interpretation of the State, and even — which he doesn't make explicit but which in my opinion can be read between the lines of his text — an opportunistic interpretation. Huge dossier.
The State, common enemy of libertarians and capitalists 1:29:11 The State — we all agree it's our enemy, no, but I'm doing this on purpose to provoke a little — take the libertarians, what's worse than the State for a libertarian, what's worse than the State for an anarchist, it's the State, this cold monster as they say, isn't it. Look at the young Marx, still under the influence of a Feuerbach, who has several very libertarian aspects that will progressively disappear, especially starting not only from The German Ideology but from the famous Theses on Feuerbach, where Marx recognizes the unavoidable contribution brought by German idealism regarding the activity of the subject, the Tätigkeit, to speak like snobs. So where am I? I'm at the State, I said it's our common enemy — common to whom, you say, the libertarians — but it's not only the libertarians — ah no, there's the opposite, there are the capitalists, you agree, the bosses, they no longer have the right
1:30:21 to say, we're ordering ourselves around in the State — not at all, you can really see that our libertarians should listen to BFM Business more often, because I happen to listen to it often, and it does me good — there's nothing more capitalist, as they say now, liberal, they prefer that we say liberal on BFM Business because in "liberal" there's "liberty" and it gives a little positive credit to this monstrous machine for destruction that capitalism is, destroying the earth and man, the planet and the world — we'll come back to worldliness, the most Clouscardian concept, it's still a bit early — if you listen to BFM Business you'll see that they spit on the State every five minutes, every day that God makes, as my great-aunt used to say. But yes, it's the common enemy of the worst reactionaries
1:31:32 and of the most sincere among those who want to free us from oppression. Say, that's a strange dossier, the State, and it's true that the young Marx makes a virulent, ferocious critique, moreover with the appropriate style, because here was someone who knew how to write, in particular in Marx's first major publication — I'm not talking about his thesis on the atomism of the ancients, but his first great publication properly speaking, truly intended for the public — that is indeed the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, that is, the critique of the philosopher who had almost deified the State — I'm speaking here in terms of conventional imagery, I refer here to the work of Éric Weil, who showed that the State in Hegel is something other than the Prussian administrative monarchy that was tracking Hegel, and of which Hegel
1:32:43 knew he was under the threat of its censorship, isn't that so, and above all to the works of Jacques D'Hondt, who thus reads Hegel secret and Hegel en son temps — Hegel Secret and Hegel in His Time — you'd find these, in part, at Éditions Delga, they are masterpieces, with a true dowser's genius, Jacques D'Hondt consults all the documentation that allows him to show to what extent Hegel's relationship to his own administrative hierarchy — and, well, I'll stop there, out of theoretical prudence — was at the very least ambiguous, let's say, it being understood that I mean this as a litotes here, not merely a euphemism. So this dossier on the State needs to be set in order, because indeed Morilhat picked up on something — this was the era when the Communist Party, I told you, began a deviation that ended up with it getting fewer votes now than the Animalist Party, because it wanted
1:33:55 to be social-democratic — that's its right, but at that point, as they say in Africa, we prefer the model to the photocopy: if it's to be social-democratic, there's always better than the Communist Party — the cunning of a Mitterrand who comes from Vichy and passes himself off as the man furthest to the left there is, it's true that, hand on heart, he'd often say how a man of the left, for me, cannot bear... you know, with his eyelids closing — I noticed that every time Mitterrand's eyelids closed, it was when he was telling a lie, so they'd close all the time when he talked. Mitterrand who abolished the death penalty — I fully approve, it hadn't been applied for years anyway, he's a clever one, Mitterrand, but it's very good, the policy had to be ratified — except that it was to make people forget that he had refused clemency to a French communist who had supported Algerian independence and who was beheaded because Mitterrand refused him clemency when he was Minister of Justice under the Fourth Republic. No, no, I'm serious when I say that these moderate people
1:35:07 who are the center-left — it's not the center, they are serious extremists, and that's what has been governing us for more than two generations now, whether it's center-right or center-left matters little here. Let's come back to the State, this State which, starting with Mitterrand — there I'm being unfair — starting with Giscard, Pompidou, Pompidou, Giscard, but especially Giscard and especially Mitterrand. As for him, one really shouldn't visit the sins of the fathers on the sons — Giscard's father received the Francisque decoration under Pétain, but what's less well known is that Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the son, threatened de Gaulle with his resignation, while he was the all-powerful pillar of the government as the all-powerful Minister of Finance, of the Economy and the Plan at the time — it's not what we looked at in the plan — if de Gaulle did not pardon the putschists of French Algeria in Algiers and the generals. But yes, that's the far right, all that is Vichy coming back. But consider the party
1:36:17 of Giscard — ah no, that's not far right, we're among people who take their cup of tea with their little fingers out like that, no no, it's the Independent Republicans — yes, that's exactly what it means, I am a republican, but yes, like de Gaulle after all, but I'm not a Gaullist, ah no that, then me neither, I voted against de Gaulle at the time, but for opposite reasons — Giscard, there you go, I developed this a bit last time, I won't go back over it, how ambiguous it is to say I'm anti-Gaullist, I'm anti-communist, you have to see where you stand. So you can guess it's time to bring a little clarity to this concept. You listen to BFM Business, capitalism, they protest all the time against excessive regulations, you recognize capitalist discourse; conversely, the Yellow Vests — I'm not talking about the employers here, I'm not talking about the State here, I'm talking about those from whom the State has torn away hands and eyes, against which they protest, at first not because there's too much State — that's BFM Business — but against the fact that the State has abandoned them, that the tax office has retreated 50 km away
1:37:27 and that it costs me gas money, and on top of that with these bastard eco-warriors — I have nothing against the environment, I'm talking about these bastard eco-warriors, it's called political ecology — there are only two forces rising in Europe now, you know, check it out, it's topical, in Germany, in France, in Italy: the far right and the greens, the green Khmers — if you think I'm overstating it, don't take my word for it, look at the polls, you'll be terrified by what awaits us in these spheres. The State has abandoned us, the tax office 50 km away, the post office has been closed, primary school, there's none left, there are municipalities — what's now called peripheral France — we're back in TV panel chit-chat, I'm trying to conceptualize, to move from images to the concept, the social security fund
Distinguishing the State from the state apparatus 1:38:41 all that was true, so what is it, are we suffering from too much State or a lack of State? It's not the same thing, there's a problem, there are contradictions. So I'm going to try to clarify things, and this, I'm trying to let you benefit from discussions that lasted years, in Paris, in Corsica on holidays with Clouscard, at Viggianello sometimes, more rarely, but most often between Paris and Corsica, because we had joint holidays when I was there, and when there wasn't the whole Sahara between us and the Mediterranean, when I worked south of the Sahara — these discussions, among the recurring themes of all these discussions with this friend who used to say, with a great burst of laughter at the end, "there's no holiday in the concept" — these discussions concerned, and here's the first step forward I'm making to get out of this confusion, the concept of the State such that it remains a representation. I'm going to tell you exactly what Clouscard says, it's all the more urgent to get it out
1:39:51 of representation, of fantasy, and to raise it to the concept: there is a distinction to be made between State and State apparatus. This is one of the greatest secrets of the contemporary world, forgive me for being a bit solemn or humorous, whichever you like, one doesn't preclude the other, one can exorcise the other. Given the importance of the stakes, I'm going to be very precise and very concrete: never have we been oppressed by a State apparatus as monstrous as in the contemporary world. Am I clear here? I'm conceding the point to the libertarians, and I'm with them: the surveillance cameras, the GAFA, the internet, I mean the fact that everything you write on the internet will be held against you — it's not the case, say, if I run for legislative elections, they'll bring up that I had a depression, it's an impersonal game, this was done with McGovern, I remember, in the United States, he's not a man of the left exactly, but for the US he worried big capital a little, they brought up the fact that he had
1:41:01 undergone psychoanalysis 15 years before the election, while he was leading in the polls, he collapsed within 48 hours. Well, we've never had a State apparatus as powerful as today, satellites listening in, Mrs. Merkel, we learn she's spied on by the CIA and the NSA — it's not just that she's spied on, meanwhile she's spying on France — it's extraordinary, we've never seen a State apparatus with such means, means that would have made a Fouché dream, Napoleon's first great Minister of the Interior, the first cop of France at the time — they were amateurs by comparison, even the Stalinist apparatus is nothing next to the intelligence resources available now, facial recognition in the street, in the metro, well, the cameras, let's move on, you know this better than me after all, it's your generation. Well, there you're proving the invitation's point right: the State is the enemy — careful, I'm talking here about the State apparatus, and that includes many apparatuses, literal and figurative
1:42:11 but this State apparatus, taken as a whole, a global structure, is entirely at the service of this absence of State that is the private sphere — there's the secret they're hiding from you. So here we're caught in a trap of words — ah yes, a State apparatus at the service of the destruction of the State, well that's a good one, wait, you think I'm making this up, that I'm doing my own Pagani thing? You want some Clouscard? Look: by using this Trojan horse that is the republican State, in the name of human rights, acting on civil society which is its negative — civil society is bourgeois society, we'll come back to that — by investing the State apparatus, by slipping into the play of power relations, by even seizing certain bastions of management — social security could be proposed as a privileged case of this struggle — one must understand the inversion carried out by capitalism, listen carefully: it is no longer the State that decides civil society — what we're being told is not that the State runs the civil society in which we live
Libertarian liberalism, libertarian social democracy, and Atlanticism 1:43:21 the State has become the emanation of a capitalism that has completely mastered civil society by reducing it to a generalized market, the market of desire — I'll set aside desire for now, precisely because it's very concrete and complex, but so as not to confuse my listeners, and also because we mustn't get the wrong target, let's come back to clarity — letting oneself be duped by the strategy of, listen carefully, libertarian social liberalism, one of Clouscard's phrases that has been most successful, to the point that now several influencers, that's what I think they're called now on the internet, use it, the concept of libertarian liberalism — who would have thought before Clouscard, since he is the creator of this expression, who could have thought that those who pretended to be adversaries in '68, Cohn-Bendit at the foot of the barricades and Pompidou at the Élysée, were the same thing, the liberal and the libertarian
1:44:31 the banker Pompidou and the insurgent — not the revolutionary, not the rebel, the revolted — that's better seen in the salons. Let me quote Merleau-Ponty, not a thunderbolt of revolution, Merleau-Ponty is no Bolshevik with a knife between his teeth, he says a magnificent sentence in In Praise of Philosophy about Socrates, I quote Merleau-Ponty: "if the philosopher were a rebel, he would shock less, for after all everyone knows privately that the world is not as it should be, though they forget it when they come to power." With Socrates, it's something else. So the liberal libertarian, yes, so one mustn't get the wrong target, letting oneself be duped by the strategy of libertarian social liberalism, before arriving at this phrase, because all that requires development — but Hegel spoke of dialectic for a long time before speaking of speculative philosophy, and as for Marx, he never spoke
1:45:41 of dialectical and historical materialism, we'll have to wait for Engels to formalize all that, no doubt betraying Marx's thought, quite the contrary. So I specify here, before arriving at his concept — and I'm getting to it now — of the libertarian liberal: in the works that precede the appearance of this phrase, he was still talking about libertarian social democracy, we were under Mitterrand, quite simply. He had spotted very well that this form of libertarianism, brought into vogue by the notion of the '68er, which he clearly distinguished from the workers' movement of '68, which was a tremendous advance that people wanted to reduce to a mess of pottage on the libertarian side — there now, that's interesting too, those who really don't have many worries, finding it pitiful that the minimum wage was raised by 40%, that union rights in companies were imposed, all that
1:46:52 that's what Cohn-Bendit called, with the contempt you know, "category-based demands," the leftists used to say at the time, the rebels, the libertarians, category-based, you know, your little problems of pensions, of month-end money — well there's the end of the world and you're telling me about the end of the month, but listen, Greta, stop listening to Marx — no I'm not making an amalgam — it's like the doctor who told the poor sick man, you must eat fruit or you won't get better, the sick man lets himself die because he never finds "fruit," he only sees cherries, peaches, apples, and medlars — well yes, he should have made a conceptual amalgam. Before speaking of libertarian liberalism, there was libertarian social democracy, because we're suffering from something that infiltrated us via the left, they weren't leftists at all, Mitterrand comes from Vichy, he's no more opposed to the left, but Mitterrand had the intelligence to understand — those who financed Mitterrand, and I say this to be clear, it's the world
1:48:02 of Atlanticism — I'm not proving it, I'm not eating American, I'm eating Atlanticism, the proof is Mitterrand is Atlanticist, Giscard, Macron, all that is Atlanticist, there are African heads of state we support through the World Bank or French cooperation who are Atlanticist, that doesn't make them American — conversely, there are Americans who fight against this system, very well, Thelonious Monk just as much as Charlie Parker are not Atlanticist, well America isn't all bad after all, Einstein etc., and Oppenheimer. So what am I saying, I'm saying there was Atlanticism behind Mitterrand, they tried, the case — France is at stake in Europe, I'm saying there are consequences — at the time Germany, as they used to say, was already starting to be an economic giant but a political dwarf, that's the common expression, it's gained rank since then politically, it told Tsipras, ch ch ch ch, and then Greece ended up — more Marxist than me, you die — finished, I'll... if you align yourself with Brussels' conditions
1:49:12 it's no longer a political dwarf, Germany. But at the time, it was the case. France is huge. And then, the nuclear weapon. As it shouldn't. There's a small rank. Well, anyway. So where was I? I was on the trial of Atlanticism. I'm not going to do it, because that would be another subject, it would take us far, but it's millions of dead. You think I'm exaggerating?
1:49:42 No, no, just in Korea or Vietnam, there are twice three million dead. Because these countries which are 10,000 km away, which never troubled the United States of America — we've never seen Vietnamese planes bombing Los Angeles. Whereas there are still now, aren't there, atrocious after-effects of Agent Orange, this defoliant, this defoliant gas the Americans used to destroy the virgin forest, so they could see the guerrillas hiding in it, the Vietnamese communists.
1:50:23 And still now, the people without faces — well, I won't indulge in voyeurism, it's atrocious. Atlanticism, that's what it is, I mean, it's Iraq where every single day, every day, I mean. If I had lived under Saddam Hussein, I would have ended up in a vat of acid, that's where he threw his opponents. So I'm not defending the former regime, but what Atlanticism is doing now is ten times worse. Under Saddam Hussein, there was running water, there were nuclear engineers walking around in the street, there were women.
1:50:53 I know an Iraqi friend whose father was jailed at the time by Saddam Hussein, but who told me, "I was in shorts at 15, no one could say anything about it in Baghdad." So we're no longer there. The Americans saw that thanks to Islamism — I have immense respect and admiration for Islamic civilization and its culture, I'm talking about Islamism, that is modern Islamism, the one reactivated by the CIA to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan originally, and which has since inspired what is happening now in Syria.
1:51:23 Anyway. So, and all that, Atlanticism. No, no, it's serious, it depends. I don't measure up to the American, so, they tried Atlanticism, I'm not doing a conspiracy theory here, I'm not doing Atlanticism, but look it up. What's typically conspiratorial is when there's a blurry photo to prove what's being said, things, we never... Here, it's very well documented, look it up. There were even assassination attempts on de Gaulle under Kennedy.
1:51:54 He's a guy who wants to withdraw from NATO, who demands that the dollar be reimbursed in gold, and who criticizes, in the same Phnom Penh speech, American policy, saying it couldn't go on like that. That was two years before '68. Atlanticism, I'm getting to it now and this time I'll conclude, tried to bring down de Gaulle from the right. The communists fought against him tooth and nail always, but de Gaulle, from the right.
1:52:25 They tried Lecanuet. Young people don't really know him, he was nicknamed "white teeth" because he had an American-style smile in his election campaigns, with his wife, his children, he was already running glamour-style campaigns. It didn't work, the French were attached to what is disgracefully called the welfare state. But providence is religious, it falls from the sky. Whereas social security and our pensions, whatever's left of them, are the result of struggles, there were deaths involved.
1:52:57 But no, we call it providence. That is, we found it at birth, in the order of being, in the creation of the world. The chief notion, you see, everyday language — you have to keep your distance while using it. All that is Atlanticism. And they understood the stroke of genius of Atlanticism: they understood that in France, it wasn't through the right, because it had been too marked by collaboration in French society. It's through the left that they had to get there, by making people believe they were to the left of them.
The State at the orders of civil society 1:53:32 So I'll resume my point. I'm commenting on Clouscard's expression that preceded "libertarian liberalism," "libertarian social democracy." That has been the Trojan horse of the world we now live in. Which means the Yellow Vests lament that there's no more social security, no more local presence, no more primary school, no more post office. That's what I'm talking about. And that close to 150 emergency centers in hospitals across France are on strike, so much has the public sector been attacked by the capitalist State apparatus.
1:54:13 That is, the private apparatus for private profit. Because, I listen to BFM Business, I told you. Let me give you an excerpt. For the rest, listen yourselves, it won't be wasted time. You often hear: we mustn't confuse the public domain with public service. Of course we need public service. Yes, we must accept educating children and taking care of people's health. But well, that can be done by the private sector.
1:54:44 Public service must be delegated, says BFM Business, to private agencies. That's what's happening now. Look at the airports currently, it's topical. Look at the hydroelectric plants — I'm being concrete. Now what does Clouscard say? One mustn't get the wrong target, letting oneself be duped by the strategy of libertarian social liberalism. The State is at the orders of civil society. And earlier I was going to say the State, our common enemy, we are all at the orders of the State.
1:55:15 No, it's the opposite. The State — capitalism managed to invert it. The State is at the orders of civil society insofar as civil society is subjected to capitalism. Capitalism has always hated the State. Capitalism is fundamentally libertarian. Céline is a right-wing anarchist, more Nazi than that, you can't get — I know I shouldn't speak lightly of the greatest author of all time in France. Well, positively, it's hard to contest.
1:55:46 The State has essentially become the management instrument of a nation that has become a generalized market. It's on this State — I'm telling you it's cowards, lasers, this State, not the State in general, these are fantasmatic representations — that the collective worker can now work, by taking advantage of its opportunistic disintegration, playing on its joints and historical expressions. Making the State a monolithic abstraction, which is what the libertarians do, in the manner of Althusser — Althusser was a Maoist.
Leftism, Althusser, and the dictatorship of the proletariat 1:56:19 I recall that the leftism I'm criticizing here alongside Clouscard, the leftism that had as its main adversary the Communist Party in '68, and Gaullism, the two adversaries of Atlanticism — strange coincidence, isn't it? Well, both have disappeared, but now we understand why American rule over the world is unipolar. The Berlin Wall fell, and de Gaulle is no longer there. There you go. On the right, there were only two things opposing Atlanticism — sorry, in the French political field, there was on the right Gaullism, the Gaullist resistance, and the communist resistance.
1:56:52 Both having been liquidated, I'm not too surprised by the world we live in. There. I repeat that having voted against de Gaulle throughout the time he was in power, I can allow myself to say this without having to take lessons from those who did not know that era. The State, on the other hand — let this serve as a lesson to those who don't have the excuse of not having known it, who knew it well and who took advantage of it.
1:57:23 It's on this State that the collective worker can now work. So, making the State a political abstraction in the manner of Althusser — to resume my little interruption — leftism isn't, here too, one mustn't make it into a fantasy, I have nothing against the left, except that it barely exists anymore. But anyway, the leftists are the union, in the set-theoretic sense, of three, essentially three forces that I lay out here simply in a bluntly chronological order: anarchism, the oldest historically, Trotskyism from the 1930s onward, and Maoism from the split between the two Meccas of communism, as the bourgeois press used to say, Moscow and Beijing.
1:58:12 And so, I started from the third branch of Maoism, like Badiou. I don't want any confusion, I don't want to conflate Badiou, who is a real philosopher, I mean an intellectual one must discuss with, I don't want to conflate him with another Maoist like Kessler, Kessler, you know, he's the number 2 at the MEDEF, but who was a Maoist in 1968.
1:58:43 Interesting, isn't it? Like Jospin, who was a Trotskyist and ended up saying my program is not socialist. At the time he said communism wasn't enough, we needed to go further, but much later, when he was Mitterrand's prime minister, he said my program is not socialist. No, when I put leftism on trial, well, it's my generation, I know what I'm talking about. So making the state into a monolithic abstraction in the manner of libertarians, in the manner of Althusser, is to rule out any strategy other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.
1:59:17 You take the state or nothing. What has Clouscard just done? A superb dialectical twist. He's saying that Althusser, apparently the opposite of a libertarian, since Althusser protested against the French Communist Party's abandonment of the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is therefore a Stalinist. I recall this here because history is no longer taught. I heard a history colleague say that the history of the Soviet Union now boils down to the Gulag, that the history of Europe boils down to our European institutions, the Parliament, the Council of Europe.
1:59:52 And soon, it will be... it will be nothing but natural history, the disappearance of species. Anyway. I'm forced to make these reminders, but don't take my word for it, I'm speaking about history here, it's not my specialty, so it should be checked. During the events of '68, while leftists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists were labeling members of the French Communist Party, or militants of the French Communist Party, as so many Stalins, as "Krapstal" — let's be clear, Stalinist scum, they said "Krapstal."
2:00:28 I was paying tribute to Richard Lagache earlier, whom I've known for, alas, a few years now, but with whom we sometimes disagree, all the better, within the communist current. He was, very courageously, at that time a militant of the UEC, the Union of Communist Students, and he told me that, wanting to get to the university restaurant — he doesn't come from a very wealthy family — access to the restaurant was blocked by Maoist militants of the time, who had iron bars and told him, "You will not eat at the people's restaurant!"
2:01:15 You see, it was serious, you Stalinist scum. Well, let's leave the anecdote aside. What's much more serious is that these leftists who called communist militants Stalinist scum applauded the great Chinese revolution led by the Great Helmsman at the time. You know, those Red Guards, 13-14 years old, who with a Kalashnikov kept members of the Communist Party who had made the Long March at bay.
2:01:48 I'm not going to go through the whole Chinese dossier, but it's complicated. I admire the Mao of the Long March. I deplore the Mao of the Cultural Revolution, but that's another matter. One must not be sectarian, no one is all white or all black, not Hegel, not Marx, not on any side. I don't take everything from anyone. So they all admired the great Chinese proletarian revolution, where whenever it goes badly, communism is still the best there is.
2:02:23 Moreover, at the time, the authorities, including the Gaullist authorities, or even later the Giscardian, Mitterrandian authorities, always held up an example to the French communists: why don't you do like the Italian and Spanish communists? You see, they're for Eurocommunism. That's good. It's always good, other people's communism. There's no communist party left in Italy, you'll have noticed. And in Spain it was liquidated too. Interesting, for those who wanted to do as they did.
2:02:55 I haven't finished my point. All these leftists who called communist militants Stalinist scum, who admired the great Chinese proletarian revolution, and now, here I get to it, which was daily illustrated by marches carrying huge portraits, in effigy, of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
2:03:26 Go figure. You're called Stalinist scum, and you're given as an example a regime far more Stalinist than the Soviet regime. I'd even say that one of the great bones of contention — though I don't want to dwell on this dossier because it's complex — between Moscow and Beijing, I'm not settling that now, is that Mao never forgave Khrushchev for de-Stalinization.
2:04:00 That's why, long after Soviet de-Stalinization, the Chinese continued to carry Stalin's portrait. Maybe they were wrong, I'm not settling that question of substance now, but I'm showing you the inconsistency — that much is settled — of those who called themselves anti-Stalinist here, and pro-Chinese over there. So let me continue this debate on the state, you see where it's taking us.
The political as a struggle for management, against economism 2:04:32 Watch closely. My definition — Clouscard takes up the word — "the political" seems to me to be precisely the expression of this situation. It is dialectical and historical. Contrary to what Claude Morilhat says when he interprets my phrase "the political is now nothing but the struggle over management," he must have thought Clouscard meant "just have good management and that's it, and that will be democratic." Which reminds me of Tony Blair — there's another libertarian social-democrat, Tony Blair, you know, everyone's forgotten this.
2:05:11 He was invited to the French Parliament to come make a statement, the prime minister, the British prime minister, who comes there before our whole parliament, before all our deputies, before your elected representatives, and makes a statement. That's fine, I suppose. It works both ways, that's fine. And then I jumped when he said, "There is no left-wing management or right-wing management, there is good or bad management, that's all." Thunderous applause! Well, my goodness!
2:05:41 But I tell you that Auschwitz was impeccably managed. That was good management, I trust the Germans on that. There will be a ledger entry for every gold tooth pulled out, don't worry. There's no left-wing management or right-wing management. There's good or bad management, that's all. It's economic pragmatism that sends both the left and the right of politics packing. Clouscard, that's serious stuff. Morilhat must have made this misreading.
2:06:11 "The political is now nothing but the struggle over management." Let me be precise — Clouscard takes up the phrase — insofar as management turns out to be, in today's capitalism, the very politics of the economic, all of this goes in the direction of Marxism. Two points. It is indeed the economic which, in the last instance, determines the political. This is not Althusser's "last instance," that is, the one you're sent off to and never actually get to talk about economics. Althusser uses this notion... he acknowledges economic determination in the last instance, it's one of the few threads by which he connects to Marx, because what's left afterward is either Foucault, Deleuze, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan — I was treated in the camps and whatever might have fallen into the wrong hands a bit, that's not the question.
2:06:58 We're never going to reproach someone for suffering. That's certainly not my case. It's even to his credit. But when he speaks of the last instance, it's in order to say: while waiting to talk about it, one must always speak of a relatively autonomous domain. In aesthetics, one must speak of aesthetics. In economics, one must speak of economics. In morality, one must speak of morality.
2:07:28 The economic is supposed to come afterward. In fact it never comes. So it's a bit rich to claim Marx while never actually bringing in economics. All the same. Except when there's a debate, when he writes the preface to Capital, he does speak of relative surplus value. Sure. But it's really marginal in his work. So while the dominant discourse of ideology has become economism — I refer you to BFM Business, and not only there, because you hear economics on every TV set.
2:08:04 The Marxist, however, by explaining this play of categories, gains access to politics. This is dense. It's only an article of a few pages, a counter-article of a few pages, this reply. So one must be careful, one mustn't slide over the words. "The dominant discourse of ideology has become economism." So that's not at all my position, contrary to what Morilhat makes it out to be. Yes, I place economics, like Marx, as determining in the last instance, but I'm not doing economism. Why? Because in denouncing what economic determination lies behind things that apparently have no connection — for example, when I denounce, behind the discourse of degrowth among environmentalists, the fact that it plays right into the hands of the MEDEF, which tends more to lay off, as far as I can tell from the figures, than to hire, for three generations now.
2:08:57 Mass unemployment began in the sixties, to go back a bit. Interesting to see what appeared at that moment as ideological discourse. Now what does degrowth mean? You're consuming too much, you're producing too much. Productivism is the environmentalist's intimate enemy. The state is the libertarian's intimate enemy. Productivism is the environmentalist's intimate enemy. As if that means something — it must mean nothing. There are things we produce too much of for my taste, and others we don't produce enough of.
2:09:28 Do you think we produce too many anti-AIDS drugs? I'm speaking of Africa, for example, for Africa. There's a number of people who give up on treatment, even here, in the world's fifth economic power, because medicines or care are too expensive. In short, attacking growth plays into the hands of a MEDEF that thinks we consume too much — oh I don't know, you exaggerate, wage increases, pensions, what else — and then we must work longer and work ever more to earn less and less.
2:10:06 It's not put that way, because it wouldn't fly. And there you go. It's flawless: growth is what we need. There are convergences, but there, I do restore the economic — yes — but I'm not doing economism. On the contrary, that's where I'm at my most political, that's what Clouscard says. Let me put the sentence more clearly. "But while the dominant discourse of ideology has become economism, the Marxist, by explaining this play of categories, gains access to the political."
2:10:37 To be political is to recall the face of economics behind the mask of saving frogs and behind crossing the Atlantic in a carbon-fiber sailboat. I don't know if you know this, but the crew of the boat accompanying poor Greta — against whom I have nothing, I'm even scandalized by the instrumentalization she's subjected to by people who know exactly what they're doing and who don't have any autistic syndrome at all —
2:11:08 The crew, check this, don't take my word for it, I mean, came back by plane. There were six return plane tickets, you see. We're really being taken for fools. All right, let me pick back up and continue. "But while the dominant discourse of ideology has become economism, the Marxist, by explaining this play of categories, gains access to the political."
The state forest, the republican State, and Marxism taken as settled 2:11:39 To explain that the problematic of management has become the effectivity of the political is a political knowledge necessary for anyone who wants to propose a strategy — listen carefully — no longer one of revolt, but revolutionary. There follows a discussion of being for or against the state, you see that one can be for or against, now we can see a bit more clearly. I'm not against social security, I'm for the collectivity having a say in matters of health, and not only in social protection but in social prevention — not only in the sense of preventive medicine, prevention in every sense — contributing toward pensions is prevention too.
2:12:28 For all that, there's admirable work by Friot on this, which is, in my opinion, the best of Friot, the part that allows us to understand to what extent the revolution partly took place when the CNR [National Council of the Resistance] was set up. Even though it's terrible to know that it took 50 million dead for the bourgeoisie to concede what is still abjectly called the welfare state. For example, you're in the city of heaven, so to speak.
2:13:07 So, this problem of the state, let me sum it up now to conclude. I say to conclude because I've told you the workshops will soon resume in October, in the first half of October to be more precise, still at the Centre Goscinny, in the 13th arrondissement, and I intend to develop, as I briefly mentioned without going into detail, what I call the logic of the subject — what should be called the logic of the subject — where we'll find quite a few of the problems that were only barely sketched out here.
2:13:43 Among these, then, is that of the state, and to finish, at least for today, with that of the state, I'd like to give a very simple image. It's not exactly an image, it's a real situation, but let's say a thought experiment, as they say. We're at the gates of autumn. We'll soon be able to go mushroom picking. Now suppose that on my foraging I run into a wall, a property wall in the forest where it's written, engraved on the trees, "Private property, mushroom picking forbidden."
2:14:17 Fine. What does "private" mean here? As opposed to the state. It's a private forest. We have the right to do this, that's not the question. It means that it's me who is deprived [privé] of picking mushrooms. It's me, it's you, it's the collectivity that is deprived. It's the affair of whoever owns it, who's there. So here, what's called "private" is a limit on my freedom to venture into the forest in search of ceps or chanterelles or blusher mushrooms.
2:14:49 But all of a sudden, I notice — suddenly, around a bend in this same forest — a state forest, of Pontarmé, of Chantilly, of Fontainebleau, and many others. And there it says, good grief, here I can go as far as I want. That means it belongs to us. It has to be "domanial" [state-owned]. The domain, that's you, that's me. If "state" means that, the state is not the repressive state. So I mentioned at the start, saying we're all against the state. No. Against the state that spies on me, that puts up surveillance cameras, that fines me because I drove a diesel car in Paris —
2:15:31 Even so, I'm not going — well, I'm helping to make sure Hidalgo doesn't get reelected, that's not good. That is the repressive state, but we've seen that this is not the state — it's the state apparatus in the service of... this absence of the state which is private, I won't repeat myself, we're starting to see clearly. So the state forest, in spite of everything, grows. That state, that state, is what... you don't want the word "state"? Fine, doesn't bother me, I'm not a structuralist, you know that. If you don't want the word "state," use a Rousseauian term: the general will.
2:16:03 The Republic. Now, you see, this is exactly what Clouscard says here. My thesis is that the state has three dimensions. Three attributes, as Spinoza would say, three roles, three functions. Is the French state not also, after all, republican? Question mark. Historically, he speaks. Wouldn't gaucho-fascism, which wanted to destroy the state, have thereby liquidated the Republic?
2:16:35 But only Clouscard could come up with that, "gaucho-fascism." I was explaining to you earlier that Cohn-Bendit, the Mitterrands, all that comes out of Vichy. Cohn-Bendit is complicit with a Europe — yesterday morning I suddenly read that there's Europe-related teaching material online that denounces everywhere the idea that Europe means peace, and that it's against wars, etc.
2:17:09 And it lists the wars, the slaughter of 14-18, it laments very well. And it puts the French Revolution among these catastrophes. But damn, they couldn't have done worse. The French Revolution ranked among the great slaughters. Mitterrand too had held a bicentennial of the Revolution, where the victims were — there were some — the Vendéens, the Bretons, and the executioner was Robespierre, who had opposed the massacre.
2:17:40 There are well-documented dossiers on this, I won't dwell on it. But it's cutting straight to the point when he says that gaucho-fascism is an ellipsis, not a hyperbole. It's a shorthand, if you prefer. It's not an exaggeration. What I showed you earlier, with the number 2 of the MEDEF, a former Maoist, is that when you claim to be to the left of the Communist Party, you're actually to the right of De Gaulle. Good grief, these are secrets no one will ever tell you.
2:18:11 That is to say, you're the liberal right, anti-state, for civil society, for business, against social security, against pay-as-you-go pensions and contributions — yes, that's it. Interesting. So, moving quickly: can we define the French state as if the French Revolution had never happened? Can we spit on a state born of the French Revolution? That's what he says here.
2:18:42 We're not talking about the real state of Jules Ferry, who carried out colonialism, which was constantly the site of struggles within it between the executive and the opposition. That's what the state is. Also, the mythical state of the general will, as Claude Morilhat puts it, seems to me on the contrary to be a very real, institutional and constitutional component that theory would be gravely wrong to neglect, since the consequence would be a fatal strategic error. And I'll end on the fact that Clouscard doesn't hesitate to say that Marx himself never theorized the state.
2:19:21 You won't find anywhere in Clouscard a sentence distancing himself from Marx's position on the state. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say "I disagree with the Marxist theory of the state." There is no Marxist theorization of the state. And it's true that Marx takes up the libertarian ideas of his youth, and afterward he has other fish to fry and turns to the study of the enterprise. He looks at what capital is. So I'll end with the last quotation I'll take from Clouscard, who, as I've just shown, sends back to back the dogmatic Stalinist who wants to reinstate, as if nothing had happened, the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose main victims were in practice the communists themselves.
2:20:10 Something we never point out enough. I often tell right-wingers who'd want to erect a statue to Stalin: nobody gunned down more communists than he did. And he sends back to back the dogmatists — that's his polite word for the Parisian Stalinists — and the leftists, or the social democrats, or the neopositivism — that's philosophical, as we'll see elsewhere. I never claimed to rewrite Capital myself.
2:20:40 You see how it was Althusser's Marx, rewritten in terms of philosophy. Quite the contrary, my phenomenology of praxis never calls Marx's Capital into question. That's for those who would like to pull Clouscard in the opposite direction, toward the social-democratic side, who would like to split apart Clouscard and Marx, wouldn't they? That's very fashionable too. And curiously it's fashionable both on the far right and the far left of the political spectrum.
2:21:10 It's curious. I take Marxism as a given. I don't indulge in any theoretical revisionism. I hope I've been a bit clearer and have helped clarify a few of Clouscard's aporias. But you see the complexity. Every time he's on point, it's on a dialectical matter where one must hold together, at the same time, contradictory and opposed things.
2:21:42 I can't go much further in the short time I'm given within the space of a video. I invite you either to come and join us live to attend our workshops where I will develop each of these points—as you might well expect—through the approach of the logic of the subject, or live at the René Goscinny center in the 13th arrondissement, or, as more and more of you are doing, often from the five continents, since I've just learned that the book which some of my listeners were kind enough, patient enough, and perceptive enough to write, which sums up my oral talks, entitled Pagani sans détour, has been ordered by bookshops in the Far East, in Asia—there you go, that's just to tell you that those who follow us remotely have geographical reasons for not being able to be there, so I give a rendez-vous to all of you, I give you a rendez-vous starting from the first, October 15th, at our workshops
2:22:58 and thank you all.
