English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Heat wave, move, and news from the association 0:00 Good evening dear friends, dear comrades, dear faithful ones. It's fine in speech, we don't have to be inclusive. "Faithful," you can hear it however you like, masculine or feminine, to the ear it's the same. I survived the heatwave. I know, I know, most of those who are terrorized by the prevailing discourse will say, but it's not over, it's going to come back even worse.
0:36 Yes, I know, we know all that. We're all going to die in atrocious suffering. Seriously, I was very worn out because I had the ludicrous idea, well, I was somewhat forced to, for domestic reasons. At the retirement home where I live, they closed off the bathroom that was adjoining my room.
1:07 It was what worked best, since I only had two meters to walk barefoot to find myself under the shower. A shower that worked very well, the thing that worked best in that establishment. No, no, but don't think I'm wandering off into the trivial and the anecdotal. It's to get to the heart of the matter. There's so much less credit, isn't there? I'm in a retirement home that is run, broadly speaking, by the social services of the city of Paris, even though it's in the suburbs, in Cachan.
1:37 And in fact, it turned out that in this bathroom, which I remind you was the best thing in the establishment, there was a small leak. And since there's no more budget — you see, this is something serious — there's no longer enough budget even to fix that leak, so they closed off the bathroom. So I was forced to move, when was it? A week before the worst of the heatwave. So I've just been through a terrible period, for my 81 years, mind you, on top of it, with a shopping cart, a little supermarket cart in each arm, full of books.
2:17 I've spent my life moving books around. Books in boxes, that's like lead. Everyone who's ever moved books knows what I mean. But I had forgotten that I no longer had the strength to do all that. Anyway, all this to say that it's been quite a while since we last saw each other. I haven't, how do you say, been slacking off, no? During that period, I had the good fortune to be invited for a week to stay with angels — I mean with friends and comrades — who are now part of this new organization, the OCF, but who are very lucid and are under no illusions, who know there's a lot to be done, including within the OCF, in terms of theoretical training.
3:11 Anyway, let's move on. In any case, I spent a wonderful week, and I pay tribute to the gang of four, as I call them, the four friends, most of whom have a background in the hard sciences, but it was right out in the countryside, 50 km east of Aix-en-Provence. An incredible coincidence meant that I was able to see again, in Aix, my grandsons — two grandsons — and my children, my son and his wife, who happened to be in Aix to see a doctor about some allergy issues.
3:49 They had come specially from Corsica, there you go. So, I'm explaining why so much time has gone by since the last video, for which I thank you again for the comments, for the questions I'll come back to. But before that, I'd like to give some practical, technical reminders that are very important. You know I had taken the initiative, in the second-to-last video, to express something of a state of mind, saying that the organization of the association was starting to fall apart, and that the young people to whom I owe so much, and who, on a volunteer basis, handled things like the treasury, the secretariat, who were single at the time, got married, then had children, went to live in the provinces, and so I found myself somewhat alone,
4:59 at a certain point, faced with everything that a simple fact implies — that you have an upcoming video each time, a new video each time — that required a minimum of organization, and I'll get straight to specific aspects, the financial aspect first. Some of you rightly grew concerned, wanting to top up the association's fund, either by sending in your membership dues or by making donations, and I thank them for that, as you can imagine, except they found that the association was no longer responding — so, I tell you, it was a bit of a vicious circle, but anyway, we got out of it, and so, to be clear, now you should no longer send your money to the association, you need to send us an email at Philosophie avec Dominique Pagani, to the mail box, which we'll leave in the video,
6:12 linked, of course, right, Adrien? There, I'm glad — I should have started with that — thanking Adrien, I always say, whether it snows, hails, or rains, he comes by bike, but this time, this was worse, he braved the heat, for sure — so the link will be posted, you simply send us a message, with your intention, saying, I'd like to send such and such an amount, and we, in return, will send you the association's bank details, and all you have to do is make a transfer — that's it for the financial situation, for now. Secondly, this has nothing to do with that, regarding the distribution of our videos, I remind you that thanks precisely to our comrades from the OCF, and in particular those who founded the Discord site — you know that better than I do — the reposting of all
7:24 my videos, past, present and future, but especially the past ones, which you can now find, with text and images, on Deezer, and — I'm forgetting — Deezer is always linked to the other one, Spotify, thank you, thank you Adrien — so don't hesitate to go have a look at the extraordinary work done, in particular within the gang of four, by Yann, Julien, whom I thank especially, and — I come back to the fact that, you see, yes, of course, the studios in the retirement home all look alike, like one egg to another, but still, this is new to me, this room, I tried to recreate the setting you're familiar with,
A live reading: Proust and the little band at Balbec 8:35 and I am going, without further ado, to offer a live reading, which will allow me to kill several birds with one stone, so to speak, which will allow me, on the one hand, to continue, as I announced last time, to continue exploring all the problems arising from the original couple in the history of philosophy, that is, the Plato-Aristotle couple, mind you — but not through generalities, as last time, which was an introduction, so it had to be rather general — but this time, to get into the heart of the matter, I'm going to base myself, in exactly the opposite way, on a very particular case, taken from literature — here, I prefer — one of you asked me a very interesting question last time,
9:47 about the fact that he had seen Bernard Friot, in one of his talks, always very inspiring, allude to the book that had mattered to him in his life, or works of art, or films — well, I mean, since I don't have huge means of reproduction, I don't have a video projector, for a big screen, etc., literature is a somewhat privileged place that allows me to deal, in concreto, so to speak, with the problems I'd like to address while we're together.
10:36 There you go. And I'm going to start from a text — one moment, there — a text by Proust, taken, of course, from In Search of Lost Time, though it's a title that runs across many years and accumulates so much volume — here, more precisely, it's from Within a Budding Grove, right?
11:09 It's actually the part of the Search that won him the Prix Goncourt, whereas Gallimard had just rejected the work. I say this for those among you who write — how can one not encourage them — if they complain that their manuscript is rejected by publishers, they can tell themselves, "it happened to people like Proust." So that's not proof that what they wrote is bad.
11:39 Yes, I'm talking about a passage that isn't far from another one I quote fairly often, you know, the one where the narrator — who never gives his age — but here, since he's with his grandmother on holiday on the Normandy coast at Balbec, this text where he sees a group of young girls on the pier. And I often quote this passage to ridicule, mind you, those who criticize mechanistic Marxism, who inject economics from the outside into things that have nothing to do with economics, like love, beauty, art — and Proust, who is not particularly a political writer, mind you, in the passage I quote often — not the one we'll be working on tonight, don't worry — but still, Proust says very clearly that this group of young girls, what was strange, was that it was homogeneous
12:49 and yet, there was — I don't know, I'm making this up — a tall redhead, a small blonde, a curly-haired brunette, etc., but there was something common circulating from one to the other, and that's where he says perhaps even that the class to which they belonged, and which I would not have known how to define, was at a certain moment in its evolution, thanks to progress in comfort and in sporting habits — that was new, sport in the English style, the word comes from English by the way. So there you go, if you were at least as Marxist as Proust, that would be enough for me, wouldn't it?
13:25 He even ends up saying that these habits, these privileged classes who take up sport in their leisure hours, that this kind of social situation produces in abundance, he says, beautiful hips, beautiful figures, beautiful faces, there you go. But that's not it. A bit later, he singles one out from among the others. We guess this will be the future Albertine, who will play a major role in his life. We're not here to summarize the whole plot of the Search.
The black ray of the gaze and Descartes' automata 13:58 And so, without further delay, I'll read you a passage that will let me answer several of the last questions you asked during the Plato and Aristotle session. "But for an instant, as I passed beside the brown-haired girl with the fat cheeks" — that's the future Albertine — "who was pushing a bicycle, all of that was new."
14:33 The bike, the bicycle, was new. And at the time, it really was reserved for a small privileged few. Sure, it would quickly become very popular, but that wasn't the case yet. We're still in the establishment, so to speak, right? "For an instant, as I passed beside the brown-haired girl with the fat cheeks who was pushing a bicycle, I met her sidelong, laughing glance, directed at me from within that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little tribe" — he's talking about the group of young girls — "inaccessible, unknown, where the idea of what I was could certainly neither reach nor find a place."
15:10 "Wholly occupied with what her companions were saying, this girl, wearing a polo cap that came down very low over her forehead — had she seen me at the moment when the dark ray emanating from her eyes had met mine?" To paraphrase the introduction to one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema, I'm thinking of La Ronde by Max Ophüls, I feel like telling you, you can sense that love is about to come up. "Wholly occupied with what her companions were saying, this girl, wearing a polo cap that came down very low over her forehead — had she seen me at the moment when the dark ray emanating from her eyes had met mine?"
15:46 "If she had seen me, what could I have represented to her? From within what universe did she distinguish me? It would have been as difficult for me to say as when certain peculiarities appear to us, thanks to the telescope, on a neighboring star, it is hard to conclude from them that humans live there, that they see us, and what ideas that sight may have awakened in them." So, he has just met her gaze and this is where the analysis of what he perceives begins.
16:22 Listen carefully, one might think this is anecdotal, novelistic, whereas we are at the very heart of what seem to be the most abstract metaphysical problems. "If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely a shining disc of mica" — wait, wait, if we thought — imagine the hypothesis — let's imagine that this isn't a real girl but an artificial girl produced by a super artificial intelligence, you see how relevant all this still is.
16:56 You see, you know even better than I do about the bionic man, all those stories. And already in Descartes' time, in the 17th century, there was neither electricity nor, even less, electronics or computing, but already the emergence, the scientific revolution as it was called, of mechanical physics, of Galilean-Cartesian mechanism, had made it possible to build what we call, and still call, automata.
17:27 Nowadays we'd say robots, but they were automata, purely mechanical, made of matter and motion. And how can one not recall that incredible passage in Descartes' first Metaphysical Meditation where he says one must be careful with the words one uses because, he says, I am almost stopped short by the words of ordinary language. "For I say, for example" — this is the example he gives, I quote — "I say that from this window I see men, yet what do I see but hats and coats."
18:01 This is the age of the musketeers, you know, so seen from afar, you see figures from behind, all you see is a cape, hats, feathers, etc. Now, I say that I see men, that's what I say in my thought, in the words I use inwardly. But what do my eyes actually see? Do they see men? No. I see only hats and coats. Wait, this is only the beginning. "Which might cover automata moved by springs."
18:31 Can you imagine? Maybe I'm alone in the universe, the only living being, and what's around me are things that give the appearance of being living beings. But you see how relevant this is. Now, at a computing exhibition, the most advanced technology, Chinese or otherwise, you see robots doing absolutely astounding things. So, all this: "If we thought that the eyes of such a girl" weren't real eyes, so to speak, the kind you'd see at the medical faculty, "but a shining disc of mica" — you see, mica, that transparent stuff — and here's the main clause — "we would not be eager to know and to unite her life with our own."
What shines in the eyes: a subject, a desire, happiness 19:20 We would have no desire left at all if we imagined it was something inert like that. "But we feel" — look how careful he is, he doesn't say "we know" but "we feel" — "that what gleams there" — from the verb "to gleam" — "what gleams there, was" — so he's not even talking about her eyes anymore, he's not even talking about the gaze, everyone knows the gaze is different from the eyes, he's talking specifically about a moment of that gaze, a moment when suddenly something starts to shine, to awaken.
19:50 "But we feel that what gleams there in that reflecting disc" — that's how he talks about her pupil — "is not due merely to its material composition." You said we were getting to the very foundation of metaphysics, from a text that seems as light as young girls at a seaside resort, one of the first seaside resorts.
20:20 Ah, we can see you coming, that's classic Pagani, an immaterialist temptation, an idealist leaning, aren't we far from Marx here, you'd say, preferring — when you quoted that other passage — "but we feel that what gleams in that reflecting disc is not due merely to its material composition" — that, we'll finally find out, is what gives the sparkle to that gaze, what gleams — "that they are" — and here it starts —
20:58 "the dark shadows of the ideas that this being forms regarding the people and places it knows. Lawns of racecourses, sand of paths" — but hold on, isn't that material? It takes racecourses to make that gaze gleam, and pastry shops. I said pastry shops because pastries will come up soon. "Lawns of racecourses, sand of paths, or, pedaling" — don't forget she's a young cyclist — "through fields and woods, this little peri would have carried me off, more seductive to me than the one in the Persian paradise."
21:36 "The shadows too of the house she will return to, of the plans she is making, or that have been made for her, and above all, that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her repulsions, her obscure and unceasing will." In short, he perceives a subject. And not an object, as one might have thought from a disc of mica, right? So it's the very opposite of an immaterialist stance that I'm dealing with here.
22:10 It takes matter, it takes history, it takes a civilization, a social class at a certain point in its evolution, to produce this impression of immateriality. Right, let me start again from the beginning and continue. "If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely a shining disc of mica, we would not be eager to know and to unite her life with our own." Let's not forget this is a young adolescent speaking, right in the middle of puberty.
22:40 "But we feel that what gleams in that reflecting disc is not due merely to its material composition, that they are, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that this being forms regarding the people and places it knows" — lawns of racecourses, sand of paths, that's all infrastructure, if you want to speak in Marxian terms — "or, pedaling through fields and woods, this little peri would have carried me off" — peris are perhaps feminine divinities, fairies, so to speak, roughly the equivalent in the Muslim paradise — "more seductive to me than the one in the Persian paradise."
23:29 "The shadows too of the house she will return to, of the plans she is making, or that have been made for her." Great, my parents are taking me to Venice next week — imagine the eyes of a girl saying that. "And above all, that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her repulsions, her obscure and unceasing will." I knew — let me continue — "I knew that I would not possess this young cyclist unless I also possessed what was in her eyes."
24:02 You know, Lacan says somewhere that there is no sexual relation. In the sense — the words are precise — in the sense that it would be a relation between sexed genital organs, right? No, no, there is a relation, and all the more erotic in that it is a relation between souls. But souls cannot be grasped, can they, the way one grasps a tree branch?
24:33 Or the way one grasps a bottle to drink its contents, right? So it goes through the body, but what is aimed at is less the body than what lies behind it, which is, as he says, that "obscure and unceasing will." "I knew that I would not possess this young cyclist unless I also possessed what was in her eyes. And consequently it was her whole life that inspired me with desire."
25:07 We're far, aren't we, from ethereal immaterialism. Her whole life, meaning — "a painful desire because I felt it was unattainable, but intoxicating because what had, until then, been my whole life, having abruptly ceased to be my entire life" — now that he's caught up in the sight of this girl, he realizes how much he's lacking, doesn't he?
25:38 "And consequently" — sorry — "intoxicating because what had, until then, been my whole life, having abruptly ceased to be my entire life," being now only a small part of the space stretched out before me — where the object of his desire lies, mind you — "stretched out before me, which I burned to cover and which was made of the life" — sorry — "of those young girls" — yes, now he's within a budding grove, that's the title, he even moves from the individual before him to the group, let's not forget there was something circulating from one to the other, right, so let me pick up that sentence again and continue — "a painful desire because I felt it was unattainable, but intoxicating because what had, until then, been my whole life, having abruptly ceased to be my entire life, being now only a small part of the space stretched out before me which I burned to cover and which was made of the life of those young girls, offered me that extension, that possible multiplication of oneself which is happiness."
26:49 How could one not think here of Spinoza, who says that happiness presupposes an increase of power, of possibility — it's the same word in Latin, potens, power, possibility, right? "Offered me that extension, that possible multiplication of oneself which is happiness, and no doubt the fact that there was between us no habit, no shared idea, was bound to make it harder for me to become close to her and to please her."
First appearance of Gilberte behind the hedge 27:21 There you go, I wanted to take this detour through this extraordinary passage, with its very sharp analysis of what is material and what is not, and so, there — I'll move on to — sorry — I'll move on to another excerpt, still from In Search of Lost Time.
28:01 of Young Girls in Flower, which this time is meant to express his first encounter with another female character of the novel, Gilberte. Never mind the anecdote, but I mention it anyway so you don't think I'm completely indifferent to it, though it's not really the most important thing. You'll notice that the first names of the girls who matter in In Search of Lost Time, namely Gilberte, Albertine, are boys' names.
28:38 There you go, we already knew about Proust's proclivities, it's no great surprise, never mind. The problems of love are the same, aren't they? Between a boy and a girl, or between two girls, or between two boys. There's always one who loves more than the other, or one who loves less, or more. So here it's going to be the first encounter with Gilberte, he's still a kid, he's with his parents, they're walking along the property of the family of little Gilberte, of Swann.
29:09 As for him, all he's heard said is that Mr. Swann, the great friend of his parents, whose life story he's just told an essential part of in the second part of the novel called Swann's Way, or rather Swann in Love, the only part of the novel that's told in the third person. It's not "I" the narrator speaking, but he speaks of his hero who is Swann, so the father of little Gilberte whom we're about to discover. And so we're among people of the establishment, it's not done to climb on the wall to look inside people's homes, it's ill-mannered.
29:48 As for him, he's consumed with desire, so he lets his parents walk a little ahead, and that gives us the passage in question, so the first appearance of Gilberte. He looks over the hedge then, his parents being a little ahead, in case he might perceive something, even just Mademoiselle Swann, hoping she might be there in the park. And now I'll be quiet and let him speak. The hedge let one see, inside the park, a path bordered with jasmine, pansies and verbena, among which stocks opened their fresh purses, of a pink fragrant and faded like old Cordoba leather, while on the gravel a long hose painted green, unwinding its coils, raised, at the point where it was pierced, above the flowers whose scents it soaked, the vertical, prismatic fan of its multicolored droplets.
30:48 Suddenly I stopped, unable to move any further, as happens when a sight addresses itself not merely to our eyes but requires deeper perceptions and takes possession of our whole being. A little girl with reddish-blond hair, who looked as though she was coming back from a walk and was holding a gardening trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising a face sprinkled with pink freckles.
31:19 Her black eyes gleamed. Forgive me for laughing, you'll see why. And as I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, as I did not have, as they say, enough powers of observation to isolate the notion of their color. For a long time afterward, whenever I thought back on her, so later on, the memory of their brightness immediately presented itself to me as that of a vivid blue, since she was blond.
31:58 So naturally, she could only have deeply blue eyes, so that perhaps if her eyes hadn't been so black—which was what struck one so forcibly the first time one saw her—I might not have fallen so particularly in love, as I later did, with her blue eyes. I looked at her first with that gaze, in a situation somewhat like the one just now, of a boy in the full bloom of adolescence looking at a reddish-blond little girl.
Someone or something: love is not platonic 32:30 I looked at her first with that gaze which is not merely the mouthpiece of the eyes but at whose window all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified. The gaze that would like to touch, capture, carry off the body it's looking at. It's very consciously, isn't it, aggressive—I can't find any other word—already in this attitude. The gaze that would like to touch, capture, carry off the body it's looking at, and the soul along with it. We come back to it, there's no sexual relation, it's the soul one is ultimately seeking.
33:05 "Is there anyone here, or is there someone?" That's from Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, isn't it? Am I going to be dealing with a something or a someone? That's what's at stake. And what's the difference? So, so afraid was I that at any moment my grandfather and my father, catching sight of these young girls, might make me move on by telling me to run on ahead of them a little, that with a second glance, unconsciously imploring, I tried to force her to pay attention to me, to get to know me.
33:36 She threw her pupils forward and to the side to take stock of my grandfather and my father. And no doubt the impression she formed was that we were ridiculous—he's talking about the little girl, she has a class consciousness—and with an air of indifference and disdain she turned away and positioned herself sideways to spare her face from being in their field of vision.
34:07 And while continuing to walk and not having noticed—"he had passed me," he's talking about his parents—she let her glance run its full length in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me, but with a fixity and a hidden smile that I could only interpret, according to the notions of good breeding that had been given me, as proof of insulting contempt. And her hand at the same time sketched—try to imagine whatever you like, he's a bit vague—her hand at the same time sketched an indecent gesture which, when addressed in public to a person one didn't know, the little dictionary of civility I carried within me could give only one meaning: that of an insolent intention. "Come along, Gilberte, what are you doing?"
35:10 cried in a piercing, authoritative voice a lady in white whom I hadn't noticed, and at some distance from whom a gentleman dressed in ticking—the first sighting of the Baron de Charlus—whom I didn't know, fixed on me eyes that seemed to bulge out of his head, and suddenly ceasing to smile, the girl picked up her trowel and moved away without turning back toward me, with a docile, impenetrable, incredible and sly air. Thus this name of Gilberte passed close by me, given like a talisman that might perhaps allow me one day to find again—he's alluding to her name—her of whom he had just made a person—in Africa, when one speaks ill of someone, one says you mustn't spoil my name; the name is like a part of the body, it's sacred—thus this name of Gilberte passed close by me, given like a talisman that might perhaps allow me one day to find again her of whom he had just made a person
36:20 and who, a moment before, had been only an uncertain image—thus the name passed, uttered above the jasmine and the stocks, sharp and fresh like the drops from the green watering hose, permeating, gleaming—we find again, we get the impression that all this is dematerialized, but it's quite the opposite, look how much matter is needed here, vegetal, aristocratic, one senses clearly it's an estate, it's not some working-class person living there, how much is needed—thus the name passed, uttered above the jasmine and the stocks, sharp and fresh like the drops from the green watering hose, permeating, gleaming the zone of pure air it had crossed and which it isolated from the mystery of the life of the one it designated, for the happy beings who lived and traveled with her in his imagination—it must be nice to travel and live with a girl like that
37:30 spreading beneath the pink hawthorn, at the height of my shoulder, the quintessence of their familiarity, so painful for me, with her, with the unknown part of her life into which I would never enter—you see, this is the second time there's this exchange of glances that signifies a platonic love, I don't know if it involves the soul at all—not at all, I told you we'd extend Plato to Aristotle—first of all, understand that in Plato love is anything but platonic, I mean we mustn't take them for fools, especially the Greeks of that era, we're in the Hellenic period, neither archaic nor Hellenistic—archaic is a bit before, Hellenistic is a bit after the acme
38:42 that's what is conventionally called in classical studies the acme of the world of ancient Greece, of the ancient city, Athens in particular—it's precisely that moment, properly Hellenic and not yet Hellenistic, let alone decadent. You can forget all that, you'll come across it again anyway. Why do I bring up platonic love here? Because he does mean that what is aimed at is souls, in that sense it comes close to Plato—I won't have shocked some of you—but it's an impersonal game, imagine, imagine that boy X is making love with, never mind the partner, Y, and that while kissing they say to each other, "I love your mouth"—why do I take this example, because there's a purely bodily relation
39:52 the kiss, apparently, the contact of lips—but there's also a statement, "I love your mouth"—so you'll tell me, but the pleasure comes from the body, there—no, it doesn't come from there, but the statement is also made to call forth a response, so that there's a kind of "me too" or something, or a reciprocity, and in short each of the two subjects of the couple does everything to make sure that there really is a someone behind the body and not merely a something. That's the great lesson I want, that I want to insist on this evening. The difference isn't obvious. One could have an extremely pessimistic conception and say, in fact there's only something, and we have the illusion that there's someone—what does that mean, that I'm the only one alive? One has to assume the consequences of that thought. I'm now going to read you exactly the opposite, that is, a text
Les Veilles de Bonaventura: life as the plaything of nothingness 41:02 I can't find any other word—terrifying, where the very hypothesis is made that there are no someones, and I borrow it not from the free-thinkers, as they were called in those days, today's materialists, no, much more serious than that, I take it from the height of what is conventionally called German Romanticism, so an extract from what the one who best translated its authors called that fabulous verbal ocean that was German Romanticism—it's a text I've quoted once before, a long time ago, for something rather different, but whose author's name I cannot give you—no, well, of course, it's not that I don't want to, it's that even now people are trying to figure out who the author is, it has come down to us
42:12 in the form of a pseudonym—you know all about that, on the networks you see only pseudonyms—and this pseudonym is Bonaventura, one word, Bonaventura. This author—some have even thought of philosophers like Schelling, the roommate in the same chamber as Hegel and Hölderlin when they were students at the theological seminary in Tübingen—so, you see, when I tell you about a terrifying text, you're beginning to understand, with this neighborhood, that it's going to be serious—and he left as his only work a work entitled The Night-Watches, The Night-Watches of Bonaventura, because the plot is easy to sum up: it's a night watchman who writes his diary every night, so we should say his "noctal" rather than his "journal," you see, and
43:22 I'll spare you the richness of this text, it's so striking, but let me get back to the story—we were there, weren't we—and old age is a shipwreck, as De Gaulle used to say—so, extract, I'll give you the reference, The Night-Watches of Bonaventura, you'll find it published by José Corti, Corti, and I'll give you the eighth watch, there, it's like an eighth chapter, same thing: "Behind the mask and its amorous glances, the death's-head is never lacking" — life, that reddish-blond little girl
44:32 you bet, "behind"—the death's-head is never lacking, and life—listen carefully to this sentence—"and life is only the tinkling bauble"—that's literal, dressed with the bauble, that was the fool's cap, the king's jester, he had a little cap with bells on it, like that, doesn't he—"and life is only the tinkling bauble", cling cling cling ding dong, "that nothingness"—with a capital N, concept and bonds—"puts on for amusement's sake, to play with its bells, before tearing it savagely apart and finally casting it far away: all is nothing"—one must dare write it, listen carefully, I repeat, "all is nothing, and swallows itself, choking as it gulps itself down too quickly, greedily." So not only do you have nothingness here, but—I'm refining the analysis—not as a noun, but as what the word grammatically is, that is, the present participle of the verb "to negate," that is, an act
45:42 the act of suppressing, swallowing, choking from swallowing so much, isn't it—"all is nothing and swallows itself, choking as it gulps itself down too quickly, greedily"—it's the annihilation, if you will, of everything that is outside—that's why I'm the only one to hypothesize that it's Hegel, it's so much his theme, isn't it—"nor is even this self-devouring anything but a treacherous illusion, a duel of mirrors, as if there were something there; for if ever indeed the greed to devour itself wanted to pause for an instant, nothingness would immediately manifest itself so meaningfully that you would be seized with horror." This text was written in 1805—French Romanticism hadn't even begun, Napoleon has only just been crowned emperor in 1804, the industrial 19th century hasn't begun in France, practically, there have barely been a few stirrings of it
A text from 1805 and the two cracks of our modernity 46:52 in England, isn't it, Germany is still far behind—"for if ever indeed the greed to devour itself wanted to pause for an instant, nothingness would immediately manifest itself so meaningfully that you would be seized with horror. Fools hear and see, behind this interruption, eternity; but it is properly nothing but nothingness and absolute death, whereas life, on the contrary, is born and comes into being only through continuous death." You feel dizzy, and there's good reason—taking these things seriously one could easily end up in the madhouse—how many times have I recalled that German Romanticism led to a slaughter of authors who died mad or by suicide, or both—think of Nerval, who resembles them a great deal, who indeed did both, didn't he, madness and suicide—I insist on all this
48:06 because it was unthinkable to express this before the appearance of this theme, which is perhaps the most recurrent of those I develop, because we're together in this—it's the theme not of our modernity in the vague sense, our contemporary modernity, if I may say so, because modernity in a vague sense could just as well be the end of hunting and gathering, the beginning of settled life, why not, that's acceptable, and even the appearance of the first cities in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, all that is "modern"—historians agree to call "modern times" what begins after the Middle Ages, whose first moment is nicknamed, in the 16th century, the Renaissance, for instance, even though it's a bit earlier in Italy, all that is modern—but no, I'm not talking about our modernity, and to be precise now, I date it from two great fractures whose effects we're still
49:17 still undergoing—that's why I say our modernity: the English industrial revolution, the French political revolution, the two occurring within a handkerchief's-width of chronological space, the second half of the 18th century—there I'm being precise—this text is written at the end of that period, so I repeat and I conclude: "these things, and wanting to take them seriously, one could easily end up in the madhouse, but I take them myself as a harlequinade"—he becomes a clown again, if you will—"and it is as such that my prologue is conducted right up to the very gates of tragedy." So when I tell you that through eros—when I say eros, one immediately imagines a profusion of physical, bodily relations—yes, why not, we're not in Puritanism
Eros, puritanism and Anglo-Saxon domination since Waterloo 50:27 which has dominated the world ideologically since Waterloo—no, no, I say it because there are things so obvious that they're never said, whereas they should be taught in elementary school—the world has been run since Waterloo by Anglo-Saxons, that's no value judgment, there are excellent aspects, there are formidable aspects, I'm simply noting that the world has been run by the Anglo-Saxons starting from Waterloo—I didn't say Thermidor, I didn't say from the end of the revolutionary period of the French Revolution, because Napoleon was still considered a danger of contagion by the French Revolution—see the incredible letter that Hegel sends when he puts the finishing touch to the Phenomenology, at the moment when Napoleon enters—he finishes it in Jena at the moment Napoleon enters the city, having just crushed the Prussian army at Jena—he says
51:37 we all wish success to the French armies who are coming to free them from their local petty tyrants—for them it was the continuation of the Revolution; Napoleon, very shrewdly, politically played on those sentiments. Of course, great strategists aren't just guys charging into gunfire, they're also people who concern themselves with what boots their soldiers have, and with knowing, as Julius Caesar did, how to divide up the clans and peoples in the regions one crosses, in order to have some on your side against others—I'm not praising or blaming, as Spinoza would say; here it's not a matter of laughing or crying, it's a matter of understanding—understanding that the world is run—that's a fact one cannot deny—up until a fairly recent period; it's true this is starting to decline a bit, what I've said, it's true that what is conventionally called the West, run precisely by the Anglo-Saxons, first the British Empire
52:47 then the American relay, especially from the start of the Cold War in '45, when it's practically the only surviving power, the others being razed, destroyed, bled white, and some never even recovered—maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but I'm just looking, I'm doing logic, not psychology or morality—there's a Protestant dimension, whatever one thinks of it, good or bad, in that these are cultures where Puritanism plays an essential role—I'm not losing my thread—I'm saying that when we speak of eros, one might think, quite the opposite of a Puritan attitude, that it's a debauchery of bodies—but no, or if it is, it's because the bodies are desperately trying, through their contact, to grasp what is being sought and which is not the bodies but is precisely—I won't say the soul, that sounds a bit metaphysical and religious—I say to grasp a someone, and not
53:58 to find oneself alone with some somethings. There, well, if we could stop there for this evening, because it's dense—you see we're not very far from—not from platonic love, which is really a joke, which has little to do with the work of Plato, but from the great Plato, isn't it. I'll answer a few questions—I'd like to thank, before leaving you, all those who've corrected me, I very much like being corrected when I make an objective error—I didn't say being contradicted, I like that too, but that's something else, that's a debate; but being corrected, I'm not debating, I see right away that I've made either a slip—I make a lot of them, I'm terrified when I rewatch my videos, I start a sentence attributing something to Baudelaire and by the end I say "that's why Rousseau concludes that"—that happens to me sometimes, but here
Correction on Whitehead and Gödel, announcement of what follows 55:09 it's not a slip, it's a mistake: when I said it was Gödel who had said—the mathematician and logician, the immense Gödel—who had said in the 1930s, I believe, that all the reflections of philosophers who specialize in the sciences and mathematics were only footnotes—isn't that right—to a dialogue of Plato—actually it wasn't Gödel, many of you, and I thank them, corrected me, it was Whitehead—but I was fascinated by the revelation Gödel gave us of the fact—well, that's not our subject so I won't dwell on it—of the fact that no theory can ever validate itself from within without appealing to a metalanguage—anyway, and I will always be grateful to Gödel for having formulated what is called the incompleteness principle. But there, thank you for that correction, and I'm doing it on purpose, leaving you in a manner that's
56:19 a bit abrupt, on a subject I was about to say burning, and we'll be all the more delighted to meet again next time to see the consequences, the continuations, in short, in a word, what comes next. Thank you, Adrien, for being here, thank you for your patience and your commitment, and thank you above all to you, and don't forget, if you want to send us some money, that's very timely, we always need it, but especially now in this period, and you can send it to the email address we'll leave below the video and on YouTube, and we'll send you back the association's bank details. I'll answer the many questions you've kindly asked me following the introduction
57:30 that I gave on the Plato-Rousseau dichotomy, next time—there, that's how the program is announced, thank you all, thank you Adrien, and until next time, thank you very much, thank you.
