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Reading of a question on romanticism and music 0:00 Try! Ah! Good evening everyone. I'm delighted that everyone's availability means I can once again, as I promised you, take up again, or rather continue, our question-and-answer session that we interrupted several weeks ago.
0:40 I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain to begin with the question from Aurélien Bahler, our dear comrade from the IHT, who is a rather young old acquaintance, and who asked me a very detailed question, to the point that I'm going to make a point of reading it beforehand. Beforehand, I had promised him I would start with his question, because it is at the heart of many other questions that some of you are asking as well, though in a more synthetic way.
1:20 And I'm very grateful for the way he formulated it, which is both clear—well, which is clear without sacrificing anything of the complexity of the problems raised. There we are. So, let me look at his question on my monitoring screen, if you don't mind. I've finally taken the time—well, I'll skip the beginnings, and go straight to the substance of the question.
1:55 First, on Romanticism. "You often speak of the Romantic movement and the retreat into aesthetics that it entails at the expense of the political." "My intuition is that this state of affairs concerns German Romantics more than French Romantics." Forgive me for interrupting—I'm interrupting to tell you that I won't interrupt again. I'm first stating the text without commentary, if you will. So if it seems incomplete, don't worry, we will of course come straight back to it.
2:28 "Indeed, how can one not think of Hugo and Lamartine? How do you explain this? What differentiates German Romanticism, and perhaps English Romanticism, from French Romanticism? Did Hugo manage, with Les Misérables, to overcome the contradictions of the French Romantics?" Secondly, on the relationship between music and politics in Antiquity: "In the course of my reading of Plato and Aristotle, I noticed that music played an important role in their conception of education aimed at an ideal city."
3:01 "Both in the Republic and in the Politics, what do you think? Does this touch on the solution to our problem concerning the relationship between aesthetics and politics? Music being at once the most ethereal art but also the most mathematical, a discipline supposed to unite men, this makes me think of the line by Rimbaud that you often quote, 'Learned music is lacking to our desire.'" There remain three lines that I'll allow myself to quote too, even though they're a bit off to the side, where our friend Aurélien has the nerve to apologize for his excellent questions.
3:47 "I apologize in advance if my questions are a bit disjointed, I'm far from being a specialist." I begin with these two lines precisely to say that they are nothing of the sort disjointed, that on the contrary they are very coherent, and that I thank him for them. So, I'll go back to the beginning, if you don't mind, of this long question in two phases, so to speak, since it's first about Romanticism in general, and then about one of the arts that Hegel proclaims to be Romantic par excellence, music.
Romanticism, bourgeois civil society and the violet point 4:19 "You often speak of the Romantic movement and the retreat into aesthetics that it entails at the expense of the political." Now here Aurélien insists on a particular determination of Romanticism—I'll say right away, I'm already answering Aurélien on substance—there is nothing more complex than speaking of Romanticism as an artistic, literary, civilizational movement, whatever you like for now, since it embraced, as you know, almost every discipline—of course the arts, literature, but also law, history—look at the Romantic breath in Michelet, the historian, for example; there is even a military Romanticism when you look at the way Bonaparte is depicted in painting, there, at the bridge of Arcole for instance, or simply the way people spoke of him, among the poets—think of Victor Hugo's Legend of the Ages, for example. So this Romanticism, I don't want to reduce it to a single word,
5:30 but I would like there to be one word we never forget as soon as we want to deepen our understanding of the philosophical assessment of Romanticism: the word ambivalence. What I'm saying is that Romanticism is capable of the best as well as the worst—understand that politically, understand it aesthetically, as you like—but also of the best, and in this sense it is indeed the expression, as I often recall, of our modernity—not of modernity in general—which appeared at the same time as what is called, with a curious pleonasm, bourgeois civil society. I say pleonasm when you think about it a bit in German, since it's borrowed from the German language, from Hegel and Marx of course: "Bürgerliche Gesellschaft," because to say civil society, the Germans say bourgeois society, "Bürgerliche." But in fact, etymologically, it comes down to the same thing, because "Burg,"
6:40 is the city, isn't it? For example, to say a citizen of Berlin, in Germany, they say "Berliner Bürger"—a bourgeois of Berlin—but actually that's mistranslated, it's a citizen of Berlin. And since "citizen" comes back to the same thing, and "civil society" comes from "civis," which means the city, in the end, etymologically, it amounts to the same thing. So, bourgeois civil society—so as not to be mistaken, so that one doesn't think it's civil society as opposed to military society, that's not it.
7:14 It's the society that arose from the industrial revolution—which has always existed. I've already said that a small community of hunter-gatherers deep in the Amazon rainforest can experience an embryo of civil society, when two hunters leave the village—which is the world of the family and the state, we'll come back to that later—to go, since one must renew things from time to time, it's all very well, the world of the city, but one must go right out into nature, into the Amazon rainforest, to bring back food.
7:51 But when the two of them are in the forest, they are an embryo of civil society. There's no more constraint, no more curtains, so to speak, no more prohibitions—you know, the men's hut, the women's hut, the sacred spaces one must not enter. There is a certain—not laxity, but a relaxation, I mean—so, our two friends, our two hunters, in Urangoguet's phrase, in the jungle, can exchange remarks all the freer—in quotes, with a thousand quotation marks, it's an illusory freedom, as we'll see another time—because there's no one there to censor them.
8:31 There, that's already something. So, but really, we truly speak of civil society in a theoretical way, and become aware of its importance as a middle term between the origin of all society, the family—or the most original form of sociability, if you like, for each of us, the family—and the one that takes the longest to build up in history, the state, the most structured form of society. Between the family and the state, you have as a middle term, as a milieu, civil society.
9:07 So why this long detour when I was talking about Romanticism? Because Romanticism has this status of the middle, that's why I said be wary, it is ambivalent like everything that is in the middle. I recall my image, which seems very simple but which we never think about, because it would lead us into extremely complex reflections. Take a segment AB, right? Take the point M in the middle—can't get simpler than that, apparently—paint the half-segment AM red and the half-segment MB blue, and you'll notice that the point which is in the middle, which I say is the very place of ambivalence, is violet.
9:50 We no longer know whether it's red or blue. In politics, is it red or is it brown? Is it hyper-conservative or hyper-revolutionary? We're no longer quite sure when we're in the middle. I say this because I believe it was Jean-François Kahn—I rarely quote this kind of politician, so to speak, or of freelance commentator, as one might say, freelance commentator on political politics—who said, "I belong to the extreme center."
10:27 It's a formula I hold to. He meant it somewhat ironically. I hold to it enormously. Some say it doesn't exist. Thus Michel Onfray says it makes no sense—either you're extreme or you're centrist. You can see how much trouble he has being dialectical. Poor Onfray. So no, on the contrary. I apologize to Aurélien for this long detour, but I'm sure that, as someone deeply politically engaged with great seriousness—if only through the importance and force of his theoretical rigor—he will understand very well why this detour is well founded
11:08 in relation to his question. So I come back to the extreme center and to my violet point in the middle there, which is neither red nor blue, or which is both at once, which can make red believe it's blue and blue believe it's red, if you prefer. Well, I come back to this because it is yet another way of answering a very recurring question among you these days and for some time now.
11:39 "Well, left and right don't mean anything anymore." You see? There we go, I'd said, right? Since I'm answering several questions at once, but which all bear, you see, a family resemblance—we're seeing that already, if only on a strictly logical level, which is actually the most interesting thing—I'll linger a bit. Obviously, if there are those who think that being in the PS [Socialist Party] means being on the left, right?
Left, right and self-consciousness 12:11 I'm talking about the PS today, I'm not talking about the time of Jaurès, I'm not talking about what socialism was before the Cold War—because there are those who think it's starting from Hollande, or even Macron, right, that the left betrayed its principles. But no, it goes back a long way, and especially at the time of the Cold War, right—it took the socialist Jules Moch, a minister at the time, in the 1950s, to fire actual rifle bullets, mind you, at the dockers of Marseille, right,
12:44 who were blocking the ships that were being loaded with weapons sent by the Americans to help the French bogged down in the Indochina War, right? And there you have it—a socialist minister. Another socialist minister, German this time, right before the Third Reich took hold in Germany, right in the middle of the Weimar Republic, when there were bloody riots every day between them.
13:16 So this is where one must be careful not to conflate—which the European Commission would love to do, the European Union would love to identify Nazism and Communism as one and the same—they were so identical, right, that they engaged in bloody clashes with each other. I'm not even talking about the repression that would fall on the communists once the Reich came to power, I'm talking already about the fighting between the two parties, the two organizations, in the streets of German towns, in the 1930s. Well, it was in the course of one of these confrontations, alas, that the two leaders of the Spartacists, of the German Communist Party, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were savagely massacred.
13:59 Now, the police at that time had as its boss the Minister of the Interior—the equivalent here—yes, that's right, he was a socialist, I recall, named Noske, N-O-S-K-E, and who himself said, "I will be the bloodhound." You see? No, no, but it's been a long time since the anti-communist left, right, has been the extreme right's best auxiliary, of course. No, no, it's…
14:30 But let's leave that aside, because otherwise we'll soon be in café-counter polemics if we go about it the wrong way. And the subject is too serious for that. So let's come back to essentials. Let's return to Marx. What does he say in the famous 1859 preface? Something that should serve as a warning to those who say, well, all the same, I mean, there's no longer any distinction between left and right, between me and Macron who comes from Hollande. Fine, all right. Well, Marx says—no more than we judge an individual by the idea he has of himself,
15:04 do we judge an era by its self-consciousness. He makes it a quotation. But come now, it would be a bit too easy if we judged an individual by the idea he has of himself. All it would take is for some guy to say "I'm on the left" for you to count him as being on the left. But then trials would go a lot faster. Why bother trying to create a justice system? "Defendant, rise, what do you think of yourself?" "I'm innocent." "Never mind, acquitted." But no—if we judged an individual by the idea he has of himself…
15:35 You see, this goes far, what we're looking at here. It recalls the notion of the unconscious in Marx, doesn't it? What an individual is, is neither for others nor for himself what he thinks of himself. Do you know many reactionary individuals who are conscious of their class status? It can happen, and even then. It's not the general rule. Well. So if you call "left" those who position themselves on the left out of opportunism—I don't like ad hominem arguments, referring to actual people, but here the anecdote is so telling, and besides they're now somewhat out of the current news—I'm thinking of François Hollande and his ex, well, his companion at the time, Ségolène Royal, when they graduated from Sciences Po, quite young, and were about to devote themselves to politics, they were neither on the left nor on the right yet, which is why I use this example, right?
16:34 And Hollande apparently said, "It seems the left is on the rise now, so I'll rather commit myself to the left, me." You see? That's not what the left is. That's not the people who stood on the picket lines so that you, now, could have paid holidays and social security in 1936—no less! And those who resisted in 1945, especially in 1947, right—the cream of the crop of the Resistance being the communists, right?
17:07 And the most committed on the left, alongside the Gaullists on the right, but above all the communists, when it came to creating social security, right? But there you have it—so this long detour to say: beware of the extreme center, right, and of the concealment it implies—either concealment, that is, ambiguity, meaning I'm a dissembler, in plain English, one might say a hypocrite, excuse me—or, and this is harder to grasp, not ambiguity but, I come back to it, ambivalence, that is, unbeknownst even to the speaker himself, right?
Rimbaud: "romanticism has never been well understood" 17:55 What he says can be taken in two completely opposite senses. Now Romanticism, I come back to Aurélien's question—thank you for showing it again—belongs par excellence to this, and, you know, don't think I'm embroidering or dragging things toward some kind of political opportunism—Rimbaud, right, who was affiliated with no organization, as far as I know, even if he did insist on taking part in the movement of the Paris Commune all the same.
18:29 Rimbaud says, in that famous letter to his rhetoric teacher, where he gives something of a whole history of poetry since the Greeks—he gives a literature lesson to his literature teacher at the age of seventeen—he says: we have never really understood Romanticism. Here is someone writing in the 1870s who says, even though Romanticism had already gone out of fashion long before, that it still has not been understood.
18:59 And I am repeating the same thing today. We have never understood Romanticism. "Who would have understood it?" Rimbaud asks. He continues: "Who would have understood it? The critics? The Romantics??" So Rimbaud, you see—I was about to say he agrees with me, forgive the presumption, it's I who am influenced by him—yes, unbeknownst to themselves, they believe they are this or that, they believe they love nature, right?
19:31 And in fact, when they are well along in their journey—I'm thinking of Alfred de Vigny, to take an example, since he mentions the French Romantics, Aurélien—sometimes one has the impression that "Alfred" should be factored out as common to Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny—no, I'll stop joking. Alfred de Vigny, Servitude and Grandeur of Military Life, he wrote a rather stiff—Vigny is a bit conservative, as for morals I mean, apparently, an aristocrat, in short—and in what is doubtless his most beautiful poem, La Maison du Berger, yes, he is less rhetorical, as often happens with the French Romantic, I'll come back to that—Vigny has this line where he makes nature speak, he does what's called a prosopopoeia, and nature—and we are startled that a Romantic would have her say this, someone says to me "a mother, mama Gaia," you see, that's very current—someone says to me "a mother," and I say "a tomb"—it's death, nature—beware the illusion,
20:41 that's a Romantic who went through a long journey, right—at the beginning he invests fully in nature, and here I refer you, right, to another question I'll answer later, a question from Lucille, who asks me to go back over my distinction between nature and landscape—there, it's a bit of a way of referring you to that series, if you go to our site, or simply to our YouTube channel, I mean, if you click on "videos," you'll find them in chronological order, that's the advantage of that page—there is, at a certain point, a whole series of talks called "Nature-Landscape, Question Mark," where I dig into this—I'll come back to it.
Literature of action and literature of evasion 21:28 So I return—I never left—to the detail of Aurélien's question, and at the beginning he alludes, saying, when he speaks of the withdrawal, the retreat, a certain Romanticism, right, flees political action for evasion. And I had said, indeed, that one of the keys to modernity is this dichotomy between action and evasion.
21:59 There are two great categories of literature—there are a thousand, but today I ask you to pay attention to this division, which reduces this abundance to two great categories. A literature of action—I don't know, Sartre, commitment—or simply, Balzac, who was not committed to any political party, though he did hold rather royalist convictions, but who plunges us into a world where people act, they are not contemplatives, not merely dreamers—that's Balzac.
22:35 We are no longer in Romanticism, we are in novelistic realism and not in Romantic poetry. You see that the distinction between Romanticism and realism doubles as a distinction of genres. One succeeds especially in poetry, the other in the novel. What literary genre, better than the novel, can be attuned to this abundance, which is the real, right there, right there, right there—what's truly around us. And what's around us is not nature, it's the city, it's men, it's Balzac's world, it's the bailiffs, the bankers, the ambitious men, the small-time provincial social climbers, and lost illusions.
23:10 Well. So, an excellent film was made—for which I thank Amélie, who will recognize herself, for pointing it out to me and for helping me get to see it—which is, for once, a not-too-bad, even good, adaptation of a novelistic work. So, there, I thank Aurélien because—I want to look at his question again.
23:42 Thank you. He extends this position about escapism, saying, yes, but this escapism, literature of evasion, applies more to the Germans. Well, he's quite right, no one escaped as much as the German Romantics did. And he says, but the same cannot be said, and he's right, historically, of the French Romantics. And he says, indeed, how can one not think of Hugo and Lamartine? He reminds us, because there are still some who don't know this. So it needs to be clarified again.
24:12 He is right to remind us that Hugo, all by himself, symbolized an era, almost the whole of the opposition. One need only look at the millions of people who followed his coffin during his funeral. Right? It's historic, funerals like that. The exile of Guernsey, of Jersey, etc., in working-class families, and the father of the household would read aloud, by candlelight, excerpts from Les Misérables—there again, I come back to Aurélien's question—Les Misérables to the family.
24:49 For once a writer, coming somewhat from the establishment, as we'd say today—well, who did not come from the working class, still less from the peasantry—for once devoted thousands of his pages to the condition of the wretched, that surely deserved this tribute. So how could one say Hugo is not literature of action? And Lamartine—recalling that it's Lamartine who seems hyper-Romantic—I recall the first stanza of a poem like "Recueillement": "Often, upon the mountain, in the shade of the old oak, at sunset, sadly, I sit"—you have all of Romanticism in one line—sadly, feeling, and not impression or sensation or ideas, it's not feeling—and you have the act of sitting down.
25:41 It's a tired and Romantic generation. And yes, their fathers must have been more so, because their fathers were in the Grande Armée—Hugo's father was in the Grande Armée, Nerval's father was a military doctor in the Grande Armée. It was there that he lost Nerval's mother, right, on a bridge laden with corpses between Russia and Poland. And so, to the generation of men of action, of the Napoleonic epic, succeeded those who sit in the cafés of Paris. I say this because Musset, who had a sense of self-mockery, had himself called "the coffee prince."
26:21 So, he's right, Aurélien, to say that there's a dichotomy between romanticism and romanticism. But, as I've already had the chance to discuss with him, I'll point out in passing that, of course, there's already a French political tradition of which Marx and Hegel, of which Marx and Hegel were great admirers. Don't forget that Marx said, "I am at the confluence of three great traditions."
26:52 What richness—the English economic tradition, the French political tradition, the English economic tradition, German theoretical tradition, and the French political tradition. Because we Germans, we are profound, we are even more profound than the French, we think more carefully, we think, but what do we think? We think about what they've done, but they, they do it, they storm the Bastille. When they say the French political tradition, that's serious business.
27:25 There's admiration. And then there's the Paris Commune in its time, there's all of that, you see. Collective action in France isn't an isolated case. Should we speak of it in the past tense? That's for you to see. It's up to you to know whether this formula is still current or not. When I say "you," I'm targeting mainly, but not only, the youth. Let me finish this little parenthesis. I have admiration for those who are practically my age, at least senior citizens, who went to warm their hands over the braziers in the dead of winter, at the roundabouts during the Yellow Vests movement.
28:05 All the same. The French political tradition isn't dead, but like embers, the flames can go out at a certain moment, but the embers are still there. Blow on them! And so, he clearly notices that there's a dichotomy, he's right, between German romanticism and French romanticism. So when I speak of an escapist romanticism that withdraws from politics, in what Hegel denounces as the unhappy consciousness, which is unhappy precisely because it is—it's Aurélien's word—entrenched within itself, shut up within itself.
Unhappy consciousness and a Germany without a state 28:43 And it has forgotten the wisdom of an Aristotle who is at the extreme opposite—from the modern romantic society to the ancient classical society. A Greek like Aristotle says, "Man is a zoon politikon, man is a political animal." There's no choice. You can't escape—we'll have to wait. Rimbaud, well, decidedly, I'm going from one extreme of history to the other, that makes twice now. I'm thinking of Rimbaud who says, "We do not escape, let's take again the paths from here." But to whom does he say that?
29:13 To himself, above all. Because Rimbaud had gone through all these phases. You see, I'm taking Romantic in an extensive sense, in which Rimbaud was more romantic than anyone before he got out of it. When Rimbaud paints the most pitiless self-portrait any writer has ever made—that is, when he portrays himself, from the verb "portraire," to make one's portrait, when he portrays himself through a discourse he attributes to Verlaine in "Delirium 1, Foolish Virgin"
29:45 in A Season in Hell. In A Season in Hell, isolate the chapter. It's called "Delirium 1, Foolish Virgin." There, Rimbaud paints himself in a pitiless way, including his failings, his ridiculousness, his selfishness, his violence. And at one point, he says of himself, "I never understood this rage he put into escaping." You see, he went through that. And the same Rimbaud says, "We do not escape"
30:16 after the descent, the season. In hell, isn't it, taking again the paths from here. You see, Aurélien's question brings us back to important reminders. But yes, that's all of it. I'm dwelling on this because I hold it against this amnesiac culture of geographic societies rather than historic ones, which are the dominant societies—I'm alluding, of course, to American society, it's not the fault of Americans. But still, it happens that the world is dominated by a country whose history doesn't go back very far, which therefore has every interest, doesn't it, in emphasizing nature, landscape, out of Africa, the Great North, a hero who goes looking for who knows what in the snow, somewhere between Wisconsin and Oregon, or in the great forest, the great forest of Oregon, precisely.
31:18 Among the sequoias, there is—yes, it all fits together, isn't it—a negation of history and therefore hostility to Marxism, yes, because, how do you want to think about those who denounce you? There would be too much resistance, as they say over at Freud's, isn't it, who didn't allude to history, who saw this only at an individual level, but it is indeed the notion of resistance, collectively, isn't it, that in Marxist terms is called ideology, isn't it, the ideological resistance that means I can't manage to know myself or that I fantasize about myself by expanding into space, isn't it, especially when I'm the master of the world's spaces, isn't it—those Russian bastards dared to set up a base in Syria at Latakia, isn't it, that's the only one they have abroad, whereas the Americans have 800 bases, on all five, six continents, because they have many bases in the middle of the sea too, one of the biggest bases in the world moreover, an islet in the middle of the Indian Ocean, far from everything, called Diego Garcia.
32:24 All right, let's go back to Aurélien. So the question is, what differentiates German romanticism from French romanticism? Well, I say, politically, I give the point to the French romantics, it's clear they're much less escapist than the German romantic; only, look, I'm talking about romanticism in my little work called "Aesthetics and Politics" in Hegel. In other words, the relationship of this aesthetico-politics within the Hegelian system.
32:54 of "Femininity and Community," isn't it? Since I often articulate it around the figure of Antigone. Now, in Hegel, it's really German French romanticism he holds a grudge against, precisely for being this unhappy consciousness that withdraws from the political. Because—and I'm starting to answer his question—what differentiates German romanticism? First we thought of history. It's that France, which the Germans called at the time, and even long after, but especially at the time, die grosse Nation, the great nation, unified, centralized for centuries.
33:33 whereas Germany was not a state at the time. It was neither a state nor a nation, and even less a nation-state. There were plenty of little states swarming about—Baden-Württemberg, isn't it, the Kingdom of Bavaria, the Kingdom of Prussia, I'm telling you the best-known ones, but there were plenty of them. There's a novel by Jean Paul that I had cited, precisely, when I was talking about nature and landscape.
34:03 There's a novel by Jean Paul in which there's a magnificent walking journey—that's why I had cited it in Nature or Landscape—along the Romantische Straße, the Romantic Road, as it's called in Germany, somewhere between Bamberg and Bayreuth, roughly, where the hero of the novel—well, the narrator says of the hero of the novel—sets off on foot and leaves for a long journey toward where his friend lives.
34:33 And when, after a few moments, when he arrived on foreign soil, within a quarter of an hour, we're already in another state, after a quarter of an hour's walk. Can you imagine the political fragmentation that made Hegel say, unfortunately, in a text of which four-fifths have been lost, the Constitution of Germany, "Germany is not a state." So, first answer, what's different from French romanticism is that it's first of all history—that, unable to invest themselves in politics as the French do, the Germans invested in the night.
Reading of Novalis's Hymns to the Night 35:17 I'm thinking, I'm of course alluding to the text that is perhaps the most romantic of the German romantic—I'm thinking of Novalis's Hymns to the Night, isn't it? So I'm going to quote you a short excerpt to show you how much escape occupies an important place from the very first lines. So, let me tell you right away that for hymns to the night, it starts oddly, because it starts with a hymn to light, isn't it? But that's to better bring in the night after a few lines, of course. So, here, you see, "Mein Briller"
35:51 There, so: "What living being endowed with senses does not love, above all else, in the miracle of appearances across that vast space around it—the light, the joy of all things, together, its colors, its rays and its waves, the soothing gentleness of its omnipresence with day and its awakening. It is she, the light, as well as the innermost soul of life that the giant universe of untiring stars breathes."
36:26 Look at the progression—it starts with the inert world, the galaxies. "The giant universe of untiring stars, and it swims, dancing, in the azure of its waves. It is she that the sparkling stone breathes, the mineral, in eternal repose. And the plant"—we move to the living—"and the meditative plant that is all suction, the meditative plant that is all suction, and the savage, ardent, multiform animal."
36:56 And you can guess what comes to crown this progression. "And before all still, the magnificent stranger with his pensive eyes, his weightless gait and his melodious lips, delicately closed." Admirable, isn't it? "Like a monarch of nature here below, she calls forth every force to countless metamorphoses." That's the end of the hymn to light. Watch closely, on the next line: "Profoundly, I turn away from it toward the holy, ineffable, utterly mysterious night."
37:34 Don't forget that this is written just as we're barely emerging from the Age of Enlightenment. I insist. Learn to have these systematic reflexes in your head. These aren't systematic things just in your head, they're systematic things that are in the order of things and in the order of historical things. I'll skip a passage to avoid misreadings about the night—it's not night in the astronomical sense, isn't it? And even less the blackness of nothingness.
38:04 No, on the contrary, it's a night full of... like the night of dreams, where there is plenty of light and images, isn't it? There. So, here's the most important passage, where I want to return to the escape linked to the night, and which I'm introducing with these few little paragraphs.
38:36 "Must morning always return? Will the empire of this world never end?" There's really, you see, a rejection of day. "Must morning always return? Will the empire of this world never end? Cursed the bustle that consumes"—the night that draws near, "a fatal activity engulfs the divine impulses of the approaching night. Will the occult sacrifice of love never burn eternally, like the rose, for the night? The light had its time, which was measured out to it." Measure, time, science—but the reign of night is outside time and outside space.
39:09 "And it is eternity that sleep has to last." So, you see, we've moved from night to sleep. I'm talking to you about escape. Listen closely. "Sacred sleep, do not come too rarely; during the earthly labor of the day, fill with your bliss the faithful adepts of the night." Nietzsche, who knew something about this—forgive me for laughing, but you'll see it's rather funny what he says. He's right, moreover. He said, "The romantics have always confused the pleasure of falling asleep with that of waking up."
39:41 "So, only the senseless fail to recognize you." Now, watch, he's speaking to sleep. And here we see what he calls sleep. It's not about biological sleep, isn't it? "Only the senseless fail to recognize you"—the idiots, the fools, the fatuous ones who understand nothing, who simply don't understand what I call sleep. Watch closely. "And know not our sleep"—so here it's sleep in the proper sense—"which is the shadow that you cast out of compassion for us at the twilight of the true night. They do not feel you."
40:12 Now we're going to see where we need to find—what he calls night, sleep. "They do not feel you"—it begins—"in the golden flow of the grapes." Note that he's talking about alcohol here. Escape already. And you find again the divisions of Flowers of Evil. There's a chapter in Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil called "Wine." That's where you see that romanticism is extensive. It's supposed to be over by the time Baudelaire writes The Flowers of Evil—yeah, right.
40:42 "Only the senseless fail to recognize you"—so, "they do not feel you"—I repeat, the progression—"in the golden flow of the grapes, in the miraculous oil of the almond, or in the brown sap of the poppy"—I'll point out he's talking about opium, and therefore alkaloids, and therefore heroin, and morphine at the limit. "They do not feel you"—I repeat, the progression—"in the golden flow of the grapes, in the miraculous oil of the almond, or in the brown sap of the poppy."
41:13 So there, that's escape into what would later, in Baudelaire's time, be called artificial paradises. "They do not know"—another escape, no doubt the most important one—"that it is you, you, sleep, night, who thus haloes the tender breast of the Virgin and makes of her heart a paradise for us. They do not sense that, rising from ancient legends, you advance toward us, opening the sky, and you carry the key that opens the dwellings of beatitude, silent messenger of infinite mysteries."
41:50 Well, there you go, we find all the—I shouldn't overdo it, being too harsh is a bit unfair because it's a very beautiful romantic text. Well, mystery preferred to knowledge, isn't it, night preferred to day—it's clearer than one thinks, all this, despite all these luminous shadows which are in fact shadows. Let's not forget that Mozart's whole Magic Flute, which is itself a summation of the Age of Enlightenment—it's practically contemporary with Rousseau—don't forget that Mozart's Magic Flute is a struggle between the king of suns, Sarastro, who is a variant of Zarathustra, of Zoroaster, because in ancient Persia there was what's called a Manichaeism, a duality between the world of light and the world of darkness, and his wife, with whom he's always in conflict, a bit like in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—the Queen of the Night, who does evil by drawing consciousnesses into illusions and spells.
The aesthetic point to the Germans: Hugo and Stella 42:59 There. So, what are we seeing with Novalis about this? Aurélien, I haven't forgotten you, I haven't forgotten that this is especially of interest. Look closely—it's that I gave the point to the French regarding politics, but as for aesthetics, I give the point a thousand times over to the German romantics. I'm not talking about Hugo—a figure like Hugo overflows widely; he's romantic, of course, because he was the leader of his generation at that level, but I mean, he's one of the best realists, I'm thinking of Les Misérables, he can be impressionist, he can be symbolist, whatever you like, it's not—
43:40 And so, but generally speaking, French romanticism is too much a prisoner of the great classical form, of the alexandrine—it's too often thought put into verse rather than poetry. That's why there's a lot of dead weight. When it succeeds, it's magnificent, but there's a lot of dead weight, that is, from a strictly poetic point of view, it's reflections put into verse.
44:12 If you want to see all this in a very short span, listen to Rimbaud, who knows a lot about this—in the same letter, he says "Stella gives roughly the measure of Hugo's vision." Stella is a poem by Hugo, you can find it everywhere, in anthologies, S-T-E-L-L-A, Stella. Now, in this poem—why am I talking about it? Because there, Hugo is even impressionist. And when Rimbaud pays him this tribute, because Rimbaud, a great poet, is great insofar as he is a seer, that's famous, isn't it?
44:48 So he says, "The romantics have sometimes seen, in their last volumes, but they're strangled by the old form." You see, he knows well that the peak of French literature is in the classical era, especially, isn't it? Voltaire, his dream is to write like Racine. There you go, he never manages it. In his theater he writes very well, in his letters and his short stories, or in his tales. There, but it's...
45:18 There, there's no dead weight, but on the other hand, I mean, with the romantics, when it succeeds, it's extraordinary. But then, what is there as dead weight, as thought put into verse? So, an example, you have Stella. "I had fallen asleep at night near the shore. A cool wind woke me." There's not a feeling for now. There are only sensations. That's hyper modern. And it's Hugo. There, he's well beyond romantic. He's already in Rimbaud's "Dawn," for example.
45:48 "A cool wind"—fresh, that's not a feeling, it's a sensation. "I had fallen asleep at night near the shore. A cool wind woke me." I have a memory lapse. "I emerged from my dream. I opened my eyes, I saw the morning star." It's a vision. "It shone at the far end of the sky." Stella means star in Latin. "It shone at the far end of the distant sky." Listen closely.
46:18 "In a soft, infinite, and charming whiteness"—that's impressionism. "In a soft, infinite, and charming whiteness. The dazzling star was changing the cloud into down. It was a thought that shone, that lived. One would have thought one saw a soul through a pearl. It calmed the reef where the wave breaks." There's not a single feeling. He only speaks of objects, of sensations, of concrete, material impressions.
46:51 And all of a sudden, he makes it speak. Because this image, this star, is in fact only the symbol of liberty that is coming to save societies. Which, politically, is excellent. But well, it's the weakest part of the poem. "I am the angel Liberty, the giant of light. I shone on Moses, I shone on Sinai, I shone on Taygetus." The National Assembly—this is no longer poetry. It becomes rhetoric, it becomes emphatic, it becomes... So, I've given you the two Hugos, the most brilliant one, isn't it?
47:23 And from a strictly poetic point of view, I'm speaking—watch out!—I've paid tribute to Les Misérables. And I'll end my answer to Aurélien with that. In any case, regarding the first part of his question, which was: "Did Hugo manage, with Les Misérables, to overcome the contradictions of German romanticism?" But he couldn't put it better, since Rimbaud, who is so harsh with all his predecessors—this age is merciless, including with Hugo—let me continue what he says about Stella: "Stella gives roughly the measure of Hugo."
48:03 "Too much Belmontet, too many Jehovahs, too many columns, old cracked enormities"—there you go. So he rejects the whole second part that I sketched out for you. But right away he says, "I have Les Misérables at hand: a real poem." For Rimbaud, so severe, to pay such a glowing tribute to Hugo's greatest novelistic work—he calls it a poem, which is the highest compliment he can give it—proves that it's not at all reductive.
48:33 Here, when I say that Hugo can't be reduced, isn't it, can't be brought down to that regrettable aspect of French romanticism of being too often thought—however generous, however well politically oriented—put into verse, isn't it? Poetry isn't just verse. The proof is that Baudelaire, especially starting with Baudelaire, we've seen what could be achieved, and even from Rousseau on, if you look closely at poetic prose. There. So that was for romanticism in general, and now Aurélien takes us into the second part of his question, on the relationship of music, somewhat as a corollary of the previous question, in Antiquity.
Music in Plato: Socrates's dream 49:19 "I noticed as I read Plato and Aristotle that music occupied an important role in their conception of education aimed at an ideal city." Here, a small—not a caveat exactly, because what Aurélien says isn't wrong, but it's incomparably more true for Plato than for Aristotle. Because Aristotle speaks of the importance music can have in the education of a well-rounded citizen, etc. But no, in Plato, it's more than that.
49:49 To the point that, somewhere—I'll only give two references regarding Plato—to the point that he says, in the Republic, that all education should come down to two disciplines: gymnastics for the body and music for the soul. But above all, in the Phaedo, Socrates' final dialogue—not Plato's final dialogue, but Socrates' final dialogue with his disciples, the one in which, in the final discussion possible before taking the hemlock in his cell, whose subject is the immortality of the soul—before the discussion begins, don't worry, we're not going to get into that, we're not going to do metaphysics—but just before, Socrates, as often happens, Plato, the greatest stage director in the history of thought, what a filmmaker, what a dramatist, isn't it, this way of crafting introductions and conclusions, finales, as one would say, in music.
50:47 Well, before the truly philosophical discussion about the immortality of man begins, he has Socrates say this to his disciples—it's curious—that night, so his last night, I had a strange dream, I saw a woman dressed in white who said to me, Socrates, but make music, compose. And upon waking, I asked myself, you know, the ancients always knew that dreams had a meaning, in which Freud proved them right.
51:19 Yes, yes, yes, yes, Freud says that our grandmothers, saying, oh dear, if I dreamed of that, it means you're going to get better, he says, well, sure, there's a naive side to confusing the imaginary and the real, but it's deeper to see that dreams have a meaning, even if it's a fantasized meaning, rather than saying it's a stomach upset. Because that would mean the dream has a cause, but no meaning. I close the parenthesis. But think about this parenthesis I just made, when I'm asked, among the same batch of questions she's answering today, about the subject, the object, the logic of subjects, and the gilt of the object regarding neopositivism, we'll have to come back to it.
52:02 There is no subject where there is no meaning. There are only causes. Everything that happens in the galaxies has causes. I don't mean to say there's meaning there. With man, it's the opposite. Plenty of things in man are explained by causes. And nothing whatever is immaterial, that's not the question, but not everything reduces to causes. There's also meaning. I'll set that aside.
52:32 For now, I'll go back to the anecdote I was telling you. He says, this dream means... And suddenly he says, I realized that this woman, in my dream, was encouraging me to do what I have always done with you. And there he says this sentence which illustrates what I mean when I say it's much more important for Plato even than for Aristotle. It doesn't mean music. In this sense, he says, that music is the highest philosophy and that it is indeed philosophy that I am engaged in.
53:05 It's this very Plato that the German Romantics placed above all other thinkers. In a letter, Novalis says that his favorite philosophers are Plato and Hemsterhuis—Hemsterhuis being a contemporary of his. There you have it. So, with that clarification, music played an important role in their conception of education aimed at an ideal city, both in the Republic and in the Politics.
Decoupling aesthetic investment from political investment 53:35 Plato's Republic, of course, and Aristotle's Politics. What do you think? Do we here touch on the solution to our problem regarding the relationship of aesthetics to politics? I say no right away. No. Yes, it's good to acknowledge, it's good to understand that there is a relationship. But I'm not going to do as Plato did, I'm not going to content myself with music, if you will, to guard the citizen's soul against the danger of fascism, for example.
54:09 And yes, all of a sudden I'm being blunt here. Well, I'm making an abrupt turn, an abrupt non-sequitur. And yes, I ask, by the way, why I'm talking about fascism, because apparently it has disappeared. Who says there are Nazis in Ukraine? Oh, that's just another conspiracy theory. There are no more Nazis. It's very strange. At the very moment when Nazism is coming back, at the moment when far-right movements—let's be precise now, come on, let's be scientific, let's measure—if you take the political forces at the level of parties that have been advancing in Europe over the last 20 years, you'll see a decline of the so-called traditional parties, both on the left and on the right.
54:44 Everyone knows what I'm talking about. This was illustrated once again in a striking way in the last election, wasn't it? And what's rising—there are only two forces rising, if you measure it, the far right and the Greens in Europe. Don't put words in my mouth suggesting there's a connection between the two. You know I defend ecology against ecologism. Don't make me say what I haven't said either. Because there's a right-wing critique of ecology which is not mine, and which is even the opposite. Just saying, in passing.
55:14 We'll talk another time about real ecology, which requires rehabilitating what is the opposite of the right, that is, planning. By deciding collectively and democratically what needs to be produced as a priority, what is essential and what is less so. Rather than proclaiming degrowth and explaining that to the wife of a Sahelian farmer. That would be the last straw, having to degrow.
55:45 She would just like to have electricity, without even going as far as nuclear energy. So, why am I talking about fascism? Because it's not a matter of escaping. I must say solemnly, and here I reassure Aurélien because I know it's his deep conviction, his sensibility, which is entirely to his credit, that we must decouple within ourselves the concern—sorry, aesthetic investment—from political investment.
56:21 To naively believe that wherever things are most beautiful, they are necessarily most politically relevant, is a hyper-dangerous optimism. An author can be an excellent writer and be the worst political scoundrel there is—that's been seen, no need to name names. And if it were only literary authors—but since I'm talking about aesthetics, I give them priority, because otherwise, in scientific discourse too, there are excellent scientists, among the best of the 20th century, I'm thinking of Heisenberg, who is nonetheless one of the founders of quantum theory.
56:57 There would not have been—I believe he was the first, my physicist friends can correct me if I'm wrong—to have formalized what is called the uncertainty relations. They say it is impossible to determine both the speed and the position of an elementary particle, an electron in this case. He had sympathies for the Third Reich that everyone knows about. That shouldn't be surprising either. I'll give two examples.
57:27 The writer, who is... Céline, for example—that doesn't mean he's a bad writer, it's not because one holds bad political ideas that one is a bad writer. Conversely, it's not with good sentiments and generous political ideas that one produces literary masterpieces. Earlier I gave an example where Hugo starts writing versified thought, he who is an immense poet, right after having produced an absolute poetic masterpiece of astonishing modernity for his time.
58:01 I don't know. Because suddenly he has nothing in mind but conveying political ideas, which is entirely his right and even his duty—that, I grant him. But there are other vehicles besides poetry for that. There are very rare exceptions, but they are incredibly marginal, hence the admiration and gratitude we owe them. I'm thinking of course of people like Aragon. There's the whole sensibility of those who escaped as if mad, but who don't actually escape.
58:35 I'm thinking of Brecht, to take a French example and a German one. You see, I stay within the scope of the question. There you go. And here, allow me, for once, to refer you to the interview your humble servant gave, which the members of the blog Le Gros Rouge qui tâche, at the initiative of its founder Benjamin Lelouard, whom I greet warmly here, very warmly, kindly conducted, when I was very happy.
59:12 to be on his balcony with the smell of iodine in my nostrils, since we were in Brittany, not far from Saint-Brieuc, there, at his place. And in that interview, it's about Hölderlin's political thought, quite simply. They are so rare, this Hölderlin, who says—I'll end on this—"Mein ist die Rede vom Vaterland, das neide mir keiner"—and no one should envy me the discourse on the fatherland.
59:44 well, we'll come back to it, Aurélien, your question is so rich that it deserves—I've been long, but it deserves to go even further—but we also need to take other questions into account. My answer was also long because I anticipated the answer to other questions that are coming. So, there's also Lucile's question, which is going to come up, and you'll see that although it appears quite different, it actually brings us back to the same issues.
Surface and reflection: the liquid gold of the sunset 1:00:18 So here it is: would it be possible to give more precision on two concepts that you touch on sporadically in all your talks? I mean, in a great many of them. That of surface and that of reflection. I'm not even sure there's a distinction between the two. Here I answer right away, clearly. There can be non-reflecting surfaces, but it's true that there is no reflection except on a surface.
1:00:48 Careful. Like the sun on the sea, so as not to stray too far from Plato. I'm not even sure there's a distinction between the two. Such is the extent of my incomprehension, or comprehension. The surface would be deeper than it appears, because it is a historical production. So, since this is going to get a bit more difficult, I'm very grateful, Lucile, that you paid such close attention to the difficulties I tried to take into account in this series, called, as I remind you, Nature or Landscape?
1:01:25 as a question, given within the four walls of our Centre Goscinny, back then, in the 13th arrondissement—the surface would be deeper than the depths. Of course, you already see how we play with metaphors. By definition already, one would—the dolt, he who doesn't see how the center can be at the periphery and how there can be an extreme center—he would just as well fail to see how the surface, by definition, can be deeper than the bottom, which is nonetheless well below it.
1:02:01 All right, so we constantly move from the literal to the figurative sense, don't we? And yes, in what deep sense? I take the example I had already used, which she's alluding to. When I see the sun shining on the sea, as Baudelaire says in a very beautiful poem: I love the greenish light in your long eyes, sweet beauty, but today everything is bitter to me, and neither your love, nor the boudoir, nor the hearth, is worth as much as the sun shining on the sea.
1:02:34 A poem that was probably written in Honfleur, where Baudelaire made long stays and where there are admirable sunsets. There you go. So you see what that is. The sea that dusts—what is it? What pure work of fine flashes consumes many a diamond of imperceptible foam. That's another poem there. Here, it's not gold, it's silver. Or diamond. What pure work of fine flashes consumes many a diamond of imperceptible foam.
1:03:05 Here time sparkles and the dream is knowledge. That's Valéry in Le Cimetière marin—the reflection of the sun on the sea. Last example: Overbeck, a friend of Nietzsche's, urged Nietzsche to go hear the Rheingold that had just been staged at Bayreuth. He said, go listen to this orchestration, it's like liquid gold. You see, a sunset over the sea is a bit like liquid gold. It makes you want to bathe in it.
1:03:37 Well, let's go! Let's go and pour ourselves a glass. Right there, in the middle of the liquid gold. Let's look at the glass. What a disappointment! Colorless water. I won't say tasteless, it's salty. If you do it with river water, it's the same. Because the sun can turn red, can't it, or unleash the most beautiful golden-red hues, if I may say so, on the Seine. You often see this in Paris when you look westward.
1:04:07 So, at sunset, what a disappointment! No color at all. Nothing. H2O. Well, yes! With a bit more sodium chloride when it's seawater. Yes, what we were contemplating was not the sea in its depths, it was the surface—the encounter between the sunlight and the screen that the surface of the water opposes to it. Exactly like a screen in old movie theaters used to oppose the beam coming from the projector behind the spectators.
1:04:45 I don't know. Because if there were no screen, the beam would be lost to infinity in space. And so, there you have it. It's a relation, as Lucile puts it so well the next time. She says it confuses her, but in fact she has the merit of bringing us back to these seemingly difficult notions. In fact, in this sense, it is deep. Why? Because on this reflection, which is not the real sea—not the one where one must actually go fishing—just as the surface of the river is not the one laughing in the sun like a rain of diamonds.
1:05:26 dappled, that's not the river in its depths. In the depths, there are only earthworms that swans go looking for. You know, when swans dip their heads underwater, you only see their necks. People say, oh how beautiful, they're looking for worms in the mud. That's what depth is. What interest is there in that, none. It's not that deep. You see, I'm playing with words—it's not deep in the sense that matters to us. On the other hand, that reflection, we can imagine anything we like about it, proof of which follows.
1:05:57 Look at this flood of metaphors expressing all these reflections. The water was transparent as on the finest day. My friend the carp made a thousand turns there with the pike, her companion, I think, from La Fontaine's The Heron. Isn't it? One day, on his long legs, walking he knew not where, the heron with the long beak set on a long neck, was skirting a river.
1:06:28 You see, there's already a mystery in this line: was skirting a river. The water was transparent as on the finest day. There you go. Well, yes, we're not going to talk about muddy water. So why is this surface deeper? Because in this object, which is merely a chemical object, and which interests us little for the moment, physical or chemical, there is reflected what is no longer an object but belongs to the order of the subject—our own interests, our desires, our fantasy life are projected there.
1:07:01 And often, since at sunset, what are the two dominant colors? Red and gold—the colors of Spain, if you look closely, the heroic colors, Roman purple, and gold, the gold of power. Because that's how a hero dies. When there's a sunset, you get the impression it's truly the blaze of a hero dying, the hero here of course being the sun itself. Isn't it? As if we were seeing its apotheosis at the very moment of its decline.
1:07:34 This apotheosis so well described by Baudelaire, look closely, in L'Invitation au voyage, of course, the last stanza. The setting suns clothe the fields, the canals—you see, there must always be water, the reflection—clothe the whole town in hyacinth and gold, the world falls asleep in a warm light. But inside the houses, the hearths, it's darkness. You see?
The surface of the dream, ambivalence and ideology 1:08:04 It's on a surface that all this magic occurs. And well, it's this surface, you see, since all these questions hang together—I said there was a connection between Lucile's question and Aurélien's, and I'm still answering Aurélien—well, it's this surface that Novalis glorifies in his Hymns to the Night, because it's in sleep that on this surface, on the black screen of my sleepless nights, so to speak, to sing like Nougaro, all the images of the dream are suddenly projected.
1:08:40 It's not the night of darkness and nothingness. Because physically, in the Newtonian spectrum, black is the absence of all light—black—and white is the presence, the co-presence of all colors at once. It's too much light even to distinguish the colors, you see, you need a prism to separate them. And here, it's neither one nor the other. It's luminosity reflecting itself onto darkness.
1:09:12 But careful, it's the dream. Everything there is deep. I give credit here, you see, to the German Romantics, for the depth of their aesthetics. Political problems are there, but they aren't conscious of it, they believe they are in poetry. Our desires are there. The repressed is there. Because since we're not thinking about it, we don't resist expressing it. We're no longer on our guard. Just as in dreams, since there's no one else present when we dream, are we ever more alone than when we dream.
1:09:45 Socially, I mean, it's not someone external telling you "you're going to dream this or that." So if we dream of this or that, we can only blame ourselves, including when we have nightmares. When we dream we're in some awful nightmare, being chased and unable to flee, paralyzed by some force that keeps us from moving, perhaps there's within us an ambivalence—the desire to flee the danger and the opposite desire, ambivalently, to stay and see what will happen.
1:10:21 Well yes. So there you go. I come back to a very good question from Lucile. The surface would be deeper than it appears because it is a historical production. So, I just made an allusion to reflection, but at an individual level, for pedagogical purposes, I'm doing this to make it understood, right? At a psychoanalytic level, if you prefer. You see, I just gave an example where the dreamer having a nightmare simultaneously wants to flee the danger and yet would also like, wouldn't he, to be prey to that very danger.
1:11:02 which is precisely the mark of an ambivalence, a term taken literally from Freud. But she goes further. She goes as far as what Clouscard calls the unconscious of the unconscious, that which is unconscious even for psychoanalysis, namely the unconscious that belongs to all of us. I don't mean the collective unconscious, to avoid confusion with the unconscious as conflated with Jung's genetics—I'm talking precisely about an unconscious foreign both to Jung and to Freud, but present in Marx.
1:11:42 And which is precisely what he calls ideology. And don't think that ideology in Marx is nothing, that it's secondary, that it's just a tune played on a pipe—well now, to come back to the Germans, you know that German tale where a pied piper draws all the children of the town away. To take revenge for not having been paid when, with his pipe, he had gathered up all the rats infesting the town at the inhabitants' request and had drowned them.
1:12:15 You see, beware of political pipe-playing, beware of the media. I say this because I have never seen such unanimity as at present, and it frightens me. It's been a long time since I've spoken about the war. It's been years since I've been giving lectures which, thanks among others to Pierre-Alain and others, and thanks to you and your attention, get published.
1:12:48 it's been almost ten years now that I've been saying that between crisis and war, one must philosophize. It's urgent. We may no longer have the leisure to philosophize if the war is confirmed. I say this because a great silence surrounds the war. Even, I'd say, within my own camp—I'm not, I'm in no camp, if you will, in the strict sense of "embedded," as American journalists say, referring to how during the Iraq war the Americans embedded them in tanks, etc.
1:13:21 We couldn't wander around freely as journalists without being supervised by the American army. Well, I'm not in a camp in that sense, but even friends who are, broadly speaking, within my sympathies, my political commitments, above all my solidarities, they themselves say "no, believing in war, I don't quite believe in that. watch out, we're staying silent about what makes the most noise."
Landscape is the surface of nature 1:13:51 So, I come back to it—it's the collective side that Lucille has the merit of bringing out in the notion of reflection, for the surface is a historical production, the landscape is—and so she explains what she just said, it seemed difficult, but she comes up with a formula—I'm not here to hand out good and bad marks, but still, I'm bowled over, honestly, by the relevance of her formulation.
1:14:22 The landscape is the surface of nature. The landscape is not nature. Nature is what the physicist knows, what the geologist knows, the volcanologist—vulcanologist, whatever you want to call it—there are sciences that have as their object, it's the astronomer, the astrophysicist, the chemist, the biologist, when he studies extra-human nature and thanks to which we were able to develop a medicine useful to man.
1:14:56 The science of the living, if you prefer, but not living reduced to man, with broader scope. That's what really speaks of nature. Besides, physics—there's a Greek word, physis, which means nature. But the landscape is not that. A Romanesque chapel in a wheat field, there's nothing natural about it. The field is sweat, elbow grease, thought and intelligence. And what to say of the Romanesque chapel? As a fantastic effort—muscular, intellectual, spiritual.
1:15:32 But if I see a wonderful landscape with a forest—that's nature—and then, suddenly, interrupted by a magnificent meadow with a Romanesque chapel in the middle on a little knoll. And someone tells me, well, McDonald's is going to raze that to make a parking lot. I'll sign the petition, I'm more of an environmentalist than you there, but of course, that ecology, I'm for it. But I'm not protecting nature there. I'm protecting the landscape—do you see what Lucille is pointing us back to, and how important it is?
1:16:02 I thank her for having paid attention to this series where I dig into this distinction, which I often sum up in the magnificent formula of one of the most beautiful landscape writers in our literature. I'm thinking of Senancour, a contemporary of Chateaubriand, the generation right after Rousseau. You know I often quote this sentence of his—well, I used to quote it often in this series Nature to Landscape—where he says this season, spring is more beautiful in nature.
1:16:35 But man has done so much—there's history for you—but man has done so much that autumn is sweeter. Let me go on. The landscape—now you understand what she means when she says the landscape is the surface of nature. A produced surface, obviously, a conquest over nature, just as the reflection in Albertine's eyes reflects the historical world surrounding her. Right? This is what she's alluding to here.
1:17:07 How reassuring it is for me to see passages that I think no one will remember, because I say them while speaking, and to understand speech you have to let it flee and fly, as Homer says. And here it is, held onto somewhere. I say that because I have the complex of someone who doesn't write, right? Who doesn't fix the fluidity of speech. And here you are, reacting, proving thereby that this speech hasn't been lost into infinity, as I said earlier about the film projector without a screen—somewhere, that does me a lot of good, and I thank you for it.
Albertine's gaze and the girl with the fruit 1:17:47 And yes, she's alluding to that incredible passage where Proust suddenly crosses eyes—the narrator is very young, he's an adolescent, still too shy to speak to the girls he admires, the young girls he sees on the pier, a group of young girls from a privileged milieu, he says so himself, the class to which they belonged. But yes, yes, Proust, at a certain moment, crosses the gaze of a young cyclist—we'll learn later, much later, that she is Albertine, who will so torment poor Swann—well, poor Swann, poor Swann when Albertine makes him unhappy, nothing worse in life.
1:18:38 He reflects on—not even the gaze, that's already—people often say the eyes are the mirror of the soul, the mirror, the reflection, well, well, popular language knows all that. And yes, it's not the light coming from outside, the eyes reflecting the sunlight dazzling them—no, it's a light that suddenly comes from within, because the gaze suddenly lights up at certain thoughts, certain sensations, impressions, feelings.
1:19:10 And what's magnificent in this passage, and which she remembers very well, is that he says he could never grasp this cyclist if he didn't grasp the sparkle—it's not even the gaze—the sparkle of her eye, right, how does he put it, this reflecting mirror. Or this reflection of what, he says, the plans she has made or that have been made for her, the pastry shops she's going to walk into, the lawns of racetracks, the paths down which this young cyclist would have led me, more seductive to me than the one from Persian paradise.
1:19:57 In other words, it was her whole life that inspired desire in me, a painful desire when I felt it was unrealizable, I don't know, but there it is—and she sees this very well—it's said to be immaterial, right, but there's nothing more material, look at all the historical materiality that such a gaze presupposes. And of course, I'm playing counterpoint to what Serge is saying, I'm still singing along with a slightly offbeat melody, with this reference to Proust that Lucille makes here—leaving the name unspoken, but she remembers it very well, since she speaks of Albertine—I think of Hegel and the fruit-girl.
1:20:38 We were there last time when we dealt with my little work on femininity and community, right, the fruit-girl, of whom Hegel says that the fruits she offers—she doesn't hand them to us, just as a museum doesn't hand us a landscape of, I don't know, the Italian countryside, I'm thinking of Corot for instance—doesn't give us the climate of those lands, the temperature that produced them, the natural conditions—there's something of a reduction, it's a bit disappointing, as if picked fruits were less than fruit on the tree.
1:21:23 But he says, yet in the same way, the young girl is more than her fruits, more than the natural being-there of her fruits, because she synthesizes—look how it works, it's really incredible, we're always within the realm of reflection—she synthesizes in the sparkle of her self-conscious eye all her natural data, in the gesture that offers the fruits. And I had concluded by saying that modern aesthetics is that of museums.
1:21:57 We always have a mediated relation to beauty, whereas the ancients had an immediate relation. We think we're inside it, from time to time we try to escape, especially when on vacation in Greece. But somewhere, we can never again do what—I gave you this example—the painter did, at the very beginning of the Renaissance, Fra Angelico, the Italian painter who painted the Saint and the Virgin on his knees.
1:22:29 His knees bleeding. Because for him, it's at first degree, so to speak. The religious, like the artistic, is at first degree. There you go. So, you see, everything that has been internalized in Albertine's gaze, from her whole life, her whole concrete and collective life, the plans she made or that were made for her—her parents, her friends. Right? He indeed speaks of the paths along which he would have liked to pedal with her.
Interiorization externalized: praxis, nature and history 1:23:00 All that, those paths, they had to be built. The pastry shop she's going to walk into. Someone had to write the history of cakes. Pompe aux arbres, the cakes. Well, she carries on in that vein: a produced surface, obviously, a conquest over nature, just as the reflection in Albertine's eyes reflects the historical world surrounding her. I'm very glad she understood that this historical world isn't merely psychological. It doesn't reflect only Albertine's life, but everything collective that makes Albertine's individual life possible, that surrounds and determines her.
1:23:38 So the reflection would be at the same time—yes, a question mark, I answer yes—an internalization made external. Superb, isn't it? Man internalizing, spiritualizing the natural world—the old opposition between nature and spirit, right? Spirit, the world of history, the city, the pyramids of Egypt—not natural, all that, the palaces of kings, the cathedrals, a simple, magnificent peasant cottage, right?
1:24:14 The beautiful half-timbering of an Anglo-Norman house—I say that because I was there not long ago—all of this is wrested away by labor, by praxis; the natural given must be transformed, without which none of this would be possible. Let's remember, let's be materialists on this point, but if there were only matter without form—matter is given to us by nature, form is given by history, that is, by what began when we left the 100% natural behind, when the artificial began.
1:24:53 Yes, I say that because now it's become pejorative—oh no, I don't know, it's chemical, as if a banana weren't chemical, as if there weren't carbon, sugar, glucose in it—these distinctions are stupid. What people really mean is: don't eat that, it's artificial—but you'd have to admit you're against man, the artificing animal. Let's be clear. So, a fine dialectic of interior and exterior exchanging their functions, you see—man internalizing, spiritualizing, through praxis understood, the natural world, before re-concretizing it in its anthropologized form through praxis—not before, after, the eyelash.
1:25:37 It's praxis that, first of all, produces a world that I can now internalize—literally, even—to furnish the inside of my home; it takes material labor, quite simply, including for each of the objects that are there. It was wrested from the outside and now it's my interior. We're playing with words, of course—there's also interiority in the psychic sense, of course. But this interiority, what action toward the exterior did it take to produce it?
The two senses of dialectic and neopositivism 1:26:09 That's the word she's quite right to use here. This is where I get tangled up. But no, no, Lucille, you've got it, because you bring in—it's not because it seems contradictory that we get tangled up, for reality is dialectical. A little pedagogical aside. Which I thank Lucille for giving me the chance to return to—something I don't do often enough. The word dialectic, throughout the history of thought, has two meanings.
1:26:40 I come back to what I said earlier, there are plenty of meanings. But there are two fundamental ones, mutually exclusive, very different. Sometimes dialectic designates the method—whether good or bad is another matter—but in any case it's spoken of as a method, a path to reach being, the absolute, the true, whatever you like, the real, it being understood that being, the true and the real are not themselves dialectical.
1:27:10 It's only the path leading there. That path being the right one for Plato, and that path being one to avoid for Kant or Aristotle. But in both cases, it's the path. And then there's a second discourse using the word dialectic, which begins with Heraclitus, comes back around Plato's time roughly, and then isn't found again until Hegel, and is then deepened and elevated by Marx—see his preface to the second edition of Capital where he definitively states what sets him apart from Hegel—where here it is said that it's not the path leading to reality, it's reality itself that is dialectical.
1:27:59 You see, in Plato, in the allegory of the cave, there's a whole journey leading from the bottom of the cave toward the sun, toward being, truth, the good. Very well. But once we reach being, truth, the sun, we stop speaking—there's no more logos, no more dialogos, nothing more to say, only to contemplate and to suck in. No, I'm not joking. I'm not joking. Perhaps the most profound passage, just before the allegory of the cave, where Plato says that just as the sun—which for him is the image of the good in the sensible world, equivalent to the good in the intelligible world—just as the sun is what allows the eye to see and the object to be seen, light in general, the sun in particular—it also gives beings growth and nourishment.
1:28:55 So the last stage in Plato is no longer discourse—it's no longer, it's a contemplation, theoria, that's the term he uses, an old Greek verb, theorein, meaning to contemplate, to see, the opposite of acting here. So there you have it: dialectic in Plato is the path leading to being, but once you reach being, there's no more dialectic, no more contradiction, everything is resolved. Whereas in Heraclitus, in Hegel, in Marx, it's being itself that is dialectical.
1:29:26 So, Lucille, you're not getting muddled, you're within dialectical materialism and not within what dominates contemporary ideology—the dominant ideology, not the only one, is not idealism, contrary to what many Marxists keep saying—it's neopositivism. I have nothing against positivism, which was an advance, but neopositivism is a backward step, a regression compared to both positivism and idealism, which Marx sees very well in the Theses on Feuerbach, where he says the merit of German idealism was to have insisted on the activity of the subject—well, well, there we come back to it.
1:30:15 And as for Lenin, we're not going to suspect Lenin of idealism, and yet, when Lenin tackled—I say tackled because frankly, for an autodidact like him, hats off, it's a feat, it's harder—Hegel's Great Logic in his Philosophical Notebooks. The famous passage that has often been commented on, but from which not all the consequences seem to have been drawn. Proof of this is that we keep staging the materialism-idealism face-off in too dichotomous a way, not dialectical enough.
1:30:51 I'm not saying there's no conflict between the two, but this conflict must be dialecticized. Lenin, at the end, reaches the last chapter of Hegel's Logic, titled "The Absolute Idea"—we're far from materialism, apparently. And there he writes—this passage is truly remarkable—it's Hegel's most realist, most materialist passage. This is Lenin continuing: it's contradictory, but it's a fact.
1:31:21 Don't be more Leninist than Lenin, comrades. The dominant ideology, the one that now threatens us, is the one that denies everything that is subject. It's terrifying. It's the world of the mad scientist, without any moral principle, of the one who serves the Pentagon, NASA. NASA is an excellent thing. Except that I've criticized it since it privatized itself, since it hands over—all these discoveries—it subcontracts to the likes of Elon Musk, right?
Relation and substance, quality and quantity 1:31:52 Rich kids, right? Who make people believe they started from nothing, and who have only inherited from slavery and apartheid. Yes, that's where the primitive accumulation happened, look it up. It's family history. So, there you go, bravo, for seeing that there's a dialectic and an exchange of functions between the interior and the exterior, mediated by the movement of history. This is where I get tangled up, because you sometimes bring in the concept of relation. I said it earlier—what makes the liquid gold in the evening on the sea, a certain sunset, is the relation between the light coming from the sun and the reflection of the water which, without that, would be dark.
1:32:36 The same water. It's the meeting of the two that creates, as Baudelaire says, the sun shining on the sea. But yes, it's a relation. But you know, if it can reassure you, I understand why the question of relation bothers you. In fact, you say so yourself, in parentheses: would the reflection be the relation between two phenomena, for example, the sea and the sun, which together form the golden reflection? Are we still talking about the same reflection? You also bring in the sign-meaning pair?
1:33:08 In short, a diagram of all these concepts would be very useful and much appreciated. Thanks in advance. I'm trying my best. And let me come back to it. We're right in the thick of it, with this business of relation. What bothers you is that relation, in logic—when learning logic, beginners, in Aristotle, used to start with logic in the first year. You begin by learning the categories you'll need for whatever problems you're dealing with. And among these categories is substance. And—or the subject, but in the grammatical sense this time, not the subject opposed to the object.
1:33:42 Now, substance is the antonym, the opposite if you prefer, of relation. Left and right belong to the categories of relation. They're not things in themselves. Proof: I turn around and left and right are reversed. Up and down, the same. In New Zealand and here, pointing "up" isn't the same direction—it's actually the opposite direction. Right? That's the world of relation.
1:34:12 On the other hand, what suffices unto itself, what doesn't exist relatively or because it's positioned that way in relation to something else, but suffices unto itself—that's substance. But careful, let's not dream. That doesn't exist anywhere. Or else it's God. It's Spinoza. Spinoza was very consistent when he said that once you've understood the concept of substance as being above all causa sui, cause of itself.
1:34:42 You see, I don't need anything else. Unlike relation, which always needs something to be relative to—up, down, left, right, heavy, light, what does that even mean, right? Cold, hot, what does that mean? For a Russian, it's hot where for an African it's cold. No, I'm not falling into relativism. Beyond that, we're not in science anymore. Science got us out of that. Science never says it's hot, it's cold. It says it's 28 degrees. Hot, cold, that's your business. Ask the Russian, the African, that's a matter of the subject.
1:35:14 But as for the object, right, the air temperature, it's 28 degrees. That's why it annoys me now when I hear: it's 16 degrees, feels like 11. So now we're bringing back what it took centuries to try to get away from—the "feels like." Good grief! Hot, cold, qualities, qualifying adjectives, you learned that in elementary school. Everyone understands that as a child. Oh, mommy, it's boiling. Well, yes, but you don't need to be a great scientist to know what hot and cold are. It took millennia to produce the notion of temperature.
1:35:51 This has been studied in epistemology, right? There it is—the time it took to understand there was a constant relation between the elongation of a column of mercury in a thermometer and the ambient temperature has been studied. And that presupposes a law that wasn't known before, called heat, which is stated as: heat expands bodies. So there, we move from quality to quantity, and we stop making war over whether it's hot or cold.
1:36:21 Mathematics unites men, politics divides them. Thank you very much, Lucille.
