English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Lenin as reader of Hegel's Logic 1:42 But so he places himself, courageously, and rather late, within a tradition — not a mechanistic Marxism of well-intentioned militants who at certain periods were accused of the deviation of philosophism — so I don't know what institutional authority he could have claimed, or what orthodoxy, but here's someone who's not quite the local leftist, since Lenin himself enjoins us to read Hegel, and he doesn't denounce it as philosophism. I'm alluding here to that prodigious reading, a reading you have before your eyes when you read what are called the Notebooks on Dialectics, to sum up Lenin's philosophical writings — when you get to the famous passage where you witness, in real time so to speak, his reading, because it's worth noting that Lenin's text consists of annotations he makes on Hegel's Logic, which he's approaching for the first time in his life.
2:57 He's in Switzerland, he had a bit of free time — yes, you understood well, he's in Switzerland, he escaped just in time to avoid being shot by the most... he'd already had a stay, hadn't he, he took his pseudonym on the banks of a camp, on the banks of the Lena — that's where Ulyanov got the name Lenin. So he's in Switzerland, exiled, stuck, with free time, he who wasn't used to sitting there meditating with a book in hand, as Dominique just said — he had a bit of time for that. You need time, as Aristotle was the first to show, and Hegel pays him homage for it, showing the relationship between theoretical unfolding and material conditions — and here we come right back to the schema of praxis: you need time and leisure to be theoretical. And Hegel often quotes this line of Aristotle's, which he loves: Aristotle says it's in Egypt that mathematics began to develop because there the priestly class enjoyed leisure. Well, he had more leisure than usual.
4:07 Lenin, so, now we can get to the point: who is this Hegel? He's a Marxist, he's read Marx and Engels well, he's read the Russian revolutionaries, the populists, and he knows the utopians by heart — fine, but Hegel is difficult, and on top of that the man is self-taught. Lenin is admirable — the achievement I'm describing to you, if everyone did as much... he's a specialist in praxis, quite so. And at first his comments are harsh — he tries, he already talks about God on the third page, well, he recites what he believes to be his Marxist catechism, a visitor to the philosophy of the plume of the people. And then, as the pages go on, you see him going quite well, very well, superb, excellent — bim bam, sometimes he writes bim bam, no but I'm quoting, an exclamation point meaning: well hit back at the opponent, etc. And let's get to the essential, at the end — that's important, to go all the way to the end, when he reaches the end, the most difficult part, the chapter on the Absolute Idea at the end of the Great Logic — by the way he notes in the margin that this passage should be called 'the best way to get a headache.'
5:18 He says at one point — and he boxes it, so important is it to him, he boxes it in his notes, you have to see the facsimile manuscript, it was done, it used to be published by Éditions Sociales — this passage on the Absolute Idea is remarkably outstanding: we might think this is where he'll be harshest, the Absolute Idea, so idealism — and yet it's remarkably outstanding, colon: it's Hegel's most idealist and most materialist passage, it's contradictory but it's a fact. Secondly, but as you'll see, every four pages here, of mutual implication or reciprocal engendering — that expression comes up often — between matter and mind, he's in the same wake, we're validating this. And Lenin adds: all those who have read Marx before — I'll read this — the Plekhanovs, the Bukharins, no, simpler than that — have not understood Marx, because to understand the whole of Marx's Capital, says Lenin, you have to understand the whole of Hegel's Logic.
6:32 And that work has never been done, because there are always urgent matters, the fight going on — the time of theory is a time of detour, a slow, roundabout time — a detour reminiscent of Plato, the passage at the beginning of the Republic, at the beginning of book 2, on what should be done to improve cities — we're all in agreement, we'll come to an agreement, and then, in order to settle the question of how to help the city, Glaucon takes far too long to pose that question, and in the end the whole philosophy curriculum goes by, and that's when he says: but if I understand my comrade correctly, he's going to make us take an immense detour here — and that detour is the very history of reflective thought, of philosophy, which, I remind you tonight, is political at the outset and political on arrival, even in Plato's case. So I'd like to hand it over to the floor now, because there are other points that will come back, but I think through your questions, through discussion — the book is so rich and abundant — I wanted nonetheless to introduce its contextualization, and the first philosophical problematic is that of the opposition to a contemporary danger of re-fascization, if not through ontology, through a reactionary invocation.
Wresting ontology from Heidegger 7:43 I quote you these words on ontology, and he could have concluded — I'm going to conclude now, over to you — with this little fall: one might conclude from this that not doing ontology... ontology is reactionary. No — ontology has to be wrested from Heidegger's hands. It's not about abandoning his so-called outdated metaphysics — this reminds me of the battle in the 1960s of philosophy against the human sciences, where philosophy was attacked for metaphysicism, which was somewhat rigorous when you see the state the two are in now — philosophers now, in three letters, I'd say in five — and the state of the human sciences, scattered, everyone wanting whatever they want — count how many 'fields' there are in Bourdieu, here's a little exercise for the holidays if you can find your way through it. So they escaped totality — well, that's what it got them — but look what's left, no more totality when there's no more state, no more borders, there's nothing left but the people of Daesh playing football with severed heads. That's what not liking limits looks like, nor...
Questions from the audience: an unfinished book and praxis 8:53 ...totality, but who loves chaos, and also from a certain point of view — and when it comes to those who love chaos in economics, in the social sphere, that's finance — those who love chaos with severed heads, that's already more worrying. And so the re-fascization I'm talking about, you can well imagine it's not some imagery, it's not some little Nazi about to pop up out of nowhere, hidden away — there are serious things happening in eastern Europe, dangerous for humanity — dangerous just for me or for a few committed people, that wouldn't be serious. If I may, to kick off the debate, because I'd like you to bring another conclusion — I take the liberty of asking, since we talked about it beforehand, the purpose being to serve as a propaedeutic element to properly grasp the book. To re-explain, as you mentioned at the start, that it's almost a work in progress that, for lack of time, Clouscard wasn't able to finish putting into final form — we're starting to see elements of a critical apparatus that should be very important.
10:09 Since it's in a way a whole that will be mentioned just as a warning to the reader — it's already more or less present in the preface, but I think it needs to be stressed, because the book, for all the reasons you've mentioned — but perhaps it needs emphasizing for people who are about to start reading it — that's what gives it a rather off-putting side. You mentioned my first feeling — that's not the word I would have used, I'd have said a somewhat discouraging side at first, a dense text. Yes, you're right, a bit dense, off-putting — no, it's not boring, or at least not for every reader, for those used to a more sociological style it's a bit difficult, because the formalism hasn't been smoothed out the way it usually is, even with Clouscard, even in his rather abrupt style — and here it's simply because he didn't have the time, so it's not really a question, it's just — he brought everything to bear, if you could confirm that. The second question was about the return to praxis, because you mentioned it a bit in...
11:19 ...your presentation, but to justify it a bit more, or say a bit more about the content — what can we expect from the book, as you mentioned, you concluded on Lenin, indeed a great notorious champion of praxis — playing a little extension after that fall, so justify the fact that Edmond spoke a bit himself in his presentation, but it seems to me it remains a bit abstract, perhaps for people, for the audience who don't know Paris, praxis — they'll discover it here, in any case in the video, and it should make them want to talk about it only negatively — well, to read the book, to reintroduce this notion of praxis, I propose we do that, but you may have a completely different idea. No, but before the discussion, it's that Leninist praxis, of 'what is to be done,' of moving from 'what should I do' to 'what is to be done' concretely — that's it, and Clouscard adds in this very interesting work 'to make oneself' — youth smokes — so that's where I was, so you pick up the thread — and I have the sense of excusing Clouscard for doing philosophy.
The three powers of spirit and the tool 12:34 ...of placing himself in Hegel's wake — through the damage done, the boom of publications on Marx thanks to the crisis, even though it hadn't had such abundance, even if a lot of those publications hover a bit around the theory of value, trying to scratch at it in passing — well, why not, these aren't sacred things — but Clouscard isn't in those debates around the theory of value, which seem the most topical part of Marx today, and in a few... it's not a step backward, it's a regression, no — but to come to praxis, I confess, Hegel and praxis — yes, it's the Hegel they've hidden from you, you see, Hegel hasn't yet written the Phenomenology, so this goes back a long way, it's two years before, 1805, but it's the first work where his system begins — for me it's when he becomes conscious of the systematicity in his thought, and he hasn't yet separated from Schelling, he's redoing a bit of the history of philosophy, he's examining what he calls the three powers of spirit — triadic, as everything in Clouscard is, a division into three — the distinctions of being, subject, and praxis, and there he speaks of the three powers of spirit, telling you right away a very precise term.
13:50 Power — a term he still owes at that time to his friend Schelling — power here in the Aristotelian sense means the three roots, if you prefer, the three conditions of possibility without which spirit would never have appeared. Spirit — we're not in Marx, we're not in Lenin, we're not in class struggle. So what are the three powers for spirit to appear, for Hegel? Language, first; memory, mother of language, no wait — language, relation — there we fall from the sky — and the tool. But what kind of philosopher is this, who, for the first time in 2,000 years, since the appearance of philosophy, suddenly comes out with two such crude and dirty things as the tool, the productive force, as we'll soon say in Marxist terms — the tool, a hoe, I don't know, a trowel — the tool as a power of spirit? How, me, a German Romantic, are you telling me it took a trowel to make my spirit, my sublime interiority? That's not possible, this smells of the mob, of the masses. Well, not only does he say that, but he announces what...
15:10 ...I just called — and this is where we come back to — the reciprocal engendering of spirit and matter, of cause and effect, and all the dichotomies in which we're still locked, as if dialectics had never existed — reciprocal engendering. Clouscard, yes, but of these categories I just opposed, in particular spirit and matter here — and he says this about the tool, the instrument, here it is: the instrument is the existing rational middle term, the existing universality — and this, under Hegel's pen, that's dense — it means it's no longer a project in my head, it's what Marx would say afterward, distinguishing right away — it's a well-known passage — the most inept of architects from the most industrious of bees: what distinguishes them right away is that the architect has his house in his head before realizing it in reality, he doesn't just unroll a program, a kind of perpetual present — so indeed a plan beforehand, but...
16:25 ...well, we don't live in the house that's in my head, we don't live in the house on the architect's blueprint, just as we don't take a nap in the shade of an acorn but of an oak, not of the potential-oak. And this is for those who think that the in-itself holds everything — so the rigid — well, when it exists three times over, it's because with the tool, what I had in my head, the form, has passed into the real, and that's — think of the chipped flint — he's not talking about Taylor and the industrial world, which he's the first to see coming and which he encounters in this work, with — oh, I shouldn't have told you that — he doesn't say whose it is, of course it's mine — the instrument, and, I repeat the phrase, is the existing rational middle term, the existing universality of the practical process — that gives me the Kantian practical reason of morality — of the practical process, it appears on the side of what is active, the worker, facing what is passive, the worked object, and so three things: the active worker, the passive object which...
17:36 ...lets itself be worked, and between the two, the most important for Hegel, the middle term, precisely the tool. And you'll see that the tool sends these two extremes back to back — it appears on the side of the active, facing the passive, yet it is itself passive, the instrument — look how nuanced this is: considered from the side of the worker, it's active, the instrument is at once passive and active — active toward the worked object, it is that in which labor's permanence resides. That's exactly what is said here, the foundations of ontology — praxis was needed for existence to appear. Well, yes, I don't have being, because we'll see afterward that Clouscard reserves 'being' in the general sense for a stage prior to anthropology, being in the raw, ordinary sense, and of nature in particular — yes, we can call it becoming, whatever you like, but there's not yet, not yet, existence properly speaking, precisely because there hasn't yet been man. And I can anticipate what follows, but there, I mean, I...
18:46 ...am quoting a text which, you see, for the first time in the history of thought, integrates material production in the most technical, most economic, almost the most praxical sense of the term — he goes even further here, in a debate of ideas that went unnoticed — moreover the Phenomenology will take this up again and show that not only the instrument, but the struggle between the one who possesses the instruments, the tools, the weapons in particular — master and slave — will be decisive for the formation of societies. You see, this won't fall on deaf ears, at least not for someone who's going to say that class struggles are the motor of history — master and slave, you see, we're not far from that here. There, I'll let you have that digression, because there was praxis before Marx and before — just to corroborate what you're saying, and to add a layer to it, it fits nicely, it's on the back cover, so I'll read it to you: 'The real as a corollary of praxis, and the most radical proposition of the concept of praxis: it...
Reality as a construction of praxis 19:57 ...cannot be reduced to any realism of time and space. The real is a construction; it does not rely on a rationality that would be external to praxis and independent of it. It is the identification of a duration born from labor and a chronology which is nothing other than the shaping of production. Praxis is the measure of all things' — that is to say, rationality only exists because there is praxis, so it exists, that fits perfectly, it goes very well with the quotations I'm about to read, and I imagine we'll move on and hand the floor to the audience, but I'd like to reassure right away any potential reader who might be interested in the book, who might want to read it more closely: don't think we're only going to talk about pulleys, tools, and machines — there are the longest developments on music and the constitutive role of rhythm in the emergence of man in this work, never has Clouscard gone so far, developed things so elaborately in the sphere traditionally reserved for aesthetics — but he pushes it very far, in fact there's a chapter called 'aesthetics of praxis' — never has his...
21:11 ...developments on rhythm, music, and — seduction, already seduction — ever reached such proportions, as if he were waiting for the very end to give us, as he himself says, the flower of civilization. So, if there are no immediate questions... I had a complementary one — no one seems ready — well then, I'll think about it, sorry — pardon — going back to the discussion, and I think it's important sometimes to return, for us today too, to what Clouscard brings — we just talked about it — that at a time when we constantly talk about the construction of the self by nature itself, etc., he restores the construction of an individual as a social being through praxis — that's it, I think that's something important to bring up, and that's why it's interesting to read, to read it today. And secondly, on the more political terrain, broadly speaking, there's the fact of distinguishing but not separating theory from...
There is neither action nor identity in nature 22:22 ...practice, and as Lenin rightly says, without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice. I think it's important to insist on that sound principle today, in this period of permanent contemporary nihilism, where there's a construction — well, we talk less and less about construction, about praxis, and it's the return to naturalism — if I may pick up on one element of the question, that we're being pushed toward personal fulfillment, 'take care of yourself, my friend,' lost causes have fallen by the wayside — the fact that there isn't really — I wake up — but the fact that there is precisely this negation of history and negation of praxis, as if everything had suddenly fallen from the sky, and it's either naturalist... it's this place, precisely, I think that's why it's interesting, but there's even — you just spoke of it, actually, in the example, and the many examples you gave with the story of the acorn and the oak — yes, because not everything comes from some deep, essential self. No, but that makes us think of a problem of extreme...
23:35 ...topicality too, both sociological and political — that of so-called identity. So, could you — could you give us a mediation with what that gives in praxis in the Clouscardian sense, all the more so since in this work there is a genuine constructivist construction of identity, showing that it is certainly not original, that it comes late — identity, nature doesn't have it — could you develop that? Yes, and in relation, obviously — this is so enormous, this is right in the heart of dominant naturalist ideology — that's why I come back to this, by analogy I recall something Clouscard would have agreed with, not so long ago, when I say, in a way that seems a bit brutal but is scientifically accurate: there is no action in nature, except metaphorically of course. I mean, when I say 'the wind bends the trees,' I mean — any schoolteacher will say the trees are bent by the wind, the trees as the complement of the agent, not the wind is active, the trees are passive — in fact this is an illusion...
24:50 ...of language and grammar. You know very well, from a scientific point of view, the wind is no more active, no more spontaneous — there's no soul of the wind blowing like that over the branches; the wind itself is, in fact, exactly like the bending branches, an effect of differences between cold and warm air, which are themselves effects of different pressures, and so on, in the endless chain of causes and effects in space-time. So I mean, there are no acts — we're covering, and all the mediations are in this book, but I have to summarize, if I don't quote it, I won't get through it, of course, and I'm also warning you about the way he proceeds — but it's just to say, I don't want to give away the name, but I just wanted to make clear that if I'm asking you these questions, it's to help make clear — I know readers dread digressions and future readers — no, but there's a theory of the detour, the detour isn't a problem — it's to make clear what Clouscard is going to talk to us about in this work. I know that in Belgium there's a Marxist cell that was founded following the video, which was kind enough to film it, and they named their cell 'the revolutionary detour.' Well, no, but you're quite right about identity.
26:02 No, we said, we said this was the demiurgic aspect of praxis, that is to say that it's praxis, he says it, praxis is the measure of all things — that is to say, indeed, the real, thought, the subject itself, it's praxis that is matricial. Yes, of course, but I wouldn't want anyone to think that means a symphony by Mozart and a bic pen are on the same plane just because both are made of praxis — that's abstractly true, you see what I mean, it doesn't define values — and this claim is already in Marx, I mean, fundamentally — but let me come back to identity because it's important. At the start, when I say there's no act in nature, that means no identity can appear there either — it's for us that there's this thing called a mountain, and this thing called — but that's in human language. You know what a peneplain is in geography — there are some in the Massif Central — a peneplain is a plain resulting from the leveling of an enormous mountain that once stood above it, but which erosion razed — precisely a tabula rasa — to make it a plain. And a peneplain in our time...
27:17 ...our fast time, us, human passengers on Earth, compared to geological time — we clearly distinguish, apparently, you see, two different identities, the plain and the mountain. In geological time, you would see the mountain do this, sped up — sped up, you'd see the mountain do this — there aren't two objects, there aren't two identities, it's the same identity evolving, these are two moments of the same identity. There is no identity in nature, there is only otherness — nature is the absolute being-other of each thing to itself, because the cork is outside the bottle, it's outside itself. But Hegel says somewhere that death is the immediate being-there of nature — troubling, you only find that in him — at that moment, death is the being-there become immediate — but that means we can only speak of nature as the other, we're dead there, we're in immediate contact. There, from the moment we're alive, we have mediations, precisely what Clouscard develops over 60, 300, however many — well it's not serious, I wanted to say all of it, six hundred, two hundred pages — well, almost 300 pages where he develops all these mediations that we believe to be natural. He indeed says, for example, when he speaks of praxis, I...
28:28 ...am not talking about technical acts, that is, what we do that unfolds in space and time and which are modifications of a being that would already be there — man — to which praxis comes to add something. He's talking about what constitutes anthropology itself, what predetermines it, if you will — and fortunately so, he says, because you might say, but that's a frightful determinism, this thing — wasn't it enough that I'm determined by nature, since every day I'm hungry, and that's not something I decided, I have to eat to live, it's not you who decreed the law. No, but there are those who think we're freer in nature than in society — I find that strange, given that there are laws with no exceptions, I can't transgress them, whereas a red light, if there's no cop, if it's two in the morning, nothing stops you — it doesn't kill you, you might say, but you can run it. It's not that you must, it's not that you should — that's where the difference lies, but you can. So this business of identity is crucial, because the notion of identity is linked — you can well imagine, philosophically speaking — to a unity that is already necessary though not sufficient to create the notion of identity.
The unit of measure, a human conquest 29:41 Now, the notion of unity is another conquest of man, a noble conquest, I'd say. What's more arbitrary than the centimeter, the gram, the second — in short, the unit of measure? For example, what's arbitrary is that we impose on a reality that isn't at all prepared, linked to measure or to identity, an order which is the order of measurement. And as you know, there is science only of the measurable — not of the measured, contrary to what's often said, which is ridiculous — but of the measurable, of what can lend itself to measurement. So if you like, the length of this book is absolutely indeterminate from a strictly material point of view — for our everyday use, that's fine, it's such-and-such centimeters, I move on. But look closely — if you look under an electron microscope, and an electron is doing this, it doesn't have a fixed length, it's constantly moving, it's in Heraclitus's panta rhei, everything flows, so go put a measure on that! Well, man has arbitrarily settled on the meter, which is kept at the Sèvres museum, the museum of weights and measures — it's not that this is the true definition of the meter, it's just the one that's there, because at the equator it's a bit smaller, and then measurements are taken...
30:52 ...whether with a meter, with angstroms, whatever you like, becquerels — these are units of measure. So there is no act in nature, there is no identity — so either there's no identity at all, that's the skeptics' position, or if there is one, it can only fall, like a girl, from above, that is, from history in relation to nature. And to come back, to conclude on this point, to the conception — which interests many people especially today — of identity, that is, the identity of the subject, the joy, the pleasure, the happiness of being at ease with oneself, becoming oneself, as Attali would say, the joy of the pleasure of becoming oneself, finally being oneself — well, that's the whole personal-development discourse, and it should be essential, and it falls within the field, in relation to the earlier reflection, of what people call philosophy. So if we confuse that with the seasons, then he opposes the acorn and the oak to praxis in a political conception — that's also something present in Clouscard's thinking, of course.
32:03 Of course, and could we talk about the revolutionary character, precisely, since you started on that, of this whole genealogy, and the character that will rely on praxis — that is, the party, it's the oak that gives me shade, and I'm not going to be especially grateful to the acorn from way back — well, you have to keep it, otherwise there'll be no oak, right — well, that's better, to clarify in Clouscardian terms what I just said, I feel I could go on to a completely different question — no, but that's exactly why I insisted on Clouscard's recourse to Hegel, because he himself is clandestine in a way — through what you're saying, we understand better the solitude I alluded to earlier, which wasn't psychological, we see it well in political terms — he raises enormous unspoken issues by doing ontology, by putting praxis at the heart of what seems most intimate, most ineffable, most unsayable: subjectivity. Well, I'm not saying anything about that, and especially not Clouscard, who attaches enormous importance to the highest forms of subjectivity, but if they...
33:13 ...claim Hegel, it's not for the Hegel who was an arch-administrative Prussian, with his — no, it's for the Hegel who says this — look, because this is incredible, that in these — the Marxist theology — we haven't kept — this is a veritable Marxist manifesto: 'Consciousness will determine its relation to the other-being, to its object, differently depending on the degree at which the world-spirit finds itself in becoming conscious of itself. How the world-spirit finds and determines itself immediately is what consciousness does immediately, and how it determines its object at each degree, or how it is for-itself, depends on what it has already become in-itself' — it's underlined already — 'become.' The real must already have moved for this subjectivity to appear — hardly clearer, barely clearer, about the relationship between world and self. Yes, so I like your question about identity, because it's an eminently dialectical notion, because it contains a thing and its opposite. Let me dig further now into the philosophical status of identity — there is at once unity, I said it, but not only that, it's not a positive unity, because otherwise it...
Exclusive identity and apartheid 34:27 ...wouldn't be an identity — an identity must be exclusive. Spinoza saw this when he said all determination is negation: to affirm a field, you have to make a forest disappear, or drain a marsh — you can't have, in that same space, both the forest that was there and the field I'm cultivating at the same time. There you see that action separates, action is not innocent, and Hegel says somewhere that not even a child — only the stone is innocent, the moment you desire, from the moment of pursuit, you're implicated, involved, no cause for celebration in the hunt. But it's important to see right away how much the very notion of identity contains both identity and difference at once — I must be able to oppose myself to the other, anyone who has raised children knows this, but it's not just a stage where they can only assert themselves by opposing themselves, even when they've had — that's the paradox of the conception of ident— sorry for this aside, but I'm going to insist on it because it's very much of the moment, and the confusions that reign — the paradox is that there's, among many aspects, a reception one can give to identity which is in reality exactly the opposite, since it is...
35:39 ...invoked not in order to identify myself by excluding the rest, but in order to identify myself with others — there's a big misunderstanding there too, because in reality it's the fundamental principle of internal contradiction that underlies this conception — sorry, of logical internal contradiction — since I am going to be at once myself, unique, my own property, and at the same time I claim to be identical to others, and I find myself in a logical impasse from the moment this is my essential determination, in a certain way, when I posit the other negatively — so in the case of exclusive unity, I also identify with the other, since I need him in order to posit myself; in the end, whether I posit myself negatively or positively in relation to him, in both cases I need him. So the relation to the other is already included in exclusive unity. But give me an example — if I take, let's say, in Côte d'Ivoire, how much, I mean, I was doing a bit of history-geography, for example...
36:49 ...the history of timing, by way of philosophy, to determine by moments — it was time and the subject, it was the hot subject of apartheid, in Côte d'Ivoire at that time, I recall that Houphouët-Boigny had been the first head of state to engage in dialogue with the apartheid racists, which people didn't say to his face critically — well, and there was an indicator in each class, we don't visit a single-party regime while making remarks — we talked about Rousseau, but I remember we were talking about apartheid, and I asked them for the definition — almost all the students, the Ivorians too, the older ones since we were in the final year — repeated to me what they'd heard on RFI, that apartheid was 'separate development,' the diplomatic, political formula of the time, for whites and blacks. I said, well, if that's it, it doesn't exist — everyone in the class was stunned that I was saying it didn't exist — 'do you realize the suffering of our brothers' — I said, but I never said it wasn't serious, I said that as you're formulating it, it doesn't exist, and I get to what you're saying, because Mister Kruger, who owns a De Beers mine...
38:00 ...that's where I'm going with this — he loves the coloured men, the natives as they're called, so much, he loves them so much, he can't do without them so much, that as soon as he needs work done, funnily enough, he calls them — there's no more separate development, do you agree? If there had been white owners of mines with white miners underneath, and black owners of mines with black miners underneath, that would be separate development, to each their own taste. No, it's that they can't do without each other, as you say, it's in order to be myself, Mister Kruger, that I need to consume the substance of millions of workers of another color. For this I refer you to an admirable dramatic illustration, this time theatrical, a masterpiece too, by an author we often talked about in avant-garde theatre alongside Ionesco and Beckett — I mean Arthur Adamov, who fell into oblivion the moment he joined the Communist Party — at the time everyone deserted him, in short he wrote a play called 'La Politique des restes' ('The Politics of Leftovers'), which tells the story of an Afrikaner, as they say, like millions of whites of the... but who has himself treated...
39:16 ...by a psychiatrist, why, because he has a pathology — as soon as he sees leftovers, ash in an ashtray, dregs of wine at the bottom of a glass, you see, a bizarre pathology, leftovers on a plate — and one day, his houseboy wants to empty the trash, trips in the living room and spills the garbage. That's the last straw — the other man takes his gun and kills the boy — it's too much, too much, it's too much, and the play is the trial of this man, and it's magnificent how, over the course of the trial, the leftovers, the garbage, this teeming mass of eighty percent — sorry, eighty percent — of natives, as he calls them, which unconsciously was behind him, left behind, was his own substance, his own leftovers. Magnificent, 'La Politique des restes' answers your question about identity well, and corroborates what you're saying: that identity — you're not saying it doesn't exist, I'm not a skeptic — French identity, that's nonsense, whatever you like, I'd rather be a skeptic than someone who talks about French identity as if it were blue eyes or blond hair — it's always still tied to a praxis, that's said in — I was going to...
Aragon, the triad of identity, being and added value 40:28 ...say it has no meaning otherwise, of course, of course — there's play on this, since we're talking about French identity, I refer you to a very beautiful text by Aragon, the introduction to 'La Diane française,' a collection of poems well known from the Resistance — I was mistaken, no it's the same theme but it's not about being French, excuse me, it's 'La Leçon de Ribérac,' a text called 'La Leçon de Ribérac,' about an Occitan poet whom Aragon knew well, from the 12th century — one of the troubadours, and it recounts how French unity was made, for Aragon — how the fusion took place between this barbarous, Germanic north with the langue d'oïl, and this south, which had already had writing, written law — and it was through language, and through extraordinary policing, that the models of culture had to be unified, in the literal, agricultural sense. It's a remarkable text, read 'La Leçon de Ribérac' on that level — but yes, of course, so I'm not against the notion of identity as such — dogmatic, first thesis, dogmatic identity.
41:40 There, German identity, that's blue eyes — no, that's Hitler — no, it's not that it's blue, it's all the — well written, Göring anyway — well, that's the thesis, the easy antithesis — antithesis, I mean identity doesn't exist, that's the skeptic. So let's not be lazy, let's take a third step: identity exists as the result of a process, always linked to the conditions of that result, that is, capable of evolving. There, Clouscard spends his time identifying concepts that are opposed, or antinomies that seem irreducible, so he's well placed — there's a long chapter on the notion of identity in the logical sense, very good, and identity in the phenomenological sense, the one that concerns us with French identity, identity of two, of a person, of my own — as you feel like saying, well, cultural, whatever you want, I mean — there's a very good passage where he shows how the mediation of the passage of the individual, in the biological sense of the term, and of...
42:55 ...praxis, was needed, which will add to biological time what he calls, in a magnificent way — and this is in fact the title the book could have had, you can guess what I mean — he says this book could have been titled 'Being and Surplus Value' — we wait for being, these profound things, and you, the oak and the acorn, there, being — I might take another example — 'Being and Surplus Value' means that the appearance of man immediately induces a surplus, an added value, in relation not to natural activity — I said there wasn't any — but in relation to the natural process, which is repetitive. And I wanted to ask you whether you think Clouscard wrote this book with a social outcome in mind, how would you see the articulation between this detour — whether through ontology of Heidegger, of course, the ontology of social being and of praxis — how, if you like, does he do this, what's the articulation between this detour through ontology and...
From the ontological detour to the social outlet 44:09 ...what he sets as his target, namely social grounding. I'll complete the question by simply telling you, since you have limited time, because time is running out, and there's this necessity of praxis — this vast question should be dealt with hastily, you mean, roughly, whether there was a target structure — I'm not sure whether others... what I want to know is whether what's proposed throughout these books, that is, well, indeed we'll get to earthly matters, we'll end with the brokers, etc. — why this detour through ontology in the end, and does the development of praxis imply, if you like, a social outcome — the fact of, how do you say, sorting out what praxis is, for example, in what way it can lead to social progress, the fact that there's only good news compared to the impasses we're locked into today, how the individual is locked into his personal development — it's extraordinary, the liberating things there are here, there's a war against political...
45:23 ...correctness, where the locks are placed to keep us from seeing beyond, it's true that we stay within a single model — to finish quickly on the current situation on this question, I mean, it's limited, I mean, they're asking Greece to leave the euro because it's unthinkable that any model other than the all-market model — because we've had to, we can't do it — it's extraordinary, we've said what we could about it — a question closely connected to what Loïc was saying, who was diagnosing alienation through the delegation of the production process, so is it precisely this detour, yes, all done to de-alienate, so that each person finds their place, recognizes themselves, precisely in the sense of delegation, and thus of the social outcome — that's why I insisted there was a development on music and rhythm, that appeals to a lot of people who don't even...
46:35 ...think of themselves as Marxists, don't even think of themselves as political, so it's a very great opening — but it will require, and if I may, I'll conclude on this, complementary work, and price collectives including editorial and conceptual ones — it's a working basis, at the same time as the public, especially the young people who have a whole life ahead of them, I tell them: prepare the critical edition, the pre-critique of the next edition. As a conclusion, to take up what you mentioned at the beginning, since we come back to the situation which, in certain respects, after this detour, this era, and Being and Nothingness, and Sartre's commentaries, and Clouscard's response — could you recall it in conclusion? Yes, indeed, there's a hubris to it, I accept that, but it's an effect of the misfortune of the times — the intellectual who tackles such problems can only be isolated, but as for teamwork, I ask for nothing better, send them to me, that's it — it's not by choice that I'm alone.
47:46 I'm a social being myself, send me the teams — there, so that's the age I'm counting on, philosophy workshops, it's up to you now. Thank you, Dominique.
