English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The distinction between the State and the State apparatus 0:00 That's Putin, right there! Action. Restricted action, as Mallarmé says. So, a distinction that we have often developed.
0:30 and dug into — when I say we, I'm thinking of Michel Clouscard — it's the distinction between the state and the state apparatus. I'm surprised this distinction hasn't become a commonplace in political philosophy. I know there are plenty of shops that teach, at university level — I'm not even talking about political science, sciences po, which is almost an antiphrasis when you hear what goes on there. No, I'm surprised this distinction hasn't become almost a commonplace.
1:08 So much does it become unavoidable, when you look closely, for untangling the traps in which most discussions get stuck that circle around, roughly, the state, our relationship to the state. Ah! The state, that's what must be brought down. There are people who claim to follow Marx to say that, you know. There are plenty of pages of Marx that can corroborate that, especially the young Marx, you'll notice. Already the more experienced Marx, who had completed the essential — well, completed, he never finished anything — but who had made considerable progress in his theoretical work, I'm thinking of the one contemporary with Capital, with the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
1:56 That Marx, when he writes that political gem — this time not just theoretical — which is the Critique of the Gotha and Erfurt Programmes, a critique addressed to the far left of the time, right? Which tended to forget what — precisely. Let me give you an example, because I'm afraid this may sound abstract given the gravity of what's at stake, I'll try to be concrete. In their program, the good social democrats, as they were called at the time, who were something of the avant-garde back then, German, had said: we must restore to the workers the entirety of the wealth produced by Capital.
2:41 Oh really, says Marx? The entirety. To the workers. So those who don't work — retirees, children — we drop them. That doesn't work. Already, you have to deduct from the collective pot. We'll get to the state. You have to deduct enough to pay pensions. Our elders — that's essential after all. If we're here, it's because they produced value. So you can't give everything back to the workers.
Private property and the state forest 3:16 Because you also have to pay, to help finance their health, social security. You don't give everything back. So I'll get more and more concrete, and afterward we can extract whatever concepts we want. I go for a walk in the forest in autumn. You can guess I'm looking for mushrooms.
3:48 It's a joy. It's not a chore. The smell of humus, the rot — well, I won't start again. It's like the perfume that stinks. Must be remembered. It's curious that we love it. The smell of leaves decomposing. Come on, that's not another topic tonight. All the charm of autumn — I won't draw you a picture, everyone knows it. And it's a relief from the heat we've been suffering lately. Bang. And there I am, arriving in front of a little wall. I see a sign, it says 'Private property, mushroom picking forbidden.'
4:22 There, I understand very well what that means, private. And it means: 'Get lost, I'm depriving you of your mushrooms. This is my place. Why not?' I'm not playing the anarchist. I say 'Fine, I bow out.' That's the private. It's the very opposite of the state. Private property. It's not the public. Private, public. You see, it's concrete. And then I go, you know, I like to go toward Nerval's country, because it's not far from Paris.
4:54 The autumns there are magnificent. There are plenty of mushrooms. The forests. Forest of Chantilly, forest of Senlis, forest of Pontarmé, forest of Halatte, forest of Ermenonville. And there I see written 'State forest of Chantilly.' What does 'state' mean there? It means I can go in, so can you. It's ours. So the state, that's also that. The state isn't only the one who forbids me, who puts a ticket on my windshield because I'm badly parked.
The oppressive State and the contradiction of the notion 5:30 It's not the one who declares war without asking my opinion and without consulting parliament. It's today that they decided, at the NATO summit, to increase military spending of the world's richest countries by 5% against a country that never attacked us. On the contrary, that saved our honor. If we're not under the Nazi boot, it's because 30 million Popovs died. Soviets.
6:00 Because it wasn't only Popovs. There were Tungus, Chukchi, Chechens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks. Do you know the song 'La Butte Rouge'? For the bandits who cause wars never die, only the innocent are killed. Some people don't know these classics.
6:30 It's not the young people's fault, their inheritance was stolen from them. But still, for others who don't have the excuse of youth — you know Prada, who doesn't know Prada. Who doesn't know Porsche. Those were Nazi companies, I mean, that fully backed the Nazi regime. They've never done so well. For the bandits who cause wars never die, only the innocent are killed. You think I wasn't talking about current events?
7:05 Sorry, but coffee is an excellent remedy against the heatwave. I'm not a doctor, check anyway. So, the state — I too often think there are too many states. So the anarchist, the libertarian, will say we must get rid of it, there are too many states. Me, what I like is free freedom, as Rimbaud said back when he was in revolt. A period he would laugh at two years later, because he — evolutions that take each of us a lifetime — it took him two years to go from the rebel to the revolutionary who says what foolishness that was.
7:45 Speaking of his revolt, what foolishness. That was A Season in Hell — don't just take my word, read it, it's not long. The state has two meanings. Sometimes it's oppression, that's true. I was talking about war. You have all those laws that suddenly decide to cut school curricula down to the bare minimum, so that teachers don't even have a choice and they're always in the wrong facing parents, facing the administration, and facing the students — the teacher is always wrong.
8:28 Yes, I know, I know. People on the right, they don't like teachers because of that, because they pass things on. So those who want it to stay among themselves, you see, the 'real values' — those people don't like teachers. They don't like sharing. Communists, at one time, were called the 'sharers.' Right-wing people called them the sharers. I remember when I was in the Drôme, a rural region, at election time you'd see a vulture with the hammer and sickle in black, like that, above a flock of sheep.
9:02 It said: the communists are going to take your land. Result: they have no land left. The communists were never in power, but the land is gone. And the peasants left for the city. You know the rest. So, that's three times I've interrupted myself, this time I'll continue. The state has two meanings. No, not just different — I'm not making a distinction here. I'm showing a contradiction in the notion of the state.
9:33 which can mean A and not-A, if I'm speaking to people with mathematical training. Whereas in principle it's either A or not-A, you can't be both. Yes — the state is both, if you don't specify. In everyday language, we don't specify. So the libertarian will say we're fed up with the state, I come back to it. Ah, the state, neither God nor Caesar — you don't know that saying? Except the MEDEF says the same thing. There's too much state, too many regulations, too much administration, we can't exploit as we please.
The State apparatus: police, army, secrecy 10:04 You see how it is? It's not simple. So, come on, to clarify — because we need clarity, univocity, for things this important — I return to my example of mushroom picking. State forest of Ermenonville means: you, her, him, me, us — it increases our freedom. There we can go into the forest. There's no sign saying 'private property, mushrooms forbidden.'
10:37 And then there's the state that, on the contrary, oppresses. That's not the state. That's where I propose the distinction to you. It's the state apparatus. The police, the army, the justice system, the advisers, the cabinets of the various ministers, those who talk among themselves about things that are never public — no, I'm serious. Take Churchill, a statesman if ever there was one, don't be flippant, given the era he lived through and of which he was one of the main actors.
11:11 Churchill said: if citizens knew what we talk about among ourselves — we, the leaders, the bosses, the governors, the ministers — they would come to Buckingham Palace to hang us. That's not some communist who said that, Churchill, anticommunist if ever there was one. I suppose this is conspiracy theory. No, Churchill said that. He's never been called a conspiracy theorist. If citizens knew, meaning, a tenth of what we discuss among ourselves and which is never public, what's off camera, off the record, they would come and hang us.
11:51 Right there, right there. At Parliament, or at Downing Street, or at Buckingham Palace. So there is the oppressive state — let's agree, now that we've clarified this, to no longer call it 'the state' for the oppressive state that opposes our freedoms. We must call it the state apparatus. It's concrete, it exists, it's terrible. You saw those who demonstrated in Los Angeles, who are still doing so, in part, because the embers are still there, it doesn't take much for the flames to reignite.
The general will, an organic whole 12:31 They sent the army against them. The army, not the police. The two armed police forces are part of the state apparatus par excellence. Whereas the state that increases my freedom, the one that serves your interest, his, ours, yours, the interest we have in common — well, that one arose from what Rousseau, at the height of the Enlightenment, calls the general will. Not the will of a few — the general will, which is not the sum of everyone's individual wills.
13:05 It's more than that. A whole that is more than the sum of its parts. An organic whole, not a mechanical whole. Ah, I'm getting a bit philosophical here. Take a pile of stones — that's a mechanical whole. One stone plus one stone plus one stone makes a pile. You remove one of the stones, it's still a pile. You remove the cerebellum, there's no more Pagani. That is an organic whole. Every part is indispensable, you see. And where the parts, as Leibniz magnificently put it, conspire with one another.
13:38 That's what makes it so that when you find a dinosaur's tooth, you can deduce whether it was herbivorous or carnivorous just from the shape of the teeth. In other words, the tooth points to a certain form of stomach, which points to a certain form of skeleton, and so on. That's not a mechanical whole. That means there's something, a unity, a totality that circulates through all the parts — the opposite of a totalitarian totality. Because what is abominable about the totalitarian — I don't like using that abominable concept, which allowed Hitler to escape the solitude of his historical cell and find himself joined by the communists inside it thanks to a disciple of the most Nazi of philosophers.
14:20 I won't spell it out for you. What is abominable in what we designate as totalitarian, Hannah Arendt — it's not that it's the whole that rules. I'd love for the whole to rule. The whole means we're all in it. We're all governing. Listen, I don't see what we'd have against that. That would be the totalitarian. No — what's abominable is that there's a part that rules over the whole. It's a class that rules over the others. It's sometimes a family, in certain countries.
14:50 A clan that rules over the entire population — that's what's abominable. It's not when the whole rules, it's that it's the part that directs the whole. You won't find that in the newspapers of the extreme center, that is, almost all the newspapers. When I say newspapers, I mean television news too, internet news, pardon the barbarism. There. That's what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. The distinction between the state in the sense of the general will — remember the yellow vests.
The gilets jaunes and the paradox of the present 15:27 How did it start? With people who were furious that the public domain — namely the reimbursement of my health expenses — suddenly found itself 70 km away, and that my car, which we had all been encouraged to buy in diesel at the time because that was more in line with the interests of the moment — now, suddenly, they decide, now that we're all in diesel, right, to raise it by X%, while sending the primary school where my children went and social security 70 km from my hometown.
16:03 So, fortunately, people aren't stupid. They complain about a retreat of the state, a distancing of the state, of the state in its most defensible sense. So I come back now to the state one can complain about, and which I tell you it's better to call the state apparatus. This is important, what we're saying tonight. I'm circling around it on purpose because we're not used to this distinction. So it needs to be made operative. This state apparatus — who does it work for, if not for us?
16:36 So there, we arrive at the paradox. This paradox is a masterpiece, a masterpiece of concealment and hypocrisy. We are currently living, perhaps, through the most monstrous state apparatus in human history. What was the Third Reich? There were no cameras, no satellites, no cell phones that give you away. Everyone says it, I don't know if it's true, that even a switched-off phone knows I'm living here, right now. There is now a state apparatus, in the hands of those who lead our communities, of a monstrous force such as has never existed before.
17:11 But what does it serve? I ask my question again, I haven't answered it. And here's the great surprise: it serves the opposite of the state, it serves the private, the given — well, that had to be done. A monstrous state apparatus in the service of the hatred of the state. You know, listen to the MEDEF, they're always grumbling that the state sticks its nose in everywhere. I can't lay someone off without giving compensation, all that.
17:41 I can't put someone on unemployment without paying unemployment benefits. And then the current battle, you saw, the battle over pensions that's coming back. There was a meeting today where our prime minister found himself in trouble. Even the socialists, right, the extreme center, that is, a part of the right, really. Even the socialists — well yes, listen, you think I often go looking for Foucault, and so on, and Deleuze, and…
18:19 Well, there, I'll quote him for once positively, an intelligent sentence from Foucault when he said: Mitterrand is Vichy. That's not some communist Bolshevik who said that, it's an anticommunist like Foucault. Mitterrand is Vichy. Look at the photo where he's presented to Pétain, Mitterrand, look, with his beaming face. From the moment Gaullism on the right and communism on the left were both wiped out by the events of '68, the aftermath of '68, careful, this isn't an opinion, you measure it, you take a ruler and you measure.
19:06 You measure the decline of the communist parties or the Gaullist parties from '68 onward. You'll see. What's left on the right is — what opposes both, what opposes the Gaullists? I used to vote against De Gaulle when he was in power, against Gaullist power. And then there are those who vote against the communists, why not? I'm a democrat, one has the right to be anticommunist. But when you resent both, when you push out both the communists and the Gaullists, that reminds me of a certain regime that hunted down Gaullists and communists — it was called hunting the Resistance.
19:50 It's a serious period we're living through, one that's been led by the extreme center since the '70s. That's quite a long time now. More than half a century now. We shouldn't be too surprised at what's happening in the world around us. That leads us — a simple-seeming, academic distinction between the state and the state apparatus, another intellectual thing. No, no, no, it's serious. We are in the concrete.
From the essential to the existential: false allies 20:21 Let me sum up the essential in case anyone is wavering a bit or if I'm going too fast. We currently live under the rule of the most monstrous state apparatus — monstrous, well, I'm willing to withdraw that word — the state apparatus most powerful against the individuals that we are that has ever existed. But this state apparatus is in the service of the negation of the state, which is the private. That's what must be remembered.
20:53 I want to make clear right away that what I just told you is roughly the essential. That's not enough for the essential. There's a long way from the essential to the existential. Right? That's where you see it. I mean that if we stick only to the essential — Mozart, Austrian musician, yes Hitler was Austrian too — we haven't said much about either one. You see? By insisting on sticking to the essential, we become reductive.
21:24 So what I'd like to clarify now is that you're free to rail against the state. Me, I'm fine with that, it doesn't bother me. Provided that each time you don't do what's admirably called in French 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater.' Be aware, and I'll take one more example, that this can foster serious confusions where I get trapped thinking someone is somewhat on my side when they're actually doing the opposite of what I want.
22:01 Example. I am anti-Gaullist. That happened to me — not your generation, but during the Algerian War. I am anti-Gaullist. Someone tells me, me too, I voted against De Gaulle — no wait, I voted for him once, except for the referendum on the independence of the African countries and Algeria. Yes, because he's handing Algeria over to the Arabs. Yes, the other one is anti-Gaullist too.
22:31 It's not the same thing. You see the confusion I was denouncing. If we stick to the essential — I'm anti-Gaullist. Ah yes, very good. But there are those who hate De Gaulle because he's the man of the Resistance, and who never digested the fact that the Soviets, right, put an end to the Third Reich from Stalingrad all the way to Berlin. That's what they can't forgive the Popovs for. In certain circles, it would be nice if the world could be divided between Germans across the Atlantic, the Americans, WASPs, you know, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Eisenhower, Kissinger, Bush — that's Germanic, essentially, the white peoples of America.
23:16 I can't help it, not complexed like the Germans. And there you are, in the news today. Someone gets elected in the United States to disengage from foreign interventions and to think of America first, who begins by delivering thousands of missiles every day to the Ukrainian Nazis and tens of thousands of missiles to the State of Israel, to the Netanyahu-esque executive.
The private, the particular and the red-browns 23:58 We need to be careful with this business of the State and the State apparatus. There, I think I've clarified things a bit. I'm quite willing to warn against the threatening side of the State apparatus, but not against the general will—on the contrary, in favor of the general will. And not to use the legitimate concern we have for the public sector to reinforce the private sector.
24:33 I didn't say the particular. We all have a private part of our life. It's not something anyone gets to enter into. I was talking with a puritan the other day. Well, a friend, even a comrade. His name doesn't matter. But someone who has, from time to time, puritanical stiffnesses. That can happen. We can argue for hours—it's societal—I don't know, about female or male infidelity, about homosexuals, always the same problems, men, women.
25:06 And he disputed the fact that one could have a private domain. No, no, the collective must have a right to oversight. I said, is that so? But hey, you don't make love with your girlfriend on the Place de la Concorde at 6pm, as far as I know. No? Well, you're quite right. So we also have to respect everyone's right to a little private domain, for every man and every woman. Agreed? But the private ruling the public—that's the MEDEF.
25:38 And which uses the State apparatus, in other words your taxes, our taxes, to exercise this domination. That's what I wanted to make clear today. And a lot of the confusion in political discussions today comes from the fact, you know, what's called the red-browns, where you no longer know who's on the left or the right—it comes precisely from the fact that we credit as being on the left everyone who is against the State, it's so easy.
26:12 Whereas the first people to be against the State are, first of all, the people furthest to the right in our society. Now, all the so-called Western states—you know, I don't like that word, I prefer to say Atlanticist imperialism, that's precise. There are other imperialisms, but the one that runs the world is Atlanticist imperialism, less and less so. But still, for a good part, the American defense budget is 13 times larger than all the other military budgets on the planet combined.
26:51 Even in decline, it still has plenty of room. But I'm not backing off from the American, I've already told you that. I'm attacking Atlanticism, which is very different. How many times do I have to repeat that one can be Atlanticist and Luxembourgish, or Nigerien? I didn't say Nigerian. And conversely, there are people in the United States who also deplore Atlanticist imperialism, and I salute them.
27:21 There are some. They get less publicity than the others. And for good reason. There. So let's be clear, we need to find—we need what used to be called the left, I say used to because it's as if we no longer have a species at that level—to find common ground again with the notion of the general will.
The universal against cultures and genes 28:00 So as not to risk letting such important things fall into the confusion of abstraction, I'm going to give another concrete example. When I was... You know, I spent part of my career in French-speaking African countries, and how many times I saw businessmen, French in this case—sometimes even non-French, but no matter—most often French, arriving in Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Benin, whatever, Niger.
28:35 And often they'd be introduced to me and people would say, you have to ask Dominique Pagani, he's an old African hand—as if having been there for years gave me some expertise. I know plenty of people who say, "I've dealt with the negroes for 50 years, I know what they're like"—those people haven't understood anything about Africa. But anyway, people would tell me, so you know Africa well, so what... because I just arrived, so what... how should we talk to their wives? Should we leave a tip?
29:05 They asked me questions as if we were talking about Martians. And I answered them, well, listen, you're asking me for tips about Africans and I'll give them to you, but here it is—it's a scoop, I have to repeat it—what Africans want is for their children to be healthy, to go to school, and to bring home some money. Oh! They were disappointed. They wanted me to talk to them about negroes, and instead I talked to them about human beings.
29:36 You see what it is, this universal that's so fought against nowadays—everyone gets locked into their own culture. In my culture, it's not planned that... It's not in our genes, that's even worse. It's not in our genes. Since the Third Reich, people have never talked about genes as much as now. Not genes in the scientific sense, because that's something I respect as not being my field, that's something else, alright? But things attributed to genes—remember Sarkozy? Remember!
30:06 When he said we also need to look at young people, whether crime isn't genetic, because it's not all that clear. You see? How things come back around like that. From leftism—that is, from anti-communist leftism—we move to fascism. And here you see the relevance of a book written in 1972 with Clouscard, Néofascisme et idéologie du désir [Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire]. It starts with the ideology of desire, "it is forbidden to forbid," well, live and consume like pigs, and it ends with people rushing headlong to raise the military budget by 5% to go fight against those who liberated us from Nazism.
30:55 There. I'll leave you with these reflections. I don't want to settle it. You can well guess which way I lean, can't you? No, not toward Putin's success, but Putin is an anti-communist, he's not on my side. But I'd rather a thousand times have an anti-communist like Putin than certain people who call themselves communists, wouldn't you say? And who deliver weapons to what remains of the Nazis in Europe, financed by—by what? By what? By the State apparatus of Atlanticist imperialism.
31:28 There. I leave you with these configurations, which seemed to start off in abstraction and which run up against an unfortunately burning current reality.
