English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Musical opening and return after a long interruption 0:08 Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr, Chirr And now, as in Berlin, the lackeys slink through.
0:50 Will they become more hostile, his arms still watching, when he comes arriving.
3:11 ... your life will fade away in all eternity.
4:07 anche Stemme Sous-Land.
5:28 ... is as broad, as strong, as a man can bear. ... like your power, as ropes laid around the heart.
6:00 ...on aine mal, and it was so then. ... and it was so then. ...in the Atus, you see, you f***, ...a warm... foot,
7:31 Very happy to be with you again. Yes, I say that every time, but tonight it's even more true. As for the time that's passed since last time, I'm not going to bore you with it, you have every reason to wonder, most of it is technical, I had serious IT problems with the building's installation, because it's not my personal setup, but there you go. On one hand, and then everyone's schedules didn't line up. In short, and I also had a load of things to do that meant I couldn't find the time to be with you again.
8:17 When I wanted to, I didn't have the technical means. Don't be too surprised by tonight's program. I'm easing off the pedal a bit. I'm thinking about how any content of my talks could be affected by current political events.
8:49 The latter is undergoing such an acceleration, a whirlwind acceleration, if I may risk that barbarism, isn't it? I mean, careful there too. That doesn't mean everything suddenly changes, we'd like that, for some things at least. No, it means there are a lot of changes, but in the form of a whirlwind. We notice it's changing when it goes away, but it comes back. There's also repetition, there are also very slow things. We'd love there to be peace here and peace there.
9:28 The carnage doesn't stop in either case. So we can't say that at that level things move very fast. But on the other hand, let's say the fundamental data of the problem, the way it's posed, is evolving so quickly that I thought it needed a specific approach. For now I won't commit much, except to say that I'll clarify the approach I intend to take and return to current events. First, it will be collective work. The stakes are too important for the certainties of any one person, starting with mine, to stand in for truth. So I'll see, we'll do this as a small multiplex, if you like, with interlocutors, people I think are up to the task, I imagine anyway, and most of you know them, and others who can only enrich this debate, I'll come back to that.
10:35 But in the meantime, I so need to take some distance, and I'm so certain that, whatever topics I deal with tonight, I unfortunately can't manage to distract myself from current events, including and especially in what is sometimes worrying about them. How many times have I told you about the danger of war? It was true every time, but it increases every time I've said it. That's not very reassuring.
Rilke, Samain, Verlaine: the imponderable does not exclude rigor 11:15 So now, I'm going to the other extreme, I'm going to talk about things that will seem light. The lightest there is, what could be lighter? Rilke says in a poem, the poet Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke, who will point a finger at a scent? Who will point a finger at a scent? What could be lighter? I'm going to introduce, yes, I'm going to talk about perfumes. I'll start with a text I'll describe very quickly.
11:50 But first, I'd like to introduce it a bit as a verbal epigraph with this quotation from a rather forgotten poet, a fin-de-siècle poet, as they say, 19th century. So, later than or contemporary with the movement called Symbolism, if you like, for those interested, I'm thinking of Albert Samain, S-A-M-A-I-N, Albert, who in a poem about Versailles, 'You are a beautiful thing,' says at one point this, and you'll see the connection with the sense of smell, this sense that will occupy us tonight.
12:38 'And then, light as a scent, pretty as a smile, it's this old France air that everything breathes here, Versailles, and everywhere this penetrating smell of boxwood.' You see, there's suddenly an olfactory presence there. So, you can guess that my talk tonight falls into the category that, on our site, we've placed under the heading... what I've called analytical reveries.
13:13 As seemingly free as a reverie and as fond of rigor as the analytical theme requires. In other words, trying to join two things that are usually opposed, but that, not a philosopher, but like Verlaine manages to combine in all poetry, I'm thinking of an excerpt from his Art poétique, it's just an art poétique, it's a genre, the art poétique, it's basically how to write poems worth writing or reciting.
14:00 It's that famous Art poétique that begins with that stroke of the bow, that unforgettable opening, music before all else. And for that, prefer the odd number, vaguer and more soluble in air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses. Oh my, we're almost in perfumes, look! Vaguer and more soluble in air, with nothing in it that weighs or poses. Rilke said 'who will point a finger at a scent?' Yes, but who will weigh the weight of a perfume that suddenly fills the room and awakens a billion memories.
14:34 You see, it's imponderable, as they say. So Verlaine, to say watch out, it's not because it's imponderable like that that you should think it lacks analysis. I return to justifying my expression 'analytical reverie,' so you don't think it's slapdash, that I'm just sprinkling a little sugar here, a little salt there, hoping that by stirring it all up it'll make a nice mix. No! Look what Verlaine says.
15:09 He speaks to the reader, so, confess to me, you also need to not go seeking your words without some slight error. Nothing is dearer than the grey song, you see all this is contemporary with Impressionism, nothing dearer than the grey song, now listen carefully, where the vague joins the precise. It's beautiful eyes behind veils, it's the great trembling light of noon, it's through a mellowed autumn sky the blue jumble of clear stars.
15:44 He tries to give several examples of this thing that doesn't weigh, that doesn't pose, but that isn't for all that devoid of structure, that isn't for all that lacking in fine articulation and structure. So, I'm far from thinking that the analytical reverie I'm offering you tonight is as finely articulated as this beautiful poem by Verlaine called 'Art poétique,' which I refer you to by the way.
16:18 It's very easy to find in the resources. So, but I'm not going to talk about just any smell, nor just any perfume, but about perfume that stinks. And there, if I may, try to hear the quotation marks around the expression 'perfume that stinks,' because I'm borrowing this title from a rather young old acquaintance of our association, since she is practically one of its...
16:50 And to say one of the founding fathers, we don't know where we are anymore. One of the founding mothers, but well, since she's a young woman, it's hard for me to say one of the founding mothers. Yes, she's a mother of a family, careful, a young mother of a family. It's Caroline, if you remember, isn't it? We had worked well with her excellent research and publications, a notion around the notion of 'rotten' in cooking, in the field of flavors, not smells.
17:24 And we had already noticed, so much for the philosophical quotient, why I'm always interested in something that comes from her side, because I know that this research is always relevant and well grounded philosophically. The common point between sounds, scents, smells, perfumes, tastes, tastes in the culinary sense, flavors, all three have this in common, that it's not by closing your eyes that you savor them less, on the contrary. In other words, they're quite distinct from all the other arts or all the other ways of providing pleasure that go through the visual: sculpture, architecture, painting, photography, cinema, opera too, there's no shortage of them.
18:24 And we have nothing against them. Those familiar with this vocabulary know very well that on one side there are the arts of space, which in French are readily called the plastic arts, which I've just listed, I recall, that's my philosophy. It's a rather abrupt reentry, it's been a while since we worked in the order of the most concrete exteriority with all its dimensions, I'm thinking of architecture or sculpture where there are three dimensions, we have width, depth, and then with painting where we abstract entirely from depth, where we find it again in painting mode. That's what, starting from the 16th century, well from the Quattrocento in Renaissance Italy, we'll call perspective.
19:21 Isn't that right? So on an illusory mode. In reality we abstract from real depth in space, there are only two dimensions on the plane of the painting. That's painting. In other words, painting has always been abstract well before Cubism. In a certain way because it abstracts from a whole dimension of real, concrete space. Unlike a cathedral or Rodin's statue of Balzac. That said, if we continue the progression with music, it's not just depth but all spatial dimensions that disappear, only the temporal dimension remains.
20:08 Music is a duration, whether you like it or not, whether it's beautiful, whether it's made for an orchestra of 200 instrumentalists or a solo guitarist, melancholic or unleashed, in every case, I mean, it's time, it's no longer space. You can't say 'give me 30 cm of guitar, please.' And when we get to music, we're in the order of time, so we can close our eyes, we're no longer in the order of space.
20:45 It's not the person who closes their eyes at the concert who misses out most on the music, far from it. In the fifth arrondissement, there used to be—now they've closed, they've moved to our neighborhood, but for a very long time, end of the 19th century, there was the headquarters of the association of blind piano tuners. Paris piano tuners, it's a big market for tuning pianos in a city like Paris, of course, and it was grouped together. And it was the blind who were at the task, so to speak, because the deprivation of sight, you see, makes them all the more attentive, in terms of picking up on the outside world, to the slightest sound.
21:34 Not to mention, I'm going back to the physical and even to the metaphysical, to what Rilke says in another poem, a magnificent poem from the Sonnets to Orpheus, where he says—I'm coming back to smells, don't worry, but you see, I'm still on a common element, what is not of the visual order but of the order of what can be savored with eyes closed. Parenthesis closed, reminder closed. Rilke says: 'Only he who has already raised his lyre among shadows can sense and proclaim the infinite praise.' And that, I said in voiceover, in case it wasn't understood yet, the continuation which illustrates and confirms: 'Only he who has eaten of the dead's poppy, their poppy, will never again lose even the faintest of sounds.' That's what the blind piano tuners made me think of.
22:34 So, in this whole domain—sounds, perfumes, tastes, flavors—you'll notice that the first two, sounds and perfumes, are the opening of a famous line, from one of Baudelaire's most famous poems, Harmonie du soir, which we've seen for other reasons. 'Sounds and perfumes swirl in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous dizziness.' There you have, in a few words, in two lines, you already have...
Reading of an article on "polarizing" perfumes 23:06 'And sounds and perfumes swirl in the evening air, melancholy waltz and languorous dizziness.' Well, so, I told you that these aren't the suave perfumes of that kind, or rather, out of courtesy to the author, to Caroline, who is currently working on, polishing the final manuscript of her forthcoming publication.
23:36 I don't want to send you the text in writing, that wouldn't be considerate, but with her permission, I'll read you a few excerpts from her article, which itself begins with a quotation. 'The mussel not very fresh, the wet dachshund, the quite advanced red tuna, rancid milk, semen, fresh blood spilled on the ground'—I'm looking at the text—'putrid algae, piss, sweat. Personally I love this scent because it breaks from the usual routine, from the dull stuff we're usually served.'
24:20 So the 'dull stuff' is probably jasmine, rose, no doubt, the dull stuff we're usually served, it's very original, daring, disconcerting, unconventional. That's how this article by Caroline goes, who takes up the pen again and says, I quote: 'If, like me, you...' You widened your eyes reading this comment, that means you've missed a trend, that of so-called polarizing, conceptual perfumes. Meaning perfumes that stink, for the uninitiated.
24:53 And she gives a few examples, but these are cosmetics companies that exist, look them up, I'm sure some of you know this better than I do. Such as the magnificent secretions of the label État Libre d'Orange, Sadonazo by Nasomatto, the nose's madman, Wotan, Wotan, Nasomatto, going on through Sombre by Sprengeuse or But Not Today by Filippo Sorcinelli, to name only these—'A small circle of initiates seems to devote a cult to nocturnal fluids, humors, and other bodily emanations. Everything that perfume, it seemed to me, naively, to you and me no doubt, is supposed to keep at a distance.'
25:42 You see there, we see Caroline's conceptual sharpness, I'll make her blush, but still, she has an immediate philosophical nose. When she reads the book, she immediately sees the underlying problems—in principle, perfume, the art of cosmetics, since and for as long as we have written traces. That doesn't mean that even before, perhaps at the level of prehistory, we've indeed found in Magdalenian archaeology, for example, haven't we?
Freud, ambergris, and La Bruyère's point of perfection 26:17 And later than Cro-Magnon man, we find lots of traces of feminine coquetry—coquetry, I can't really see from the inside, what do we know about it? Anyway, decorative objects, rings, bands, necklaces. So there must also have been olfactory equivalents, we'd need to find out. In any case, what's certain is that from Egypt onward, the oldest written historical traces we have, there's already a whole art of perfumes. And here, Caroline knows this, but not everyone does, so we need to recall here an extremely important aside from Freud in a series of articles collected in the, isn't it, PUF, like the...
27:02 What did I say? PUF, I said... I'm mixing that up, by Freud, published by Payot, grouped under the generic title Sexual Life, a rather vague and general title, in which there are articles of prime importance for understanding the Freudian field, including one called 'On Narcissism: An Introduction,' and believe me, with everything we've said about illusory identity—but that's not our subject here.
27:35 Well, at first glance anyway. But here, I'm thinking of an article where Freud discusses object choice, why some always choose women who are in a state of ruin and whom they think they're going to save. I knew a legionnaire like that who spent his time wanting to bring prostitutes back to religion. Anyway, that's pathos.
28:06 And among these object choices, at one point, in a footnote, he says we should ask whether the fact that the sense of smell is so atrophied in humans—atrophied in relative terms of course, otherwise it wouldn't be objective—compared to other mammals, like the dog, like the cat, like wild beasts, Freud says it's not a coincidence that this atrophy might come from repression, when we see the role smell plays in the sexuality of mammals.
28:46 And there we are, back to perfumes, but then it's not quite the smell of roses anymore. Although, although, the Minitel rose, as it was called, no, the beginning of X-rated content on mass media. Rose being fairly connoted in the imagination, in language, isn't it? When people said 'pink ballets,' those were scandals involving members of parliament, the Fourth Republic, you just have to search that on Google, you'll see, in the public multimedia, the 'ballets roses' affair. There were several, but it's always stories of more or less admitted prostitution.
29:31 So, let's leave that aside, it's still connoted by the word 'rose.' Freud says, as if the whole art of cosmetics since its origins, which brings me back to Egypt, was as if very early on, people had felt the need, not to deny, to suppress, how to cancel it, annihilate it, what is immediately and strongly sexual in the function of smell among mammals, but—and this is a very important term in Freud—to sublimate it.
30:15 The art of perfumes and cosmetics being the sublimation of far less commendable odors. And there, the first surprise, you'll tell me, but that's not possible, there are bad smells and good smells, well what is this all about? And well, precisely, you know I'm against the extreme center, don't worry, I'm not about to tell you we're going to make a compromise. No, I'm introducing you—I want to give her back the floor—to what you believe are differences of nature, foul odors, good smells, even opposites, are often simply, it's the same substance smelled, but at different degrees.
30:57 I'll give an example, you'll understand right away. Among the substances that are the base of the greatest perfumes, substances worth a fortune per gram, there's the famous one—I think many of you know it—ambergris, which is extracted from the sperm whale. I used to look at comic strips when I was little, where there was a whale fisherman with a harpoon who was overjoyed because he had finally found 2 kg of ambergris in a sperm whale and had made a fortune for life—that's just to give you an idea of what it was worth per gram.
31:33 Except that the smell of ambergris is foul, it comes out of the entrails of the sperm whale. But it's all a matter of dosage—at a certain infinitesimal dose, its presence is necessary, and without the presence of this perfume that smells bad on another scale, the perfume that's made would have no interest. It would be like a meal without salt, without seasoning. Interesting! So what we believe is a difference of nature is actually a difference of degree.
32:07 And here, an analytical reverie—I'll extend it, but I'll stay rigorous. And here I think of what La Bruyère says in the 17th century about what constitutes perfection in a work of art. You'll say, well, we already have trouble getting our bearings with things we can't really grasp with our hands, like smells, tastes, sounds, and now it's perfection in the work of art. I'm quoting you the passage where La Bruyère addresses the problem of aesthetic perfection: "There is in art a point of perfection, as there is of goodness or maturity in nature."
32:56 There's a point—do you realize, the word "point"? Just before that point, the fig is very good when you taste it, but it could still be sweeter. Up to a certain point, a culmination—if you go further, it will taste bad, it will be rotten. Between the two, the cursor must reach... Now I'll repeat it, you'll see how much clearer it is with the image of the fig. "There is in art a point of perfection"—but a point, "as there is of goodness or maturity in nature."
Hygiene, purity, and the deodorization of the world 33:31 "Whoever senses it has perfect taste; whoever falls short of it or goes beyond it has defective taste. There is therefore a good and a bad taste, and one disputes about tastes with good grounds." We're quite right to argue about tastes and colors, otherwise about blows and sorrows [a French pun on "goûts et couleurs"/"coups et douleurs"]. Well, so, after this contextualization, I come back to Caroline's text with another quotation she makes from someone who, like her, stumbled upon these perfumers of stinking perfumes. And here's what this friend says: "A collector friend introduced me to this olfactory villainy, whose deliberate provocation was no doubt to reach the limit point of the unbearable." You see the word "point" again.
34:33 "It evokes for me the act of vomiting sparkling wine onto used diapers delicately scented with talcum." Sorry, "delicately"—I can't manage to say it, it's ironic of course. Caroline Drogne takes the floor and says: on the specialist websites, the perfumers specializing in stinking perfumes, the comments compete in poetic flourish to evoke the mixture of fascination and repulsion that these stinking perfumes seem to provoke.
35:07 Snobbery? Olfactory deviance? Return of the repressed? To get to the bottom of it, I went to explore the temples of niche perfumery. Well, I'll skip ahead. And right away, look at the rigor of Caroline's inquiry: "As a general rule, one applies perfume after washing. This gesture is not trivial; it expresses the tacit link that centuries of the civilizing of manners have woven between the world of ablutions, toilette, showers, baths, and that of good-smelling. How could the latter become bad-smelling?" That's the question raised, for example, by Ruhad. You see the name of the perfume? Ruhad—yes, you understood correctly, there's the smell of horse manure in it.
35:59 [Ruh] roads of imperial perfumes offering the possibility of perfuming oneself lavishly with horse manure and sweat. There are websites that sell you that. After a good shower. "The evocation is sumptuously realistic, to the great delight of equestrian enthusiasts." I'll skip a passage where she develops the idea that originally, the whole art of perfume, of cosmetics in general and of perfumes, of fragrances in particular, is precisely to move away from brutality, to mask or suppress or deny bodily odors.
36:48 Except that they're meant to be put on the skin. You can feel there's a dialectic here, a contradiction, a Hegelian one. So, from 1750 on, we gradually stopped tolerating in the West the proximity of excrement or filth, which used to be much more... you know, you think that because all the streets carried refuse down the middle, hence the expression "to hold the high ground of the pavement," which was a bit less dirty than the middle, and people appreciated the heavy scents of musk. So, a new sensibility. "This marks the beginning of an easy enterprise of deodorization, culminating in the olfactory silence of our present environment," as the great historian Alain Corbin reminds us.
37:30 So today, to feel good, you have to smell good, to have a good odor, and that of cleanliness—all these words stand in a relation of equivalence. It's precisely from this point of view that stinking perfumes bring to light the implicit pact linking perfume and hygiene. You see, there's a moral coloring here, and the stakes are profoundly moral.
38:02 "Whatever the era, filth connotes questionable morals. The fight against bodily exhalations is much more than a matter of public sanitation. The smell of clean and dirty inevitably joins that of pure and impure." And look—I told you that language knows more than we who believe we use it, but it's language that uses us. Look, "putain" [whore], in quotation marks—the word putain means "she who stinks," from the Latin putida. That's where it comes from. The deodorization of the world is a way of silencing bodies. Thus the daffodil has vanquished the miasma and supplanted musk, too explicitly indecent.
38:45 You know that musk was made from glands—let's not say sexual, genital glands—of mammals of the mustelid family. What could be more innocent than a flower, even one that grows in marshes? So, starting from there, how can one not think—I wouldn't want such a concrete subject to be treated in abstract generalities.
Exotic Perfume: the inner landscape 39:19 So, we're going to find this issue again in what's most embodied, in the here and now of poems by these rare poets who know how to express what seems inexpressible—the most imponderable thing precisely, the world of perfume. Let's maybe start with Baudelaire—I'll ask Pierre-Alain to send, for example, Exotic Perfume.
39:53 With Baudelaire—I'm not teaching anything to those familiar with Baudelaire's work in the literary field—I'm not telling them much by saying that if there's a poet of perfumes, he's the first one we think of, but let's send the text, I'd rather... thank you, on the button. And so, wait, there we go, and let's see, so I need to click on Marfi—perfect, yes, Exotic Perfume—I'm just recalling the only elements of context I'll give: Baudelaire, when he was very young and hadn't yet properly chosen his path, his stepfather, worried, the man his mother had remarried.
40:46 To knock some sense into him, as they say, he had him practically forced aboard a ship heading for the African coast. He would go all the way, down to South Africa, to the Cape of Good Hope, and back, and several of the most beautiful poems of The Flowers of Evil would be inspired by the unforgettable impressions of that real voyage. So that's the first point. And the second point of context: everyone knows he had for a long time as his mistress, as they said at the time, Jeanne Duval, who was mixed-race.
41:24 At the time, they said "mulatto." Anyway, what follows tells it very well. So, Exotic Perfume: "When, both eyes closed, on a warm autumn evening, I breathe the scent of your warm breast"—so here he's addressing Jeanne Duval—"I see happy shores unfolding before me, dazzled by the fires of a monotonous sun." There you have a whole universe, a whole distant world, as he says in his other poem, "A Distant World."
42:03 A whole detailed, concrete, present universe, made of a multitude of olfactory, sonic, visual sensations, all coming out—but the way a genie comes out of Aladdin's lamp—coming out of a perfume, there, in an attic room in Paris. A warm autumn evening: "When, both eyes closed, on a warm autumn evening, I breathe the scent of your warm breast, I see happy shores unfolding"—while his eyes are closed.
42:36 In literature, this is what came to be called, starting with Baudelaire, the interior landscape. Don't look for an anecdotal description; this isn't about depiction, it's about evocation—and in "evocation" there's "vocal," you know, the voice. "I see happy shores unfolding, dazzled by the fires of a monotonous sun. An island"—the complement continues, doesn't it—"I see, I see, a languid island where nature gives strange trees and savory fruits."
43:08 And there we go, we have flavors. You see, a perfume has called forth flavors. "Men whose bodies are slender and strong, and women whose eyes astonish with their frankness. Guided by your scent toward charming climes"—which you can feel are far off—"I see a harbor full of sails and masts still quite weary from the sea swell, the scent of green tamarind trees"—so many sensations. You understand why we speak of Impressionism? These aren't feelings, they're sensations. It's not only the heart speaking here, it's the body.
43:55 There you go! "While the scent..."—first the word "weary" that keeps recurring, "the fires of a monotonous sun," "a languid island," "a harbor full of sails and masts, still quite weary," the sails and masts, in the plural, "from the sea swell." All of that is sensations, so bodily—weariness, languor, as we say so well in French. "While the scent"—and there for the nostrils—"of green tamarind trees, which circulates in the air the way sounds, the way tastes circulate in the air and fill my nostrils, mingles in my soul with the song of the sailors."
Sed non satiata and Invitation to the Voyage 44:39 Well, we won't linger here, let's move on to other perfumes, to other evocations of scent by Baudelaire in different contexts. So let me maybe ask—did I give out "Strange goddess, dusky as the nights"? No? Do we have that one? Wait, wait, because I'll find it myself. I'll find it, I know where it is. There, there, there. So let me pick up my thing. There. Oh no, that's my—that's the A, yes, yes, sorry. There. There.
45:18 So, The Flowers of Evil, there we go. And there. "Strange goddess, dusky as the nights"—I think it's, I can't remember, is it Sed non satiata? Yes, that's it. I'm sending it to you now. It's working, perfect. I'm still amazed by today's technology—what a time-saver. Thank you Pierre-Alain, thank you Technology. Well, I won't do like my grandmother, who, when electricity arrived in her village in Corsica, couldn't stop turning the light switch on and off.
45:54 It's marvelous. Sed non satiata. In Latin that means "but not satisfied." "Strange goddess, dusky as the nights"—you see, this picks up again on Exotic Perfume, she's dusky, the girl, she's mixed-race—"with a scent blended of musk and Havana." You see, these odors that we were supposedly moving away from to refine ourselves, because they smell too much of the erotic origins of olfactory sensibility—well no, here musk is embraced.
46:28 "Strange goddess, dusky as the nights, with a scent blended of musk and Havana"—you can think of cigars, whatever you like—"work of some obeah man, the Faust of the savanna"—the telescoping between the Germanic world, Faust, and the savanna—"sorceress with an ebony flank, child of black midnights. I prefer, to Constance, to opium, to the Nights"... I'm sorry to burden you with my voiceover, but what can you do, I could play something so beautiful, but at the same time you might miss it entirely.
47:00 "Constance"—make no mistake, it's the name of a wine, a famous South African wine. South Africa makes excellent wines, having a Mediterranean climate. "Opium"—you know what that is—and "Nights"—there's an S on "Nuits," a capital O for the singular and "Nights" plural—meaning this refers to Nuits-Saint-Georges, fine Burgundies. So: "I prefer, to Constance, to opium, to the Nights, the elixir of your mouth where love struts."
47:30 "When toward you my desires depart in caravan"—so the desires, you see, are thirsty like dromedaries in a desert, the caravan—I take the text literally, I'm not interpreting—"When toward you my desires depart in caravan"—and there's the nice cold bottle of Coke waiting for you, forgive the sacrilege—"your eyes are the cistern where my boredoms drink." Well, I'll stop here, because after that it's about the eyes rather than the perfume, but we'll continue the series.
48:07 And here I think of "Invitation to the Voyage," surely one of the five most famous poems in all of The Flowers of Evil, isn't it—which isn't centered solely on perfume, but still, just judge for yourself. Remember in Exotic Perfume, he closed his eyes and a whole universe, with its sub-Saharan dominant, came out—I said it like the genie of Aladdin earlier—came out of that little flacon, came out of that perfume of intimacy, to suddenly set in motion a whole detailed world.
48:48 Here you have Baudelaire, who generally has an ambivalent relationship to femininity. Sometimes woman is the impure, the woman of the Bible, the prostitute, the Babylon who has heaped upon herself all the sins of creation, the Kundry of Parsifal, as we've already seen. And then there's another relationship, very tender, very moving, much more generous toward femininity, which is the relationship to a woman, including a lover, a mistress, but as a sister.
49:22 "My child, my sister, think of the sweetness of going there to live together." Careful, this isn't a poem about the voyage, it's a poem inviting to the voyage, and the whole philosophical interest—don't forget we're in a philosophy course, it may seem to make you forget that, but here I'm giving a reminder—the invitation to the voyage is not the voyage, it's the prospect of the voyage. So, let's not complicate things for now, let's continue: "To love at leisure, to love and die in the land that resembles you."
49:58 Well, alright, I've hesitated several times now, so I'll tell you. There are fools who have blackened page after page over where he was talking about when he says "there, to live together." Some have said it was Holland, because he speaks of canals at the end, you'll see, magnificent—a coda at the end, I speak of it as in music—the last lines: "See on these canals sleep those vessels whose mood is wandering." So, canals, it must be Holland. And then, a country with lots of ports, sails, masts, travelers.
50:30 Others say no, it's Portugal. It's well known that Baudelaire—not to mention the vegetation—was drawn to Lisbon, it's true, in his correspondence he says "I'd gladly go to Lisbon, there the inhabitants have banished irregular vegetation, there's only metal, marble, and water." Anyway, you'll see why trying to make interpretations is pointless when the poem itself says very clearly where "there" is. So, I'll pick up again and this time follow through: "My child, my sister, think of the sweetness of going there to live together, to love at leisure, to love and die in the land that resembles you"—already that's a clue—"the moist suns of those clouded skies."
51:12 If that isn't Monet, I don't know what is—when I tell you this is contemporary with Impressionism. People say "Oh, these are rather artificial correspondences." No, no, look closely! Visualize what he's saying and you have a Monet painting. "The moist suns of those clouded skies hold for my mind the mysterious charms of your treacherous eyes, shining through their tears." And then the famous refrain, let's raise it a bit, thank you: "There, all is order and beauty"—ah, Romanticism is over.
51:44 Order is classicism, it's a neo-classicism—we can see we've passed through the Parnassian school, but with a vibration, without the sculptural coldness—the marmoreal quality, that comes from marble, of the Parnasse, which was very useful for relearning how to write well-forged verses. That's a good thing, that's what we owe to neo-classicism, but it remained a bit cold, so Romanticism comes back, the vibration is there with Baudelaire, but in formally very sinewy verses. Look closely: "There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm, and voluptuousness."
52:25 Neither calm, nor voluptuousness, nor order are Romantic. Well, yes, the Romantics do have a voluptuousness, but a negative one, the voluptuousness of melancholy. So, let's continue: "Gleaming furniture"—that's for the eyes—"polished by the years, would adorn our room. The rarest flowers"—there we go—"mingling their scents with the faint odors of amber." So the skies are clouded, aren't they? Try to tell where the sea ends and the sky begins, where the water ends and the land begins.
Symbolism, impressionism, and escape 52:59 Well, it's the same here—who can say—"the faint odors of amber, the rich ceilings, the deep mirrors, the oriental splendor." Look at all the sensations that pour forth as soon as we say "oriental splendor." "Everything there would speak to the soul in secret." And there's the answer—neither Holland, nor Portugal, it's right there in the text—"her sweet native tongue." If you want to understand the whole poetics inaugurated by Baudelaire's initiative—that is, poetic modernity practically—what was called at the time Symbolism, though the name doesn't matter to us, none of the poets, neither Verlaine nor Rimbaud, nor those called Symbolists, ever called themselves Symbolists, these words don't matter. What matters is to see that this is contemporary with the Impressionist movement.
53:47 And so, I repeat the analytical elements to remember in order to find one's bearings and identify them as Impressionist: it's the omnipresence of sensation, or the indispensable presence of the body—through hearing, through sight, through smell, through touch. There is indeed, in Baudelaire's "Correspondances": "There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh"—for touch—"sweet as oboes"—there for the ear—"green as meadows"—there for the eye, you see.
54:18 All of that is still sensory impressions—we're listing the senses, sight, hearing, smell. So sensation is closer to the body than feeling. I have nothing against either one. What matters is these distinctions. So, "everything there would speak to the soul in secret." If you want to understand this whole movement, coming back to that—"her sweet native tongue"—you might ask why he insists on that. It's because the secret of this literary current—I prefer that word to "school," it's more dynamic, this current—is that there's a neo-Platonic metaphysics immanent to it.
55:03 I may seem to be complicating things, not at all. The keyword of this current is escape. It's about escaping—there it is, the invitation to the voyage. You're invited to "escape," as they say, not the way we still say it at my place, "s'échaper," mind you, but "s'évader" [to escape/get away]. And that's typical of modernity. We won't go back over the whole theme of diversion since Pascal—we should, we should, but I'm assuming here that this is already known, right?
55:35 You know, Pascal, who said that when he set out to examine the misfortune of men, he noticed it came from the fact that they cannot remain at rest in a room, that one must not be alone facing oneself, but that something must always come along to divert us—new landscapes, new spectacles. Except that when one really travels, one risks then... Let's say I land in a distant country, this time to savor all its sensations—I'll quickly notice how many things it has in common with the place I left from.
56:12 And as Baudelaire says in "The Voyage," "Bitter is the knowledge one draws from travel"—not from the invitation to the voyage, you see why I was distinguishing them earlier. No, not what I had in mind when I felt like traveling, but the real voyage exposes one to disappointments. "The monotonous and small world," I'm quoting Baudelaire in "The Voyage," the last poem of The Flowers of Evil, "everywhere, always, shows us our own image, colon, pay attention, this is harsh, an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." There's the pessimistic human condition for this Symbolist current.
56:51 But who returns to paradise and to voluptuousness, and who escapes from this reality which is only an oasis of horror. But if you want to change it and go elsewhere, you'll find the same problems again in a desert of boredom. So the ideal is to convince yourself, isn't it, that there is somewhere else, that it would be good to go there, or in any case that it does you good to dream of it, to picture it to yourself. So why am I telling him all this? Because it seems to contradict a Nervalian maxim I've often repeated, that ignorance cannot be learned.
Semper eadem: intoxicating oneself with a lie 57:30 How can I convince myself, that something I know to be an illusion—that elsewhere there's a solution, if I go elsewhere, if I change, if I make a local displacement, as they say in Aristotle—knowing that it's an illusion, why can I still fall under its spell? I know it's never anything but an illusion, that it's just because I'm not leaving that things are fine. Well, I'm going to call on another poem by Baudelaire called "Semper eadem," where the answer lies.
58:04 Extremely ambivalent, as you'll see. And once again, we'll find ourselves in bed with a mistress. Let's take Semper eadem. And that simply means—it's true not everyone is a Latinist anymore—always the same, Semper eadem. So you see, there are quotation marks, meaning he's giving voice to the woman with whom, in his arms, the woman he's in bed with.
58:40 "Where does it come from, you asked?" So she was speaking to him. "Where does it come from, you asked, this strange sadness, rising like the sea over the black, bare rock?" Yes, Baudelaire is the poet of spleen, like his whole movement. "Where does it come from, you asked, this strange sadness rising like the sea over the black, bare rock?" And this recurring feeling of being invaded as if by a rising tide, isn't it? It's lovely, like a rising tide of melancholy. The answer, you see, comes quickly, with a dash.
59:12 Once our heart has made its harvest—here we're not talking about the young man who's a virgin, or the Virgin, no. Once our heart has made its harvest, it's Baudelaire speaking, living is an evil, it's a secret known to all. I don't mean to say I share what he says. It's clear. A very simple, not mysterious, pain. And like your joy—careful, none of what follows is very feminist, I hope Sandrine Rousseau isn't listening—and like your radiant joy for all, stop searching then, oh beautiful curious one, you heard why? I look sad like this. And though your voice be sweet, be silent.
59:56 Yes, be beautiful and be silent, no? There's something more important than that. Look closely, the crucial line is coming: be silent, ignorant one, soul forever enraptured, mouth with a childlike laugh, more than life itself, death holds us often by subtle bonds. The most important line, which contradicts Nerval's claim that ignorance cannot be learned. "Let my heart get drunk on a lie"—so I know it's a lie, but for heaven's sake, don't spoil my illusion by talking, by laughing.
1:00:36 Do you see the difficulty of modernity? Do you see why I insisted on the fact that the invitation to the voyage—that's more clever. The voyage itself, because I'm being lulled, I remind you—literary types probably know this, but I'm reminding many others—that L'Invitation au voyage is the title of a poem from Les Fleurs du Mal that we just read, but also of a prose poem, in the collection of prose poems titled Le Spleen de Paris, also by Baudelaire, where he elaborates further on the fact that when you're in...
1:01:14 In a boat that's in port, that's where the invitation to the voyage is. I started earlier with an exotic perfume, I see a port full of sails and masts, you see, there, they're at rest, they're not really at rest, they're always still moving a bit in the harbor, and Baudelaire is very subtle, in an arrhythmic way. It's a movement that seems regular, and which is, in certain respects, but with occasional, not quite asymmetries that seem to come along and, I'd almost say, spice up this regularity.
1:01:51 And there, I notice that I'm thinking of the memoir of another friend who had, a very long time ago, written a master's thesis in literature. So, on... a parallel between the narrator's journey in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and the initiatory journey of Wagner's Parsifal—she had drawn a parallel about fidelity to grace, that's what it was called, that's the common theme in both journeys, fidelity, from the one clinging to his mother's skirts to grace.
1:02:28 I recall precisely that we ran into this problem of fidelity as a kind of fixation—I was looking for the term in the Freudian sense—which can be deadly. But "let my heart get drunk on a lie," you see the difficulty. How can I deliberately savor something I know, at the same time, to be an illusion?
1:03:05 Well, yes, in her thesis, I'm quoting that friend who had drawn this parallel, because she had found in Rousseau—she said that Rousseau's fifth walk, which I often quote elsewhere, is the matrix of everything modern from a strictly poetic point of view in this literature. Now Rousseau says it very well, the ebb and flow of this water—here I'm quoting word for word Rousseau's fifth walk, or rather that passage—its continuous sound, we were there, weren't we, with the boats in the harbor. Its continuous sound.
1:03:45 And things continue, but swelling at intervals, you see, that little recurring arrhythmia again. In short, digging into this detail proves just how much there is a recourse to hypnosis, if you will. Just as, take lullabies—I worked on this back when I took part in a call for projects as project leader of the music training and promotion center that I directed thanks to Rosembault.
1:04:15 In Niger, since the money came from Brussels, I worked on an appropriate UNESCO project about lullabies around the world. It really takes a hit, relativism—oh that's true for us but not for the Bantu, not for the Amazonian Indians. There is no culture in the world where the lullaby is raging hard rock, no. The lullaby is always slow, always extremely recurrent metrically, regular, monotonous, hypnotic.
1:04:46 Rock-a-bye baby, go ahead and try it in Bantu, whatever you like. It's the same effect produced by the rocking of the waves against the hull, of the little boat you find yourself sitting in. Now I'm generalizing a bit, and that's why I'm coming back to the invitation to the voyage and to this attitude that characterizes modernity—we can never repeat it enough. And here, I'm going to ask you for a little exercise, an effort of abstraction.
Revision: philosophy questions words 1:05:31 Since we haven't spoken in a while, this will allow for a very quick review, don't worry, but a fundamental one, of fundamental elements, from the very first videos up to now. If you look closely, I've always started—it's natural, because the philosophy curriculum starts this way too, in the final year of high school—by asking what is the nature and origin of philosophy, in other words, what is properly philosophical? What kind of discourse can we say is properly philosophical, and not scientific, or religious? There's no contradiction so far in any of this, but these aren't the same fields. It's not scientific discourse, it's not religious discourse, it's not the discourse of opinion at the corner café, it's not...
1:06:28 Poetic discourse—what is proper to philosophy. And we realized, so I'll move quickly through this, otherwise it will take us far afield, that philosophy means interrogating the words that serve as our mediation with reality, and showing how problematic these words are, it being understood that a problem is more than a question. A problem—if it were just a question, it wouldn't be a problem. A problem is when, in addition to being a question—so the common point is that it too is a question—a problem is a question to which one cannot answer.
1:07:14 Careful, there are two elements. Immediately, that's one, and second, with a yes or no. You can answer neither yes nor no, nor immediately. You have to take a detour—that's philosophy, isn't it? And above all, it consists in trying to answer the question of values, what must I do, which the scientist doesn't ask—I'll go quickly here, I'll explain why we can't conflate the two. The philosopher needs rigor—I come back to my analytic daydream from earlier—he needs rigor, and in this sense he resembles the scientist, except that he wants rigor not only in answering the question 'what can I know,' which, you'll agree, is asked just as much at the CNRS—we can never say it enough—as it is asked by the geologist, the astrophysicist, the biologist, all of them, I want to know.
1:08:00 So that's covered. We're not at all forbidding philosophers from asking all these questions, but that's not what defines philosophy—there, he's rather in competition, and often unfortunate in that domain. On the other hand, with the question 'what must I do?'—it's Kant who made this great distinction—'what must I do?' has nothing more to do with the cognitive, with the question 'what can I know.' I don't want to repeat myself, but yes, I will repeat it again, because I'm always happy to see that we have new people joining us, new fellow travelers, whether men or women, as you wish.
1:08:41 And who perhaps haven't heard as often that when it comes to knowing the chemical composition of albumin, we'd better turn to biologists than to philosophers. We all agree on that. But knowing whether I should put a loved one out of their misery—someone very dear to me who has an incurable disease and is suffering atrociously—should I end their life, euthanasia, or keep them alive? That's the question 'what must I do?' It has nothing more to do with knowledge.
1:09:21 Knowledge, I've drawn on it, the doctor has told me everything I could know. He tells me, 'here, if you want euthanasia, we can do that, if you don't want it, it's up to you to decide.' It's thrown back onto me, and rightly so—that's something else, it's no longer the domain of the cognitive specialist. That is the specifically philosophical field. I'll go quickly, I haven't said that this is philosophy with no relation to the other parts of my talks, and yet, what I've just said about philosophy, we can also say about man.
1:09:56 For man is the animal that speaks, and we find the same specificities. You know, in Diderot's work, there's this bishop facing a cage into which an orangutan has just been brought. It was the first time one had been seen in Europe, in the 18th century. Probably brought back by the Dutch from their Indies, from present-day Indonesia, right? An orangutan. The bishop looks at it, amazed. He had never seen an animal that could resemble a human being to such a degree, and he says to it, like a good bishop who knew his metaphysics, 'speak, and I will baptize you.'
1:10:39 You see? So this specificity, the fact that... I don't want to go too fast, let me step back. What is specific to philosophy is not 'what is a star?'—that's astronomy. It's 'what do you call a star?'—it's not reflection on the thing but on the word. A star—after that I listen carefully to what the astrophysicist says. On the other hand, you know, when we say 'what do you call democracy?', 'what do you call justice?', 'what do you call peace?', 'what do you call war?', it becomes much more problematic.
1:11:20 So there you have it, Aristotle—those who enrolled with him in the first year, we'd now say beginners—he always told them you must start with the Organon, which we translate as logic, that is, the science of the logos of words, since we're going to use logic, the logos, in all the scientific disciplines, geology, astronomy, zoology, right? It means discourse on, discourse on the earth, geology, discourse on animals, zoology.
1:11:53 You see, before speaking of all these realities, since we see that each time we're going to speak of the discourses that designate them, logoi, it's better to work right away on the tool by which we designate them, which will serve us in all these disciplines. Well, it's the same thing. Now, you see, this brings us back to man, who had, as Scripture says, the privilege of naming the creatures.
1:12:28 Not just of communicating—dolphins, bees know very well how to communicate, food for example, its distance. Of course, these are matters we've often discussed, I won't go back over them. It's not a matter of merely communicating, of giving information. Bees know how to do that. Birds that keep watch, a blackbird that goes 'tweet'—they all fly off before a predator can appear. That's information. Speaking is different. Speaking is different. It's about giving a name.
Our modernity: Enlightenment and revolutions 1:13:02 You're a donkey, you're an ox, and so on. So Adam has the privilege of naming the creatures, and that's how they get their bearings. Why did I make this detour? Because it's not over. What I say of philosophy, I can say of man, and what I say of man in general—so I don't know myself whether he emerges somewhere between Neanderthal and Sapiens, that's not my problem, that's the specialists' problem. In any case, the problem bounces back. And we come back to the other point.
1:13:34 The modernity I always talk to you about, because it's a relative term, I want to be rigorous today. If I say 'modernity' to you, full stop, there are those who say modernity ends when we stop being at the hunter-gatherer stage and start becoming sedentary, creating towns and cities, or even with agriculture. So for them, already that's too modern. Historians, nowadays, when you study history, what's called the 'modern era' is what comes after the Middle Ages.
1:14:10 So, from the 16th century on, we start being 'modern.' I'm not talking about that kind of modernity. So I'm specifying which one I mean, to be clear and honest—yours, of modernity, mine, ours, the one triggered by two great fractures that occur within a stone's throw of each other in time, in the second half of the 18th century. You need to guess: the English industrial revolution and, in its wake, the French political revolution.
1:14:43 You need both, right? Both produce a shockwave we haven't emerged from. That's what I call our modernity. Now, what's the connection with what I said about language, and with the fact that it's similar to the appearance—I'm in the process of making it equivalent to the appearance of philosophy, even the appearance of man? Do you see my overlay? Well, the common point is that, starting—I'll go quickly—when you see the undermining work done against religious alienation during the Age of Enlightenment, this undermining work that makes the poet Alfred de Musset say, out of resentment against this demystification carried out by the Enlightenment, by Voltaire in particular—it's the famous passage where the poet says, 'Do you sleep content, Voltaire, and does your hideous smile still flit over the poet?'
1:15:42 'On your fleshless bones one sees the sculpture'—where he's all skinny. You see, implied here, there's been a gnawing work, like termites eating away at the building. And that building was, above all, the religious edifice on which... You see the connection now with man in general? Until the Age of Enlightenment, and a fortiori the world that emerged from it after the French Revolution, the answers preceded the questions. As for the human condition, questions could be asked—we've been asking them since the Chinese, the Hindus, Mesopotamia, Egypt, not to mention.
1:16:21 Philosophy from Plato, Aristotle, Socrates onward, it's not questions that are lacking. Except that what was never called into question was the answer that preceded them, which belonged to the sacred and religious domain. Look at the height of 17th-century philosophy, so-called classical philosophy, where we still speak of Cartesians—not because they all agree with everything Descartes says, but because they place themselves, they rush into the wake opened up by Descartes, by the navigator Descartes, because he ventures out with his cogito like Columbus's wave onto seas that had never before been charted.
1:16:56 Yes, Spinoza, Leibniz—they breathe within God, they don't have the same conception of God, but no matter, good Lord, everything happens in, through, and by way of God. And there, that's where the Enlightenment appears. So you see why I'm doing this mirror-in-mirror work? As if the human condition hadn't sprung forth like Athena from Jupiter's head—the thigh is Hephaestus, Jupiter's whole body is full of gods.
1:17:44 And yes, we split Jupiter's skull open, and out came Athena with her weapons. No, that's not how man appears, suddenly emerging from the animal at midnight on December 31st of some year, millions of years ago—it's not like that. Man never stops making himself, with you, with us. He is the movement itself, he is not the origin of the movement, nor its end, he is the movement itself. Sometimes it bogs down and sometimes it surges forward. There's the revolution after the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time, man is compelled—that's what our modernity is.
1:18:21 And that's exactly what Baudelaire would like to forget. I come back to it when he says 'let my soul get drunk on a lie.' That is, forgetting that I know too much, that I know that everything that made the world bearable up until now has been pulverized by the critique of the Enlightenment. So from that point on, solutions can only be earthly, you see. Aesthetics began by replacing the religious, then the political replaced the aesthetic—that's a bit the story of modernity that I'm recalling here.
The rotten in cooking: dosage and sublimation 1:18:58 There you have it—it all started from things as light as perfumes. Remember, we started from a quotation by Albert Samain. 'And light as a perfume, pretty as a smile, it's this old France air that everything here breathes, and everywhere this penetrating scent of boxwood.' It seemed as light as champagne bubbles, and no! Because we ran up against this strange ambivalence whereby the sweetest perfumes are always very close to detestable odors—it's very curious, or else it's only a difference of degree. I'm summing up a bit everything we've seen, it's not obvious.
1:19:43 And we find this again in taste. With Caroline, we had often reflected on the importance of rot in excellent cuisine. Rot, so to speak, but listen, cheap wine, wine, and all the more so when the wine is good—it's fermentation. There's a question of when exactly the liquid is no longer merely fermented but is outright spoiled, rotten. There's a threshold between the two.
1:20:14 We understand La Bruyère's text better now, which I'll repeat to you now, since it takes on new meaning. There is, in art—the art of making wine, for instance—a point of perfection, just as there is, in the same way, a point of goodness or ripeness in nature. Whoever senses it has perfect taste; whoever falls short of it or goes beyond it has faulty taste. You see, you all have, sometimes, during the fine season—it's coming, the fine season—we're going to have fruit. And what do we do? Do we need to eat them now?
1:20:53 They're a bit too green because in large... Let me go back—take avocados, for instance, as in Africa, they're hard as stone. I'm not just talking about fruit generally, but there are fruits like that. But if I leave them too long, they'll be inedible. Between the two, there's an ideal point. It's this question of dosage, of the slider I'd like to draw your attention to. When you reason in dynamic rather than static terms like that, it's no longer a fixed point. We're less surprised that apparently the most contradictory things—repulsive odors and the sweetest odors—end up colliding with each other.
1:21:32 But let me come back to taste. Rot—what's the connection? Yes, fine, we accept that wine, fermentation, is a beginning of rotting, but it's not just wine. What is cheese? What does it mean to age a cheese, if not to have the patience to wait a bit for it to rot a little before eating it—it's so much better. 'Would you like Roquefort without the mold? Moldy! Moldy! Mold is disgusting!'
1:22:03 Listen, the little cavities in Roquefort, that's exactly it! It's delicious! Well, it's a bit... it's a bit... risqué, my story. And I should point out I'm not the only one—Freud had this vertiginous insight, saying that the repression of the sense of smell in man—though I've seen in Niger, Tuareg people who can smell that there's a well with water more than 2 km away, sometimes, just by scent.
1:22:38 So much so that it's vital for them, their sense of smell is trained to detect the slightest trace of moisture. Now precisely, since we're talking about smell and water, stagnant waters, putrid waters have much stronger odors than pure water, which, as you know, is odorless, colorless and tasteless. It's not from that water that perfumes come.
1:23:15 And so, you saw Boulard talking about musk earlier, that's what I call the scabrous side, in the sense that the energy brought—I'll sum up now, I'll stop beating around the bush—the energy brought by the libidinal element, which is fundamental in the relationship to smell in mammals, which plays such a large role in sexuality, and therefore in reproduction. It's not a secondary issue for mammals. The energy comes from there; but the form, with millennia of history, traditions, cosmetics, sublimations in Freudian terms, gives you more or less the whole history of cosmetics.
The indeterminate and the finite, from the Greeks to the moderns 1:24:01 And so, after having been ironic about these perfumes that stink, Caroline has the merit of saying that she's raising a real problem. And the problem that interests us philosophically is that they put us on the track of one of the most important dichotomies in philosophical thought. It's the one that opposes the indeterminate—pointing to a smell, it seems to be indeterminate, a smell, a sound, a perfume.
1:24:36 All that has no well-defined contours. There's an end to the opposite of indeterminate. There, it's determined. The columns of the Parthenon, that's fine, that's clear. Red on green, that's clear. But the indeterminate—if you look closely, I was talking about impressionism earlier—but what happens starting from poetic modernity, we saw it with Verlaine earlier?
1:25:12 And for that he prefers the odd, the vaguer, the indeterminate, vaguer and more soluble in air—what is more indeterminate than the airy element, with nothing in it that weighs or settles? Determined things have at least a weight, not even that. So it's a fundamental moment in which we recognize a surge of modernity. For example, you explain that to a Greek and he doesn't understand—I mean a Greek from antiquity of course—for him it's the exact opposite: the beautiful is what is perfectly finished. Besides, 'perfect' means 'finished,' you find it again in grammar, in the pluperfect of the Anglo-Saxon languages. 'Perfect' means past in grammatical conjugations.
1:26:01 To finish, finished. This dichotomy of the indeterminate and the finished, that's what this sends us back to. That's why I've gone through several poems by... We'll see another one, the one called 'Reader, have you sometimes...' It's the one in a series of poems, I think it's 'A Phantom.'
1:26:45 Thank you. You start with 'Reader, have you sometimes breathed in?' It's about perfume. Perfume, there you go. Thank you. There, so you see Baudelaire again, again on the theme of perfume, you see he piles it on. 'Reader, I address you, myself.' 'Have you sometimes breathed in with intoxication?' And in any case, there's this trouble, even in the body that's present.
1:27:17 'And slow gluttony'—tastes aren't far from perfumes. The link that unites the nose to the mouth, you see. How many times can we not bear the smell of a good meal prepared by our grandmothers, our mothers, even sometimes by our partners, that can happen—and how many times, isn't it, do we have only one desire, which is to pounce on the food that smells so good.
1:27:50 So, reader, have you sometimes breathed in with intoxication and slow gluttony? Breathed in what? That grain of incense that fills a church, or from a sachet, the ingrained musk. If you like, the smell of musk, you find it at hairdressers'. Now it's even synthetic, but you find that smell which comes, I remind you, from a gland used for the reproductive apparatus of mustelids.
1:28:22 That's the family of ermines, martens, mongooses, very odorous families that can be smelled even from far away. The musk extracted from their gland plays a fundamental role in classic perfumery. Look at the second stanza, which describes the effects of this revelation through smell. What does it say? 'Deep, magical charm,' with which we get intoxicated.
1:28:55 Careful, there in one line you have the whole program of In Search of Lost Time, all the volumes—'with which we get intoxicated in the present, the restored past.' With one smell, you have the whole temporal thickness back again, which is the very property of man, of man as the historical animal. And as an example: 'thus the lover on an adored body'—so through a smell, on an adored body—'gathers the exquisite flower of memory.' You see this temporal thickness that suddenly surges through a perfume. It's not as light as that, and at the same time, it's never very far from multiple smells.
Two dialectical moments: the example of security 1:29:46 I'll take this opportunity to remind you that I am neither for the indefinite, for the indeterminate, nor for the finished; I don't choose between the Greek and the modern, nor do I dismiss them back to back, but I recall that each of these positions, each of these situations, are moments in the dialectical sense of the term—that is, one absolutely has to pass through them, each of these two moments is indispensable to truth.
1:30:19 We saw that—I'll draw an analogy with the theme of security. Those of you who have good memory, and I know there are more and more of you, which pleases me, who remember a previous talk when we go on to state the sequel—we had done something on... how to sum it up with a title? Security, that's even better.
1:30:53 Security, there's the question: is it reactionary or is it progressive? Is it a value of the left or the right, call it whatever you like. And I had answered that it all depends on the moment. We're certainly not going to reproach—and I come back to lullabies—a mother with her infant in her arms, rocking him, we're not going to tell her 'stop getting him used to security!' Come on, really! There's a necessary moment for this hyper-fragile being, who has just undergone perhaps the greatest trauma of his life, moving from perfection, from the ideal temperature, from the absence of effort to stand up.
1:31:42 from food that arrives as soon as one is hungry, from the suppression of all distance between desire and its satisfaction—and suddenly one has to cry, wail, fight against the cold, against the light. This refers to a magnificent study by Otto Rank in the psychoanalytic field called The Trauma of Birth. No need to draw a picture. And Chateaubriand, speaking of his birthday, says that it's that day of year X 'when my mother inflicted life on me.' You can already sense the mal du siècle.
1:32:26 Well yes, modernity reactivates what is fundamental in man, the anxious animal, the unhappy animal, man always a bit of a newborn somewhere out of nature, isn't he? And who is no longer even reassured, as before the Age of Enlightenment, by religious answers that preceded the questions. There, I'm summing up a bit everything we've just realized, as if it were nothing, starting from apparently imponderable things, barely tangible, that are fragrances.
1:33:06 The security example is quite clear. Security is necessary at the moment, but if that's all there is, it becomes habit and becomes a constraint. When there's no more risk-taking at all, it's just as deadly as if there were chaos. And I had given an illustration of that which always makes me laugh when I think about it, it's that text by Kafka called The Burrow, which is the confession of an animal that is presumably a rodent, well, an animal that digs burrows.
Kafka's The Burrow 1:33:42 There, I say that because inside there are just as well carnivores like the badger or the fox as rodents, like the mole. In short, there's an underground animal, we wonder if it's a mole, we don't see very clearly, it doesn't matter, it's not specified, who spends its time telling us how it builds its burrow, how it makes galleries, decoys, fake rooms. There are tricks to ensure its safety, its safety, its obsession, is that a predator's tooth might suddenly plunge into a corridor and sink into its back.
1:34:22 So it's obsessed with that. For it, it's not a moment, there's only one thing, its security. But even for it, from time to time it needs to renew its food stocks. So from time to time, it has to go out. So there, we leave security, we move to the antithesis-moment of security, risk. For now we don't see what's funny about it, but I'll get there. But when it comes back with its prey, to bring it back into its burrow—and here I give the floor back to Kafka—it says: when I see, when I approach and see the opening of my burrow, only I can see it, because I've disguised it with branches, with decoys, with things that conceal it, but only I can see that it's the entrance.
1:35:07 I am moved by the perfection of my work, by my tenacity, and sometimes, that's what makes me laugh till I cry. It is moved by its success at having so well hidden the entrance of its burrow. And that's why I laugh, you'll understand right away, and Kafka pulls out things like: 'so that my burrow never reassures me as much as when I am outside it and see it from the outside.' You see, we're not far from Invitation to the Voyage, where the voyage is never as wonderful as when I don't undertake it, isn't that so?
1:35:46 There is indeed a thread running through all this. But there you go, just as there is a moment for security, without which it would be chaos, it would be horror, nightmare. But if there's only security, it's boredom. What did Baudelaire say? That our existence is an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. It's not so incoherent, everything we're saying this evening. I can feel that you were a bit worried at the start, with all these stories about things difficult to grasp, to pin down.
Pim Pam Poum, migration, and the anthropological sphere 1:36:25 Smell, taste. I'll end almost on a humorous note—that's not really the case, I won't finish there, but still I put it second to last. For those—you're too young—there was a comic strip series sacred to the initiated called Pim Pam Poum, those three awful rascals, the ill-mannered kids, well anyway, but it was very funny. And at one point, one of the three arrives with a poem of his own creation.
1:36:56 You'll see the connection with our theme tonight. 'The flower has a strange pallor, / And your sister, said the tax collector, / Difficulty getting butter, / Melancholy of elevators, / Horror, stupor, vapor.' It sounds like a caricature of the theme we've dealt with tonight, but you won't believe me, I haven't looked at this text again. When I last read it, I was 11 years old. You see, I haven't reread it, I know it by heart. I repeat, the flower has a strange pallor.
1:37:33 'And your sister, said the tax collector'—it says whatever, just to make it rhyme, you see, 'difficulty getting butter, melancholy of elevators, horror, stupor, vapor.' We were a little afraid, weren't we, that it might go off in all directions like that. But no, we saw how far it led us, to our permanent itinerant position. When I think that some have designated the majority of our immigrant workers as bedouins, that is, nomads.
1:38:14 Do you know where the word 'Arab' comes from? It's not an ethnicity, it's not a people. You could say it's a language, if that still holds—people will tell you that in the Maghreb it's not Arabic, well anyway, no matter. But above all, in the Arabic language, originally, it designates the one who is out in the bush with three goats and two sheep, almost in the desert, the itinerant, the nomad not yet settled. Ibn Khaldun, the scholar, the sage, the philosopher, or Ibn Battuta, doesn't consider himself an Arab—that's the people of the bush.
1:38:56 It's more a social function, rather low-grade in terms of prestige, if you like. A bit like sometimes in Corsica—now it seems quite sacrilegious, because now the shepherd is being revalued, but for a long time. I remember old people saying, 'well, I saw two men and a shepherd today.' The 'Arab' is that, it's a bit the one who is with the animals far from the cities or between the cities.
1:39:27 How can we call them migrants in a pejorative way? I've just shown that it's the very essence of the anthropology of man, of all of us, to be in shuttle motion. I know that in Germany there are geraniums on the windows. And there, things don't move, but people are even worried about everything that comes from outside, originally. Not in the center of Berlin, of course. And youth is generous about that. But since the jungles of central Africa, Homo sapiens has spread out across the five continents. That's an immense migration.
1:40:09 That's the normal state of man, migration. I told you earlier that what characterizes man was not acquired once and for all at the origin. And even when Rousseau distinguishes the state of nature and speaks of the passage from the state of nature to the civil state, you shouldn't believe that it happened—I repeat once again—on December 31st at midnight. Between Neanderthal and Sapiens? No. I recommend talks by an anthropologist—there I'm leaving philosophy, I'm in anthropology, in paleoanthropology I'm thinking of Hublin, H-U-B-L-I-N, who is director of research at the Collège de France and who gives admirable talks about this, who keeps telling you that the movement by which Homo sapiens began to appear is not finished. You keep going, every time we raise a child, we continue to come out of nature, to gradually free ourselves from zoology, from which we will never be entirely out. You shouldn't be an idealist about it, I mean, there will always be a need to eat to live.
1:41:22 But not just eating, but making a meal—here with chopsticks, elsewhere with forks, over there with the three fingers of the right hand, that's a third place—or not making one, deciding to fast; that's already beyond the program of hunger. It can no longer be explained by hunger alone. The way of satisfying it requires something else, and it's that something else that grounds the anthropological sphere. Once again, our union leaders would do well to remember—no, I'm not criticizing them, on the contrary, it's to help them that I say this.
1:42:02 When people say 'that's enough, you have the minimum for survival,' that's monstrous to say, the minimum for survival. But after all prehistoric man, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, had already gone beyond that minimum for survival, they weren't content with it already. You won't make me believe otherwise. Already 50,000 years ago. And cave paintings, that doesn't serve to eat better. Well, it certainly had functions, but certainly not vital ones. They must have known well that they'd keep living without it. And burying the dead, that's not vital either. With their weapons, with their jewelry, that's not vital, all that care.
1:42:44 That's what characterizes the anthropological sphere. When we find a burial with jewelry, artifacts, we know we might ask ourselves: isn't this rather an Australopithecus rather than a Homo? There, we know, we're sure it's a human. There's a whole process, especially since it's often complex, of rituals. The civilization of the burial axes all along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast.
Kafka's The Castle: the land surveyor's shuttle 1:43:14 So, this has taken us quite far, we started from apparently imponderable things and we arrive at the very foundation, perhaps, not only of philosophy but of anthropology. It's this shuttle motion, this permanent itinerancy between two extremes, always passing each time through something like a focal point, through a middle term. I'll conclude this theme.
1:43:44 With an example, not to close the problem but rather to open it up—it's a text I'm citing, among other passages, but which I'm citing here today, precisely for this theme of shuttling between two extremes, I'm thinking of Kafka's The Castle, Kafka's testament, his last novel. She said 'unfinished' but you're taking the words right out of my mouth, aren't you? Kafka's greatest masterpieces are unfinished, and even the part we manage to read, despite their unfinished state, the treasure that it constitutes, we owe to Max Brod, Kafka's friend, who had the fortunate infidelity of not obeying the dying Kafka, who had asked him to burn all his unfinished manuscripts.
1:44:31 The Castle is undoubtedly, in a way I can't help but state the obvious when I say that it's considered perhaps the most accomplished masterpiece among Kafka's great novels, because there are also these short stories which are on the same level but condensed into a few pages, or even fewer. No, I'm talking about novels. Well, The Castle, you remember, it's some fellow who shows up one night, at nightfall in a small village, saying he's been hired by the castle of the village, by the administration of the castle, hired as a land surveyor.
1:45:13 What is a land surveyor? Someone who surveys. You know, geometers, one step, two steps, three steps. That's the origin of mathematics. And yes! What does 'geometry' mean, in your opinion? Because it all started there. What does it mean? Study of the Earth? No, that's geology. Geometry, literally, is 'measure of the Earth.' Geometry, yes, because the Nile flooded, came and scrambled everything, so if you need to give back to each person their fields according to their property, you need an objective measuring element. That's how geometry began.
1:45:53 Surveying. So this surveyor arrives. You see already, this isn't the indeterminate, it's quite the opposite, the one who wants to introduce a measurement, the determined, the finite—it measures 27 cm, point such and such. There, there's a measurement. There's our first moment. And then in the village, people say, 'but a surveyor, we've never needed a surveyor.' The castle's envoy comes and says, 'say whatever you like, what proof do you have that you were hired by the castle?' I'll sum this up very quickly, it's not the key moment I'm going to dwell on.
1:46:32 'You just have to phone at this hour, you arrive late and you want us to wake up the castle, who do you think you are?' You see, there's tension. And finally, remember this text I did in another analytic musing where the castle is finally on the phone, K—that's the surveyor's name—K listens and all he hears is a crackling, a crackling, it was like distant children's voices gathering and joining together and growing in volume as if they wanted to pierce through something stronger than a poor ear could bear. And this sound that suddenly arose. But that's not where I want to go, I mentioned shuttling.
1:47:25 The villagers are astonished by this man who absolutely wants to go to the castle. They, the peasants, stick sensibly, if I may say so, to their daily affairs, which already take up quite enough of their time. And then there's the castle, which is inaccessible. Our hero is going to spend the whole novel shuttling back and forth, you see the connection. And as a result, he'll be neither fully of the village—since in the real village nobody cares about the castle, everyone tends their own garden as they say—nor of the castle itself, which is inaccessible.
1:48:03 So he keeps going back and forth all the time. That's a bit what man is. Earlier I was talking about a whirlwind, of a determination that leaves and comes back. That's the spiral, you see, but without returning to zero each time, there's a small bit of progress each time. The radius of the spiral increases. But still, there are comings and goings, comings and goings, we always come back. And this will be my conclusion—one could tell me I'm making detours, one might think I'm going off somewhere, but no, I'm always saying the same thing.
1:48:35 I want to know what you think of this opposition between the indeterminate and the strictly determined, when you do us the honor and pleasure of watching this recording. Thank you so much, I await your questions, and the next session will be my response to your questions on this subject, or on others, but on this subject as a priority.
1:49:05 Thank you for your patience.
1:50:24 What's it worth, what I can tell you, poor as I am, a shabby man. The work shall not please me, friend, I'd rather be free, for the leather must be stretched, and all poetry set aside.
1:51:37 [unintelligible sung syllables] ... us, our sweet malt,
1:52:55 Whoever hears it and true door, imitates the bird, the splendid finery into disgrace,
