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 end of the religion of art: the statues are corpses 0:24 The other one was called Sinistra at the time. So off we go, after the wave, and so it's the last Thursday...
12:58 The state of right — this refers, in a good translation, to the Roman world; in the state of right, then, the ethical world is Greece, and its religion has sunk into the consciousness of comedy, and unhappy consciousness is the knowledge of this loss — total, it's underlined, not total — the trust in the eternal laws of the gods has become mute, as has the trust in the oracles who were supposed to know particulars — particular, referring of course to the oracle of Delphi. The statues are now corpses whose animating soul has fled — worth noting that Roman statuary, which is very remarkable, very realistic, there are figures of Seneca that you see twisted with anxiety — this hyper-realism is the opposite of the ideal of the Greek city, which does not lose itself in details and anecdotes. So the statues are now corpses whose animating soul has fled, the hymns are words that faith has abandoned, the tables of the gods — this is very Hölderlinian, all this — are without spiritual food and drink, and the games and festivals no longer restore to consciousness — the games and festivals, imagine the gladiators, or bears tearing at a panther, or more often at men, and that's not quite the ideal of the beautiful Olympiad — the tables and the games and the festivals no longer restore to consciousness the blessed unity of themselves with their essence; the works of the Muses lack the force of the spirit which, in the time of the city, saw springing forth from the crushing of gods and men,
14:23 there he's alluding of course to tragedy, a mysterious culmination of Greek art, of the spirit which saw, springing forth from the crushing of gods and men, self-certainty. They are henceforth — the statues, the hymns, the tables of the gods — they are henceforth, and here there's a strange reversal, one that speaks to us today, this is what I wanted to introduce today — what they are for us: we are no longer fully immersed in art the way the ancients were, we are art lovers, the museum is our world, we moderns — when I say we, and this 'we' apparently is so far from being recent that Hegel already attests to it — they are henceforth what they are for us: beautiful fruits, there they are, my fruits, they're quite autumnal — beautiful fruits plucked from the tree; a friendly destiny has offered them to us, the way a young girl presents her fruits — I warn you, she who was having fun, there's the young girl — they are henceforth what they are for us, beautiful fruits plucked from the tree — interesting to have the severe Hegel say — a friendly destiny has offered them to us, the way a young girl presents her fruits; there is no longer the effective life of their being-there, neither the tree that bore them, nor the earth, nor the elements that made up their substance, nor the climate that determined them,
We are art lovers: the museum, the baroque, jazz 15:37 nor the alternation of the seasons that governed the process of their becoming. Thus destiny — yes, it's a rather melancholic tone overall, it's a bit like an elegy — thus destiny does not deliver to us, with the works of this art, their world, the spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled memory, or the inner recollection — there's the museum, one day, William — the inner recollection of that effectivity. Our operation, we moderns, our operation when we enjoy these works, is therefore no longer that of divine worship, through which our consciousness would attain its perfect truths.
16:12 You have to imagine a day that was meant to end with the performance of Aeschylus's Persians in Athens, or Sophocles's Antigone — you have to imagine the atmosphere in the city. Today we say to ourselves, what are you doing tonight? I don't know, I'll go listen to some jazz, no, I'd rather go listen to, I don't know, Vanessa Paradis, or a film, or this or that — we have a choice. That evening, everyone went to Sophocles; there was not yet the particularization of modern civil society.
16:43 So, our operation when we enjoy these works is therefore no longer that of divine worship, through which our consciousness would attain its perfect truth, which would fulfill it, but it is an external operation — we are connoisseurs, of course — external, which cleanses these fruits of a few drops of rain or a few grains of dust, and in place of the inner elements of the ethical effectivity that surrounded them, engendered them, and gave them spirit, establishes the endless scaffolding of dead elements — this, he's talking about criticism, of course — dead elements of their outward existence: language, the element of history, etc.
17:18 We are connoisseurs, we are scholars. I think of the vogue for baroque music, which confirms, by excellence for example, what Hegel is saying here. People absolutely want to play this music with period instruments, and in the best way it was played at the time, doing careful research, thanks to a whole work of archiving — what Hegel calls the element of history, language — to restore the timbres, etc. Forgetting one thing: that Bach himself was not concerned with the music that had been made three centuries before him.
17:48 It was the music of his own time. And it's the same for jazz. I was struck, when I came back from a mission to Africa, struck when I got off the metro, to see young people at the metro exit, or even in the metro, playing admirably the most difficult jazz themes. I'm thinking of bebop, for example — Gillespie, or Monk, etc. — without a single mistake, with incredible mastery, with a little amp, you know how it's done. And I was full of admiration, it's remarkable, really — and it's strange that...
18:23 And then afterward I said to myself, I'm admiring a young man playing the jazz of 40 years ago. Parker didn't play the jazz of 40 years before him. So, that's what Hegel is saying here — moving from substance to subject. And then, that somewhat melancholic tone, that kind of elegy — there is no longer this, there is no longer that, the statues are corpses, the hymns have lost their substantiality.
The girl who offers the fruits is more than nature 18:53 There is a reversal, and that's what I want to draw your attention to. Good morning, madam, please come in. And there's a 'but' that inaugurates this reversal — but just as the young girl, you see, when she's in the... isn't she gone — just as the young girl who offers the fruits of the tree is more than the nature that presented them immediately. A very Hegelian reversal. History, spirit superior to nature and to the immediate. There have been mediations in between. Here, the young girl is mediating; she offers the fruits.
19:25 Just as the young girl who offers the fruits of the tree is more than the nature that presented them immediately — nature deployed in its conditions and its elements, the tree, the air, the light, etc. — because she, the young girl, synthesizes in a higher form all these conditions, her climatic, meteorological, telluric conditions, because she synthesizes in a higher form all these conditions in the gleam of her self-conscious eye.
19:56 Strange text. Where all the rich diversity of the world condenses onto a quasi-non-being. The gleam in the eye of a young girl offering fruits. The gleam of her gaze — not even the material composition of her eyes, we'll leave that to physiology and anatomy — but its gleam. We're more in the order of act than in the order of being, if you will. So, because she synthesizes in a higher form all these conditions in the gleam of her self-conscious eye and in the gesture that offers the fruits — likewise, the spirit of destiny that presents its works of art to us.
20:27 So, we moderns, when today we enjoy Bach's music, or a tragedy by Sophocles, or when we read Madame Bovary — likewise, because she synthesizes in a higher form — I find this an important sentence — all these conditions in the gleam of her self-conscious eye and in the gesture that offers the fruits, likewise the spirit of destiny that presents its works of art to us is more than the ethical life and the effectivity of that people.
21:02 In other words, we do not manage, like the Greeks, to immediately produce beauty with that perfection. So what you get may be less beautiful, but it's deeper. That's the disjunction we're going to try to dig into. It is the spirit of tragic destiny which gathers all these individual gods and all these attributes of substance into the single pantheon, into the spirit conscious of itself as spirit. There, I'll say, since the text is rather superb, indeed, it's almost a prose poem. And I'm going to pair it immediately with another text, not by a philosopher, but by an author who has taught us to distrust what is ideological in philosophy.
Marx: base, superstructure and gaps 21:40 I'm referring of course to Marx, who wrote, as you also know, in his youth, a work called The Poverty of Philosophy. 'Poverty' should be understood here as 'misery,' because that's the Latin sense. So I'm going to read you the passage that contains the most Marx in the fewest lines. And the Éditions Sociales had the very good idea of extracting the introduction into a small volume that you'll find in bookshops.
22:13 But this extract, from a work written immediately before Capital — so this is the definitive Marx, so to speak — is his famous Contribution, yes, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Marx did not want to write one more work of political economy, even a Marxist one, alongside those of the classical or bourgeois economists. On the contrary, he contests economics' claim to set itself up as an autonomous science — a critique of political economy.
22:44 So, in this introduction, you have a text that is very precious because it's very rare — a bit like Hegel, you know we saw with Hegel that Hegel doesn't like, in fact often reminds us, that it's pointless to try to summarize, condense the essence of a thought into a sentence or two. What matters is the development, the enrichment, the detail, etc. And here, an exception — no doubt because this is an introduction and Marx is addressing his readers at a turning point — he understands that he needs to summarize somewhat the essence of his thought, so that the trees don't hide the forest.
23:17 So, here it is. Let's take advantage of it. Once again, I'm giving you the maximum of Marx in the minimum of lines. 'The general result at which I arrived' — this is a bit of a recap of his journey before reaching the stage he's at, which, once attained, served as the guiding thread for my studies — 'can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite relations that are necessary, independent of their will — relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.'
23:51 'The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.'
24:22 There, I read that straight through, without stopping, because it gives a sense of what has been called basic Marxism, which is going to be immediately contradicted by Marx himself, and above all what follows, which is decisive. I say basic because, almost literally, we have a base — it's Marx himself who supplies the word — the infrastructure, the world of economic and material production, and above it, everything that's in our head or our heart, to put it more simply, everything that's internal, the superstructure. The mode of production of material life conditions the process of social, political, and intellectual life in general.
24:52 It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, it is their social being that determines their consciousness. So there, everything's fine, there's a base and then above it a superstructure that is supposedly its reflection and that has less reality, necessarily, if we go on using this metaphor. You know well that there can't be more reality in the mirror than there is in front of it. There can be at best as much — I don't know if the mirror isn't too distorted — but never more. And yet that's not how it happens.
25:23 Because here, we're in immobility, we're not in becoming, we're not in movement. For the moment, we've taken a snapshot. We're in spatial metaphors, we're not in time. Base, summit — spatial metaphor, we're in — linguists would say synchrony, not diachrony. And here comes diachrony. 'At a certain stage of their development' — let's get back to seriousness and reality, that is, to time and history — 'the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production.' The relations of production, to put it very quickly, are the political forms, if you will, engendered by these material arrangements, and in particular the forms of property.
26:02 We've been very precise about this. So, in one sentence, Marx said — he was saying that the superstructure expresses the infrastructure, is its reflection, in terms of basic marxology — and now suddenly it's the opposite. 'The material productive forces of society come into contradiction' — it's no longer a matter of reflecting, expressing, but of contradicting — 'with the existing relations of production.' Well yes, back to basic Marxism, another famous sentence: 'the hand-mill gives you feudalism, the steam-mill gives you the bourgeoisie' — a famous sentence of Marx's.
26:37 But we didn't pass from feudalism to the bourgeoisie in a given year, on a December 31st at midnight. All of that is gradual. And many aspects of the old historical figure persist even as the next one is being gestated. So there are permanent lags. That's what Marx is studying here. There's always a gap between the infrastructure and the superstructure. Look at Roman law. Roman law, in Marxist terms, is the legal — hence intellectual, hence ideological — expression of a deeper reality, that of the Empire.
27:10 But Roman law is still used enormously in the legal world. It has traveled through the centuries. So there is a permanent lag, isn't there, between the base and the summit. We're in the order of time. So, I go back to this dynamic part of the text, after the static part: 'At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or — what is merely a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations'
27:40 'within which they had operated until then.' We're not here to do a course on Marx today, but still, since we're at the heart of Marxist-ness, to speak fashionably — when we hesitate over the notion of relations of production, it sounds abstract; think relations of property. In other words, the productive forces are purely material, the relations of production are political. To be even more precise, imagine — to simplify — a society of a hundred, a hundred units, a hundred inhabitants, in the Amazon rainforest or a village in the Sahel, it doesn't matter, where the only productive force to ensure the existence of each and all would be, not even the plow, let's say, a kind of hoe, a daba, as they say in Africa, a spade-hoe.
28:26 Well, that's the productive force Marx is alluding to here, but it doesn't produce at all the same world depending on whether this productive force belongs to a chief who makes private use of it, or whether there's a collective, cooperative use of it, as also happens, moreover, in the most archaic societies. In other words, the same productive force can give rise to very different relations of production. So let's return to this text about the lag that interests me a great deal.
28:59 The word 'lag' is fashionable too, same thing. At certain moments, then, in their evolution, 'the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or — what is merely a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they had operated until then. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.' So there are indeed two distinct moments. I'm deliberately drawing this contrast between the young girl offering the fruits with the gleam in her eye in Hegel, and suddenly the crudeness of material relations, economic relations.
29:33 I'm doing this deliberately, because this great leap is going to prove fruitful here. 'From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.' Up to this point, then, it was the economic infrastructure that was the content and the superstructure that was the form. And now, suddenly, the dominant ideological form becomes a fetter — very topical, what I'm saying — becomes a fetter on the further development of the productive forces.
30:06 Thus, the aristocratic and feudal modes of production, at the end of the eighteenth century, had reached saturation. The new productive forces, in particular the very recent industrial revolution that had occurred mainly in England and was soon to spread like wildfire, with the steam engine etc., could not flourish within the framework of the feudal-aristocratic superstructure. We can make the same argument today. It seems that, in the complexity of today's world, archaic capitalist forms of production no longer suffice, to say the least given the crisis, to express the expectations of today's world.
30:44 So, 'from forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.' It's when this distortion becomes too great that, for Marx, an epoch of social revolution opens. I'll continue the text without interruption. 'The change in the economic foundation more or less rapidly transforms the entire immense superstructure' — for centuries, for weeks, more or less rapidly, all the superstructure norms. When one considers such upheavals' — addressed to intellectuals, theorists, sociologists, economists.
31:15 'When one considers such upheavals, one must always distinguish between' — one must always distinguish between the material upheaval, which can be established with the precision of natural science — you can measure it, we have historians among us, how much food was produced roughly in the 7th century, how much is produced three generations later, and today. The advantage of the economic is above all that it's a realm of the measurable. So everybody can agree on what they're talking about. 'When one considers such upheavals, one must always distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and' — on the one hand — 'and, on the other, the legal' — careful, here comes the list — 'political, religious, artistic' — and we come back to our subject, we started from aesthetics, it connects up.
32:04 That's why I chose this text by Marx. 'Or philosophic' — in short, there would be a word integrating all these sectors, all these spheres, all these fields — let's talk like Bourdieu — in short, I repeat, the conditions of production, the legal, political, religious, artistic, philosophic forms — in short, all the species of the genus superstructure, in short, the ideological forms — those are ideological forms. There you have Marx's concept of what he calls ideology. It's not at all a political theory.
32:35 We're in ideology just as much when we listen to certain — not pejorative — a certain kind of music, or when we study the principle of joint inheritance in traditional Corsican property, quite simply. Just as one doesn't judge an individual on... excuse me. In short, 'the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict' — so that's not nothing. Marx never said the superstructure was nothing, was a mere reflection you could throw in the trash — this is crucial, this is a materialism, Marx's — it matters that the reflection itself exists and has an effect.
33:06 He knows how much Rousseau's texts — apparently ideas, mere words, not material forms — had the importance you know on the development of the French Revolution, for example, through someone like Saint-Just, whom people invoke so often. In short, 'the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.' 'Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks of himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness.' It would be simple if we could judge an era by the idea it has of itself.
33:40 It would suffice to read Cicero to see what was happening in Roman times. And he says, just as one does not judge an individual by the idea he has of himself. It would be easy — trials, all you'd have to do is: defendant, please rise. What do you think of yourself? Oh well, I'm rather innocent. Fine, we'll acquit you. Just as one does not judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, so one cannot judge such a period of upheaval by its self-consciousness. 'On the contrary, this consciousness must be explained' — thank you, Hegel — 'from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social productive forces and the relations of production.'
34:12 'No social formation ever disappears' — this is for the impatient ones. There's a name in the history of the workers' movement for that, it's called leftism — wanting everything right away, right now. At the end of demonstrations, people would say, shall we go burn down the stock exchange? Well, that does absolutely nothing to capitalism. It's like replacing one minister with another minister — it's never cost capitalism a single penny. 'No social formation ever disappears before all the productive forces for which it is broad enough have been developed.'
34:43 'And new, higher relations of production never replace it before the material conditions of existence for these relations have been brought to maturity within the framework of the old society itself. That is why mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve. For, looking closer, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.' There. So, I've spoken of a great leap. We were, you see, in that case of the most immaterial thing, the most imponderable, the gleam in the eye of the young girl and her gesture offering the fruits.
Proust: the girl's look and the little band 35:20 And here I am, in the noise of excavators, in coal mines, and soon, as they say now, Fordism and mass production. So we're far from — 'just as the young girl who offers the fruits of the tree is more than the nature that presents them immediately, because she synthesizes in a higher form all these conditions in the gleam of her self-conscious eye.' Between the gleam of that self-conscious eye and the harsh materiality Marx reminds us of, there seems to be an abyss.
35:55 Well, I'd like to bridge that abyss today, to show you that we're never as close to the depths as when we're right at the edge of the surface. And that's why I'm going to extend Hegel's beautiful text about the young girl and the fruits, to give a title to this text that Hegel of course never gave it. I'd like to pair it, not with a philosopher's text this time, but with the text of an artist — an artist of language, since it's a writer. I'm going to quote you a passage from Proust — for those familiar with Proust, it's from Within a Budding Grove, taken from the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, at the point where the narrator is still a boy, well, a pre-adolescent, convalescent, often ill, recovering.
36:42 And when he sees for the first time the group of young girls on the jetty, from which will emerge—then Claire, Albertine, if you don't know the rest. And at a certain moment, on holiday with his grandmother at Balbec, at Granville roughly speaking, at a certain moment his gaze crosses the gaze, you see, we're speaking of Hegel's text, the gaze of one of these young girls: "For an instant, as I passed beside the brown-haired girl with the plump cheeks who was pushing a bicycle, I met these sidelong, laughing glances, directed from the depths of that inhuman world" — they come to speak of the little group to which these young girls belonged, which enclosed the life of this little tribe.
37:23 inaccessible, unknown, where the idea of what I was could certainly neither reach nor find a place. He's a shy young boy, these young girls seem very much at ease in the world. Wholly absorbed in what her companions were saying, this young girl wearing a polo cap that came down very low over her forehead, had she seen me at the moment when the black ray emanating from her eyes had met me? You see how the games converge again. We linger on what is at the border between inside and outside, the gleam of the eye. If she had seen me, what could I have represented to her, from within what universe did she distinguish me?
37:54 And there we have this admirable text. If we thought—it's a far-fetched hypothesis, but to bring out the truth better—if we thought that the eyes of such a girl are nothing but a shiny disc of mica, a hypothesis made credible by the bionic man, I don't know what they call it now, you know—already, Descartes had been the first attentive to automatons. The first automatons appear in the seventeenth century, when mechanistic thought explodes. And already Descartes wondered, you know, in that famous text, at his window, he says, I see men.
38:25 I say that I see men. But then what do I see other than coats, hats, which could cover automatons moved by springs? Descartes's distrust. I see only coats, hats, let's be clear about how one speaks. Perhaps underneath there are automatons that take the form of men. There it is. So one must be careful with what Descartes says. So, if we thought it were a crystal or a shiny disc of mica, in short—if we could reproduce these very, very, very familiar themes, even though they're developing a great deal now with virtual reality, of course, 3D, all that, yes.
38:59 So we have even more means today to make this text valid, don't we, than at the time when Proust was writing it. "If we thought, 'The eyes of such a girl are nothing but a shiny disc of mica,' we would not be eager to know and to unite with us her life." In short, if it were purely a material composition, if there were no gleam—we started from Hegel for this gleam—which gives life to what was merely dead matter, however perfectly it imitated the living, physically, chemically. "But we feel that what shines, from the verb 'to shine,' that what shines in this reflecting disc is not due solely to its material composition."
39:40 So you'll say to me, "Oh dear, we're sliding into idealism, that is, there's something other than the body, behind it there's the soul"—not at all. Because it's a material function of the eye. But look at what follows. "That what shines"—subject of "that what shines"—"what shines in the gleam of that eye, unknown to us, are the black shadows of the ideas this being forms about the people and places he knows. The lawns of racetracks, the sand of the paths where, pedaling through fields and woods, this little peri, more seductive to me than the one of the Persian paradise, would have led me."
40:10 "The shadows too of the house she is going to enter, of the plans she is forming or that have been formed for her. And above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her repulsions, her obscure and unceasing will." It's extraordinary. Proust shows very well that what shines in that gaze is an entire life. So it's a misreading to invoke an interiority that becomes invisible behind it. Of course there's an interiority. This interiority is made up of the immense materiality of what the girl lives, of the world in which she lives.
40:41 So, to jump from Proust to Marx—not even Hegel but straight to Marx—let me read you a reflection he makes about the little band of young girls, at a moment when they're on the famous strip of girls on the jetty. It's a fairly well-known passage. And he has just noted, I hope for you, that although they are very different individually, there is something circulating through them that makes for the homogeneity of the little band, as he calls it, which must not be due to physical looks, since one is brunette, another blonde, one small, another tall, etc.
41:13 "We are not straying from the point. Perhaps it was not chance alone that, in bringing these friends together, had chosen them all so beautiful. Perhaps these girls"—whose attitude sufficed to reveal their bold, frivolous, and hard nature, extremely sensitive to anything ridiculous or ugly, incapable of yielding to an attraction of an intellectual or moral order, he's speaking of these girls, don't worry— "had naturally found among companions of their own age a repulsion for all those in whom pensive or sensitive dispositions—what one calls being a bit of a brainiac—betrayed themselves through shyness, awkwardness, clumsiness, which they must have called an unappealing type."
41:48 "And had they kept these apart, while they had bonded instead with others drawn to a certain mixture of grace, suppleness, physical elegance—the only form under which they could picture the frankness of a seductive character and the promise of good times to be spent together." What does this have to do with Marx, you'll ask. It's coming. Because so far he's only given somewhat psychological common traits. And now, all of a sudden, perhaps it's also class, social class. When we speak of social class nowadays, people say it's outdated, it's old hat, it's Marx and out.
42:18 It's old, it's totalitarian, throw it on the fire. I'm exaggerating a bit, but not by much. The moment you dare even mention class determinations, you get sent back to prehistory. And here, on Proust's side, what a shame for the anti-Marxists—the notion of class is right there, and decisive, you'll see. "Perhaps also the class to which they belonged, which I could not have specified, was at that point in its evolution where, whether through the enrichment and leisure, or through the new habits of sport, spread even into certain popular milieus, and of a physical culture to which the culture of the intellect had not yet been added."
42:53 "Such a social milieu, like schools of harmonious and fruitful sculpture that do not yet seek tormented expression, naturally produces"—so this economic and social evolution naturally produces, and in abundance—"beautiful bodies with beautiful legs, beautiful hips, healthy and restful faces, with an air of agility and cunning. Were they not noble and calm models of human beauty that I saw there before the sea, like statues displayed in the sun on a shore of Greece?" These are encounters that seem fortuitous like that but are no accident—Marx, that is, they belong together, and not in just any way.
Aesthetics, anesthesia and surface 43:26 to show that we're not so far from the infrastructure when we're dealing with the gleam, mind you, in the young girl's eye. And if I began with this gleam, it's because, as I promised you last time, our discussion today would focus on the field of aesthetics. Now, if we consider the word aesthetics—perhaps some of you already know—etymologically, what does it refer us back to? The word itself. Etymology alone doesn't make a definition, but it's a clue.
43:56 You find it again in "anesthesia"—what does anesthesia mean? What does it suppress in anesthesia? Yes, it suppresses the senses, exactly, sensibility, the sensible. The sensible—this is truly Plato—what I touch, what I see, appearance, beautiful or not, the world of sensible appearance. So anesthesia is first of all, and this is exactly where I wanted to arrive, which is why I started from the gleam in the young girl's eye—it's the world of surface, of appearance, without worrying for now about what lies behind, isn't that so?
44:29 If I contemplate a beautiful sunset over the sea—let me put it better, let me say it through Baudelaire—here, "Chant d'automne," quite fittingly seasonal today, "Chant d'automne," first part: "I love the greenish light of your long eyes, sweet beauty, but today everything is bitter to me, and nothing, neither your love, nor the boudoir, nor the hearth, is worth as much to me as the sun shining on the sea." So let's stay with this almost non-figurative picture—I'm not speaking of any motif—the sun shining on the sea, there's not much that's figurative in that.
45:00 And if I look at that kind of liquid gold that sometimes spreads over the sea at twilight, I'm dazzled by this richness, this fullness, but if suddenly I take a glass, drawn right from the heart of that colored sea, if I take a glass and show it to you, it will be colorless, won't it, transparent. We were in illusion, we were at the surface, and it's at the surface, at the meeting of the sun's light and the surface of the water, that this poetic magic occurs.
45:38 But it's obvious that if I take a pin, if I start going 2 mm deep, this magic has already vanished. I say this because the notion of surface is complex. It's complex because it's almost of the order of a non-being. If I take a surface, to simplify—let's leave the sea, now I'll take fresh, still water, to simplify, a flat surface—where is it, at the surface of the water? I mean, at the boundary between the air and the water.
46:09 It's typical even of an imaginary notion. It occupies the space of the boundary. Once again, if I go 1 mm below that surface, into the water, I'm already no longer at the surface. I'm going to start slipping into depth. And so it's as a relation between two heterogeneous realities that the surface takes on its full meaning. You see that this is quite a complex notion, this notion of surface. Now, in language, we have connotations that divert us a little from the point we're trying to make.
46:42 because very often the notion of surface is connoted pejoratively in relation to depth, which seems to be the essential thing. "Let's get to the bottom of things," implying that's where we'll arrive. We arrive at the bottom. Strictly speaking, there's mud and slime. That's perhaps not the most interesting bottom. Whereas at the surface, there are all sorts of reflections. I think of Schubert's music, which often takes on its full meaning only near clear, transparent water—trout don't generally swim about in murky waters. There are other waters in music, but Schubert's is an extraordinary effort to reach the light.
47:15 And you know that in the song cycle, for those who know Schubert, "Die schöne Müllerin," the miller's apprentice who follows the course of the river like a destiny will end up at the bottom of the water. So we'll stay at this surface, which will be the skin, for example, in painting—Hegel has long discussions in his Berlin lectures on aesthetics, long discussions on the time it took in the history of painting to render flesh, which for him is somewhat the synthesis of all colors, the difficulty involved in rendering skin tone.
47:51 This is a passage where I speak of surface. I wonder if there isn't... A passage where this is illustrated in particular. I'll take an excerpt where I stay at the surface. "That is why painting is obliged to renounce total spatiality." In this passage, mind you, he's distinguishing the specificities of each of the fine arts.
48:23 Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, hierarchy. "That is why painting is obliged to renounce total spatiality, and this is not merely due to the limitation of human nature that imposes this renunciation on it. From the moment, indeed, when the object of painting represents, from the spatial point of view, only a reflection of the spiritual interiority that art offers to spirit, spatial and concrete reality loses its independence and enters into more direct and narrower relations with the spectator than those of works of sculpture." He means by this that in sculpture there are three dimensions. Depth is real in sculpture.
48:55 With painting, there's an enormous leap. That's why he places it among the romantic arts—not at all in the sense of the nineteenth-century Romantic school. As he dates it, from the appearance of Christianity, to distinguish it, of course, from classicism and Greek art. But a modern art already, if you like, in that there is a dimension of the real, depth precisely, which becomes abstract in painting. Long before so-called abstract painting appeared, painting is always abstract from its very principle, by the simple fact that depth is indeed present, but under the mode of illusion called perspective, of course, as you know.
49:25 It's no longer a real depth, it's an imaginary depth that can therefore only appear on a surface. It's not a real depth. That's the great difference with sculpture. And then—I can't find it... I won't make you waste time, but I have a passage on flesh, which is admirable, that I'll find again for you. Yes, and so, since I've come to flesh, this surface, the skin—since I was there—that's still not enough. This skin, one still needs to add more surface to it.
49:57 This added surface is called makeup, tanning. You see that there's a lot of work done on this surface. I once taught a class to Africans—it was required, in the final year—and I told them, imagine that we bring into class... No, sorry, excuse me. It was a secretarial vocational class, BAC secrétariat. It was a kind of substitute class, a poor young girl who did typing. I say poor because they were burdened with two hours of philosophy a week, on top of all the typing classes they already had.
50:28 and so I didn't burden them too much with the concept, substance, subject and predicates. And so she asked me to talk about what interests young girls, of course, and regarding seduction, they asked me a lot why European women wear so much makeup, etc. And I said to them, what do you like about your beloved? So they answer, everything. I said, fine, if it's everything, I won't take away much. I'll just take away one small surface.
The hierarchy of the arts and interiority become 50:58 the skin. And what's left is the écorché, the flayed figure in the science room. You should have seen the recoil, the horror in the class at that moment. "But how? You told me you liked everything." I've barely removed anything. I removed almost nothing. When you think about it, I suppose it becomes rather painful. But there we had a surface. You see? The surface is nonetheless profound. It's still what arouses interest, desire, or dislike, whatever the case. But well, all this happens independently of knowing what lies behind it, fortunately. So, if I continue from painting to music, for example, then there—we had already seen that in painting, a dimension had evaporated, in real terms, that of depth, which became perspective, hence imaginary.
51:41 And now in music, there's no dimension at all left. There's no spatiality at all. No spatiality at all. Except in less accomplished kinds of music. A music, for example, that contents itself with a regular rhythm, a bit like a colonnade—that is, it shows that it's still subject to the plastic ideal. It needs regular reference points, etc. And, you know, Verlaine, in his "Art poétique," which has that very famous incipit, "Music before all else," and for that, prefers the uneven, he starts from the uneven meter of the verse, of course.
52:18 "And for that, prefer the uneven, / vaguer and more soluble in air, / with nothing in it that weighs or poses." We're far here from plastic materiality, we're truly in musical imponderability. This is exactly what "music before all else" means, the bow-stroke of it. "And for that, prefer the uneven, / vaguer and more soluble in air"—there's no more determinate form and outline, "vaguer and more soluble in air, / with nothing in it that weighs or poses." And he catches this again in the following stanza.
52:49 "Vague" doesn't mean here that we're going to do just anything, all blurry, muddying the waters. "You must also not go / choosing your words without some scorn; / nothing dearer than the gray song / where the vague and the precise join." All the same, there's a musical precision, you know, as perfect as any plastic precision. In music, even all the spatial dimensions have evaporated, and so it's as if we had even left the order of surface, as if it were the depths speaking directly.
53:21 And this depth, what is it? It's no longer space, it's time. And here we have the whole order of Hegel's aesthetics. If you look closely at the hierarchy of the arts on which his monumental aesthetics is built: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry. I'll come back to the hierarchy of the last two, which poses a complex problem. You have architecture, the art most caught up in spatial constraints. Architecture, moreover, at the outset, has no properly aesthetic aim.
53:52 The important thing is that it doesn't collapse, after all. There are constraints like gravity, all that. There are the three dimensions. He speaks of Greek temple architecture, for example, which serves above all as a preparation—it's made to house the figure of the god, the statue of Zeus at Olympia for instance, the statue of Diana at Ephesus, which is one of the wonders of the world. Then, when we move on to painting, as we've seen, a dimension of real empirical exteriority disappears: depth.
54:24 With music, it's all the spatial dimensions that disappear. You can see that the progression makes sense. It's one that moves from exteriority toward interiority, quite simply. But when I say interiority, don't think of the kind we access by meditating, by introspecting, by doing like Rodin's Thinker, asking "what am I thinking right now?" Of course, that interiority—as we saw earlier with Proust's young girl—itself refers back to a very rich exteriority, but a past one. We're within the order of time. It has passed by, and so this gleam, the gleam in her eye, is the actualized result of that entire history.
55:00 No one says it, it's her whole life. Let me recall here the continuation, which is more explicit on this point, regarding the object of interiority. I repeat the passage I recited and continue on from it. "If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but a shiny disc of mica, we would not be eager to know and to unite with us her life. But we feel that what shines"—from the verb "to shine"—"in this reflecting disc is not due solely to its material composition. That there are, unknown to us, the black shadows of the ideas this being forms about the people and places she knows."
55:35 "The lawns of racetracks"—you see, we're not in abstract interiority, this is real. Past. "The sand of the paths where, pedaling through fields and woods, this little peri, more seductive to me than the houri of Persian paradise, would have led me." Peri and houri are oriental deities. "The shadows too of the house she will go into, of the plans she forms or that have been formed for her, and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her repulsions, her obscure and unceasing will. I knew," he continues, "that I would not possess this young cyclist unless I also possessed what was in her eyes."
56:08 Which is more complicated, isn't it, than a simple embrace, if you think about it a little. Because to appropriate the lawns of racetracks, gardens, sands, paths, I don't know—one doesn't enclose all that in an embrace. "And it was consequently her whole life that inspired me with desire, a painful desire because I felt it unrealizable"—the narrator isn't entirely a fool—"but intoxicating because what had until then been my whole life, having suddenly ceased to be my total life, being no more than a small part of the space stretching out before me that I burned to cover, and which was made up of the life of these young girls, offered me this extension, this possible multiplication of oneself, which is happiness."
56:46 So it's clear here that this evolution, which, when I say it goes from empirical exteriority to interiority, doesn't mean that interiority is abstract—it's quite the opposite. It's the exterior world that has become interiorized. But we have worked enough in previous sessions to know that we cannot ignore the becoming that preceded this result and that gives the result its full meaning. This is what Hegel calls a Gewordensein, a having-become, which we understand nothing of if we don't restore to it the becoming that constituted it.
57:23 If flamingos are pink, it's a result due to the fact that they've spent their time eating crustaceans, tiny crustaceans found especially in East Africa. And there you have it—the pink of their food hasn't disappeared, it has simply become integrated into the final result, on the surface of their plumage, so to speak, the time having passed. What was ingested at depth comes back in the form of surface. And so, this is a bit difficult to grasp at first, but well, it's not insurmountable—it's the dialectic of interiority and exteriority.
58:04 The interiority toward which all of Hegel's aesthetics tends is not an abstract and empty interiority, that of the abstract self we've sufficiently criticized, as we saw in previous sessions. On the contrary, it is the self with all the richness of the unfolding diversity of the world. In short. So when he spoke of the young girl earlier, he indeed said that the young girl synthesizes, doesn't he? If she synthesizes, it's because there are several things. It's not the empty and abstract unity of the self, of the negative. She synthesizes, in a higher form, all these conditions—air, light, sun—in the gleam of her self-conscious eye and in the gesture that offers the fruits.
Every word signifies for someone: recognition 58:41 Simply, there's this attitude—we're sure, thanks to this gleam, that we're no longer dealing with a mere thing, what Proust called the shiny disc of mica, that was a thing, but that we're dealing with someone. You know, I like to repeat what, in my opinion, is Lacan's best formula—there are many, more or less felicitous, but there's one that's admirable: you know he spoke a great deal about language, often with real pertinence, and in particular about speech, and he says—before signifying something, every word of speech signifies for someone.
59:13 I'll take up an example again, I think we'd already analyzed it a little — I say this for newcomers — but if I write three letters, one to my boss asking for a raise, one to my parents telling them about my vacation, and one a love letter, the vocabulary won't be the same, nor the syntax, nor the style, because the three someones I'm addressing impose on me, as sender, a specific writing, specific to the relationship that comes into being from the moment it's to this one or that one that I'm speaking, and not to the other.
59:51 In other words, I am not the sole author of my own work — which Rimbaud saw perfectly well. "The fools who proclaim themselves authors of their work," Rimbaud said. Rimbaud knew that the I is an other. To use a formula — it isn't even said "I am an other," to radicalize the alterity further, he said "I is," even if it meant doing violence to syntax. So the fact of the importance of this someone brings us back to the great result we had reached last time — since in science one does recapitulative reminders — namely that the great result of Hegel's philosophy is recognition.
1:00:29 Once again, Hegel could have had his entire system — not just his, but that of Plato, Leibniz, or anyone — reduced to a single fundamental thought. But still, if there's one final concept in Hegel, it's that of recognition. We saw it in the reality of master and slave, and we see it well here too. The narrator complains of being a nothingness compared to these young girls who seem to lead a life in a superior world, a sphere he has no access to and in which he is not yet recognized. And last time we brought up stakes of recognition hidden beneath very familiar, everyday forms of courtesy, like "you first?"
1:01:10 "Go ahead of me, please" when you enter a room where there's a crowd — and we showed among ourselves that this is a way of saying "well yes, I'm like you, I don't want to look like an animal rushing toward its food, driven by instinct." I say to him, "you go first," to show that I'm a bit above mere natural determination. We're not aware of any of this. We say "go ahead!" But there's all of that at stake, as Hegel would say — "Spiel," play, "Beispiel," example, a pun he often makes. So this struggle for recognition is a key to human relations, or as we say in philosophy, to intersubjective relations.
1:01:47 Philosophy spent twenty centuries deepening the subject-object relation, the relation of knowledge, and it's only quite late — thanks to, well, it's twenty centuries, I mean that's the result of it — that it understood that the key to the subject-object relation was the subject-subject relation. In other words, that the essential, the truth, is only attained in a three-beat rhythm and not in the binary relation that Lacan called specular.
1:02:19 Speculum is the mirror, illusory. The binary relation — for us, it's more than "I" and it's more than "you and I." So: me, the other, and something. Someone, another someone, and something. Even when people gather, even if it's for peace among the Indians — I'm not a specialist, I'm using imagery familiar to everyone, leaving it to the anthropologist to say whether it's well-founded or not. But I'm thinking of the calumet, the peace pipe.
1:02:49 Even in a gathering where apparently only the subjects matter, the persons, there has to be some thing that sanctions, that ratifies, and that gives depth to the intersubjective relation. So you see, it's a gymnastics one has to train for. The relation to the other passes through the thing, the relation to the thing passes through the other. You must not step outside this triangle. There's a very fine text on this, not by Hegel, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a noble figure of postwar French philosophy who died too soon and who saves its honor.
Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy: me, the true, the others 1:03:25 I say saves its honor because from Sartre to Derrida, postwar French philosophy is no doubt an effect of the Cold War and lived in the shadow of the most Nazi of philosophers. And there are admirable things in Sartre, in whomever you like — that's not the issue. But still, there's this initial handicap, one that Merleau-Ponty subscribed to the least. And Merleau-Ponty was invited by the Collège de France to give a lecture in memory of Bergson, on the occasion of an anniversary of his death.
1:04:02 And very quickly, the discussion widens and rises from the particular case of Bergson to that of the philosopher in general and his relation precisely to the world, to the other, etc. And there's this text called In Praise of Philosophy, simply — the thing in my pocket — and there's an admirable passage where Merleau-Ponty insists on this triangle. He says there are three inseparable instances in philosophy: the self, the true — with a capital T — and the others.
1:04:38 He doesn't even say "the other," he says "the others." Either it is with others that we go toward the true, or it is not toward the true that we go. I'm quoting him literally here. Either we go toward the true with others, or it is not toward the true that we go. And he adds — because there are all the possible combinations — I can be myself with others without the true. What's that called? I am myself with others without the true. But that's opinion. I'm in opinion, what we now call the corner café. Or in sophistry.
1:05:08 Or in communication. Let's take current things. The aim of discourse is not truth, is not distinguishing the true from the false. It's to make an action succeed, however crooked it may be. That's at bottom the shyster lawyer, the shyster par excellence, who says anything so long as the result — the guilty man he thinks is guilty — gets acquitted, whatever crime he may have committed.
1:05:38 So this triangle — self, the true, the others — take it with every combination you like. Myself with others, without the true, gives opinion. We're at the opposite pole from philosophy. The break was made as early as Socrates, wasn't it — as early as Parmenides even. This is not trivial. Parmenides is the first to totally oppose knowledge, epistēmē, science, to opinion, to belief. There's myself with the true, without the others.
1:06:08 That exists too. Think of ascetics on mountaintops in contemplation — that exists. That's the religious, not the philosophical. It's a possible combination, but it's not the true philosophical one. And there can also be the others who are in the true without the self. That's already rarer, but a pathological case — that's called madness. You have all three combinations. It's an admirable passage. Let me recall why he started from Bergson.
1:06:38 It's because of a historical incident in Bergson's biography. All of Bergson's thought led him, near the end of his life, to want to convert to Catholicism, having been born Jewish. And at the moment he was about to do it, in the late 1930s, antisemitic persecutions were already beginning in the Third Reich.
1:07:10 And even — skipping a few years — we're under Pétain, and the Pétain regime wants to award Bergson the honors of the French State, rewarding the philosopher who had known how to restore all its values, spirituality to the true values against encroaching Marxism — a materialist thing, as you know. And Bergson refused. It's from this refusal that Merleau-Ponty starts to show how Bergson remains great and connects to the Socratic patronage. Socrates too had problems with opinion and with powers.
1:07:42 And he refuses, saying: I did not want to convert so as not to separate myself from those who tomorrow, as he puts it, will be persecuted. And Merleau-Ponty picks up on this anecdote, saying that this is where we see the specific relation of the philosopher to the political. Either we go with others in the mode of the true, or it is not toward the true that we go. So I recommend this admirable In Praise of Philosophy, where we find this triangle again.
The thing between subjects: the table, the fermented, Hölderlin, the blues 1:08:14 There's nothing more Hegelian than triangulation of what had until then been binary. For example, the subject was opposed to the object for twenty centuries, and the work we've been commenting on for five Thursdays now, the Phenomenology, has as its object the phenomenon, for what is given to us, Hegel says, is not the subject alone or the object alone, but the relation of the two. Because Descartes had glimpsed it, Kant had dug into it, and Hegel sanctions it with this notion of phenomenon.
1:08:45 The phenomenon is indissolubly the subject and the object, and we try to find out what comes from me, what comes from outside. For now, what is given is the relation of the two. There, we have everything, it's the richest, we haven't yet abstracted or separated anything. So this binary relation that characterizes the enterprise of knowing in philosophy only reaches its perfection when it rises to the ternary, the three elements here being: me, the thing, and you — I gave you the example of the case of the peach, of the table, and the pleasure of the table, the pleasure of eating good things with others.
1:09:20 It's inseparable. We don't make the effort of presentation, etc., when eating alone. So being with others also has repercussions on aesthetics, strictly speaking, on appearance. I don't know, whether the radishes are arranged in a circle around the sausages or the reverse. It doesn't matter whether it's a humble meal or... let's not go so far as a gourmet meal in a fancy restaurant, but I mean, it's always around some thing, even if just around drinks, that an intersubjective relation is sanctioned.
1:09:54 And it can vary from one culture to another. Here we'll share corn beer, elsewhere it will be millet beer, I don't know, or some other alcohol, but... And since I've mentioned alcohol, let me use this parenthesis to open a parenthesis within the parenthesis. Lévi-Strauss understood well the stakes involved in the distinction between the raw, a state of nature, and the cooked, a state of culture. And he saw clearly — because what interests him, of course, is the bridges between the two — whereas Kant thought there was an unbridgeable abyss between the two orders, between the order of nature and the order of the moral law.
1:10:32 And, and I think he was fascinated by the intermediate stages between raw and cooked. I alluded to this a bit earlier without meaning to — the moldy, the rotten, the fermented. Yes, but if you take a fish prepared Tahitian style, or Polynesian style, whatever, I mean, we say we're eating raw fish. In fact, it's not entirely raw. It's cooked chemically by acids, by lemon, by whatever you like, it's marinated. We say it, don't we? A marinade is a chemical cooking. And so, in between, like that, and then you have all the cultivated molds, shaped like mushrooms — to come back to the season — including the mushrooms that fill the cavities of Roquefort.
1:11:19 This isn't done for our displeasure, these molds. So you see there's something spiritual about it — by the way, we say "wine and spirits trade." No, no, don't get me wrong, I'm joking, because it's no coincidence. There's something that borders on the immaterial while being quite material, that is a synthesis of synthesis between the two. Hölderlin, you see, who is generally dealing with somewhat idealized things, in an admirable way. Hölderlin has a very beautiful poem where the memories of the only journey he made toward what...
1:11:55 I don't know, his journey, the fatal journey to Bordeaux, from which he came back mad, perhaps because he was in too immediate contact with the Greece he had so dreamed of, when he was on the banks of the Main, the Neckar, or the Rhine — he says this, because in a letter, when he was there, Apollo struck me. Hölderlin says at one point, the spirit loves the colony. The spirit loves the colony — does that mean the colonialist spirit? No, no, no. It's very precise: he was tutor to the children of the German consul in Bordeaux. That's the gig, as we'd say today, that fell on him.
1:12:27 That's what made him take the trip. And this consul, of course, we say, to make ends meet, dealt in the wine trade, since when you're in Bordeaux, why not take advantage of it. And the wine growers of the Bordeaux region at the time had the habit of putting the new wine on ships heading toward the Americas. The spirit loves the colony — to let it age a bit during the time of the voyage, which was somewhat a round trip, coming back. The spirit loves the round trip. You see, we're dealing with serious matters, with fermentation somewhere, and Hegel, speaking of a movement of collectivity, when he's being romantic, says: those who abandon themselves to the disorderly fermentation of substance.
1:13:03 We rose up, so to speak, to the mastery of the subject. These are metaphors that remain recurrent here. So I return to this progression, almost this procession that goes from architecture toward music and poetry, passing through sculpture and painting, within... But he's not foolish. He doesn't say that music is superior to architecture. He knows very well it's better to have a beautiful building and bad music. Isn't that right?
1:13:33 Let me reassure you right away. There's no hierarchy here among the realities deployed in each. Bad architecture does more damage than bad music. Sorry? Bad architecture can do more damage than bad music. But here I'm only at the aesthetic instance. What matters here is that there can be very beautiful architecture and mediocre music. That's not a problem. Music too can wreak havoc. We saw riots... the first riots to breach the Berlin Wall were to go listen to Vogue concerts.
1:14:06 But yes, the Cold War — everything was useful. This isn't a digression, it's the direct continuation of what I'm saying, but exploitation — the exploitation of exploitation, the enslavement, the enslavement of Africans, especially when they were in bondage in the nineteenth century — it's extraordinary all the same that this exploited part of humanity was the one that produced the music that has made the whole world dance for sixty years on Saturday nights.
1:14:42 In derived form, whether blues, jazz, rock, reggae — these are largely doorways into Afro-American musics. With a small pop parenthesis in England in the sixties, I'd still say — a parenthesis that owes a lot to blues if you look closely, in the harmonies and the chords. And I'm still struck by this paradox: it's the lowest rung on the social ladder that produced, I don't know, for the highest rungs of society, its supreme entertainment for weekends.
1:15:14 As if the African were condemned to do push-ups every Saturday night to make the master dance. And when jazz was liberation from the fact of slavery, it's still extraordinary that they said, you, the Negro, you're going to stand there, you're going to sing, you're going to take off your savage clothes, you're going to put on... and you're going to sing, because we sing in the temple, that is, the hymn, the Lutheran and Protestant, the chorale — to speak in terms of musical genres, there's a whole tradition. The African sang out of tune. Not because he was a bad musician, not at all, but because he was overlaying his own grid, his traditional African music grid, where half-tones don't exist — I don't want to get too technical — the interval between B and C, E and F, for example.
1:15:53 And so, since we hear in music only what we expect to hear, we notice — experiments on children are striking on this point. There are notes people don't hear because they're used to hearing something else. And they hear a different note. Because in their language, sound is linguistic. Quite right, quite right, exactly. That's very much linguistic. And so, hence the miracle of the blues — miracle in the double sense of marvel and exception — is that for the African, it was his incomparable form of resistance.
1:16:27 It's not docile — yes, I'll grant as much, I'm what's called, I don't have much choice, but I won't do that. But instead of aping the Lutheran chorale, it gave rise to the spiritual, the gospel, a music that had no precedent, that was strictly unheard-of. A great creative resistance of Africa that plays at magic. This triangular relation between the self, the thing, and the other is fundamental here. Because, what does he feel in the passage about the young girl?
1:16:58 He envies her whole life. He envies her relationships with her friends. It's the life she leads. So it's the life of relation. It's indeed the intersubjective relation that is decisive here. But I'm afraid that when I say intersubjective, you imagine some kind of empyrean world where there would only be subjects without objects, like that, in a sort of immaterial ether. That's why the intersubjective relation is truly present, only becomes present, through an object. But on condition that this object have a symbolic function. Because whether the sausages are arranged in a circle or a square around the radishes changes nothing about the biological function of food.
1:17:33 That's what we always forget, even though we do it every day. We, as human beings, need the symbolic function just as much as the purely biological function. We need, in relations between subjects, to find ourselves gathered around a common object. But for that, this object must manifest itself symbolically, and not only in its utilitarian, material, and, let's say in a word, naturalistic functions.
1:18:04 I would even say that the fermented — we're talking about alcohol, which is the most widespread form in the world — is so little part of the biological drive, so little part of it that from a strictly medical standpoint it would rather be forbidden, fermented drink and alcohol. We don't see what it contributes to the survival of the individual. So it's for something else — there's a symbolic enjoyment here, isn't there? Speaking of the symbolic enjoyment of fermenting, let me tell you — don't be fooled, Hölderlin was a drunkard. I already quoted him for the line "the spirit loves the colony."
1:18:41 I'm going to quote. I'm looking for one — it slipped my mind just now. It's not much more than that... It's an old Viennese thing. Precisely, the same passage — the memories of Bordeaux return persistently after the return to Germany — there, you know, this poem called Andenken, I say it in German because it's a bit hard to render — it's usually translated as "remembrance" in general, but remembrance is Erinnerung, specifically, a making-return-inward, Erinnerung, whereas here, Andenken, is more like evocation, thinking-of, specifically.
1:19:22 You see? The northeasterly wind blows, of all the winds the one I love best, for it promises fiery spirit and a good voyage to sailors. So go, and bring my greetings to the lovely Garonne and to the gardens of Bordeaux. This he writes on his return from the trip to Bordeaux to Germany. When he speaks of the northeasterly wind, it's the wind that heads toward Bordeaux, but so it may also head toward America, toward the South. The northeasterly wind blows, of all the winds the one I love best, for it promises sailors a fiery spirit and a good crossing — so go, and carry my greeting to the lovely Garonne and to the garden of Bordeaux. You see, we're there. Afterward, it's the contact he had with the fig trees, the olive trees, the Greek world.
1:19:52 We can imagine it. There, where the path along the steep bank stretches out, where the stream falls deep into the river, of memories. But above, look far off, a noble pair of oaks with silver aspen. I still remember it. You see, this is not immediate reality, it's veiled reality, as Hegel says, in the recollection of memories. And I see again these broad crowns leaning over the mill, the elm forest. But in the courtyard a fig tree grows. There, on feast days, the brown-skinned women go, over ground as soft as silk, in the season of March, when night and day are of equal length — the spring equinox.
1:20:27 Parenthesis — forgive me for interrupting this splendor. Heidegger, since I mentioned the most Nazi of philosophers, regarding this text — you know, Heidegger speaks of the earth almost on every page. He absolutely wants to make it a poem of the German homeland, of blood and soil. I'm exaggerating a bit, but not by much. And in any case, for this passage, he says it speaks of German women. Can you believe it? He speaks of women of Bordeaux, of brown-skinned women — it's clear in the text, isn't it? So Adorno took him to task for it, saying he was really overdoing it there. Well, that's the parenthesis.
1:20:57 There, on feast days, the brown-skinned women go, over ground as soft as silk, in the season of March, when days and nights are of equal length, when along the slow paths, with its light weight of shining dream, glides the swaying of the breezes. You'll notice there's little sentiment in this poem, whereas Hölderlin is generally seen as this excellent, hyper-romantic poet. Sentiment comes later, for example with Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, but here it's impressions, sensations, that make for a much more concrete modern poetry, engaged with the body — impressionism, impressions, it's smooth, rough, as Baudelaire says, there are perfumes fresh as children's flesh, sweet — and well, here there's only that, only impressions, sensations, the body is present, and now we come to fermentation. Ah!
1:21:43 Let them hand me, brimming with its dark light, the fragrant cup that will give me... oh, the sweetness of a slumber among the shadows! You see that the slumber here is metaphorical — it's not only sleep, but also a slight drunken drowsiness, isn't it? Yes, it's the share of dream. The sweetness of a slumber among the shadows. And then there's this admirable line: it is not good to have in the soul no perishable thought. Do you want to turn it around? It is good to have in the soul perishable thoughts — not only to cling to eternal thoughts and truths. It is not good to have in the soul no perishable thought. And yet — we're in intersubjectivity here — a conversation is a good thing. To say what the heart thinks, to hear at length talk of the days of love and of the great deeds that come to pass. There we are!
1:22:30 You see that all this goes through a cut Right! For that, to insist on this triangle Me, the true and the others which is the type, the result we arrive at in order to be recognized by the other, I have to go through the thing And so I must take it upon myself too, just as the other takes it upon himself When we all shave every morning I'm talking about men When we generally get ourselves ready I'm talking about men and women before going out into the world, I mean it's a way of taking it upon oneself in order to be recognized by others as not being someone who lets themselves go, or a beast sprawled in its den A form of language?
A me that is a we; Rousseau and the civil state 1:23:11 Of course! Par excellence! But I say it in forms less unnoticed, more unnoticed than in language, forms that speak for themselves So I'm at this passage since I was talking about presence, which is the key term here I'm referring to a passage immediately prior to the dialectic of master and slave There we go!
1:23:50 Excuse me! Speaking of presence, you see, just before, it's a bit of a summary of what's to follow, an announcement of what's to follow I won't go back over it, because we saw with the dialectic of master and slave the importance of this relation It is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness, that's what recognition is It is only thus, in fact, that it is, for it is only thus that it attains the unity of itself in its being-other The self which is the object of its concept is in fact not an object but only the object of desire, which is independent, for it is the universal, indestructible substance, the fluid essence equal to itself When a self-consciousness is the object, because that too is an object for me, but those are not self-consciousnesses, those are objects, but when it is a self-consciousness, when I speak to you for example, when self-consciousness is the object, the object is just as much myself as object, that's the difference with that, the object is a self, it is just as much external to me, thus just as much an object too, it also obstructs me, there's the same prefix, thus for us the concept of spirit is already present that means we'll talk about it later
1:25:00 Spirit will come later in the Phenomenology, but spirit is already there in this mutual recognition, which announces what will come later for consciousness and the experience of what spirit is, this absolute substance which is in the perfect freedom and independence of its opposition, that is, of diverse self-consciousnesses, each being for itself, constitutes their unity, and here he says: an I that is a we and a we that is an I - the personal pronouns are underlined in the text, the I and the we are underlined - an I that is a we and a we that is an I - fascination with the Greek city where there was this sense of collective belonging, as everyone, as we saw earlier, is going to see tonight The Persians by Aeschylus, we are all a we at that moment, and of course fascination with the recent, historical and fabulous event of the French Revolution which had somewhat rejuvenated this whole collective past just a few years before Hegel wrote this work - I don't know if you want me to point out, but Hegel finished the Phenomenology at the very moment when Napoleon was entering Jena, Hegel was in Jena, that doesn't happen every day, circumstances like that - and this is summarized in a famous letter, I told you about it earlier no doubt - an I that is a we and a we that is an I - in consciousness at the moment when history erupts into small private life
1:26:11 into the daily grind, sometimes history which is always there but which we manage to repress, all of a sudden it's so powerful, isn't it, and it has accumulated so many of the discrepancies we spoke of earlier, that suddenly it manifests itself even in intimacy - an I that is a we, a we that is an I - in self-consciousness as the concept of spirit, that is, the spirit of mutual recognition of different subjects, consciousness reaches the moment of its turning point, one might say, it is not powerful of presence, and here is the sentence from there it proceeds - it's only three lines but it is typical of the Hegelian dialectic, there are two extremes and a good middle term that sublates them - from there consciousness proceeds out of the colorful appearance of the sensible here-below - that's the external world, the worldly one in which we produce ourselves - out of the colorful appearance of the sensible here-below but also out of the empty night of the supersensible beyond - you see, he dismisses both alike, the romantic beyond of the absolute and out of the empty night of the supersensible beyond - to enter into the spiritual daylight of presence - you see, that's the last word that concludes this chapter, right before independence and dependence, domination and servitude
1:27:21 It's no accident, it's the last word, which is a bit of a we that is an I, and this concept of spirit thus constituted with its worldly stake which is there, isn't it - would we exist without the presence of the other? that too? well yes, you speak to me, if you speak it's because you learned the language, how would you learn it without the other? yes for example yes I mean we saw with the example of so-called wild children, wolf-children etc., we saw that if you haven't learned to speak beyond a certain age there are irreversible lesions, afterward you can't - we spoke, with all the efforts made, with the wolf-children we managed to get them to sit at a table, forcing them a bit, to walk somewhat upright, we even managed to get them to speak, but the important thing is that language is learned from the other, that's why all the theories, what Marx calls the Robinsonades, which imagine at the origin isolated individuals who say, it's just easier if we band together to hunt the mammoth - Marx thinks these are illusions because it's as if man already existed in a separate state without the we - yes without the we - in fact there is no man at that point - Rousseau, who nevertheless, I don't know, never misses an opportunity to speak of nature in laudatory terms
1:28:31 but who is not a naturalist, proof being that in chapter 8 of book 1 of The Social Contract he says that in the state of nature man is a stupid, limited animal, it's only in the civil state that he becomes an intelligent being and a man - this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked; although in this new state he deprives himself of several advantages he had from nature, he regains such great ones, his faculties are exercised and developed - I'll go fast - his faculties, language and thought, what would thought be without language - his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions become ennobled, sexuality becomes love, marriage, I don't know, an intersubjective relation etc., romanticism - his passions become ennobled, his whole soul is elevated to such a point that - I stop the sentence there, I make a deliberate suspense, because if we stop there we might say, well Rousseau, we don't understand him, it's the exact opposite of what we were taught, we were told he's the guy who says everything is good coming from the hands of the creator, everything degenerates in the hands of man, everything degenerates, nature degenerates, everything degenerates
1:29:41 not at all, he says the opposite, everything that is right came from the civil state, but after the 'that' there is this crucial sentence which, in my opinion, gives for the first time chronologically the Rousseauian break, I repeat, excuse me, I'm repeating myself - when he gives us morality, that makes a great break - freedom - if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he came from, he ought ceaselessly to bless the happy moment that tore him from it forever - for Rousseau there's no going back, he's not a hippie ecologist, no degrowth - that tore him from it forever, and which, from a stupid and limited animal, made an intelligent being and a man - so we gained everything by passing into the civil state - if the abuses of this new condition - that's not my subject today, but I still point out how one can abuse the civil state, you know there are two senses of abuse, either too much - I eat too much, I abuse drink, I drink too much - or I deceive - I have abused you, lied to you - both aspects of abuse are well seen by - there's a theory of evil in this passage, starting from the 'if,' of evil, of the horrors that the 20th century
Fluidifying isms: what do you call it? 1:30:51 and that our century alas continues to give examples of - there is a theory of evil that Rousseau brings forth for the first time, which does not come from the fact of being in the civil state but from making bad use of it, but which does not at all imply that one must return to the state of nature where one is a stupid, limited animal - there, that's to answer your question, I'm not going backward but trying to answer very judicious and pertinent questions that were asked of me during the break, on the one hand about the -isms, since we're dealing with an eminently dialectical thought, the -isms suggest on the contrary an ossified thought where the oppositions have hardened - I don't know, liberalism, dirigisme, dogmatism, skepticism, each time we get the impression
1:32:01 that we have two blocs facing each other and nothing can be reconciled, and to show you how much these concepts need to be fluidified - that's an expression of Hegel's - he alludes to Socrates who had done the opposite, who had the merit, I might add, of fluidifying sensible being-there in order to raise perception to the concept - what do you call...? that's how the Platonic dialogue always begins, not 'what is it' but 'what do you call...?' which is a much more radical and fundamental question than 'what is it?'
1:32:31 what is it? being is already given whereas at the outset I don't know, I've never been to Machu Picchu, I think of Machu Picchu, I've never been there but I mean I have discourses that speak of it, the starting point, with much reality, is nonetheless words and speech for us - so first question: what do you call...? I had taken the example, you know, of the difference in questioning between the scientist, the astronomer for example, or rather let me take the non-scientist, you have the astrologer questioning the sun from atop a ziggurat, as it was said in Babylon, thinking that at 60 meters' height one would see more deeply into the content of the stars - and what is the sun?
1:33:18 the astrologer asks himself a question with being already given, and so the question no longer bears on existence, on knowing whether it exists or not, but on essence - what is it? - and then it's a monologue because the sun won't answer, it won't answer 'I am a star, I am not a planet,' the sun doesn't speak - and at the foot of the ziggurat, I imagined, I don't know if you remember that session, a little bearded man, isn't it, rather round, Socrates, well that's how we imagine him, who doesn't address the sun but addresses the astrologer who is asking the sun the question, and says to him: tell me, you who ask, what is the sun?
1:33:57 what do you call the sun? that's the radical question - once you've given your definition, we'll see whether it exists or not - when we talk about the origins of jazz, since I was talking about music earlier, when we talk about the origins of a thing, we lose it - there are those who would like the origin of jazz to be Africa, jazz would never have existed without the Africans and their deportation, but at the same time there are more jazz clubs in Tokyo alone than on the whole African continent, which raises a question - jazz is an Afro-American music, if we go back to the source we'll certainly arrive at elements that constituted jazz but which, taken separately, are not jazz - when you go back up a river, to keep this metaphor, and you want to trace it to its source, since I'm talking about origins, you inevitably arrive at a place where the river gets lost - you've all been in high mountains, places where the watercourse is born, they're called 'reception cones' I think in geography, and at some point you reach a kind of undecidability - is it this or that stream or this little pool passing between my feet
1:35:07 that is truly the origin of the Amazon or the Nile - it doesn't much matter, ultimately the Nile and the Amazon begin to be themselves only when they are already the confluence of several of these pools - simply, there's what's called in modern philosophy an 'always already complex' - there's no simple at the origin of the complex, there's an always already complex, and what makes the richness of jazz is precisely its impurity, its having been able to accumulate, gather, synthesize admirably the English sound because the Black American musicians, to earn their living to begin with - there's a practical, professional notion here, of the order of what Marcel recalled as infrastructure - they earned their bread, they sang and played the fashionable tunes of the time, which were mostly not from the Black world but from Broadway musical comedy - you know, if you look at the themes, the songs from musical comedy, the tunes you're not aware of that will give you 'Summertime,' which is taken from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess for example, which will later detach themselves, as it were, into the pantheon of standards, but originally then Black musicians quite naturally were going to play
1:36:17 what the public expected, it's in the way of playing it that what I called resistance earlier was going to manifest itself, and the deep origin of the Afro-Nordic jazzman - but there is an impurity - ragtime, few people know this, would never have existed without the polka, the polka which was brought by the great Polish immigration mainly, but also Germanic, a very widespread popular dance among the bulk of the so-called WASP immigration to the United States, you know, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, you don't step outside of that - there was one president who tried to step outside of it, who was Catholic, he wasn't the only one - no, no, this is serious what I'm saying, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, it's not just an individual thing, it's Catholic, he was of Irish origin, wasn't he, he tried to deviate from the rule, it cost him dearly - I'm about to say one of the great secrets of the world we live in, that America is a Germany, and the army a Germany that follows - there are differences but still, I mean, I have a German wife who enlightened me on this - not at all alone, I know jazz well - and who shows me every time
1:37:27 the startling continuities of evidence in the furnishings etc. of the dominant white American middle class - we're used to saying 'the Anglo-Saxons,' so it might seem like people think it's the English, a bit more freewheeling - no, no, no, statistically it's measurable, the bulk of white American settlement comes from the Germanic peoples, the English are only a derivation, incidentally, mostly from Germanic Ottawa - so when we go back to the origin of a thing, I was saying we lose it, and the same goes for the -isms I was alluding to, and in a very beautiful early text, his first publication, called The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, from the time when there was still Schelling, there's an admirable passage, often commented on moreover, on the topic of the need for philosophy - he says it's not in every era that we feel the need for philosophy, and it's an admirable historical reflection, he says the need for philosophy arises particularly when, I quote
The need for philosophy, the Gorgias, pacifism and bellicism 1:38:54 as an illustration in the Socratic initiative, to take not just any philosophy but the very emergence of the concept of philosophy itself - I'm not saying there was no profound thought before Socrates, there was thought - Hindu thought is immeasurably profound, Chinese thought too - that is to say it's a formula because precisely the questioning doesn't bear on words, because to speak of Being there's no 'what do you call' - I come back to radical questions - you know, it starts with useful pretexts in Plato, a dialogue that begins with 'must one learn gymnastics in the gymnasium?'
1:39:29 or 'what should we think of Simonides' poem?' Those are the starting pretexts. It's just that we arrive at notions where, all of a sudden, we say... Let me take an example I believe I've already cited, remarkable for its precision, that of the Gorgias. Not to lose the thread, let me remind you we're talking about the need for philosophy and hardened oppositions. And in the Gorgias, the starting pretext is oratory, which was very much in vogue in Athens, and you'd pay a sophist to learn how to do 'com,' how to convince people, what I called 'com' earlier, which is the mortal enemy of the philosopher.
1:40:11 But let's not get ahead of ourselves, that's precisely the object of the discussion, not a matter of value - what is oratory? There's Gorgias who really existed, a great sophist, an orator, with his darlings around him, his young disciples, and Socrates. Socrates then asks him what oratory is, what do you call oratory? And Gorgias says it's the finest of things. Of course, you can imagine, Socrates - the finest. It may be the finest, but since you haven't yet told me what you call oratory, I can't yet know whether it's a fine thing.
1:40:41 Ah yes, well then, it's the art of persuading. There he provides a determination. We're not yet in a value judgment, 'it's the finest of things,' that's the first determination, we've made progress. We're not in the grammatical subject, oratory, but in a predicate. Oratory is the art of persuading. Good, so if I understand correctly, you're a geometer, Socrates replies. What does a geometer do? He makes demonstrations. He wants to persuade you that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles.
1:41:11 That can't be otherwise, whenever you want. Yes, that's true. And the discussion continues. And Socrates corners him and shows him, well. Persuasion is a genus, in logical terms, within which there are quite different, even contradictory species. For example, there's a persuasion, the geometer's kind, made to arrive at knowledge, and a persuasion that aims to obtain an opinion.
1:41:41 That's why he has trouble answering people, because when you look closer, what he does is quite sordid. It's a whole effort of demonstration to arrive at something, no matter if it's false, as long as you believe it, my friend. So you see this rigor of questioning, of answering, which means the interlocutor is simply obliged, as earlier, to nothing except to remain at least consistent with himself - he could have said 'yes, I'm a geometer,' no?
1:42:12 This clearly shows what I call here the hardening of oppositions. So, to settle this business of -isms, since we're going to question the false oppositions that -isms often illustrate - I gave a few examples earlier - I'll take an example of the fluidification of concepts. Let me make one last little reminder before giving my example. I told you Plato said, in Socrates' time, one had to fluidify the real, 'what do you call...,' in order to arrive at the universal, at the definition, at the genus, at the concept.
1:42:47 That was already a great revolution. And he says that nowadays it's almost the opposite. I mean, it's thoughts that need to be fluidified, it's no longer the things around us that need to be raised to the universal and made into concepts, it's solidified thoughts. I'm a liberal, or on the contrary, I'm a dirigiste, etc. And so, to put you at ease right away, I'll show you how fluid these concepts are - if I take the opposition between the one who is for war and the one who is for peace, pacifist, warmonger - there are -isms.
1:43:19 The proof that these are abstract notions, not operative as such, is that if I go back to the last years before the last war, that is, to the terrible Spanish Civil War, you know there was a whole camp, politically speaking, in France that was for intervening, to help the Republicans, wasn't there, to face fascist barbarism aided by the German air force, etc.
1:43:51 with German planes that bombed Guernica, etc. And then there was another camp that said, no, not at all, no, not at all, what is this interference in other people's affairs? So, you'll tell me, you see, that gives reason to those who say we must intervene in Syria today, non-interference isn't good, the same ones who were pacifists for Spain - it wasn't a fight between a pacifist and a warmonger, there weren't left-wing warmongers against right-wing pacifists, because those who were against intervening in Spain, on the other hand, said we must intervene in Finland.
1:44:27 At the same moment, this small country attacked by the Soviet bear, so then, they were for war, on the other hand. I'm showing you that the -ism of warmonger - the same individual can be a pacifist for one conflict and a warmonger for another, believe me. Like the truism. Sorry? That doesn't mean anything, like the truism. Like the truism. The truism is different. A truism is a truth so obvious, if you will, that stating it is like pushing on an open door, so to speak. Whereas here, what I just recalled is anything but obvious. You cannot classify humanity into categories where some would be pacifists and others warmongers.
1:45:02 What matters is the content. These are forms, to speak like Hegel, it's formalism and all that. What matters is the content, what he calls the Gehalt, the substance which alone gives meaning to what I'm doing. At some point, you have to choose your side. The Resistance fighters, or the collaborators. There, there's no more formalism. And among the Resistance fighters there could be, you know, a feminist, a monarchist, that happened, there could be a feminist, or whatever, that's something else. You have to choose. And so, that's the first question I wanted to answer.
Presence is not the now; a point on mathematics 1:45:39 And then, there was another question concerning presence, on which we concluded the first part. And one of my interlocutors very rightly connected it with what we had said about the 'now.' You know, when we analyzed that very tight passage in the very first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, after the preface and the introduction, we finally get into the heart of the matter, with sense-certainty, if you recall well. At the outset, we're dealing with this: here, now, when it comes to knowledge.
1:46:09 And the 'now' - we aim at it, but it's already past by the time we try to grasp it. It does not have the truth of being, as Hegel says. The now is no longer as soon as it is there, etc. And the sentences hold the secret to it. I'll say it for those who weren't there, because it's a rather elusive, external way of speaking. I believe that from this sentence we see that the now is precisely this: not to be anymore already when it is.
1:46:41 Here we go. We're shown the now. This particular now, mind you, not the now in general, no kidding, we're really going into the concrete and the real. Now, it has already ceased to be by the time it's shown.
1:47:12 The now that is, is other than the one that is shown. And we see that the now is precisely this: not to be anymore already when it is. The now as it is shown to us is a past. And that is its truth. It does not have the truth of being. And what relation is there between this vanishing now and the presence we discussed earlier, which is foundational for intersubjective relations, when it is correlated with an object constituting a common world for the subjects in question? Well, that's indeed a good remark, because we understood here that this presence is not at all the punctual now involved there.
1:47:48 This presence has a temporal thickness that the now does not have. The now aimed at, the punctual now, is an abstract, vanishing now, a pure effect of thought. Moreover, he makes the same analysis with the 'here.' He says 'I show here.' But here, what is it? Is it up or down? Is it left or right? And he says in the end that the 'here' aimed at is the point. But the point is non-being, precisely. And that's where we see the negativity at work in the subject as soon as it relates to an object. What is aimed at is the point. The point does not exist. The point has no dimension, no thickness, etc. It's a non-being.
1:48:22 And yet, it's from this non-being that all of geometry is fabricated. But this is a tribute I'm paying to mathematics here. It's not a criticism at all. On the contrary. It shows the power and the negativity of the spirit. It's with the point that we make the line, it's with the line that we make the surface, it's with the surface that we make planes. We start from a non-being, at the outset. And it's this non-being that grants us, humans, the ability to be, as Descartes would say, masters and possessors of nature. That's quite something. There we go. There's a second remark I'd like to make, a small return to the second-to-last session.
1:48:55 Since this is our last session for this month, I'll take the opportunity not to leave in the shadows points that were perhaps addressed too hastily. Someone recently made a remark to me, following what I had said about Hegel's contribution to mathematics, that I had a somewhat formalist view of mathematics. And that's a criticism I accept all the more readily since I had indeed overstated things a bit, in the direction of mathematical formalism. I'd like to make clear here that this is not at all the substance of my thinking, and that I'm well aware of everything mathematics owes to the back-and-forth between the theoretician and the experimenter.
1:49:32 There are admirable dialectics and texts on this. I wouldn't want people to think I'm a partisan of mathematical formalism here. I'm simply noting the extraordinary, the prodigious emancipation of the human mind that consists in positing definitions and mathematical reasoning, quite simply. But it's true that it didn't fall from the sky, and that problems, for example, of derivation, indeed the emergence of infinitesimal calculus which underlies analysis, that magnificent discipline that is analysis - I mean it wouldn't have existed without the concerns and work of Italian engineers who were trying to make water rise in Venice, in pumps where the problems arose.
Art, sensible realization of the idea; Money Jungle and correspondences 1:50:21 There, that was just a small clarification before returning to our topic on aesthetics. But so as not to continue on aesthetics in a somewhat dogmatic and univocal manner, I'd like to give you the floor. Are there any questions you'd like to ask regarding the first part? On the surface, the reflection, Marx's text, the valorization, the connection, if you will, apparently the most superficial one, between the sparkle in the young girl's eye and the working of productive forces in Marx's text.
1:50:57 Those are questions that arise. Yes, on the dimension of an approach to defining and understanding what constitutes art, in relation to the notion of aesthetics, and to reduce it to a few... Hegel speaks of aesthetics and not specifically of art. That's obviously not the same thing. Not everything that is aesthetic is... Absolutely, that's what I meant to suggest.
1:51:27 No, it's not the same thing, but that's where he begins his aesthetics. It's rather unfortunate, he inherits a word, he says 'aesthetics.' He didn't invent it. Since Hegel, art has been largely reduced to aesthetics. No, no, excuse me, but that's completely false. There's no dictatorship of Hegel over thought, there's a dictatorship of anti-Hegelianism. So Hegel - three-quarters of the people who talk about aesthetics haven't read a line of Hegel, if that reassures you. Good, I'm reassuring you. But simply, Hegel himself takes up your argument, that's the interesting thing, you're a Hegelian without knowing it.
1:51:57 He says: I inherit this term at the moment it was coined, and it's not appropriate. He says so himself. It's not appropriate - it was Baumgarten, the first to use it, in the mid-18th century, taken up afterward by Winckelmann, a specialist in Greek art. And Hegel, precisely, says that what matters is that we agree on whether it's a philosophy of art or of the fine arts, as it was called at the time. We're going to discuss, during the lectures he gives in Berlin, the philosophy of art or of the fine arts. There, now the term 'aesthetics,' indeed, refers to a more global sphere, which is the sphere of appearance in general.
1:52:32 I saw it, we saw it when I spoke about anesthesia earlier. But at the same time, to answer your question, what he calls it, if we're given a definition of art, it being understood that a definition in Hegel is rather abstract - he's the first to say that it's its fulfillment that gives it its meaning, one shouldn't be satisfied with the raw definition, so to speak - it's the sensible realization of the idea. That's it in other terms too, the idea with a capital I. It's the sensible realization of the idea. There are other realizations of the idea, and what characterizes, what specifies art, is the fact that the idea appears only in a sensible mode - auditory if it's musical, visual if it's sculptural.
1:53:11 Unfortunately, there isn't an art of perfume as developed as painting or music. It's an invitation, isn't it? It's a creation. Imagine that with the internet we managed to reproduce a range of perfumes the way we manage to reproduce colors or... that would be interesting. I'm not sure a perfumer would share your view. I think there is an art of perfume. No, it's obvious. It's even its function. A perfumer - but there isn't a developed art like the others where there's a transmission, effects, etc.
1:53:44 In general, he keeps his secrets, which is somewhat the opposite of an artistic approach. That's it. And Mozart, he presents everything he does to us. He keeps nothing for himself. I just wanted to... I'll give the floor right away, William. Let me just finish my sentence. Mozart never even heard the three greatest symphonies he wrote, because by the end of his life he no longer had enough money to pay 80 musicians. Go ahead. Are you done? No, yes, of course. It's just a punchline.
1:54:14 So you were saying that aesthetics can't be the realization of the sensible. Sensible realization of the idea. Art. Art, the beautiful. The beautiful, art, is the realization of the idea. Well, of course... But the beautiful, the art. Is art the beautiful? No, no, but everything. That made you think. I'm going to raise the questions that Hegel's aesthetics answers. He starts by distinguishing natural beauty from artistic beauty, of course. We do say a beautiful landscape, we do say a beautiful sunset. That's not made by hand. That's not artificial, of course. Those are the fundamental discussions of aesthetics. It's not easy enough to work out.
1:54:44 I'm picking up on something you were saying. And the lady... When you were talking about architecture, it's better to have beautiful architecture than... Bad music. Yes, of course. And then... And that made me... It's not a substitute for the others. ...talk earlier about music, architecture. There was a recording session for Money Jungle with Mingus, Max Roach. And... And of...
1:55:14 And the main one, Duke Ellington, yes. And... Well, all three are good readers, etc. They understand each other, etc. But actually, at one point, Ellington couldn't explain to them what he wanted them to translate. He wasn't just looking at the score. I didn't understand, sorry. Ellington? Ellington saw that they didn't understand, he saw that they were only looking at the score. Right, right. And so him, Ellington, actually, his goal wasn't to become a musician at first. He was supposed to study fine arts. Architecture. Of course. So then he wants to set the score aside and imagine...
1:55:46 That is, we leave... That is, musical notation could no longer contain the idea they wanted to represent. That's quite clear. So he asks them to imagine New York with a rain of banknotes. That is, and I was wondering... He had to tell them how to play. That's it. And it's Max Roach who tells this story. He says, at one point, someone said to him, but what do you want us to do with your score? Because you're not happy with what we gave you.
1:56:18 And so he explains to them... Well, he visualizes it the way he did when he was a fine arts student. Imagine a rain of banknotes over New York. Yes, very good example. In other words, Duke used the analogon, as we say in philosophy. He proposed an analogy. He said, if you want to play what I'm hearing, you have to picture... Yes, an analogy between the visual and the auditory, here. You have to picture a rain of banknotes over New York. I didn't know that anecdote. You realize the limits one can have of the idea one forms of...
1:56:49 Absolutely. I'm glad William brings up that album. It's an admirable album. One of the finest in the whole history of contemporary music. So we don't need to confine ourselves to jazz. Or two musicians who officially belong to modern jazz, bebop, that is, Max Roach, the most referenced drummer of modern jazz, and Mingus, no less. It's an exceptional trio. Suddenly, a producer asks them to accompany Duke Ellington, who's from the previous generation, and for whom they have great reverence.
1:57:20 They were a bit intimidated at first about the album. And it turns out, for those who've heard the album, that Duke, who here is only a pianist, who's not the arranger, who's not the big-band conductor, but simply a soloist pianist, with his two companions - it turns out he's probably the most modern of the three on the record. It's the most creative, it's quite an extraordinary album. I'm glad this album is being mentioned, one of whose tracks, African Flower, served as the theme tune for the jazz program on France Musique for about a dozen years, if I remember correctly.
1:57:51 But I didn't know the anecdote in question. So, she has a very good example, hello madam. She has a very good example of the analogon, that is, of what Baudelaire calls correspondences, around the time when modern discourse on art transforms it. When Baudelaire says - and I quoted the lines earlier for another reason - 'There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh, sweet as oboes, green as meadows' - today, we have an object for the nose, perfume; one for the ear, the timbre of the oboe; and one for the eye, the green of meadows.
1:58:26 That's a line that's central to our discussion. And so what Baudelaire suggests there is that something circulates between that green, which isn't just any green but the green of meadows, and that timbre, which isn't just any timbre, isn't just any wind instrument, isn't the flute, isn't embodied that way, but is precisely the timbre of the oboe. The double-reed instrument, and at the level of touch, the freshness, the fresh perfumes.
1:58:59 What does that mean? It means there's something common, but across several senses. That's why Duke borrows from the visual to suggest something, an auditory and musical production. But this something common that circulates among the three senses is not itself of a sensible order. That's the depth of Baudelaire's line. That's why it's rightly been said that there's a genuine neo-Platonism in modern aesthetics.
1:59:34 There is indeed an idea in the Hegelian sense, something common, which gives, from the visual point of view, the green of meadows, from the auditory point of view, the sound of the oboe, the timbre of the oboe, and from the point of view of touch, freshness. The freshness of children's flesh, we might well say. But this common element is not itself of a sensible order. Yet it cannot manifest itself - we don't have immediate access to it, we can't reach it, this is very Hegelian - except mediately, and we find again the Vermittlung, mediation; we can only access it through the sensible.
2:00:07 And now we understand why I was struggling earlier to make you understand, and for me to understand it too, really to be convinced too, that intersubjective relation can only be accomplished from a third term, which is itself an object. The intelligible is only conceivable from its sensible manifestation. And so Duke did very well to change fields entirely, and to tell them, set your scores aside, here's how it goes.
2:00:42 I'm thinking of an anecdote, I'm thinking of Debussy's La Mer, you know, his symphonic poem, for... Program music is always a bit pejorative among musicians, and here he wasn't a program composer, well, he had the misfortune of titling the first part of his symphonic poem La Mer, the first part is called From Dawn to Noon on the Sea. And Erik Satie, who is always a bit caustic, said after the first performance, it's beautiful, especially around 11:30. There you go, one mustn't be too literal-minded, one mustn't be too realistic, so your remark about Duke is excellent.
The idea as realized concept 2:01:17 He found the right procedure. What matters is expressing the idea. If you're blocked at the auditory level, you find it by a detour, but it's the same thing. So, back to the idea, let's bounce off that, unless there are other questions. Yes, so what justifies, at that point, there being a hierarchy among the forms of expression? It's the idea that demands it. Because the idea wants to be expressed for itself. And if the idea, isn't it, is shared subjectivity, it's obvious that stone, the pebble, doesn't express subjectivity as adequately as melody, for example.
2:01:49 As Yann did between architecture and poetry. Of course. So, to use your own terminology, what do you mean, for example, by good architecture and bad music? What is good or bad? What moves away from or draws closer to the idea. One must be consistent. It's the idea that's the problem as long as you haven't answered as to the idea's content. As regards the article? It's easy to answer in the abstract. Whose idea? No, no, these aren't personal ideas. The idea doesn't care whose it is.
2:02:21 It's not the idea you have in your head. That's why I specified it. So what is the idea then? That's a good question. It's not the idea with a small i, it's the Idea with a capital I. The Idea, in Hegel, is the realized concept. You see we're very far removed here. A hammer is closer to the Idea for Baudelaire than the ideas I have in my head. Because a hammer is a realized concept. He even says in one passage that it's nobler for man to make a hammer than to make a child. Making a child, nature suffices for that. That's not a creation of man, making a child.
2:02:51 Producing a hammer, that was unheard of. In the order of being. That's shit, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't say it was more comfortable. He said there was something properly human about making a hammer, whereas animals make children. I mean, it's not properly human to make children. That's all he means. That belongs to the natural order. That's not where man's specificity lies. Someone still had to imagine it, that hammer. Sorry? Someone still had to imagine it, the hammer. That's precisely the idea. That's the idea.
2:03:21 Of course. But as long as the hammer isn't realized, I mean, it's not the Idea. It's the idea with a small i, and moreover Hegel has rather blunt formulas. The concept that is only the concept is not the concept. It's there in black and white in the Principles of the Philosophy of Right. That's where you see that when we say Hegel's is a philosophy of the concept, it's certainly not in the abstract sense. The concept realizes itself, and it can only realize itself. I've repeated often during this seminar, the interior is recognized by the fact that it exteriorizes itself. A pure interior is a pure abstraction.
2:03:52 When Proust earlier spoke of the sparkle in the young girl's eye, he showed its content through everything external to her. The lawns of the racetracks, the path along which she would take him pedaling, the casino she would go into or the plans made for her. It's a whole external world that makes up the content of her rich interiority. He wanted to see it with that young girl's eyes. Yes, yes, with her whole life, with her relational life. He says quite rightly that it's incoherent, because he says it was her whole life that inspired his desire, hence an unrealizable desire.
2:04:22 That's where I say he's not entirely foolish or naive either. That's where you see the step Hegel makes the concept of the Idea take. The Idea - don't see it in abstract terms at all. The young Marx let himself be caught in that trap afterward, though he corrected himself later in The German Ideology. But the young Marx thought that for Hegel the Idea was something in the head. So the young Marx says Hegel must be turned upside down - it's not the Idea that drives the world, it's the world that produces the idea. Obviously, if you think the Idea is in the head. But it's clear that the substance of a world in which we live operates first of all completely unconsciously.
2:04:55 It doesn't correspond to the ideas I have in my head. That's how I answer your question. The Idea is the realized concept, that is, embodied in the real, in the phenomenon. Otherwise it's not the Idea. Otherwise something is still missing from the Idea. Otherwise it's just an abstract concept. I don't live in the plans of the house I designed. It's not the architect's plans that will shelter you from the rain, it's the realized house. It's not the architect's plan, of course.
2:05:27 So, you say to me, yes, but first there was the idea of making the house or the hammer. So, it's the illusion of looking for origins. But we don't start from the origin, we start from a result. That's the illusion Hegel dispels, we start from a result. As I said the other time, when the homo sapiens child comes into the world, it doesn't start over from zero like the biological individual. The biological individual must redo every stage from zero. The historical individual, who is the human individual, inherits polished stone, which is already a great step forward compared to chipped stone or split pebbles.
2:05:59 So there's no restarting from zero. There's an already-there of the realized idea. So, there's no origin. It's not that there isn't one, but man's origin is always already historical. I think I didn't understand the answer. The question was something like, how do we distinguish good from bad? That was roughly it, simplified. The answer is: close to the Idea. But if the Idea has to already be realized, what does it mean to make art close to an idea that isn't realized?
2:06:32 Is it something new? Is it an art that is already present? What is the realized idea? In that case, being close to the idea. The work has yet to be made. The work isn't present. But then one has to be close to it. But the work is a content and this content is already present. But this content isn't expressed. The great role of the artist is precisely to bring out this content that is repressed, that is hidden. Like, within humanity, sort of a common content? Of course, common. Yes, of course, of course, of course.
Lenin, Marx and Althusser as readers of Hegel 2:07:02 By piling up the questions, we get closer to the answer. I think you're going to read a note from your book. Yes. It's a note... You're putting it the first time I get quoted, in the memoir. No, no, no, that's coming, that's coming, that's coming. It's not you who's quoting. Well, actually. It's you yourself quoting someone. I prefer that. I'll let you give the author. It's remarkable that the whole chapter on the absolute idea - the 'absolute,' in quotes - barely says a word about God. And moreover, this chapter contains almost no specific idealism, but has as its essential subject the dialectical method.
2:07:39 So, I don't know... That's Lenin who wrote that. It's written, let's say. Lenin was... I don't know if the answer is actually fundamental on this question of the idea. Hunted by the Tsar's police. It's not the dialectical method, but I'd like to say I didn't understand everything. If you could comment a bit on that. Precisely, Lenin, at the moment when he's being hunted by the Tsar's police, in 1915, takes refuge in Switzerland, near Zurich. And there, hunted, well, for once he's not in militant activism, he's being hunted, etc. He has time in exile. And there, suddenly, he takes advantage, he finally tackles Hegel.
2:08:10 Because as for me, I'm a Marxist, says Lenin. And when I read Marx, I realize there's still a philosopher Marx takes seriously, even while criticizing him, turning him upside down, etc. But still, who apparently matters more than the other philosophers, and that's Hegel. So, yes, I'm caricaturing a bit, but there you go, the good militant, he doesn't have formal training, he has a rather self-taught education, Lenin. Thank you very much. And so he tackles, if I may say so, with great courage, the most difficult work there is, the Logic, the Great Logic, Wissenschaft der Logik, which is even far more abstract than the Phenomenology, believe me.
2:08:42 And, at first, he has prejudices against Hegel. Idealist, religious, mysticism, I don't know - as the young Marx said, there's good in Hegel, but you have to extract the kernel, that is, the dialectical method, the kernel from the mystical shell, etc. Because of the famous formulas, I won't go back over that. And as he progresses in his reading, that's where you see Lenin's intellectual courage, I mean, his ability to self-criticize, I mean. He becomes aware of the materialist depth of Hegel.
2:09:14 And right up to reaching that chapter I quote, where he arrives at the end of the Logic, at the chapter called the Absolute Idea, with a capital I, the Absolute Idea. And Lenin drops this incredible sentence, and he even boxes it, because here I'm giving you a reading of a reading, a reading of Hegel by Lenin. And he says, this last chapter on the absolute idea is extremely remarkable. It's the most idealist passage in Hegel and the most materialist.
2:09:44 And he adds - this isn't me, mind you, it's Lenin - it's contradictory, but it's a fact. And he goes to a new line, he says, aphorism. Colon. All readers of Marx up to now have been wrong because they hadn't read Hegel. And you can't understand Marx's thought if you haven't read the whole of Hegel's Logic. It's this passage from which I extract the sentence you just read. That is, the passage on the Idea.
2:10:14 I'll read it quickly myself. Please do. It's the afterword, since we just talked about Marx. I'm being a bit teasing about him, but you have to push him a little into his corners. It's the afterword to the French edition of Capital, by Marx himself, who spoke perfect French, but who had checked the translation. And there he speaks precisely, and you'll see, as always he's very clear, Marx. My dialectical method not only differs from the Hegelian method at its base, but is even its exact opposite.
2:10:50 For Hegel, the movement of thought, which he personifies under the name of the Idea, is the demiurge of the real, which is merely the external, phenomenal form of the Idea. For me, on the contrary - it's Marx speaking - the movement of thought is only the reflection of the real movement, transported and transposed into the human brain. That's another way of explaining what he says in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that fundamental text Dominique read to you earlier. And he specifies, Marx: I criticized the mystical side of Hegelian dialectic nearly 30 years ago, at a time when it was still fashionable.
2:11:27 There, Dominique talked about it, in The German Ideology, etc. But although, thanks to his quid pro quo, Hegel disfigures dialectic through mysticism, it is nonetheless he who first set out its overall movement. With him it's standing on its head; you only have to set it back on its feet to find a perfectly reasonable kernel within the mystical shell. And Marx concludes this passage. In its mystified form, dialectic became fashionable in Germany because it seemed to glorify the existing state of things.
2:12:00 That is, the Prussian state. In its rational form, it's a scandal and an abomination to the ruling classes. It's clear that Marx clearly saw the revolutionary and Marxist character of Hegel. Whatever quite a few of his commentators might say, especially in the seventies. Althusser, not to name him. It includes at the same time an understanding of their inevitable negation, of their necessary destruction, because, grasping the very movement of which every achieved form is only a transitory configuration, nothing can impose upon it; it is essentially critical and revolutionary.
2:12:35 comment. Good, thank you. Thank you. So, since it's a question coming from a mathematician - a mathematician or a physicist, I no longer recall. A computer scientist. A computer scientist, all right then. So, more familiar with mathematics than I am anyway, and than some of us, I imagine, I'm going to put a logical game to you. So, independent, once again, of the validity of the content. It's a confrontation of statements. Since Dominique just came from Althusser's version.
2:13:07 As I just said, Lenin says, at the end of his reading of the Great Logic, all readers of Marx before me got it wrong, because they didn't have a Hegelian reading of Marx. I'll set Lenin aside now. I'll take Althusser. The sixties. All the readers - that's the Althusserians here, they can stop me if I'm misrepresenting Althusser's thought. All readers of Marx before me, Althusser, got it wrong, because they had a Hegelian reading of Marx.
2:13:37 One of the two of them is wrong. As for me, I've chosen which one. But there, I'll say, I submit it to your cogitation. What's extraordinary, and that's why I'm now getting to my logical game, is that Althusser specifies, everyone got it wrong, except one. Dominique. Yes, bravo. There's a mathematician for you. So, I would say Althusser made a blunder in the strict sense.
2:14:08 He hasn't seen the Lenin text I'm talking about. He knows it very well. It's not a blunder. All the more so since there's a very good passage in Althusser, precisely on the notion of a blunder. That the blunder isn't a blunder, but a blindness. We can see clearly here what a blindness is. All of Hegel's readers, before me, got it wrong, because they had too Hegelian a reading of Marx, except Lenin. Let me take Lenin: all the readers of Marx before me got it wrong, because they hadn't assimilated Hegel. That's rather extraordinary all the same. Isn't this some kind of joke? I'm glad, because it does rather resemble that. Remind us all the same of Althusser's praise of Stalin, and on what word does it hinge?
2:14:44 Well, that's more about the negation of the negation. But indeed, it's no accident. It turns out that... You want me to tell you it's not a joke? When I say I claim allegiance to Lenin, people are going to say, right, he's for the gulag, that's just not possible. Well, listen, it turns out that Stalin, who is more implicated in the gulag than anyone else in the Soviet Union, Stalin, for example, officially condemned — and you know how important that was, it wasn't taken lightly — the negation of the negation in Hegel. And so, to be precise, in 1953 Althusser published an article in which he congratulates Stalin for having censored Hegel.
2:15:30 As for me, I've chosen my side in this, that's all. I mean... It's rather extraordinary that the bourgeoisie made Althusser out to be a thinker who dared to confront established authorities, the extraordinary parties, when he was congratulating Stalin for having censored Hegel. But perhaps it was a very, very roundabout ruse of reason, because at bottom Stalin embraces the negation of the negation by negating the negation of the negation, since in reality he was negating himself as negation.
2:16:00 And so, he... You're a bit too abstract for me. He became very Hegelian. I mean for us, his interlocutors. He becomes very Hegelian, Stalin does, since, in reality, by contradicting the negation of the negation, he ends up referring, in the end, to the negation that he himself represented, the negation of which he did not assume, which could have assumed its positivity. Are we agreed? There you go. Exactly. So he didn't have a dialectical turn of mind, even though he imposed dialectics in every school. He himself apparently didn't have a dialectical turn of mind.
2:16:31 I mean... But something much more archaic. That's all. It's an interesting problem, because we see a little of all the aporias that resulted from this kind of misunderstanding. I mean, there is... I was telling you earlier, I recalled it, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy very young. So I wonder why I'm defending a philosophist par excellence like Hegel, who places philosophy at the summit of everything, since we saw there was a hierarchy of the arts, for Hegel, in terms of their ability to express the Idea — that's his criterion for the hierarchy — that architecture...
Order and freedom: Leibniz, Bach, jazz 2:17:12 Each of these arts expresses the absolute, for him — an Egyptian temple, all that, is the absolute. But there is a progression within the absolute, if you will; it's not a circular absolute. There is a hierarchy of the arts, but there is also a hierarchy of instances. Aesthetics, for him, is placed within the system as it constitutes itself, not as mere sense-perception. Isn't the hierarchy, in some way, there to reassure oneself? Where would the danger be? I'll turn it back to you — where is the danger, can you say whether there's a need for reassurance?
2:17:43 The danger, the danger in... Where would the danger be? In the freedom of... of ideas, well, I don't know how to put it, but in freedom of thought, quite simply. Thinking is hierarchy. You mean that as soon as there's a hierarchy, an order, there's no more freedom? But thinking is precisely putting things in order. Giving them a rank, ordering one's thoughts. On that, I'll refer you to some cases. I was hearing hierarchy with a notion of superiority, for example.
2:18:13 That's why I specified: better a fine piece of architecture than bad music. So it's not a hierarchy in that sense — otherwise it would be abominable, of course. Rest assured. But as for the notion of order, I won't dwell on it too much, but there's a magnificent definition of order in a letter Leibniz sent to Locke, I believe. As if, in that era, it took — I don't know how long — a boat for Leibniz's letter to reach London. Anyway, there was no internet. There is order, says Leibniz, insofar as one can discern distinctions within a multitude.
2:18:44 He's a contemporary of Bach — it's magnificent, it's almost the very statement of baroque music. There is order insofar as one can discern distinctions within a multitude. Proliferation is a challenge in Bach, which he brings back to order. But it's a conquered order which is the highest form of freedom. It's the opposite of the negation of freedom. That's why I have to laugh when some bling-bling pop musician — I won't name names, there are so many of them — says, 'I'm a creative, I don't submit to a commission, to an order.'
2:19:15 Bach was commissioned a cantata every Sunday — that was his job, to produce a cantata for the Protestant service every Sunday. That didn't stop him from making a masterpiece every Sunday, to the point that if any other musician had written just one cantata like that, he'd be placed at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of musicians — and Bach did one every single Sunday, calm as you like. He had worries, he was in conflict with his superiors, he found his pupils dirty, he blew his nose during the choir rehearsal. Yes, he wasn't a purist about the baroque — he thought the instruments of his time weren't adequate, that they needed to be improved. But, I mean, rule and constraint are never the opposite of freedom for a creative person.
2:19:53 On the contrary, it's a challenge. And I come back here to jazz — the fact that in jazz people say jazz is freedom par excellence, since it's improvised music. As I used to tell my students — I directed a music center in Niger, funded, ironically, by the European Union — I'd tell my students, improvisation doesn't just improvise itself. It takes a lot of work to improvise freely. You first have to master the technique of the instrument, otherwise it's the instrument that imposes itself on you. Put a child at a keyboard, they go bang, bang, bang — it's the keyboard imposing its stuff on them.
2:20:24 It will take years and years of work to be able to express through the instrument what we ourselves want to hear from it. And the same goes for writing, for painting. Of course, of course. It's a general truth. I'm talking here about the relation of freedom to rules. I think of Kant, who spoke of the illusion of the dove that flies and feels the resistance of the air, and says, 'If I had no air, wouldn't I fly faster?' It would drop like a stone. Here, constraint is an occasion — that's my nice little dialectic. Freedom exercised by and through constraint.
2:20:59 I come back to jazz. We think we're just improvising like that, meaning I do whatever I want, whatever comes to mind on my keyboard. That's false. First of all, you play a theme. You're going to play, say, 'The Way You Look Tonight' — I don't know, let's take a standard. So, a theme that is shared, that's part of a common culture. That's not individual whim. How many times have beginning jazz pianists been told, 'You don't know how to play that tune? Well, then clear off, we need someone who knows the tunes. If you don't know them, you can't play with us.'
2:21:30 You have to play the theme. You play at the same tempo. A shared constraint. And the theme itself imposes its own constraints — it's in AABA form, I won't get too technical, meaning it has two symmetrical parts, then a bridge, a middle section, etc. So, I mean, it takes a lot of constraints for freedom to exist — constraints, I mean, that one has imposed on oneself. They're not tyrannical constraints. So, I mean, this dialectic between freedom and constraint is very important. It's not freedom on one side and order on the other. Otherwise it's the false, abstract freedom we discussed last time, what Hegel calls the freedom of the void, which, when it turns toward the real, becomes a fury of destruction.
2:22:04 I'm thinking of the Khmer Rouge. It's as if he anticipated that in that extraordinary passage in the Philosophy of Right, where he says that pure mystical contemplation — Buddhist contemplation, since his notion of the Buddhist was cultural — can turn into a fury of destruction when it turns toward the real. That's the concrete self, precisely. There you go. That's my answer to your question about order. But let me come back to the discussion of that strange trio, Marx and company — Marx, Lenin, Hegel, and Althusser.
The whole is not totalitarian; conclusion on the spirit that externalizes itself 2:22:34 There really is a farce here, all the same. I was the one who mentioned farce. And in some way, there's a farceur, somewhere. There's no farce, but there is a farceur. Oh yes, all the same. As Marx said, history doesn't repeat itself twice except in the mode of comedy. We're not far from farce. And as for Hegel, all the aesthetic cycles — the Greek cycle, the Romantic cycle — end, I note in Hegel, in humor and irony, which is always the final stage of an aesthetic culture.
2:23:06 It's the laughter of Aristophanes echoing over the ruins of an Athens soon to fall under the sway of Alexander. And there's Romantic irony. He devoted a whole work to it, about his friend Solger, who was a specialist on the question, because the German Romantics prized irony very highly. An author like Friedrich Schlegel — I hesitate to say 'an author,' since many of the German Romantics aren't known for one great work, a great novel and so on, but for aphorisms, remarks, fragments.
2:23:39 Schlegel is one of them, Friedrich Schlegel, not his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was a great linguist. Friedrich Schlegel said, 'The Idea, with a capital I, is a concept pushed to the point of irony.' You see, for him, it's irony itself that allows one to pass from the concept to the Idea. So there, let me close that little parenthesis. It's still a strange quartet, all the same. Everything happens as though there were an immense regression between Lenin and Stalin, indeed. The fact of having dropped Hegelian philosophy, which had put Marx on the track — with all the amendments he brought to it — is a huge step backward, which explains a great deal of the terrible events that followed.
2:24:21 I mean, one doesn't regress toward barbarism with impunity once one is at that level of conceptualization. And I mean, this suited everyone quite well, on both sides. The bourgeoisie of the Western world has no use for Hegel. You know, Karl Popper, for instance, says Hegel is the totalitarian author par excellence. Of course, because Hegel constantly speaks of totality — the true is the whole, the whole is concrete. Popper forgot one thing: that nothing is less totalitarian than the whole, if you think about it a bit.
2:24:55 What's appalling in the regimes historically called totalitarian — I'm not speaking philosophically here, I'm not using the concept of the totalitarian — what's appalling, no. Take the Nazi regime, for example. What's appalling isn't that the whole is in power. I don't think the whole — German society — included the Jews, the Communists, etc., too. It's not the whole that's in power, it's a part. It's the single race, the single party, the single market, the all-market.
2:25:25 That's what's totalitarian — not when the whole rules over the parts. Because bourgeois thought, you'd expect, loves the inviolability of the free, independent producer, who doesn't even want to pay taxes because that's already too much given to society, who wants to take from society but without giving anything back, right? I'm thinking of companies — like the highway companies — that benefited from state investment and then, once privatized, make a profit on it without it having cost them a cent to build. It was your taxes that built the highways, and it's private business that runs them, for instance. And so, what's monstrous is not the rule of the whole over the part, it's the rule of the part over the whole.
2:26:02 Doctors know what cancer is. It's when one part wants to develop at the expense of all the others. That's what's appalling. So we need to reverse the dominant ideology we're subjected to, which puts us on guard against any totalization whatsoever. But it's not the whole that's dangerous. It's totalitarianism. And totalitarianism is the dictatorship of a part. The single party, the single race, the superior race, over the whole. Which is not merely different but exactly the opposite. It's the part that takes itself for the whole. Of course. That's exactly what I'm saying. The part that lords it over the whole.
2:26:33 It's the frog trying to make itself as big as the ox, except it's not the frog that bursts, it's the world that bursts — the part that claims the whole for itself. There you go, exactly. And above all, which negates. Being a part means being by nature exclusive — all determination is negation — and to assert itself it is absolutely forced to negate the others. 'I want to see only one head.' Well, yes. That's what's appalling. And that's one of the great unspoken things of modern thought, of the thought of the last forty years — the 'forty shameful years,' as my late friend Clouscard called them, in contrast to the 'thirty glorious years' — the thought that claimed to be anti-totalitarian and that led us straight to the totalitarianism of the market.
2:27:08 Quite simply. And the trick is done. Which is why, once again, I read you some Proust earlier — I took a certain malicious pleasure in finding, in a novelist classified as worldly, decadent, however much admiration one has for him, a concession to the notion of social class, which is forbidden in the totalitarianism of today's thought. If Proust had written that today, people would say, 'Oh dear, Marxism, mechanistic thinking, imposing the economic and the social from outside onto literature, how scandalous.'
2:27:40 I mean, I warn you, we have rarely lived in a world as moralizing, totalitarian and repressive as today, in my opinion. There's a form of ecology that is repressive, there's a form of... Not all of it. There's a form... Of course, quite so. I'd like to take your questions. In philosophical reflection itself, there's totalitarianism. Especially. Yes, of course. The 'masters of spending' — 'maîtres dépenseurs' — one could say, as you... Yes, exactly. I'll claim that. We've had masters... For forty years, we've had masters of spending.
2:28:12 It's the totalitarianism of individuals, of their desire to be satisfied, which claims totality for itself. Here — not to correct you, because in everyday language one can speak the way you just did, and I'm the first to do it — but in rigorous language, let me recall the distinctions we saw the other day between the particular and the individual. It's the reign of the particular. The reign of the particular, sorry. The individual — something I respect. But the individual, as we saw the other day, is the particular reflected back on itself, as Hegel says, and thereby raised to the universal. That's the individual. I would call it the reign of the prepubescent ego.
2:28:44 Yes, yes. That is, the ego of France Inculture, of pretty much all the media and today's mediatic oligarchy. If you want to put it that way, it's the one to whom production — that is, the labor of others — has given the means to isolate himself, to withdraw from the game, to say, 'If only I could consume the fruits of your production without owing you anything, that would be even better.' It has a name — it's libertarianism in the United States. It's the extreme form of liberalism. You know, libertarians are those luxury anarchists who wait for the man who's come to collect their taxes with a rifle at the gate of their ranch.
2:29:15 Yes, they really are a bunch of outlaws, all the same. When I spoke of the 'masters of spending,' there is nonetheless some good news — the era of the masters of spending, in every semantic sense you can give the term — not only do they teach us to spend, and thus stop thinking, but above all to spend — that era is over. For a very simple reason: there's no more credit.
2:29:46 It's that the economic crisis is... There you go. It's clear. There, it's finished. It's clear. That's why they're all busy reinventing themselves now. As long as it was being fueled, of course. Of course. Let me give you some credit for what you're saying. I was in Côte d'Ivoire, in a region that Anne, here present, knows well. We met there. We were both teachers, deep in the Ivorian jungle, not in the capital. And we were very happy in these small, isolated, landlocked regions, as there were people passing through.
2:30:17 And it happened that there were some Italians crossing the Sahara, and one of the local planters — since the planters had gotten hold of some radios out there in isolation on the plantation — had picked up a conversation between these Italians who were a bit lost in the desert, who had gotten in touch. And since they were Italians, he told them, 'Ah, but when you get here, come, we'll have a party,' and so on. So we hosted these Italians at our place, on their trek through the desert, deep in the forest. And they had with them a young French hitchhiker they'd picked up. He was a young liberal-libertarian type, as Clouscard would say.
2:30:51 And there he was at the table and so on. And suddenly we're talking a bit, mentioning our little teacher's problems — local contract, out there, and you have your problems too, frankly it's all superfluous. 'We don't need to work to live. Look at me, I'm going to see Africa.' 'Well, there's Enzo, he had a Range Rover. I hitchhiked, he picked me up, and that's it.' No need for... I said, you idiot, why are you spitting in the soup? Shut up, get in Enzo's car, I'm glad for you.
2:31:21 But don't generalize your principle. Because if everyone did what you do, who would pick anyone up? There has to be logistics somewhere to begin with. There have to be Range Rovers, and so on. There has to be an Enzo to pick you up. It's parasitism, indeed. As you say, take away the credit and all these kinds of thinking collapse. Yes indeed. But perhaps I should move you toward the conclusion, since we... And even my conclusion, since we've devoted quite a lot of time to aesthetics, is that, I repeat, interiority expresses itself.
2:31:53 And if old Hegel, in Berlin — and if old Hegel, later in life, starts traveling, because it wasn't so easy at the time to travel to another place — goes to Vienna to hear operas, and goes to Paris to see the Antiquities at the Louvre, and so on. And we see it in his correspondence, the letters to his wife, to his friends — he weeps with joy listening to Rossini's Barber of Seville, with its light, airy melodies. That is indeed proof that, for him, depth of spirit is not made of metaphysical shudders, but that spirit externalizes itself, and it is this richness, this profusion of forms, spanning several millennia, through which man emerged from essence, from the abstract, from the universal, from fear, from love, from origins — and which precisely constitutes the appearance of the world we live in, an appearance that is produced, not merely undergone.
2:32:38 There's my conclusion, and it's something we need to recognize. There you are. Thank you, friends. Thank you. See you again very soon this week. Thanks to all of you. Thank you.
