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Tribute to Jacques D'Hondt and the reception of Hegel in France 0:30 So the two Dominiques are going to give us a popular account of our good old GFWH, whose topicality has never been as obvious as it is now, explicitly Hegelian. Over to you, gentlemen.
1:13 That's what we've tried to check. Thank you very much. First of all, thank you to everyone who came. The weather isn't really conducive to it. I'll still recall that this evening, there are several occasions that motivated the decision to hold a meeting around the return of Hegel and Marx.
1:44 There are various occasions. I'll start with the contingent ones. That doesn't mean they aren't important. But it's the fact that we have the good fortune of having Domenico Losurdo visiting France, who already has a considerable Hegelian bibliography that isn't devoted only to Hegel, far from it, but which returns significantly and recurrently to Hegel, and who has just brought out his work on politics, on the figure of hypochondria.
2:14 And that was the first occasion. Besides, there is a great figure who has passed away, to whom we pay tribute this evening, namely Jacques D'Hondt, who died on the 10th of February, and who had the merit, in a solitude one can imagine, of continuing to try to plead the cause of that dead dog Hegel had become during the last 40 years that many economists call the shameful 40, right? Or pitiful, that is, in contrast to those versions.
2:44 By contrast with those that had preceded them. So, since these shameful 40 years, there were nonetheless a few solitary figures trying to defend the cause of this dead dog. You know that this is how Lessing had spoken of Spinoza, precisely in Hegel's time. Lessing, who was one of the glories of the German Enlightenment—there isn't only darkness in Germany—Lessing had already noted that Spinoza was treated like a dead dog, and we know the role played by the rediscovery of Spinoza's importance in Hegel's youth and formation, alongside that of Kant.
3:19 And the great problems that their synthesis posed for our philosopher. So Jacques D'Hondt, who was a great résistant, who had taken part in the renaissance of Hegelian studies—I'll say a brief word about the reception of Hegel in France—had taken part in that renaissance alongside... he had been a student of Hyppolite, right? And Hyppolite had translated the Phenomenology of Spirit as early as 1939, just before the war.
3:52 I'll take the opportunity to say that the reception of Hegel in France—if you'll allow me, Dominique, we know the reception of Hegel worldwide well, so I'll dwell a bit more on his reception here in France. It was extremely superficial until a relatively recent date, historically speaking. We know there were exchanges between Victor Cousin and Hegel; that exchange is well known. We also know that Victor Cousin didn't understand much of Hegel, but that he dealt with him very honestly, and that thanks to Victor Cousin, Hegel made a trip to Paris toward the end of his life.
4:26 And thanks to Hegel, Victor Cousin was able to get out of prison in Berlin, since, by associating with Hegel, he was already suspected of being subversive. And so, a translation by Véra—the first translation of the Phenomenology into French—then we still have to wait until the eve of the Second World War for, thanks to... And that's what he draws from... Hegel's present relevance today, in a configuration partly analogous to the one we're living through, since it was the greatest crisis capital had undergone until the one we're living through today—so, at the end of the 1930s.
5:05 It's no accident that Hegel resurfaces at the same time as Marx. And there you go, we thought we were rid of all these ghosts, that Marx was dead, that Hegel had been sent off to the museum of the history of thought. And then, ruse of reason, one might say—Hegel, return of the repressed, one might say in another field. Suddenly, the old man, to speak as Marx and Engels indeed did, the old man is back. Hegel is back, as they said of Reagan.
5:36 There you go. Who would have thought it? I won't take it upon myself to see all the facets of Hegel's topicality today. I'll hand over to Domenico, who has extremely precise things to tell you about this. I'd just like perhaps to tell a little anecdote by way of introduction to the atmosphere of Hegel's reception in France.
6:07 In the 1960s—I believe it was in '66, I remember well, forgive me for dwelling on this personal anecdote—I was looking for France Musique on a radio, on radios where there were no preset stations yet, so I was searching a bit for myself, and I stumbled by chance on France Culture while looking for France Musique, and I stopped to listen to someone talking about Hegel. It was in fact the recipient's speech, as they say at the Académie; it was Maurice Druon, who would have believed it, Maurice Druon talking about Hegel. Maurice Druon was giving the recipient's speech for Georges Duhamel, who had just died. And there I heard this sentence, that for Georges Duhamel, philosophy did not stop, as is the case today, at bringing further misfortune upon Hegel.
6:46 Because Hegel plus Nietzsche gives Nazism, Hegel plus Marx gives communism, and Hegel plus Sartre gives existentialism—that is, three philosophies of debasement, etc. Since then we've had BHL, we've had even better of the kind. There you go. So, you see, this goes back a long way—I'm talking about '66. You see, when I speak of a dead dog, I'm not exaggerating. From every angle, really. He's held responsible for Nazism, for communism, for existentialism, poor old man.
Hegel in marxology: from Lenin to Althusser 7:17 There you go. And this anecdote leads us to question this extraordinary violence. And to make it worse, I would say that this violence also exists in the camp of Marxology. If it were only the reaction. The reaction has always fought Hegel. He is Popper's bête noire—Popper being roughly the philosopher of financialized capitalism, of America—well, of America, I'll say American, since being anti-American is a right-wing theme.
7:48 But let's say of Atlanticism, of which America is never anything but the flagship. And there, it's natural that Hegel should be the bête noire, right, with his references to Marx, to Rousseau, to dialectic, to the fact that once freedom has taken hold of peoples and individuals, however much one tries with old archaic substantial societies, one can't manage to hold it back—one has to reckon with it, otherwise one isn't modern. We'll illustrate this shortly with quite specific passages from Hegel on this point. But what's more serious is that in Marxology too, there has long been a gap with respect to Hegel.
8:23 At least a gap, if not conflicts. There is of course the young Marx, who is explicitly—indeed, his first important published work is the critique, or the dismantling, as you like, the critique, in the negative sense too, of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. We know that Marx, at that time, is not yet Marx—he is Feuerbachian, still under the naturalist influence of Feuerbach, who understood alienation in Hegel well but understood nothing of history, and rather of nature.
8:54 Feuerbach is more topical than Hegel ideologically—more eco-friendly, if you prefer. And there is this young Marx, who very soon, as early as The German Ideology, and especially as early as the Theses on Feuerbach, quickly rediscovers what is unavoidable in Hegel and what Feuerbach had caused to be neglected—what he calls 'Tätigkeit,' right? Theoretical activity, the activity of the subject. It gets worse afterward, at the time when Marxism was supposedly incarnated historically, at the time of the Soviet state, with someone like Stalin, for example.
9:36 and his hostility to Hegel was well known, which was an infidelity to Lenin, since, as some know, Lenin had the opportunity and the courage to swallow, if I may say so, to grind through, the most difficult work, Hegel's Logic, the enormous Wissenschaft der Logik, the Science of Logic, in Switzerland, where he was in exile, and so he had, for once, time to make a theoretical parenthesis in a life of militant and practical action that was otherwise quite full.
10:11 And it's very interesting to watch Lenin progress in his reading. At the start, he has a certain image of Hegel, since he doesn't know him well. And that image is precisely that of a Marxology which holds, well, that Hegel is perhaps a bit better than the average bourgeois thinker, but still, one must turn him upside down for him to be operational, and anyway, there is indeed an interesting kernel in there, but surrounded by a mystical, idealist husk, etc. And then, as he continues reading, he realizes this view is mistaken.
10:42 He realizes—we can't dwell on every detail—up to this rather extraordinary, famous conclusion, where at the end, when he reaches the last page of the Logic concerning the absolute idea, one couldn't apparently be further from historical and dialectical materialism, and Lenin reads—this last page of the Logic is quite remarkable. I quote: this is the most idealist and therefore the most materialist page of Hegel. It's contradictory, but it's a fact. And he adds, an aphorism he himself boxed in, since these are reading notes—I'm commenting on a reading of a reading.
11:18 Aphorism: all those who read Marx before me, Plekhanov and Bukharin, did not understand Marx because they had not read the whole of Hegel's Logic. It's underlined. One must understand—the least line of Marx requires understanding the whole of Hegel's Logic. So, between this singular homage from someone rather suspected of a leaning toward mysticism and idealism, Lenin, and the hostile opposition of Stalin, there's a contrast. And if I mention this, we are not in a museum, a gallery of ghosts from the past—quite the contrary.
11:52 it's that Althusser, who reigned unchallenged over the relation to Marx from the 1960s up to the crisis we're living through, Althusser, who said exactly the opposite of Lenin, right? One can only understand Marx if one completely cuts him off from Hegel, and links him instead sometimes to Spinoza, sometimes to Lacan, depending on the moment. He himself wasn't quite sure—well, at the end of his life, he confessed he had never read a single line of Hegel, and that when he had dismantled him, he hadn't actually looked at him.
12:22 We had to wait for his self-criticism at the end of his life for this to become known. But still, I mean, Althusser had intervened in 1953 to congratulate Stalin for having condemned the negation of the negation in Hegel—that is, the very motor element of Hegelian dialectic. There you go. I mention this in passing, not to discuss the philosophical substance of all this, but to show that the reception of Hegel remained polemical for a long time, including within the camp of Marxology.
12:57 It's no accident that interest in Hegelian studies has been returning for some years now, thanks to—I believe it's no accident—thanks to the crisis we are living through. Don't think I'm engaging in historicist or mechanistic-historicist mechanisms. There's nothing mechanical about it. I even find the timing a bit slow. Apparently, Marx dug the old mole well; it seems to me the old mole is back.
13:28 And so, I will first try to devote myself, at least, to the Hegelian corpus itself rather than—barring questions—in this sense, to the reasons why this corpus is not understood and is censored by contemporary reading. And in what I call this contemporary censorship, there is an important element, which is the distance the postmodern subject puts between himself and politics, which is something where one gets one's hands dirty and which is somewhat remote.
14:06 and I'll now hand over first to Domenico Losurdo, who had precisely the presence of mind to see that there was an essential theme, indeed a decisive one, of contemporaneity, if not of modernity, which is precisely this quasi-pathological relationship to reality, namely apoliticism. I say quasi-pathological because Domenico Losurdo has subsumed it, if I may say so, under the clinical category—these aren't merely philosophical remarks—of hypochondria.
The French Revolution and the universal that must become concrete 14:40 So we'll first ask Domenico to explain to us why this figure of the apolitical hypochondriac has taken on such importance in his thinking. My friend Dominique spoke of the return of Hegel, but for me Hegel never left. Considering that I come from a different philosophical and political tradition, in the years after the October Revolution, Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party, wrote in the journal edited by Antonio Gramsci that Marx is the direct son of Hegel.
15:23 And I would like to explain this statement, because I find that in Hegel we can read a logic of political discourse, and even a logic of revolutionary political discourse. To understand this, we can start from the French Revolution. The French Revolution provokes an epistemological and political debate that is entirely new, one that the other revolutions had not provoked.
15:56 For a very simple reason: let's compare the intellectual and political strata of the different revolutions. In France we see intellectuals who are not property owners, whereas, for example, for the American Revolution we see property owners, intellectuals who are property owners, even slave owners. If we take, for example, the first 36 years of the United States, for 30 of those 36 years the presidents of the republic were always slave owners.
16:40 I won't insist on this point; I will insist on the epistemological plane. And for this ruling stratum, the problem of what politics is, what political power is, was not a problem, because even before conquering political power, they already knew very well what exercising power meant—they already exercised it in their private property, since they were even slave owners.
17:14 The French intellectuals who are the protagonists, and the French politicians who are the protagonists of the French Revolution, are criticized by reaction for being abstract. They are abstract. They have no sense of politics. Hegel wants to explain what the meaning of politics can be for these intellectuals. Yes, they are abstract, they do not own property, but that is precisely why, for example, the French Revolution gave rise to this abstract idea of the abolition of slavery.
17:56 This idea of the abolition of slavery could not have been the thought of slave owners; it could only be the thought of intellectuals who were not property owners and who were inclined to think universality, to think in a general, universal way, to think the problem of freedom not only for a reduced community, but for the universality of men.
18:29 But the problem remains: Hegel is well aware that this universality thought by the French Revolution must become concrete, must be realized in a concrete way. To explain this, I would like to cite Hegel's critique of Christianity. He takes the commandment of love of one's neighbor, and Hegel says that if this commandment means that I must love everyone, this commandment is contradictory in itself.
19:17 Why? Because love is a particular intensity of feeling, and if this feeling is directed toward all men, this particular intensity of feeling no longer exists. One might comment—I believe, as far as I know, no one has ever seduced a woman by telling her 'I love you, and by the way, all the women in the world too'—because love is a particular intensity.
19:47 So universality, yes of course, we must think of all men, but we must give this universality a concretization—for example by building a state, a society, with new characteristics, the characteristics of emancipation. We cannot limit ourselves to proclaiming our love; we must also realize something concrete and determinate.
20:24 and the consideration Hegel applies to love, we can apply equally to hatred. If I say I hate everyone, well, hatred is a feeling with a particular intensity, and when I say that, I think of an author like Foucault—everyone knows he wrote a microphysics of power, and if power is everywhere, it's in the president of the United States and in Losurdo, who is now making you listen to him—then if power is everywhere, power is nowhere, and we cannot make a determinate critique of power. And I recall a central category of Hegel's Logic called determinate negation.
21:34 bestimmte Negation—if there is no determination, there is no negation, and ultra-revolutionary discourses that refer to an indeterminate negation are conservatism—that is Hegel's point of view. And we see this logic of political discourse, but I would like to give other concrete examples. On one hand we have universality, but this universality, the greatness of the French Revolution, could not have been the outcome of a revolution like the American one, which was led by slave owners; this universality must become concrete, that is, we must think even about empirical reality and see in what way the various aspects can be joined together—so I would like to give an example, explaining it with
Absolute empiricism: Huntington and Habermas 22:44 Hegelian categories. Let's take the war against Yugoslavia or the war against Iraq. We had authors—for example, on the war against Iraq, Huntington wrote that with this war and a succession of wars in the Middle East—he says explicitly, in this way—the Persian Gulf has become an American lake, and he is of course very happy about that; he doesn't explain why we should be happy that the Persian Gulf has become an American lake. That is empiricism, that is the renunciation of universality. But at the same time, for example, on the occasion of the war against Yugoslavia, we see a philosopher like Jürgen Habermas, or the Italian Norberto Bobbio—it's a shame, a philosopher like Jürgen Habermas, who said
23:54 that in the Balkans there is no concrete interest; if NATO waged war, it was only for a universalist ideal, only for a humanitarian intervention in the name of universality. It's a shame to have to say that Habermas doesn't know history, because the Balkans played a very important role in the First and Second World Wars, as everyone knows. So what is this so-called universalism of Habermas? I quote Hegel: in this case, to speak of universality without making a concrete analysis of the reality of the geopolitical stakes, etc.—that is not universalism, it is, I quote, absolute empiricism, the worst form of empiricism. Simple empiricism is of course the failure to recognize universality, but absolute empiricism
25:04 is even worse, because this absolute empiricism celebrates, as an expression of universality, particular interests that can be very vulgar and even very bad. So we are at the very heart of political discourse, and I must say, of revolutionary political discourse, when Hegel makes these observations. And now I come to hypochondria—this occurs in a particular situation: yes, there had been the French Revolution, but this French Revolution had fallen into crisis, Thermidor, and afterward Napoleon; it is at this time that Hegel writes his Logic, and what was the reaction? Yes, disillusionment over the misadventures of the French Revolution, there was a general crisis
Romantic hypochondria, flight from the political world 26:14 what is revolution, what is politics—and we can read the German Romantics, for example Friedrich Schlegel. Friedrich Schlegel in his youth had welcomed the French Revolution, but afterward there is disillusionment, and you know, Friedrich Schlegel—I quote a text of Friedrich Schlegel—do not dissipate your faith and love in the political world, but in the divine world of science and art; sacrifice your inwardness to the sacred cause of eternal culture. Schopenhauer expresses himself in the same way—I don't need to quote Schopenhauer. We can even cite a great poet, Schiller; he too had had sympathy for the French Revolution, but afterward he wrote that in the mountains there is freedom—that was
27:24 The flight from the political world — Hegel's discourse is a critique of this flight from the political world, and that's exactly what makes it very topical. What are Hegel's observations? First, this flight is entirely imaginary. Yes, people claim to flee the political world, but in reality it's only a superficial expression of the existing political world; it's even, yes, a conservative attitude, because it's really still part of the existing political world, and in any case it's a completely imaginary flight — it's the vulgar expression of the existing political world. These personalities may claim to be superior
28:34 to the existing political world, but they are the bad expression of that same bad political world that they claim to be superior to. And that's not all, that's not all, because this celebration of interiority even amounts to a moral critique. Yes, they claim to be superior, but this is the narcissism of subjectivity, the dogmatism of subjectivity. This attitude is doubly false: on one hand it's false because this attitude regards the political world as something that will always be vulgar, and that's a mistaken interpretation, because the political world can be changed, has been changed many times in the past, can be changed
29:44 in the future — and this flight is religious in character. I insist on this point: it's only another expression of religious flight. In the Middle Ages one said the political world was profane — Hegel's term was vulgar — and now it's the same, only perhaps even worse: the political world is vulgar and profane, and divinity is now only the empirical self, excellence is only the self. So you understand, this is a very, very radical critique, because this narcissism of subjectivity is even a moral critique. But Hegel wants to analyze this crisis of delusion after the French Revolution — in what way
Objective contradiction against the disease of revolution 30:55 can we understand the French Revolution, and even the complex and contradictory character of the French Revolution? There is already an extensive literature — Tocqueville, Burke speak of the sickness of the French Revolution, the sickness of the French Revolution. After the Revolution of '48, Tocqueville speaks of a virus of a new and unknown kind — this is a quotation — and it's precisely this quotation, which I find horrible, that for Furet is the best thing Tocqueville wrote, because Tocqueville had understood — I quote Furet — that the French revolutionaries were all mad. After the Paris Commune, Taine makes the same remark, and
32:05 Nietzsche makes the same remark as Taine. In Hegel's Logic we find a critique of this category of sickness, this so-called explanation, and in place of the category of sickness we find the category of objective contradiction. The French Revolution was complicated because there wasn't only the contradiction between the Third Estate and the aristocracy, but even within the Third Estate there were many contradictions; there were international contradictions, and Hegel even makes observations about geopolitics — he even says that the American Revolution was simpler because there was the West, that is, there was the expropriation
33:15 and deportation of the Indians, which could make the resolution of social conflicts easier. But all of Hegel's Logic is also a critique of the category of sickness — there's still more to say, I'll finish with this. Hegel's Logic — yes, one has the impression it's abstract, but it's not abstract at all. Lenin had understood this very well, but not only Lenin — one should also mention another democratic revolutionary named Herzen, who wrote that Hegel's Logic is the algebra of revolution. So, examples to explain this algebra of revolution: the
34:25 usual logic of political and social discourse is a dichotomous logic. If we take an author like Bobbio or Popper, there are the friends of liberty and the enemies of liberty. But if we take Hegel, for example, he says: yes, the landed aristocracy, the old aristocracy, on one hand polemicizes against absolute power, but on the other hand exercises absolute power over the serfs of the soil and over the nation as a whole — that's a quotation from Hegel. So when this aristocracy was abolished before the French Revolution
35:35 was this abolition of the aristocracy an act against liberty or for liberty? We cannot say this in a dichotomous way — that is, on one hand the suppression of the nobility's privileges was felt by the aristocracy as a deprivation of liberty, but on the other hand the struggle against the aristocracy meant liberty for the serfs of the soil. This is proof that one cannot use a dichotomous logic — that is the logic of the ruling class. And another example, and this is my conclusion — another example: Hegel speaks of the social question, and speaks of it very forcefully. He is the first to theorize material rights, he speaks of material right, he even speaks of the right to life — the right to life, that's even Robespierre's expression, everyone
Right to life and infinite negative judgment 36:45 knows it — Robespierre said that the right to life is the first of the rights of man. Even in Hegel we find this expression, and he makes an observation: when a man is starving and risks death by starvation — I now quote a paragraph from the Philosophy of Right — this man is in a situation of total absence of right. I quote: total absence of right, total Rechtlosigkeit. That is the condition of the slave — total absence of right is the condition of the slave — that is, the comparison between the starving man, in theory free, and the slave. We find this comparison already in Hegel, before finding it developed of course in Marx. And then this man, says Hegel, who even risks death by
37:55 starvation — I quote — has the absolute right to violate private property in order to avoid the risk of death. Absolute right, that's an expression of Hegel's. But what's especially interesting is the way he explains this concept, and he explains it logically, and with this explanation — this is the end of my talk — he does not want to deny the legitimacy of private property, but he says that the right to private property is a secondary right compared to the right to life of the man who risks death by starvation. And he says this — it's a text from the Logic — he makes a distinction; one might think this distinction is very abstract, but it's very concrete. He makes a distinction between simple negative judgment
39:05 and infinite negative judgment. A little patience: if I say 'this rose is not red,' that's a simple negative judgment, because I'm negating only one attribute, not the rose as such — this rose exists but is not red. If I say 'this thing is not a rose,' I make an infinite negative judgment. Now let's come to the social question: when we force a man to be starving and even to risk death by starvation, that is an infinite negative judgment — we are not negating merely something particular about this man, we are negating his existence as a man, his existence as a being. Whereas the starving man who might violate the private property of an owner — in that case, yes, it's a judgment
40:15 of negation, but it's a simple negative judgment. It negates only one determinate thing belonging to that property; it does not negate the personality, the existence of the owner. So in this case we have a conflict of rights — yes, there is the right to property, but there is also the right that takes priority, the right to life, and in this case the right to life must take precedence. To demand absolute respect for private property — again a quotation — is absolute injustice. So this is a further demonstration that Hegel's Logic is a very concrete logic. In the Logic, Hegel tried to categorize the categories of revolution, especially of the French Revolution, and the categories of political and social conflict, and for this
The fear of death and the "night of the world" 41:26 I think we can affirm, with Togliatti and in the journal directed by Gramsci, that Marx is the direct son of Hegel. I don't think that Hegel and Marx were ever separate, but I can welcome the return of those who, until now, have neglected and not read and not understood Hegel and Marx. Thank you Domenico for your talk. — Yes, unless you'd like to extend the introduction a little more — no, perhaps we should leave room for the debate now, I imagine there are questions. — Very willingly. I just wanted to read a short text to illustrate Domenico's point, simply because he has just very rightly distinguished the simple judgment from the infinite judgment, relating it of course to the category of substance and that of attribute — negation of the attribute
42:37 in the simple judgment, negation of the substance or of the subject in the infinite judgment — but I don't want, we don't want, I believe, to burden you today with technical terms, not because we think — I don't know — it's something that requires a long apprenticeship; one can dive straight in, that's not a problem, and Hegel is no more difficult to read than Plato's Philebus or Sophist, believe me. You know, there's a legend going around that Plato supposedly rewrote each book of the Republic seven times — it's simply a particular difficulty, one linked to the content Dominique has just developed regarding the substantial and the attribute. I'll take up this distinction again to show a passage from Hegel devoted to a feeling called fear. This passage is short, but it's the conclusion of one of the most famous chapters of the Phenomenology, if I may say so — the famous dialectic of master and slave. I remind you, though, that we're dealing with a master and a slave who are for now abstract, mythical — they are not tied to a determinate here and now at the start — and I recall that when the slave on the battlefield
43:47 is threatened with death by the one who has subjugated him in combat, he has a dialectically simple choice: either he chooses to remain alive on condition of becoming his conqueror's servant, or he dies. If he chooses to remain alive, that means that for him, as for an animal, life is more important than freedom, than this, than that — I mean he does not get himself recognized as such by the master. I can't retrace this well-known dialectic in full; I'll simply focus on the feeling aroused by the sudden, close proximity of death on this occasion, and the fear it provokes — for let us not forget that if Hegel is the thinker of the true life of spirit, it is precisely because he reminded us that anthropology has, compared to the animal, a certain relation to the knowledge of death. I read this text: 'We have seen only what servitude is in the behavior of domination.' This consciousness, the slave's consciousness, has precisely experienced anguish, not about this or that thing — there you have the attributes, not the anguish of losing one's job or the anguish of losing one's wife, not that — no, it experienced
44:57 anguish not about this or that moment, but it experienced anguish about the entirety of its essence, for it felt the fear of death. And Hegel often follows 'death' with this predicate: the absolute master. Hegel's dialectic is not always relativist — it's not that the master becomes the slave and the slave becomes the master; there is an absolute master, one that cannot be relativized, which is death. So in this anguish, consciousness has been dissolved inwardly, has trembled in its innermost depths, and everything that was fixed has wavered within it — but there, I'll stop the quotation for now, I haven't quite finished — to recall that it is the entirety of the individual's very being that was shaken by this fear, and so this fear is the founding moment of a new state of the individual, who can no longer reassure himself with the usual recipes. But Hegel recalls that this fear is simply a matter of being in contact with what he calls the simple concept of the essence of self-consciousness. I quote: 'But such a pure universal movement, such an absolute fluidization of all subsistence — that is the simple essence of self-consciousness'
46:07 absolute negativity, pure being-for-self, which is thus present in this very consciousness. So this fear, which the slave will overcome by working, by shaping — Hegel will show that the slave begins to surpass the master when he comes to be surrounded by a world in which the slave recognizes his own form, since it is he who has shaped it; there is thus a reflection of himself in being, whereas the master always deals with a disappearing reality. I wanted to show this text on fear in order to connect it with a text from 1803, where Hegel begins to glimpse the coherence of his future system, and where he speaks once again of death, saying: man is this night — not this or that man, man is this night, this empty nothingness — man, compared to all other creatures, contains within the simplicity of this night a wealth of infinitely multiple representations, images, of which precisely none comes to mind, or which are not present as such. This is the night, the interior of nature that exists here purely for itself. It is night: all around, a bloody head suddenly rises up — it's a strange text — another white shape, of white and red, and they disappear of their own accord. This is the night one discovers when one looks a man in the eyes
47:17 one plunges one's gaze into a night that becomes frightful — the word is underlined — it is the night of the world that comes forward here to meet each of us. It is to deliver us from this night of the world that, since Neanderthal times, man has shaped through social praxis — we will come back to this through your questions — a world that has allowed him to overcome this initial and fundamental anguish. There, so now, thank you — so, well, who wants to go first? Apparently you've subjugated them! — In your book, in fact, you show that for the reaction, so to speak, the universal man of the revolution is an abstraction, an unnatural abstraction, one might say, and that's the sickness you were talking about, I think — and what I find quite fruitful, indeed very fruitful, in what you say next, is that in the end it's not
Universal man as an irreversible second nature 48:28 an abstraction, but on the contrary — you introduced the phenomenon of second nature, that is, that the French Revolution in the end produced the universal man who is no longer within first nature, but a second nature which then appears. And in that case, those who are in abstraction are indeed the others, who, refusing this second nature, want to go back to before — who are, in the end, in the most total reaction, since they refuse the irreversible, since the French Revolution — well, it has this irreversible character, one cannot act as if the French Revolution had never taken place, that is, it did take place, effectively — so, that's the question; is that the answer? — Yes, the question is important, of course. There's a whole polemic against the French Revolution and against the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution. The first to argue against it is Edmund Burke, that Englishman who writes
49:38 Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Burke opposes the rights of the Englishman to the rights of man — he expresses himself this way. But perhaps the most radical in his critique of the rights of man is Joseph de Maistre. Joseph de Maistre writes: 'There is no such thing as man in the world; I have in my life seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life. If he exists, it is certainly without my knowledge.' That is the declaration — so, in this we see the nominalistic dissolution of the universal concept of man. Why is this dissolution brilliant but false? One can consider that if man as such does not exist,
50:48 then neither does the Englishman as such, the Italian as such, and we could go on — nor does the Parisian as such, etc. That is, this nominalistic dissolution of the concept ultimately leads to silence, because without concepts we cannot speak or think — to think is to express concepts, and we must consider whether these concepts are valid or not. But what is Hegel's other response? It's true, what Joseph de Maistre says — the universal concept of man is a historical construction. The universal concept of man did not exist in the Greek world, even with those great philosophers Plato and Aristotle — it did not exist and could not exist, because there were slaves, and the slaves were not subsumed under the category of man but were subsumed under the category of instrument — they were not men
51:58 so, of course, the construction of the universal concept of man is a historical construction. Marx will later say: universal history has not always existed — even universal history is a result — and that is Hegel's line. But there are results that are irreversible, and Hegel gives an example — it's a principle — yes, if a king, even a very intelligent and brilliant one, wanted to reestablish slavery in Europe, he would be mad, because now, as far as Europe at least is concerned, said Hegel, liberty or non-slavery has become a second nature. And we can say, if someone today wants to reestablish the domestic slavery of women, he can try, but I don't believe
53:08 he will have much success, because it has become a second nature. That doesn't rule out struggle, because later after Hegel we find a philosopher, a great reactionary philosopher like Nietzsche, who takes up the critique of the universal concept of man — he says that the great majority of humanity are instruments of labor — and we can see that this line ultimately leads to Hitler, who speaks of subhumans, Untermenschen. Of course, based on this nominalistic dissolution of the concept of man in Hitler, who wanted to reestablish the colonial tradition even in the heart of Eastern Europe, there was a gigantic struggle — but this gigantic struggle did not by chance end with the
The three stages of universal history 54:18 defeat of Hitler. So we can see history, the struggle — but history and struggle produce results that are irreversible, and that's an important point, because Hegel has often been criticized as a philosopher of history in the teleological sense, etc. No — there are results of history that are irreversible, and that's even Marx's thesis: that man can make history, but starting from the results that are already there. A small addition to what Domenico just said — Domenico has just reminded us, for those who might get lost in the philosophical labyrinth in general and the Hegelian labyrinth in particular, that there are nonetheless a few guiding threads, even practical ones, expressed by Hegel himself — I'm not talking about interpretation in particular — a general overview of universal history
55:28 from its origins to our own day, through this very well-known proposition of his, isn't it: the Orientals knew — understood — that one alone was free, one alone, the Pharaoh, the Emperor of China — what he called the figure of Oriental despotism — this is a historical notion here, not a geographical one. And Hegel himself knew that the earth was round, and that one is to the west or east of wherever one likes, and that Poland is east of Germany and west of Russia — Hegel indeed knew that. So when he speaks of the Orient, isn't it, it's a historical moment — so the figure of the oriental despot — history began with these great civilizations of charismatic despotism, as one says. The Orientals, in short, knew that one alone was free — I continue the quotation from Hegel — the Greeks knew that some are free, precisely those who are not slaves — that's progress. I'll dwell a bit on the Greeks, very quickly, there'll be so many occasions to come back to it — namely that, for the first time, still, power among these few takes a democratic form, that is, power no longer depends on force among these few but on conviction, on speech, for power
56:38 is decided on the agora, in parliament in the strict sense, where one has spoken, exchanged, and where, when there was concept against concept, there is nonetheless considerable progress. It's unthinkable that an Egyptian would do as Socrates did and say, faced with 'what do you call virtue?' — a whip crack: 'you're going to work building the pyramid' — before asking, 'that's virtue?' The answer precedes the question. To ask oneself a question, 'what do you call...', is to put into question the words of ordinary language and thus the ordinary relations of power. If I ask 'what is virtue' or 'what should I do,' I raise the great question of the philosophy of action as Kant sums it up in the formula 'what should I do' as opposed to 'what can I know' — he resembles rather the astronomer there. So the question 'what should I do' can only be asked by someone who knows he could do this but could just as well do something else — that presupposes a certain freedom, a certain historical achievement already present among the Greeks. It presupposes already a certain degree of democracy for philosophy to be able to appear and for the question 'what should I do' to be able to have meaning, because there are places where one says 'you will do this' before you can even ask the question. So, I recall Hegel's quotation, which comes in three stages
57:48 to traverse universal history as he sees it: the Orientals knew that one alone was free; the Greeks knew — suddenly we switch to the past simple — that some are free — the Greek miracle suddenly demands the past simple indicative; we moderns know that all are free. It's clear that this formula has been endlessly repeated, and precisely because it's been so repeated, I feel obliged to comment on it a bit, because Hegel said — this is well known — that 'what is well known, because it is well known, is not known.' There is nothing more insidious, nothing more a source of illusion in philosophical work than when one finds oneself with categories that seem familiar to us — and that's one of the great difficulties with Hegel, that the difficulty of reading him, which is well known, doesn't come from the fact that he uses a figurative or complicated vocabulary. You'll find nowhere in him the distinction between the apagogic and the ostensive as in Kant, for example — there, that's a technical language, but once you're aware of it, Kant is very democratic, Kant tells you 'I call this apagogic, I call this ostensive,' he gives us the rules of the game, then we work — but still, it's complicated, you have to learn a whole lexicon. With Hegel, when Hegel says 'the pure porosity of matters,' one wonders what he means — well, 'pure' is an ordinary word, 'porosity' is an ordinary word, 'matter' is an ordinary word — it's even a very concrete language. I say this to point out that it's a specific difficulty — I tried, with my little quotation on death earlier, to show just how much resistance there is
58:58 to understanding Hegel, which was not due, in my opinion, to the difficulty of his lexicon. So if he shows that it took millennia of effort — what he calls 'the patience of the concept,' or elsewhere 'the calvary of spirit,' which amounts to much the same thing when he thinks of all the ordeals through which humanity had to pass in order for one to be able to speak of man in general — precisely something which is not a self-evident notion, as Domenico rightly reminded us, isn't it, that the slave was not given anthropological status in antiquity — and to arrive at man in general, one needs indeed the patience and the calvary of history. Now, this dialectic requires familiarizing oneself with it. Hegel is wary and sends back to back both the one who is stuck in abstract universality, in the empty balloon so to speak, the great abstractions, and the one who is stuck in the particular, who sees only Italians, Englishmen, isn't it, and Germans, and who is incapable of seeing man. To this Hegel said, with great humor, that such a person must let himself starve to death when the doctor tells him, 'my poor friend, to get better you must eat fruit,' because he finds fruit nowhere, only bananas, oranges, cherries, and grapes. There you have it —
1:00:08 when one is not capable — as with contemporary nominalist skepticism — when it comes to keeping the universal from becoming concrete, one always finds something to dissolve and dilute the universal. Of course there are always particularities — nobody sees the trees over there at the angle where I see them right now, not even I see them anymore because I've turned this way, that's already another angle — big deal, singularity is 'indifferent difference,' as Hegel says. So, I wanted to make this reminder, that this dialectical back-and-forth, one must reach the universal — a labor several millennia old, that of philosophy, into which Socrates initiated us — rising from common representations, from that bottle there, to the concept of bottle in general — there's work involved, and we have an almost inverse effort to make, says Hegel: we moderns start from abstraction, and we need to see what makes it concrete. I want to finish quickly here to give the floor back to the room. I don't think — I know I'm going to say something that will scandalize quite a few Hegelians a bit — I don't think that knowledge is the essence of philosophy for Hegel. Knowledge is the business of science; philosophy, on the other hand, is necessary in order to have science recognized — it's a matter of recognition. Philosophy is essentially polemical, it always has a political aspect. If we managed — if we managed to recognize everything that is new since Galilean physics
1:01:18 you see, I'm not going far, I'm not even going as far as Newton, let alone Einstein — but simply, if we could actualize the passage from the closed world, into which ecology wants to make us return — it seems we're limited, we are limited — from the closed world to the infinite universe, to borrow the celebrated title of Alexandre Koyré, this infinite world that the Renaissance and humanism — as if by chance, to pick up on what Domenico was doing — brought us in the 16th century. We can clearly see what's at stake, and I'm glad he made this parenthesis on humanism, because you said: there, that's how one arrives at Hitler through the negation of man in general, but that's also how one arrives at Foucault — Foucault's great thesis is that man is a recent invention, and, he says, fortunately soon to disappear. But there, I give the floor back to the room. — Yes, yes, obviously no one will be surprised that you precede the question I was going to ask about the theme of humanism, since the topicality — the new topicality, for us French people anyway — of Hegel and, incidentally, of Marx, in whichever order one likes, is linked to the collapse of what has nevertheless been the dominant doctrine, notably in academia, in France for the past 30 or 40 years — notably what one might call Deleuzo-Foucauldianism, all-out relativism, whose great enemies
Hegelian humanism and the struggle for recognition 1:02:28 — I remind those who don't remember or don't know or have forgotten — was precisely humanism. That was one of the reasons why, obviously, Hegelian anthropology was totally reviled during the great era we know of, which starts in the '70s and truly begins with the New Philosophers. So the question is the following — it's in a certain sense what Domenico addresses in his book — the current relevance today of apoliticism: there's a Hegelian lesson to be drawn, but to draw it, one must perhaps clear away a whole series of layers of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Hegel — and notably, you were talking about nominalism regarding the determinations of man, notably national ones — we have a recent topicality, that of identities, that of communities, and all sorts of things revolving around that. One of the major criticisms that has recently been raised, no later than today, in this very bookshop,
1:03:38 rests on a total misunderstanding of the Hegelian system — that's what I'm going to ask you to try to clarify, notably the famous passages in the Philosophy of History about the African man, etc., which have been taken up, as everyone knows, by excellent Hegelians and readers of Hegel — namely Guaino and Sarkozy — so I leave you the floor to clarify this point. It's a fairly minor point, but I think it's important to use as an empirical example of how one produces the most utter nonsense with Hegel when one has refrained from reading and understanding the Hegelian system. — So, first, on universality in Hegel: there's no doubt about the fact that the status of universality is very important, even on the concrete level. Hegel speaks of slavery as the absolute crime, and he even says that enslaving a man is still worse than murder — he even says that
1:04:49 why? Once again he makes logical considerations: whether in murder or in slavery, we have the nominalistic dissolution of the concept of man — that is, when a murderer kills a man, he negates the human quality of his victim, and when someone becomes a slave, he negates the human quality of the slave. But there's a difference: when one murders, one kills a man — that's a negation at a very determinate moment, it's a single instant, this negation; in slavery we have a continuous and permanent negation of the universal concept — so in this sense Hegel says that slavery is even worse. So we see even the concrete —
1:06:00 I can say something against Popper — Popper is really an idiot when he talks about Hegel, he has never read Hegel, that's really the only excuse for him, because he understands nothing, and he speaks — he speaks of Hegel as a theorist of slavery. Hegel speaks of slavery as the absolute crime. Popper counterposes Locke as the philosopher of liberty against Hegel — he understands nothing even of Locke, because Locke explicitly justifies the enslavement of Blacks in the colonies — Locke was even a shareholder in the Royal African Company, that is, the company that ran the trade in Black slaves. So this is just to show how Western culture today is sometimes really foolish, because it talks about things it doesn't know. Now there are further studies that speak
1:07:10 of the importance that the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue had for Hegel — that was very important for what I'm saying, the condemnation of slavery as absolute crime, etc. But that said, we must see the novelty of Hegel compared to a traditional humanism. First, for Hegel, the concept of man is not only the result of a long history but above all the result of a long struggle — the struggle for recognition. So, Hegel's humanism is not, so to speak, an inert contemplation — it refers to this long struggle for recognition, and from this
1:08:20 perspective, I must criticize Althusser — his interpretation of Marx is not at all convincing, because he speaks of Marx's humanism as a weakness of youth. But if we read the Communist Manifesto and later Capital, we see that the fundamental critique Marx makes of capitalism — for example in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels always say that in capitalist society man, the worker, is an instrument — they are merely instruments traded on the market. All of Marx's critique is about the dehumanization of the worker in capitalist society. Even as far as Capital is concerned, we can read
1:09:30 this critique — that is, the recognition capitalism grants the worker is merely a formal recognition; there is no — the worker is not concretely subsumed under the universal concept of man. It's not by chance that I quoted this passage where Hegel says that the starving man who risks death by starvation is in a situation of complete absence of right, like the slave, and the slave is the victim of this infinite negative judgment which is the negation of the substance of man as such. So we should criticize — I criticize Althusser — but on the other hand we must take universality into account; for Hegel it is something very grand, he speaks of the march of history and of revolution
1:10:41 as the march of universality. In the Philosophy of History we can read that universality makes its first appearance in the American Revolution, but its wider and more concrete appearance with the French Revolution, because in the American Revolution there was still slavery, etc. But Hegel speaks of universality as something great, yet universality is also dangerous. To understand this second aspect we must think of absolute empiricism — I already spoke about empiricism, absolute empiricism, that's Hegel's category — it's not mine, it's Hegel's category — and what is it? I already gave the example: when one says the war against Libya is a humanitarian war, that is absolute empiricism — it's not universalism, it's not humanitarianism, it is universalism used as an instrument
1:11:51 for the celebration of particular interests — very bad — and absolute empiricism is even worse, according to Hegel, and Marx says the same thing in different language: absolute empiricism is even worse than ordinary empiricism. So I believe we must strongly criticize Foucault on one hand, but on the other hand we must strongly criticize Norberto Bobbio, Jürgen Habermas — and I'm not even talking here about Sarkozy, the smallest of the Napoleons of French history, I'm not talking about that. So we must fight on both fronts, that's my opinion. — There was a lady who had already asked earlier. — Me, I would like — when we speak of Engels, he speaks a great deal about the family, the family, the family, and in the end one realizes that the word 'family' doesn't mean anything at all anymore, and today Engels's principle
The family, Antigone and modern subjective freedom 1:13:01 would be entirely apt, precisely at a time when there are so many broken up, blended families — the word 'family' no longer has any meaning, and today, ultimately, it's really a notion about money. — I think that when we speak of the topicality of Engels, we should not say that every aspect of Engels's philosophy is topical. In general I'm a bit wary of this category — I'm wary, for example, even of the category of Marx's topicality. I think Marx is very important, but it's quite clear that Marx contributed to transforming the world, and if we say that Marx is as topical today as he was when he wrote the Communist Manifesto, it's as if we were saying that Marx had no effect at all on history. No — Marx did have an effect; the topicality of Marx —
1:14:11 arises today in a different way than at the time of the Manifesto, and the same could be said for Hegel — but I don't know if the family still exists, I have a wife, I have a son, and I believe I still exist with my wife and with my son. Of course the family has changed radically — the patriarchal family, fortunately, no longer exists in the West, we must add — and this radical change in the family we can only understand in the light of Hegel's philosophy, because the struggle for recognition is not only the struggle of the slave or of the worker, it has also been the struggle of women. If we make a comparison between Hegel and Nietzsche, Nietzsche too speaks of slavery
1:15:21 domestic slavery of women, as Marx and Engels do, but it's the same thing to say that slavery is normal in society for workers and is normal in the family for slaves, for women, and not only that — for slaves in the primary sense of the term. It's rather amusing, we spoke about it because one of the common points, as you know, notably of many of the thinkers and intellectuals just mentioned, is their common Nietzscheanism — so it's quite amusing to bring up precisely these completely divergent positions. What I find very amusing is that Domenico made a distinction between Hegel and Nietzsche on the relation to women — when you see Nietzsche's difficulties in founding a family, indeed the relation to the question of slavery in Nietzsche is very clear, and despite what has been claimed, it is exactly the opposite of Hegel's. I would still like to answer, to give a complementary answer — your question is fundamental, if I may, at least in terms of Hegelian studies. One must not think it secondary. Not only is it not secondary, but the opposition of the family as the sphere of the private — I don't want to put it in Hegelian terms — opposed to the state as the sphere of the public, and God knows this is a problem that is not out of date
1:16:31 for him this opposition animates the whole tragedy of Antigone, which is for him the absolute work — the tragedy of Antigone by Sophocles is the object of an absolutely exceptional exemption in Hegel, since he spends his time in his Aesthetics saying that every work of art is nonetheless — which is rather pre-Marxist — nonetheless the expression of a here and now, a determinate historical moment, apart from the aspect by which it has a relation to eternity. Every work of art is nonetheless — well, it's obvious that the amorous relation in La Princesse de Clèves, at the time of Neanderthal man that must not have been quite the same vocabulary, the same syntax — I'm not saying that, but I don't believe it for either one, but the figure of Antigone is to such an extent permanent in him, since he developed it from his earliest schoolboy notebooks up to the Philosophy of Right in Berlin, at the moment when he speaks precisely of bringing in the concept of the state in relation to civil society — he has this cry, he says this opposition of Antigone and Creon, of the family and the state, of the public and the private, and I quote: the supreme ethical opposition
1:17:42 the most highly tragic — to close the quotation. What does that mean, why this importance? You were quite right to raise the problem, because you say Hegel could not have anticipated — this is a small point of disagreement I'd have with you, but purely empirical, it doesn't concern the concepts. You cannot anticipate states of affairs — you're quite right to point to single-parent families, broken families, but these single-parent families are only the most contemporary variant of a process that Hegel knew well and which is coextensive with modernity, which he associates with Christianity as opposed to patriarchal religions, etc.
1:18:21 of course, I remind you that in the Gospel it is nonetheless written — Jesus is made to say, when they come to tell Jesus, at the moment on the mountain, that your mother and your brothers are asking for you in the crowd, Jesus says: where are my mother and my brothers? All of these are my mother and my brothers — I am not, I am in my own name; the father will kill his wife, the brother will kill the sister — you know, there's a famous passage, the Gospel is not that family-oriented, there was already progress there. So I look here because it's very topical, this return of certain lifestyles — it's the case in certain American states, isn't it, the places with the highest standards of living are those with the greatest return to nature — well, a somewhat imaginary nature — and Hegel knew this ecological tendency well when he says, in a remark to paragraph 185 of the Philosophy of Right — this is the old Hegel of Berlin, isn't it — the independent development of particularity, that is the modern world — the independent development of particularity is the moment which manifests itself in ancient states through the introduction of the corruption of mores, and is for them the supreme cause of decadence. An ancient patriarchal state cannot tolerate the appearance of modern subjective freedom — these states which are still at the patriarchal principle, you see
1:19:31 or at the principle of a more spiritual but yet simpler ethic, and which are generally founded on immediate, primitive intuition, could not bear within themselves either the division of this intuition or the infinite reflection of consciousness upon itself which appears with Christianity and above all with Romanticism — they succumbed to this reflection as soon as it began to appear in consciousness and then in reality, because their principle — he always speaks of these patriarchal societies, founded on the family — because their principle, too simple, did not possess the true and infinite force which is found only in the unity — there is nothing more anti-totalitarian — which lets the contradiction of reason develop in all its force in order then to dominate it, which maintains itself in this contradiction while at the same time unifying it within itself. And allow me to end the quotation with another quotation, because Hegel here cites Plato, as if at the beginning and the end of the history of philosophy the two were greeting each other across the great table of the banquet, at opposite ends of the table. Plato in his Republic presents morality and substantial ethical life in its beauty, in its ideal truth, but he cannot come to terms with the principle of independent particularity — for Plato wanted precisely to break up families, because, well
1:20:41 which had been introduced in his time into Greek ethical life, he contented himself with opposing to it a state that was only substantial, and excluded it even in its germ, which is private property — a fortiori the family — in its later development, the free choice of a profession. It is this defect which causes the great substantial truth of the Republic to be misrecognized — what Hegel delivers to us is the principle of the autonomous person, infinite in itself, of the individual, of subjective freedom, which appeared inwardly in the Christian religion, outwardly in the Roman world, and in political terms Hegel never tires of repeating this, only from the French Revolution onward — this is the whole patience of the concept. This principle is historically posterior to the Greek world, and likewise the philosophical reflection that reaches this depth is posterior to the substantial study of Greek philosophy. So there you have it, the dissolution of the family is already foreseen in the program of modernity as Hegel analyzes it — an analysis that is still ours. He even goes so far as to say, in his considerations on education, a phrase that Domenico knows well: the education of children is the death of the parents. Next question. Yes, I'm not a philosopher — well, I had a great taste for philosophy, I'm an anthropologist, but what interested me a great deal in the presentation and the book that I
Sublime hypochondria, psychoanalysis and slavery in Nietzsche 1:21:51 obtained by Domenico Losurdo is the topicality of the critique of Romanticism made by Hegel, and of his critique of apoliticism — well, the two things being linked, Romanticism and apoliticism. So I find there is a topicality now, a return of Romanticism today, as one can observe — I work on mystical and shamanic tourism directed toward Africa, toward Gabon, and toward Peru, where many Westerners go to consume hallucinogenic substances like ayahuasca or iboga, and so I find this a very important factor of apoliticism, of a return toward interiority, toward belief in the existence of other worlds, and so I find your critique — well, Hegel's critique concerning Romanticism and apoliticism — entirely adequate to a critique of what one might do precisely with New Age philosophy
1:23:01 as it continues to manifest itself today, all the new forms of belief as Danièle Hervieu-Léger would say, which one also finds in a certain anthropology — not in the philosophical sense but in the sense of social anthropology, as one finds for example in Philippe Descola — well, we have this idea precisely that there's a kind of dark side of the Force, the dark side of the Force as they say in Star Wars, which must be taken into account. So this interests me a lot because it allows me precisely to critique this sort of new interiority, and my question is the following: that is, at bottom you announced — or rather it was Dominique, not Domenico, but Dominique Pagani who announced — the link between, well, apoliticism and the notion of hypochondria, in your work. So the question I ask myself is whether, at bottom, one can apply that — well, the relation between apoliticism and hypochondria — can one apply that to psychoanalysis, can one apply that to psychoanalysis? And I say that because in fact I recently read
1:24:11 The Destruction of Reason by Lukács, published by the same publisher as your book, Delga, and what struck me in The Destruction of Reason, because at bottom it does connect with your theme, is that in fact Lukács does not attack psychoanalysis at all — he spares it completely; when he attacks, he attacks Nietzsche, but he does not attack psychoanalysis. And it's true that in Freud there is nonetheless a whole weight of Romanticism — well, I mean, one cannot deny it, he refers to Schopenhauer, etc. So that's a bit the question I wanted to ask you: apoliticism, hypochondria — what is your position with regard to psychoanalysis, whether that of Jung — yes, Hegel sometimes speaks of melancholy, this sentiment of German Romanticism, and above all he speaks of hypochondria — he even speaks of hypochondria because
1:25:21 we can find this category in Novalis — Novalis was one of the most important authors of German Romanticism — we can find this category in Novalis in a positive sense. Novalis celebrates what he calls sublime hypochondria, and sublime hypochondria is — yes, it is contempt, it is contempt for reality, especially political reality. I already quoted a critique by Hegel — this flight from political reality is an imaginary flight. The first thing I say is that Hegel even speaks on this subject of the impotence of the negative — this is even an important concept, because sometimes this hypochondria would like to be an attitude of political critique with respect to existence, but Hegel says this negation is a false negation, it is the impotence
1:26:31 of the negative, and when Hegel analyzes hypochondria he speaks of the political nullity of Germany — he makes a comparison and a contrast between the French and the Germans. The French made the revolution, the French demonstrated — I quote — an active fecundity, whereas the Germans lack political spirit. The French — Hegel speaks of French intellectual acuity, watchful in clarity and determination. For Hegel it is above all the Germans — the Germany of Romanticism — that is even the result of the dilution and the impotence of the negative. Hegel speaks of hypochondria — this is a quotation — as a national German malady, which has unfortunately now become
1:27:41 a national French malady as well, or something like that — we've become very Nietzschean. So what better example of sublime hypochondriac than Nietzsche, fascinating himself with the German model — Philippe remains a hypochondriac. I'd like to say something about Nietzsche because you pushed the problem — for those concerning psychoanalysis I would be a bit more reticent on this subject, not only because I don't know psychoanalysis so well, but I'm reticent to broaden the concept of hypochondria too much, because psychoanalysis can have a reduced application — psychoanalysis can become an ideology, can become an ideology according to which even political contradictions are explained by mental illness, and in that case we must criticize it, but psychoanalysis can be
1:28:51 even a reduced technique whose validity we must judge, one way or another, but in this sense — but our friend had already asked a question about Nietzsche, about Nietzsche, because apoliticism often feeds on Nietzsche. So I write a lot on Nietzsche — perhaps Delga will publish, will translate, a very thick book I'm writing on Nietzsche now — there, I'll interrupt Domenico, but he won't say it himself — to my knowledge there is no information as rich on the still-living work of Nietzsche as in the work of Domenico Losurdo, to my knowledge. I give you back the floor — sorry for this interruption, thank you for this advertising spot, which was not planned — it was not planned, oh yes it was, how lovely — but I wanted to say something about Nietzsche. I say even in this book that sometimes I am compelled, I am obliged
1:30:01 to take up the defense of Nietzsche against his apologists. Why? Nietzsche always speaks of slavery as the foundation of society — there is no society and civilization without slavery, and he gives the example of splendid Greek civilization, which was founded on slavery. So there are many interpreters, left-wing interpreters, who say: no, no, in Nietzsche slavery is only a metaphor. So I make a historical consideration first: Nietzsche was 21 years old at the conclusion of the Civil War, which ended with the abolition of slavery, and Nietzsche's spiritual death coincides with the abolition of slavery
1:31:11 in Brazil — that is, in Nietzsche's time slavery was a reality, and everyone was discussing this reality; there were abolitionists who wanted to abolish slavery and anti-abolitionists who wanted to keep slavery. Nietzsche makes very concrete references to this struggle — for example he speaks of Mrs. Beecher-Stowe, the author of the famous abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin — La case de l'oncle Tom in French — and he says that this woman was sick because she takes the side of the slaves, her references to the situation — she is decadent and sick with decadence. The references to the concrete situation are constant — for example the English in the years 1833 abolish slavery in the colonies
1:32:21 English, and Nietzsche condemns this — he condemns this abolition. So there's always a reference — Nietzsche's apologists want to absolve Nietzsche of the sin, in quotation marks, of having proclaimed the necessity of slavery, but they do so by saying Nietzsche was incapable of understanding and wanting anything politically, because he supposedly thought of slavery only as a metaphor — whereas everyone was speaking of slavery as a reality, there was the Civil War and other very important conflicts. So I say we must take Nietzsche seriously — he speaks of slavery as a reality, he can theorize slavery because he says many times that the majority of men, or rather the majority of humanity, are not men, they are instruments of labor — they use the category from classical antiquity to define
1:33:32 the condition of slavery. There is no doubt about the fact that for Nietzsche, without slavery there is no valid society, there is no civilization. If left-wing Nietzscheans don't want to understand that, we'll have the debate on sublime hypochondria perhaps another time. Are there other questions? I'd still like to add something in response to an important question that was raised — I recall, on the subject of hypochondria, that the period of the formation of the young Hegel, if I may, to borrow a famous title from Lukács, the young Hegel unfolds in the midst of an epidemic of this hypochondria without precedent, no doubt for the first time in the history of culture, and without sequel since. I'm thinking of German Romanticism, which Dominique alluded to briefly — Wackenroder dies at 24, Novalis dies at 29 of consumption, we never really know what they died of exactly, in short he no longer ate, but happy, he died, and I want to die, it's marvelous, it's magnificent, I want to return to the great ecstatic night
The romantic epidemic and the reception of Hegel in Germany 1:34:43 Hölderlin goes mad at 30, a psychic suicide this time; Kleist — the two Kleists — shoots himself with a pistol, there too in full joy, with the innkeeper who had heard Kleist and his companion arrive — it was winter, he was surprised that tables were being set outside for coffee — he heard, not long after, they were laughing like children, and it was as happy as could be. So hypochondria — no, I'm not saying that to be ironic — there really is, when it reaches this extent, it's no longer a matter of individual contingency, it's no longer a matter of psychology, there is a historical phenomenon, there is a collective phenomenon — death has returned. Death, what is it?
1:35:20 it is absolute knowledge, it is modernity — modern man does not have the security of the old substantial societies, and all the better, they were fake, just as today we don't have all the circulation — we do have wonders, we see financial and monetary circulation, which dates from the Cold War, but that's because communism had to be gotten rid of. Now that they've given you that standard of living so you wouldn't be communist — now that there's no more communist danger, it's being taken back from you, that's what puts us in crisis. There, on that note, next question. So it was a geographical question — you spoke a little about the reception of Hegel in France, so long parenthesis — what I understood is that Hegel began to appear in France starting from the end of the Second World War, but in Germany — because there doesn't seem to be a history of Hegel in Germany — but what I do know is that as soon as he died he was replaced by a guy who didn't have at all the same ideas as him at the university, namely one called Schelling, Schelling, and we have trouble, in fact we have trouble picturing a history
1:36:30 of Hegel in Germany, and well, can you tell us more? As far as the history of Hegel's reception in Germany is concerned, we can distinguish very well-defined moments — that is, Hegel was the reference philosopher for everyone, one could even say, in the Vormärz — the Vormärz is the period preceding March 1848, that is, the revolution of 1848 — the period, that is, during which everyone speaks, speaks of Hegel, the Hegelians are the revolutionaries, etc. — that is, the happiest period for the history of Hegelian philosophy. After the failure of the revolution of 1848 and the reaction that accompanies this failure of the
1:37:41 revolution, Hegel is criticized and forgotten. To understand that we can read an author named Rudolf Haym, who writes in the late 1850s of the 19th century — he writes Hegel and His Time, and he carries out a radical liquidation of Hegel. There's a difference — the turning point is the revolution of 1848 and its failure. In Italy the history of Hegel's fortune is still different, because even after the failure of the 1848 revolution there is still the Risorgimento movement, and we have a quite particular situation — we have the Spaventa brothers, that was their name, who continued to speak of Hegel as the philosopher of revolution
1:38:51 even after the failure of the 1848 revolution, and the Spaventa brothers played a very important role. Togliatti even traced a line of continuity: Risorgimento, the Spaventa brothers, the antifascist Resistance which was the new Risorgimento, up to the Communist Party — it was perhaps a somewhat bold line of continuity, but it was a line of continuity that could be traced in light of the fact that the revolution in Italy drew inspiration from Hegel, and I write something on the Spaventa brothers — they are remarkable revolutionaries, I must say, remarkable revolutionaries because, in the light of Hegel, they theorized something like the social state, the intervention of the state in the economy, etc. — on, yes, I say — but in general we can say that the turning point was
1:40:01 the revolution of 1848, with the exception perhaps of Italy, for the reason that the bourgeois revolution, of course, in Italy continued even after 1848. For example, the fortune of Schopenhauer's thought — counter-revolutionary and emblematically anti-Hegelian — comes after 1848. I recall in passing — this takes nothing away from the quality of his analyses on music — Schopenhauer called the police during the barricades of 1848 to say: they're there, the rioters, they're there, I recall it in passing. In his will, Schopenhauer left his estate for the victims of the revolution of 1848. There's a question over there — it's not a question, it's to give the floor back to Dominique and perhaps answer the question that was asked of him about Romanticism, because knowing all the books that Taine wrote — yes, Dominique, do you want us to give the floor back to the room? The proof that he did well is that you're giving me the floor back on this subject — no, because I'm just working out some precisions, because I don't think one can oppose Hegel to the Romantics in a binary way — Hegel proceeds from a certain Romanticism, that's true
Hegel against immediate knowledge: the preface to the Phenomenology 1:41:11 indeed, you heard me wrinkle my nose from a distance when I heard it said that Hegel was anti-Romantic earlier — is that it? Of course the people he's targeting are notably the German Romantics, under this form of hypochondria — one must be suspicious, humanly speaking, especially of the category of politics, of hypochondria — but the phenomenon of German Romanticism, or of Romanticism in general, already the term in Hegel, Romantic, is something that begins with Christianity, if I'm not mistaken — that's quite elaborate, as far as I'm concerned — it seems to me, I don't know, between a Viennese waltz and the divine lengths of Schubert there's something more, in terms of spirit — we agree on that. There it is — but it seems to me there's a self-critique of Romanticism in '55 — turning to '55 — well, to answer this question first, I would answer first with a word that had the merit not of settling the problem of Romanticism but at least, for the first time, of posing it, which the Romantics themselves did not do — Rimbaud says, in the famous letters of the seer to his teacher Demeny: we have never really understood Romanticism. That's how I'll begin to answer. Rimbaud says this in the 1870s, so it's been a long time since Romanticism ended — we've never really understood Romanticism
1:42:21 and he adds: who would have understood it — the critics, question mark, the Romantics, question mark. There is a topicality to your question — in modernity there is indeed an ambivalence — not ambiguity, an ambivalence — in the meaning of the term Romanticism or Romantic in Hegel. It can be extremely pejorative — that's his whole battle — and I'll read a short extract here from a preface to the Phenomenology, which is really the text everyone agrees is where he really takes on his own contours, breaking away from the influences of Schelling and his Romantic youth — so that fits well, there's the great anger that animates the second part of this preface when he says: it's in the concept, it's only in the concept that philosophy will manage to pull through — and of course that goes so much against Romantic intuition, immediate knowledge, in short the poetic relation, the concept, the severe concept, the bleak empire of the concept as Schiller said — that Hegel says this: the true form
1:43:33 of truth is thus posited in this scientificity, which amounts to saying that it is only in the concept that truth finds the element of its existence. I well know that this seems to contradict a certain representation — we're getting to the Romantic and its consequences — and so if precisely the true exists in what, or rather as what, is called now intuition, now immediate knowledge — you see how we find again the Schellings, the Nietzsches — immediate knowledge of the absolute, religion, being — not being at the center of divine love, but the very being of this center — well, from this point of view it is rather the opposite of the conceptual form that ought to be required for the presentation of philosophy — the absolute must not be conceived, but felt and intuited — we would need truffles instead of a brain, like dogs — the absolute must not be conceived but felt and intuited, not its concept but its feeling and its intuition must have the floor and be expressed. And it's there that he speaks of a whole theory of political restoration — you clarify, it's perhaps not clear to everyone that here it's humor — it's the great anger, I mean, and it's a pamphlet against — he's not making the apology here — well, the problem, as he also saw well, is that all this comes from a — the Romantic misfortune
1:44:43 the one who condemns misfortune, who condemns it as negative, as he said earlier, negative subjectivity, and caught in the hypochondriac or pathological impasse in general — is when this misfortune is that of the loss occasioned by history. Well yes, well yes my friend, there are no more slaves, that's annoying, there are no more privileges, well yes — well then we have to look for a meaning in life, and not have that meaning given by nature or by God as it has been for millennia — but yes, that's it, the essence of man is this restlessness, his dignity — but the Romantic is not there, and he says, confessing his misery, his misfortune — you know Latin well — Hegel hurling imprecations against it — spirit today, in the Romantic, demands of philosophy not so much the knowledge of what it is as the means of restoring — the political concept of restoration is there, the means of restoring — thanks to it, thanks to this philosophy — what Marx will later call ideological labor, precisely — so philosophy must restore, thanks to it, this lost substantiality and the compact solidity of being — being, so dear to Heidegger — to bring this task to completion, look at the terms Hegel uses, to bring this task to completion — restoration is a task for him, the work of the bourgeois intellectual at that level
1:45:53 to bring this task to completion, one must therefore suppress the distinctions of thought, suppress the concept in thought, and restore, a second time, the feeling of essence — the beautiful, the sacred, the eternal, religion, love — we find again all these aesthetic and beautiful concepts, don't we — they are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite. The modern is... excuse me, the modern is bored, for Hegel he's bored, that's the malady of the century, and he even fabricates ghosts for himself to arouse the desire to bite, he needs bait, doesn't he, he's not like the Greeks with the Persians invading — no, no, no, he's bored — the beautiful, the sacred, the eternal, religion, love are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite — not the concept but ecstasy, not the cold and progressive necessity of the thing — and yes, chains of equations are sometimes a bit boring — of the thing, but fiery enthusiasm must constitute the force that sustains and spreads the wealth of substance. And there's a crucial passage concerning the people and non-philosophical opinion — corresponding to this demand is a painful labor, an almost burning zeal to tear humankind out of its captivity in the sensible, the vulgar, and the particular — you know, those who looked down on the working class saying metro, work, sleep, you know
1:47:03 those who raised goats and sheep in the Ardèche on daddy's money, having found the true life in the countryside — let's say the cities, in the factories, they had, well, metro, work, they looked down like that on the working class, didn't they, resenting the worker who, when he hadn't had the luck to avoid dying before retirement from silicosis after coughing up his lungs in the mines for 40 years, and bought his first color television — sold out bourgeois, well, anyway. So Hegel alludes to precisely this conflict when he says: corresponding to this demand is a painful labor, an almost burning zeal — there's a violence in this reactionary thought — to tear humankind, as it were, out of its captivity in the sensible, the vulgar, and the singular, in order to direct its gaze toward the stars, and he adds this phrase which is an homage to peoples, as if men, quite oblivious of the divine, were on the point of being satisfied, like the earthworm, with dust and water. There, so the sacred comes back to us through the peoples. Thank you Dominique. Are there other questions? Yes, I'd like to ask you a question based on two of your statements — the first, you said that a teleological view of history had been wrongly attributed to Hegel
A non-unilinear progress and globalization 1:48:13 — fine — Marx even did it too — yes, but here we're sticking to what's been said about Hegel — so nevertheless he thinks history has a course, that history exists — but you also said, others have also said, that certainly it has a course, but it happens sometimes — I'll quote a classic — that it advances by its bad side. And that leads to a second statement, coming from you, about the bad side, or well, about universalism — you said that can be very dangerous. Currently we have a concrete universality, which is what's wrongly called, in my opinion, the globalization of capitalism, which normally should be called the transnationalization of capitalism, given that globalization actually began at the end of the 18th century and developed over the course of the — 16th, sorry, 15th century — developed over the course of the 18th century with the great discoveries and all the rest, with various stages — pre-national, international — and now we might say a transnational capitalism, to be precise. So the question I'm putting to you
1:49:23 is your proposal, given the current socio-historical conjuncture we find ourselves in, do you think there is a course of history that can be bent toward the good, despite the fact that we find ourselves in a historical conjuncture where social forces on the planetary and national scale are, for the moment, rather on the bad side — using an old progressive category, given that the very concept of progress is itself debatable — when speaking of science and technology I prefer to use the term scientific and technical advance, which can go hand in hand, when subordinated — science and technology — or to the capitalist position, toward regression, gas chambers and perhaps — but then the question, the question is this, is to know: what is your position, Domenico Losurdo, or Domenico Losurdo acting as interpreter of what Hegel might say about it — no, no, no, him and Domenico Losurdo, agreed — by 'course of history' I mean it's more neutral than 'advance,' 'progress,' etc. — in short, your political position on this — so first, when I say I criticized this teleological view
1:50:34 I'm speaking of the providential view, as there is a certain interpretation of Hegel as if Hegel had conceived a sort of providential history, as if Hegel were incapable of respecting the concrete human development of history. What I said is that even the development of history is the result of history itself, it's not the intervention of a superior divinity, but the development of history itself — that is, men, in making their own history, produce results that are irreversible, and in this sense we can speak of progress. I affirm the concept of progress, even if there are postmodernists who deny this concept
1:51:44 I believe this concept is very important and we can, we can affirm this progress from certain perspectives — I can say only, for example, at the beginning of the 20th century life expectancy, even in the country which was, at that moment, the most developed — England — was 48 years; today it's 30 years more. Of course there are nihilists who say that 30 more years of life are nothing, but for me 30 more years of life — well yes, but in addition, perhaps one should clear up an ambiguity — there's progress in the sense of the progress of Hegelian spirit, but what you were talking about is perhaps rather technical progress — neither one nor the other, it's civilizational progress — one can move toward new forms of barbarism resting on technical progress, on technical and scientific advances, the control of the entire population with cameras
1:52:54 of video surveillance — for me, forgive me, that's a regression — hardly anyone protests, apart from a minority — no, but we all agree on that, I think that's not the progress we're talking about, it's not Domenico who put the cameras in place — yes, yes, and moreover, on this precise point, I think there's absolute consensus, there's no debate about that, I believe there's a mass movement against video surveillance, called video-protection — let's let Domenico answer the question anyway — so, there is even progress in the sense of the spirit of freedom, that is the progress Hegel spoke of, but progress in Hegel and in Marx — and that's the bad side of history — is never a unilinear progress, it's a progress amid contradictions, amid struggle, and even amid restoration. We can even say that today in the West there is a restoration, but that is not the refutation of the idea of progress, because
1:54:04 the idea of progress is not a unilinear idea in Hegel and in Marx. So that's clear on this point. As far as globalization is concerned, it was already described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto — of course they spoke of globalization, there's no doubt about that on this point, but the globalization Marx and Engels speak of — he says that now goods are produced in one country and consumed in another, there are raw materials that come from one country and are the raw materials of an industry located in other countries, traditional national industries are going to disappear — I quoted the Communist Manifesto, but if I make a comparison between the Communist Manifesto on one hand, and for example another author who also speaks of globalization
1:55:14 who is roughly contemporary with Marx — Spencer, Herbert Spencer — also speaks of what we might call globalization, but for Spencer globalization was without contradiction, whereas Marx and Engels, already in the Communist Manifesto, say that with this world market, this world market, competition between the various bourgeoisies can produce — I quote — a war of industrial annihilation among nations — that's a quotation — that is to say, the Communist Manifesto foresaw in some way the First World War. So I find that this is the most correct analysis of globalization — one could even make a comparison with Tocqueville — Tocqueville, in the second volume of Democracy in America
1:56:24 which he publishes 8 years before the Communist Manifesto — in the second volume there's a chapter, 'Why revolutions will become rare,' that's the title of this fundamental chapter of the second volume of Democracy in America. The fact is that, starting from this prediction, there followed the greatest revolutions in universal history, and in this sense I think the Communist Manifesto was clearer in foreseeing the future than Tocqueville, than Spencer. In any case globalization is not without contradiction, even the sharpest ones — if I may, to take up the question that was just asked, there is a reproach often made, including by Marx, against Hegel — the question of teleology behind it all, that is, despite everything, the meaning of history at bottom — so I'll let you both answer, because that might allow us to deepen the relation to Marx as well, to continue what Domenico was just saying, precisely at the level
The meaning of history as freedom, and the tool 1:57:34 of the discussion on the concept of progress — we're still there, of course. I believe the aporias linked to the notion of progress — they're not only in Hegel — are resolved by the threefold articulation I recalled earlier. What is the meaning of history in Hegel? It's this: the Orientals knew that only one is free, the Greeks knew that some are free, the moderns know that all are free. If the meaning of history is freedom, that means progress has a direction in Hegel — that doesn't mean it's acquired, that it's assured — freedom is not the good, it means it will happen, not what God or nature has instituted, but what you will make of freedom — that's new as a concept, it's the first time that the notion of meaning and the notion of freedom are synthesized, because before there was a totalitarian meaning — it was the gods who had created meaning, one had to conform to it, the law, one must not enter the sacred wood — or else it's nature, or nature divinized, Deus sive natura, which amounts to almost the same thing, even if demystified in Spinoza it is divinized, but it is not mystified — so in any case there is an order prior to man's existence, one must conform to it, the meaning of history
1:58:44 and there is progress only to the extent, and to the sole extent, that we draw closer to freedom, but we can also draw away from it — I quite agree with you, we can draw away from it, but I don't do like Heidegger, the critique of the machine, of means — that comes back to industry, that's it — that's where you see fascism starting to dig its nest, because when I kill someone with a knife, it's not the knife that gets sent to jail, whether it's a knife or a cyclotron or an artificial satellite, it amounts to the same thing — I mean, we're not going to put the means on trial, no one has been foolish enough to put the means on trial except perhaps the fascists when it comes to attacking industrial progress — but well, one can wax rhapsodic with tears over Van Gogh's clogs, still under Heidegger's pen, saying that the greatest event of Western metaphysics is the creation of the Panzer Divisions — there we are indeed in technology, perhaps — I believe there is a human dimension that goes astray, yes — precisely, the last questions, that's what I was going to say since time is passing — do you really believe that means, for example surveillance cameras, don't influence people to commit murders, for example? I try not to speak in the mode of belief — belief is the equivalent of doxa, of opinion — I try to rise to knowledge — it's been 20 centuries since Socrates
1:59:54 It's a joke, never mind, it's a joke — jokes about the death of Novalis, the death of Kleist don't make me laugh. In a bookshop, why not mock Hölderlin, mock Baudelaire, if I may say so. You've picked the wrong target, because I know Dominique fairly well, you can't imagine how dear those people you just mentioned are to him, so the reproach falls flat here. But that's because you haven't understood the meaning of the irony. Indeed I haven't understood the meaning of the irony since it doesn't make me laugh, but it seems to me that opposing romanticism to Hegel at that point— I didn't oppose them, quite the contrary. You clearly haven't understood, since exactly the opposite was said, exactly the opposite. I take the liberty of speaking without having understood anything. You do have the merit of asking good questions. So then the answer to the question — but I think you're mistaken about my answer. Ah, sorry, so the question, the question then — the surveillance cameras, that's the law, yes, yes, let's perhaps come back to the surveillance cameras, yes, let's come back to the surveillance cameras.
2:01:05 Indeed the gentleman says: why is there no mass movement against surveillance cameras? He's asking a concrete question — I didn't see a million people in the street saying "fascism shall not pass" at the time of the intervention in Libya, which causes enormously more suffering than surveillance cameras. For now everything is wrongdoing — we're against the war in Libya too, I see that concern for individual liberties pleases me. What is the question, excuse me, in relation to the debate that was just taking place? It's a question about progress. So I'll try to refocus — I'm not a philosopher, I'll try to refocus philosophically. No, no, I simply didn't understand what the question was. The tool isn't responsible, we've never sent a knife to prison, we agree on that. My question was really in reaction to that, but afterwards I can come back to German Romanticism, though I feel I won't have the time. It would be a pleasure, another time, madam. It's really that tools are tools and people have interactions, and that at a certain point people can lose it because of the tools. Yes, madam, you said it wasn't just about things — what you said was very apt. So you could even ask your question about German Romanticism, we'll do an extension. So, first answer: yes, you're quite right, there is — Hegel studied this well — there's a feedback, as we'd say today.
2:02:15 a backlash of the means on the one who holds it, of the tool on the one who holds it, and Marx, taking this up from Hegel, taken up in this by Marx, goes so far as to say that if we take, in the form of a syllogism with two extremes and a middle term, the labor process — I'm a road worker, I work a stone, for example, there you have two extremes, the worker and the object worked on — but between the two there is the tool, and of course, says Hegel, we pass over the tool a bit like that, because it's only the means, it's not really the most important thing. Yet it is the end — it's the house I'm going to make with these stones, I don't know what I'll do with it, never mind, it's the goal I'm pursuing. But, says Hegel, the worker wears himself out in this labor process, the stone also disappears in the shaping, and what remains for future generations is the tool. So you're quite right to say that we haven't finished quickly enough with the tool. I simply said that from a moral point of view, it's not the tool we send to prison, as you understood very well, that's all, it's not the tool that's guilty. And often we put tools, factories, industries on trial in order to hide those who stand behind them and the way men are exploited within them. I know plenty of proletarians today who would be quite happy if there were a few more factories running, in places where they were razed under the pretext — you know, through economics they removed half the factories.
2:03:25 under Yeltsin, under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, which eliminated all the competitors of Western companies by saying it was polluting, for example — that's a pretext, you can always find one to kill your dog by accusing it of rabies. That's the question about the tool — perhaps your question about Romanticism now? No, but I had the impression there's a sort of opposition made, so to speak, between a kind of hypochondriac artists, totally focused on their inner life, and then, well, philosophy — I see very well what's more precise, I think Domenico, who actually wrote a book on this — yes, exactly, that's exactly the subject of the book. Ah yes, my initial question was: you gave a reading of a very beautiful quotation from Hegel that I don't know, where precisely he lets himself go a bit in terms of form — the eyes, I don't know what, of a man dying, and so on, which is in a form less — it's not of a madman as well, of that Hegel too, I agree, I don't know, but there, all of a sudden the form is a bit — it's poetic, it says more — of course it's a translation, we know nothing. Well, so maybe I'm wrong because I'm caught in the immediacy of understanding, but it speaks to me, so I'd like to know from you.
The three phases of romanticism and Aufhebung 2:04:36 where exactly does this quotation come from — from a text called the Realphilosophie, since it's one of the philosophies of spirit, 1805 — but be careful, because there are several different ones, and 1805 is the right reference, it's not the first philosophy of spirit, it's the one just before. Perhaps Domenico will conclude by answering on the problem of Romanticism. Hegel and Romanticism, in my view — I repeat, in my view — I believe we must distinguish at least three periods in the history of Romanticism; Hegel takes different positions. So in the first period we can say that Fichte himself is a romantic, because there is an exaltation of subjectivity, of the creative role of subjectivity. For example, Fichte draws a comparison between his philosophy, his doctrine of science, and the French Revolution.
2:05:46 He says: just as the French Revolution eliminated the chains of servitude of the soil, my doctrine of science has abolished the chains of the thing-in-itself. So in this case we can speak of Romanticism, because objectivity doesn't play a very important role in this vision of the French Revolution — the starting point is only subjectivity, as in his doctrine of science there is the negation of the thing-in-itself, of the thing-in-itself. So Hegel's attitude toward this — it is of course a philosophy of revolution, not hypocrisy, it is a philosophy of revolution, but a philosophy of revolution that doesn't take objective contradiction as its starting point but only subjectivity. So Hegel's attitude toward this—
2:06:56 first phase of Romanticism is a respectful but critical attitude, for the reason I've explained, because Hegel insists precisely on objective contradiction, not only on subjective initiative. The second phase of Romanticism is the crisis of the French Revolution — it's the crisis, the hopes, the expectations — at least that's Schiller's opinion, etc. — were disappointed, and so Schiller can say that freedom exists only up in the mountains, etc. Hegel, for this attitude, speaks of hypochondria — but I've already said that hypochondria is not only Hegel's term, Novalis speaks of absolute hypochondria in a positive sense, with a positive value judgment. So that's the hypochondriac phase — not all of Romanticism.
2:08:06 There is this phase, and afterward there is even a third phase where Romanticism — for example Baader — becomes precisely an explicit philosophy of restoration. So I repeat, to understand Hegel's relationship to Romanticism we must distinguish these different phases. Of course, in Hegel there is already a critique of the culture of restoration, there is a critique of hypochondria, of this negation of political reality, of this flight from political reality. But as for the first phase of Romanticism, even Fichte's philosophy can be considered romantic in this sense — Hegel's attitude is respectful but critical. One small additional point, and this will perhaps be the conclusion — no, but the lady's question is fundamental at this level, that's why I understand very well that you could have made a small misreading of the relationship between Hegel and Romanticism, because it's a relationship — I said earlier—
2:09:16 very ambivalent, I mean by that — the relationship, to put it very clearly but at the same time a bit abstractly, between Hegel and Romanticism is a relationship of Aufhebung, in Hegelian terms: suppression-conservation — a bit like the fruit, to speak with one of Hegel's images, even though he says one must not be taken in by the organic mirage of the biological example — the fruit suppresses the flower; when the fruit appears the petals must have fallen, etc. — but at the same time it fulfills that dialectical tension which lies in the suppression-conservation that the German language sums up in the term Aufhebung, which also adds the notion of raising up. That's why some propose translating it as "the relève," as in the changing of the guard — it's not such a bad translation, after all — or "sursumption," never mind. Hegel has this relationship of Aufhebung toward Romanticism — he was absolute Romanticism itself, you see, that's why he cannot criticize it, he's the roommate of the Hölderlin you were quoting. I'm very glad you quoted Hölderlin, but Hölderlin is not one of those hypochondriacs Domenico speaks of, even though he seems to be the emblematic example of it — because his case is even more serious clinically, one would call him a psychotic, whereas the hypochondria Dominique denounces is the petty bourgeois neurosis.
2:10:26 with which we've been pestering families for three centuries now, I mean, in order not to face the real problems. Hölderlin, for his part, says: "Mein ist die Rede vom Vaterland, das neide mir keiner" — "Mine is the political discourse, let no one envy me it." Hölderlin is not apolitical, and Hölderlin said, to show just how much he is not apolitical: "I hate the rabble of priests, but above all the genius that consorts with that" — and he doesn't say "with them," he says "with that." Damn it — so, does that reassure you? It reassures me — good, that's it, so perhaps we'll conclude on that. Thank you to him, thank you all, I admire you all.
