English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Post-modernism, weak thought, and the rejection of grand narratives 0:27 I would like to point out that the cover photo, frequently used for this new edition, is precisely the Storming of the Bastille. Yes, yes. It's a splendid dawn for humanity, I believe. I would just like to open the debate and the questions from the audience, taking advantage of my privilege to ask one myself, for instance to Mr. Deleuil, since he mentioned the need to wring the neck of all sorts of tenacious ideas, especially over the last thirty or even, let's say, forty years. So there are two things that haven't... Well, everything has been mentioned, but I would like to recall two tenacious ideas on which I would like to have all your comments, starting with Mr. Deleuil, that... We just spoke about the revolution's supposedly, as we know since Furet, allegedly since Furet, totalitarian character, and everything that can be associated with it—Hegel, obviously, but also the double dialectic, if I may say so, the famous general condemnation by the apostles of those shameful forty years we mentioned earlier, of the infamous dialectic, by whom we're going, by Deleuze. So there, it's on these two things, these two ideas,
1:40 very much tied to everything we've just said both about Jacques D'Hondt and about Hegel, these things, it seems to me we could wring their necks too, here's the chance. Yes, most certainly, yes. Well, the problem, if I understand the meaning of your question correctly, is, basically, it's the substitution, for a vision of what we've called philosophies of history, of something else, now called post-modernism, which proceeds by fragmentation and which naturally rejects what they themselves call the grand narratives.
2:17 In other words, it's a condemnation of any perspective that would move toward the very idea of a philosophy of history. So, I have no... I think there are a number of things that... that should be stirred up around this. Of course, there's this whole so-called post-modern current, which, incidentally, was originally, as everyone knows, more of an Italian architectural movement, and which spread everywhere and became a sort of...
2:59 replacement ideology in relation to... in relation precisely to everything that had previously been considered the grand narratives. But... there's something else. There's also the idea of a weakening of thought. And I think there... I don't want to play on words, but the Italians, again, are present here. That's what they baptized about forty years ago il pensiero debole, weak thought.
3:30 And this weak thought, which is inspired, moreover, by neo-Heideggerian currents, Gianni Vattimo, for example, but which is also inspired by a certain vision of Nietzsche, but a Heideggerized Nietzsche, if I may say so. This vision leads, in my view, to the idea that it's no longer possible to regard the past as anything other than something deserving a certain respect, an aura, as Gianni Vattimo himself puts it in certain articles, but in no way as something that should be carried forward and that should find its fulfillment.
4:11 Indeed, in their eyes there is a weakening of thought. So, I'm quite willing to have the grand narratives condemned, to have philosophies of history condemned, in the name, naturally, of a certain perspective which is, how shall I put it, retrospective and at the same time archaic, one that holds that grand narratives invariably lead to what was later called totalitarianism.
4:44 That's obviously what's at stake. And consequently, against the very idea of totality, the idea of fragmentation must be instituted. We no longer totalize, we fragment. And this can be observed, moreover, in every domain of life, I mean, everyday life. And in any case, of economic and social life. So there, that's all I have to say for now. I'll hand the floor to my colleagues, my friends. But that's what your question inspires in me.
Hegel hunted by the Nazis, the negation of the negation by Stalin 5:14 He may want to add to the answer. No? Nothing else to say on that. So let's give the floor to the audience. I suppose there are questions. Yes? Yes, yes, yes. There's no other intervention. Hegel, then, a thinker of totality, yes. Now, what's strange—I already pointed out earlier—is that the first power, chronologically speaking, to be named totalitarian, the Nazi power, carried out a systematic purge of Hegelian thought at the university.
5:44 Absolutely. And secondly, if there is one who truly deserves, perhaps, the label of archaic-Soviet totality, I'm thinking of the little father of the peoples, Stalin energetically condemned the negation of the negation, which is, so to speak, the speculative heart of the dialectic, whereas Lenin had made it its very energy. There you go. One must choose one's camp. I would also point out, in passing, that Althusser, in an article from 1953, congratulates Stalin for having condemned the negation of the negation in Hegel.
6:16 So, a question from the audience. There's a third element of Chinese work and Cold War apparently behind these conflicts. Did Stalin condemn the negation of the negation? On several occasions, but in particular at a congress and in a discussion, in a directive issued by Zhdanov, the negation of the negation is condemned by Stalin as being a negation. I wanted to... Yes.
Complex is not concrete: globalization and governance 6:46 Another question: Adorno, Althusser, Stalin, they all agree. That's quite a crowd. Yes, I have a question perhaps for Bernard Bourgeois. You spoke of the importance for Hegel and for Jacques D'Hondt of the imagining of the future. Now, Hegel was twenty at the time of the French Revolution, he was in his forties at the Restoration. Jacques D'Hondt was twenty at the Liberation. He was ninety under Sarkozy.
7:20 Let's say... How... Let's say... Does Hegel give us theoretical avenues for overcoming, I mean, this fact that... In fact, this imagining of the future gets cut down both by the Restoration and by Sarkozy. In what way could Hegel give us theoretical grounds to be able to bounce back from that?
7:50 OK. You want... The situation... The problem currently is that the world is becoming more and more complex, and complex does not mean concrete. Concrete means that it keeps differentiating itself but at the same time identifying itself, coming together, totalizing itself. Complex is when the difference or the differences are not caught up within a unity that could oversee and master them from above, but instead become knotted together in the form of networks.
8:38 It's a reticulated, rhizomatic structure. From this point of view, Deleuze and a few others grasped one dimension of the present situation well. So, the world is becoming more and more complex, and it's becoming so more and more quickly. There is a formidable acceleration of things. Computing, moreover, contributes greatly to making instantaneous encounters that used to require a great deal of time.
9:15 Consequently, given that the world is becoming ever more complex, and becoming so ever more rapidly, thought can no longer keep up. The economy is globalizing, which means that there is no sector of economic life anywhere in the world that truly, that really develops autonomously. But at the same time, this kind of totalization brings out links between the various elements in the world that are multiple links, and which consequently form networks that fail, well, that fail to come together as a unity.
10:10 So, in the field of economics, people speak of governance, because there is no world government. We speak of governance in order to ward off, as it were, the existence of these networks that link all the events of socio-economic life, but which link them without themselves being linked into a unity. There are factors that can no longer be controlled, and macroeconomics, which has always been harder to grasp than microeconomics, is becoming ever more difficult to manage.
10:57 So, the problem is that people believed—it seemed an absolutely logical requirement—that if economies were becoming globalized, they could only be controlled by a politics that also became globalized, or that could at least become totalized at the level of certain continents. So it was thought that political regulation of the economy required that political globalization accompany and control economic globalization.
11:45 But while in economics things can globalize very quickly, in political life it's quite a different matter, because politics rests, even by definition, on the voluntary involvement of the members of political communities, or of citizens. And that takes time. Look at the construction of Europe. For a new European nation to be formed, it takes more than decades, it doubtless takes centuries.
12:23 That means there has to be a unity of peoples, an internalized unity, a shared mentality of peoples. The construction of Europe has shown that you cannot short-circuit these things. So, we fail to achieve it and we give up, whereas I think that political regulation of the economy is becoming more and more necessary, and that it can only happen at the level of the totalities that hold power, and up to now, the totalities that hold power are the nation-states.
12:58 So, well, a networked economy, a political life that can't quite be called, that is multipolar—it's multipolar with one absolutely dominant pole. There is one absolutely dominant pole, we know which one it is, it will remain dominant for at least a few more decades, but, if you will, this unity, through one of its elements, is not really what could be considered a true union, a solid union, and consequently we fail to control this whole unfolding, this globalization, and that is why we also fail to think it.
The return of nature into human history 13:50 That is why there is no more political thought and that is why there is no more politics. Politicians, nowhere, know what needs to be done and what they are going to do. But can we make a connection with that? Another aspect of the situation is that a new actor is entering the socio-political game. And this new actor is one that Hegel had considered to condition political history.
14:24 Hegel says this: that in the past there was a life of nature. It was as though the sleeping spirit of nature had nightmares, which were those gigantic natural catastrophes. And this lasted until the moment when, within nature, consciousness or spirit awoke.
14:57 That was the beginning of human history, and once the natural catastrophes had paused, political crises were able to develop. Happy times of political crises, in the pause of natural catastrophes! What is happening now? Nature is returning, or is thought of as returning, which is a considerable factor.
15:32 It is coming back, if you will, coming back to act within properly human history. That means that Hegel, who could not have foreseen this situation, nonetheless gives us a certain number of considerations and arguments as to how human history can absorb or integrate the now-present intervention of, say, global warming, etc., which many people imagine to be merely a product of human recklessness, whereas it would be far more serious if it were independent of that recklessness, as some people, Claude Allègre and others, believe.
16:26 Hegel indicates to us that human history must be able to integrate within itself the return of the history of nature. And that, if you will, is a new parameter of history of which even the environmentalists themselves have not taken the measure, and it complicates matters further. So, difficulty in thinking, that is, in synthesizing, the economy. Difficulty in thinking and synthesizing the constitution of a political unity capable of controlling economic life.
The rejection of dialectic and the difficulty of thinking dialectically 17:04 And a third factor: the intervention of nature in human history—how do we bring all this together and think it? Consequently, politicians do nothing but manage, and when all you do is manage, you manage badly. I wanted, just before—I wanted to hand over the floor, actually, perhaps to answer that—there's a part of my question, that's why I'm insisting, that I haven't had answered, because you knew all these post-modern thinkers we've just been discussing quite well, you mentioned your debate with Derrida—there is nevertheless a common point you could grant them...
17:40 a shared point, the dialectical third term that unites them, is this hatred of dialectics, and it runs from Deleuze to Althusser, passing through everyone. Isn't this common point, this incapacity for dialectical thought, related to the total collapse of critical political thought today, to the total absence of any political relays, of any proposals whatsoever, for grasping hold of the contemporary world? I'll put this forward as a purely personal claim, since I've lived through, not all of it, but the last forty years, taking a great interest in these matters—this compulsive rejection of dialectics.
18:17 Starting from the 1970s, it's very clear, on the part of every actor—isn't that part of the answer? I'll give you back the floor. That's what Hegel calls the end of history. That's the end of history. It doesn't mean nothing happens anymore. Events still occur, etc. They happen faster than ever. But why reject, as the common foundation of all these so-called thinkers and philosophers, the conceptual tool that is precisely...
18:49 So, what is your interpretation? Because this is difficult. You know, thinking dialectically. Thinking dialectically, that is, differentiating and identifying at the same time. And identifying and differentiating at the same time. Taking on a thought that develops in a contradictory manner—who has managed to take on and handle this kind of thought?
19:21 For the moment, I know of only two. There was Hegel and there was Marx. There you go. That's what I wanted you to say. So, well, Althusser—Althusser nonetheless, and that's why I've always kept this in mind—admitted that he did not know Hegel at all. At the end of his life, in his posthumous writings, he confessed it. For this man. He had never read him. Sorry? At the end of his life, he admitted he had never read him.
19:52 Seriously, I mean. In The Future Lasts a Long Time and elsewhere, it's very clear. Yes, but he admitted a great many things. Althusser, in his Montesquieu—I can dispute this, but Althusser, in his Montesquieu, had practiced a kind of thought such that, to my mind, it's his most successful work. And he gave that up afterward, and I must say that it is an undertaking of considerable difficulty.
20:29 In any case, I had Olivier Bloch as a tutor at the École Normale, and I was nonetheless impressed. He had given a course on Robespierre, he had done things like that. He was thinking, to a certain extent, he had a sort of dialectical capacity for thought. In spite of himself. And he gave it up because he sank shortly afterward into dogmatism, which is a simple form of thought, but the true thought, I believe.
Governance, the domestic model of the political 21:04 So, it's so difficult to think dialectically. There are only two, in my view, who managed to do it over two centuries, so one can understand that at certain moments it no longer exists. I just wanted to go in the same direction as what Bernard just said, particularly regarding the notion of governance. Because this notion of governance, one must know where it comes from.
21:35 It's a Franco-English, Franco-American notion, it's a notion that comes from managing, that comes from the corporate world. That is, it's a notion that is purely and simply economic. And so, this fits with what you just said, namely, that it's the empire of the economy extending itself at the expense of the political. And it's the corporation that takes precedence over everything else and that becomes a kind of model for the management of states themselves.
22:05 That's what I call, in my own personal vocabulary, the domestic model of the political. Well, never mind the name. Now, we can go further. We can say that Hegel, in a way, denounced this. In the Philosophy of Right, after all, when he analyzes civil society, he does of course salute the advent of property, freedom, etc. But at the same time he sees all the pitfalls, following, moreover, Adam Smith and others, regarding possibly the division of labor, etc.
22:41 And in a certain way, he also sees the danger of economic dominance over what would, ultimately, be the establishment of the political. And that is precisely why the state must sublate civil society. So, what has been forgotten today, or set aside, is this. That is, there is a considerable extension—this is what globalization is—a considerable extension of the domestic model starting from the corporation. In the past it was something else, it was patriarchy, it was the family, the nation, whatever.
23:13 Now, it's this, it's the corporation that we manage. Governance is management. Absolutely. It's not government. So it has nothing political about it. It's purely and simply about the objectives to be achieved, etc. Management. It's nothing else. And this total dominance of the economy over what is properly political—that, in my opinion, is the drama we are living through today. I would like to intervene very briefly on the double reference to governance mentioned first by Mr. Bourgeois and then developed just now by one of the speakers.
23:52 And so as not to go on too long, I will simply cite a public anecdote, a personal anecdote. When, on a fairly solemn and rare occasion, the British Prime Minister was invited to address our parliament—it was Tony Blair, a few years back. Yes indeed. I remember that I found... it wasn't the Prime Minister's fault... Anyway, afterward. And at one point Tony Blair says something, and it will grow, it illustrates in a striking and disturbing way what people say. There's no such thing as right-wing or left-wing management, there's just good or bad management, that's all.
24:26 And at that point I said to myself, good grief, by that logic, Auschwitz was perfectly well managed. I'm sure our good Germans, with their carbon copies, their bookkeeping, their double-entry accounting of gold teeth and so on. This decoupling—and you hear it now from the mouth of any corporate manager, who tells you, 'I don't concern myself with politics, that's a matter for those in power, I'm just a technician.' This total decoupling of means from ends, in the name of becoming more rational, is one of the most disturbing aspects.
Paragraph 185 of the Philosophy of Right, an anti-totalitarian text 24:56 I lived for quite a long time in Africa, where this kind of governance was imposed at the cost of famines and appalling setbacks, through millions and millions in aid in the form of SAPs—and these things are elegantly termed structural adjustment plans. First point, and to answer the three questions very quickly, regarding totalitarianism, as for myself, sir, I'll cite a passage from the Philosophy of Right where Hegel speaks of the emergence of the particular individual in history, of how the particular insists on making itself heard, emerging from substantial society, to speak in Hegelian, patriarchal terms as you mentioned earlier—or, if one prefers more representative language, it's a remark in paragraph 185: the independent development of particularity is the moment that manifests itself in the ancient states through the introduction of the corruption of morals, and it is, for them, the supreme cause of decadence.
25:56 These ancient states, which were still at the patriarchal or religious stage, or at the stage of an ethics that was more spiritual but nonetheless simpler, and which were founded in general on immediate, primitive intuition, could not bear — these ancient states could not bear within them either the division of that intuition or the infinite reflection of consciousness upon itself, such as sophistry begins to express it, [going] to the ethics of consciousness which is science, or the skeptic — these are the illustrations Hegel takes — they succumbed, these ancient states succumbed to this reflection when it begins to appear in consciousness and then in reality, because their too-simple principle did not possess the true and infinite force which — and there we have a fine dialectical sample — which is found only in the unity that lets the contradiction of reason develop in its full strength instead of censoring it, instead of stifling it, instead of opposing it, which lets the contradiction develop in its full strength in order then to master it, which holds fast to this contradiction while at the same time unifying it within itself; this is a reminder of a violently anti-totalitarian text, if I may say so.
27:06 And a second passage, which I quote from memory, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where there is a passage in which Hegel insists on the pedagogical aspect of these undertakings, on which we have already insisted enough in our numerous publications, so I won't go back over it — the Phenomenology is a little bit the sequel to Wilhelm Meister and to Emile, it is something like a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation, as they say in Germany. And there Hegel offers a rather fine dialectic too, on the relation between individual consciousness and science, and he says: the individual must make the effort to raise himself — by means of the Anstrengung des Begriffs, the straining effort of the concept — to raise himself to science; but, he says, science must also give the individual the ladder that allows him to reach it, for whatever it may think of itself — and he adds this, Hegel says: the individual remains the unconditioned form, or the absolute form. There you have it — that's perhaps what you can conclude regarding the dialectic of the collective, of governance, and of the individual, unless you wish to add something; I will recall a leitmotif from The German Ideology: individuals always have started, and always start, from themselves.
28:16 So we have come back to Marx. Thank you — thank you all.
