English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Question from the audience: is youth a passage or a definitive state? 1:40 In Rousseau, youth comes up a great deal; he takes a great interest in education, in pedagogy, in childhood. So my question is whether youth is also a state of passage in Rousseau, in the Social Contract or also in Emile, the passage from childhood to adulthood. So is youth a state of passage, or is it a definitive state? That's what I said as my question. I say as my question. But earlier I said that the philosopher was someone who always limped, because he has never quite settled his problems with the community around him.
2:15 Insofar as he hasn't settled them with himself. And so it's as if he weren't quite born. It's not that he's unborn as the Buddhists say, nor fully born either, he's half-born. Well, it's a bit the same relationship that Rousseau has with youth. All right? And it's curious, because I'm starting to answer your question. Perhaps with the very last line of his last work, where he doesn't speak of youth but of the afflictions of age and old age. When he tries to recall memories of the Île Saint-Pierre, he says I have trouble because, in plain and familiar French, my faculties are no longer what they were.
Against youthism: Hegel and femininity, irony of the community 2:50 I'm growing old, I have malfunctions, as we'd say today. And he adds this admirable sentence, alas, it's when one is about to leave one's remains that one is most offended by it. So it's not a tribute to old age, he laments those effects. But there's no exaltation of youth either. There is never any youth-worship in Rousseau. Never. Quite the opposite, he hated that. Because — I'll come back to Antigone here, it's curious how it all fits together — because it's an effect of the ruling classes.
3:25 In the sense of youth-worship, of course. And in the analysis of the tragic conflict, in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, we find this striking passage where femininity, in the ruling classes — he says — this femininity, the eternal irony of the community, that's a bit the title of my book, corrupts through intrigue the universal end, and makes old age, devoted to the universal — I'm speaking of the Greek hero, the warrior, the sage, old age born for the universal, concerned only with it — an object of mockery for the petulance of a youth without enthusiasm.
Education and the impossible return to ignorance 4:05 I'd think I was in Cohn-Bendit's drawing rooms all of a sudden. For the petulance of a youth without enthusiasm. There you go. So Rousseau showed, through Emile, that the key for him is youth, it's the moment of youth. If there isn't an education in politics from the earliest years, it's ruined. On the other hand, he never engages in youth-worship. But what's certain is that his attachment to the passions — yes, of course, the passions — means that, as you say, he stays young until the end of his life.
4:38 We never find in him that resignation — which one can even salute — that there can be in a Montaigne, etc., in the last part of life. He remains just as ready to catch fire like an adolescent, I mean, in the Reveries, at the end of his life, as when he was a kid in Geneva. But he's not fooled either when, for instance, he speaks of the youth of the world. He knows there's no going back, and yet he casts a gaze... No, no, there's no turning back. Quite so.
5:08 He says that it was... I'm delighted that you've gone this far, because he's also a Protestant, I mean by that, in terms of youth, of his thought, a sociological youthfulness. Someone who knows the Gospel well, because Protestants take from the father to give to the son, as certain theologians used to say. So he knows well... what do we call it... from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the earthly paradise, I mean, and the return backward is impossible. There's the angel with the flaming sword guarding against the return.
5:40 And as Nerval says at one point, ignorance cannot be learned. That's one of the most profound sentences I've ever heard. You cannot deliberately not-know what you know. I could say, it has brought me nothing but worries and anguish. Knowledge — better to go back to former ignorance. I'll act as if the Earth were at the center of the world. You can't! Even if you wanted to, you can't. That's what Nietzsche tried to do. That's — even though I pay tribute to him — that's even his heroic stance, the only admirable one. He tried to act as if untruth were a value superior to truth, that it's better not to know, etc.
6:12 I won't dwell on it, there are so many passages about Nietzsche, I mean that illustrate what I'm saying. Why not the untrue? Beyond good and evil. Or when he cites the faun, Marsyas, who was pursued all day long by King Midas to learn — since he's a semi-divine being, the faun — the secret of our condition. And at one point, the faun turns around: you want to know, wretch, the most important secret? It's that for man, it is best never to have been born. Or if it's too late and he is born, it is best that he die as soon as possible.
The Letter on Virtue: what the individual owes the state 6:43 That's Nietzsche's thought, a fundamental tragic pessimism. All right? So what's the use of philosophy, of wisdom? It's to know what is unbearable. Go back to Pascal a bit, be your own passerby, the anguish of finding oneself face to face with oneself. This maddening world, we have no choice. Ignorance won't do. And Rousseau is the first to say that. One must make do with it, and to illustrate this point — I'm glad to bring it back out — there's a text, one of the least commented on by Rousseau, one of the least known, and for good reason. It lay dormant among the Outeux manuscripts, it was only republished in 1972, 1972. It's the famous letter on virtue.
7:13 I recommend it to all those tempted to make Rousseau into a naturalist. There's somewhere even a long speech, yes, it's a prosopopoeia as they said at the time, where it's the State speaking to the individual, saying: here is everything you owe me across the millennia. Everything you owe me, everything I have brought you in material, sentimental, psychic, intellectual terms — so you have the right to break the contract, here is what you owe me.
