English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Lordon: a political ally, an anti-dialectical philosopher 1:30 So the case of Karl Marx, do you think, do you believe there's this famous return to Karl Marx, also by way of economists who don't dare say his name — I'm going to allow myself to smoke to tackle this question, if you don't mind, it's not out of provocation toward the ecologists who'll be watching this film, I disapprove of tobacco, I reassure them right away, and my son doesn't smoke anything, because he's been told since he was born that it was better not to smoke anything at all, so it's what people say that counts, not what they see, and yet he hangs around with rappers.
2:33 Yes, there is... Should we believe in this return? The return of the ghost, the return of Zorro. Who believed the spectre? There you go, there you go, there you go. Since you're alluding to Lordon, you should know that I wrote a short text that serves as an afterword, published by Éditions Delga, for the reissue of Clouscard's Neo-fascism and the Ideology of Desire. Why do I start there, to answer your question? Because I had nothing against Lordon, quite the opposite, I salute him, he's even a comrade in the struggle, often, on certain points, in particular the way — and it's very courageous of him — that on the left, even to the left of the left, he pounds the table to assert that sovereignism, under certain conditions, is a value.
3:09 Whereas he is one of the few not to let the old values of the Republic be thrown in the trash, where Marine Le Pen can pick them up effortlessly whenever she wants. That, I salute in him. It's good. Not so long ago, you should remember the blue-white-red flag, which used to be the phobia of the far right — now it's the old girl, the Republic, democracy — I remember the Le Pen supporters' demonstrations with the lawyers from the west, ethics came into it, etc. And they used to walk around with the fleur-de-lys flag still, I mean, there are still a few die-hards.
3:40 Sudden turnaround — oh, the far right is blue-white-red, no, that's a usurpation. So Lordon does well to point out that a certain left has strayed by abandoning those values to the National Front. That Lordon, I salute him. He doesn't just make declarations of principle, he takes a stand on many points. That's when he's a philosopher. And I'm not making an elitist criticism of him — it's not because he has a hard-science background originally, not even the humanities — I find it all the more remarkable, precisely because it's not his field of origin, that he could achieve such ease and relevance in philosophical debate.
4:15 I salute that, I actually prefer it — Rousseau was self-taught. So I'm not making that accusation at all. But I say, he never worked himself free as a philosopher. He built his philosophical culture at a time when anti-humanist, anti-Marxist, anti-Hegelian, anti-dialectical thought precisely reigned. It's not me, it's Deleuze who speaks of "the infamous dialectic." That's not me. He was raised on that. And it shows as soon as he becomes a philosopher. And I told him once, Lordon — I salute all his political stances.
4:45 but as soon as you make a philosophical reference, you borrow from the philosophy most opposed to your economic and political positions. There's a schizophrenia there that needs thinking through. I mean, you can't pretend to converge, almost, I come back to it, with the Marxists, while at the same time reviving the modes of thought most deadly opposed to Marxism in particular — naturalist modes of thought, the ones on display today in the terrifying advances of what's called cognitive science. Just the name — because scire, science, comes from scire, which means "I know," and cognitive, cognoscere — well, whether in Greek or Latin, it means "I know," so that means the sciences that know, or what, in short, a fine tautology that Molière would have mocked, in the days of the "dormitive virtue" by which opium makes you sleep.
May '68 and the manufacturing of a leftist Marx 5:37 There you go. But no. Marx — a superb ruse of reason, that's why I teased Lordon a bit with this figure of the spectre. Because indeed, we thought Marx was buried. And Lordon had the misfortune of scratching Clouscard. In a text where he pokes a bit of fun at Clouscard, straying from the post-'68 vulgate, which says, yes, in '68 the working class sold itself for a mess of pottage. A mess of pottage! You really have to have never been on minimum wage to think that a minimum wage going from 400 francs to 900 francs is more than a mess of pottage all the same — hats off to those guys, and not only for the rights within companies and all that, I mean this whole great wave of prosperity that would follow, which people associated with Chaban-Delmas at the time of what he called the "new society," to use his phrase, and which would benefit so much, in a way, those who had been most despoiled up to that point, that it's no accident that '68 comes along all of a sudden to reverse things, and that capital takes back its marbles — now they say time is no longer working for us, enough is enough.
6:39 Other ideologies had to come along, and that's where Foucault and Deleuze and others, and Derrida, come onto the scene. So still, I maintain, to answer your question, that Marx was the most attacked. But you won't find among the people I denounce a critique of Marx the way you find one of Hegel, denouncing him as totalitarian. Why? Because the whole con of '68 consists in making people believe you're at the extreme left of the left, even to the left of the Communist Party. That's what gave them an audience among generous-minded youth.
7:12 It turns out, now we know, now the masks have fallen, we have historical hindsight, we know that those who were to the left of the Communist Party, whether Trotskyist, Maoist, or anarchist — I take the three main components of leftism, to be fair — the Trotskyist Jospin, look how he ended up in the PS apparatus, going so far as to say "my program is not socialist," I'm not making that up; the Maoist Kessler, number two at MEDEF at one point, who said, in the middle of the referendum campaign, "we must put an end to the CNR program," that is, all the same, one of the greatest advances in our history, one of the greatest governments France has had, that of the Resistance, with the Gaullists on the right and the Communists on the left, active — retirement, all that, of course, pay-as-you-go pensions and social security, and so on.
8:06 And Cohn-Bendit also saying, during the referendum battle, "we've had enough of Gaullo-communism." Good grief, what an admission! He's aged, hasn't he, Danny, he's getting old, he's no longer on his guard, before he was cleverer. There, the mask falls. Why? No, not because he says he's had enough of Gaullism — I voted against De Gaulle my whole life as a man of the left. Not because he's had enough of communism — I understand perfectly well that one can be anti-communist, in a noble way that I respect, that I salute. There can be reasons of spirituality, etc. But being against both at once — that reminds me of Vichy.
8:40 He wants nothing. Who is it that put out a "wanted" notice on De Gaulle and the communists? We agree on that. As this "nothing" of Malraux's became an everything. It's good — so I mean, in a way, it's important all the same: this return of Marx couldn't have happened if we hadn't manufactured this ghost of a leftist, Maoist Marx. And that's the return happening right now.
The stakes of Marx's return in the face of the crisis 9:10 The whole stake depends on the question you've just raised. If we start again trying to cancel Marx, to gut him of the dialectic at his core, in particular of his relation to Hegel, and turn him into a fashionable author, a bit feminist, a bit naturalist, a bit ecologist — it's being done, I've noticed. One can find Marx's work abundant — I can cite an ecological Marx, in Capital, not the young Marx, and I salute this, the Marx who says nature is part of the production process, because until further notice, we've never managed to fish fish out of waters where there were none. He's right, we've never really — I don't want to remove nature from the production process, but those who would want to pull Marx solely toward that side, without insisting that he always said what's essential is the development of the productive forces, and that it's praxis that decides everything, and that, all else being equal politically — I mean, good or bad management — a powerful production is always preferable to a lesser one, that's Marx all the same, I mean, all else remaining equal, within the same framework of justice, equity, and distribution. That's the stake of the era we're living in.
10:13 Many people are returning to Marx. Why? Because capital is being pointed at because of the crisis. Not so long ago, young people were told, listen, our system is the best of all. It has no flaws. It has fewer than the others. All the others are worse — that's what you'd hear. But what a disaster, for a whole generation of young people to be told, for almost a generation now, "we're heading straight into a wall, kids, but there's no other solution." It's despairing. I understand that some of them end up going to wage jihad in Syria, or doing some other foolish thing, I don't know. As you say. There you go.
10:43 Instead of that, I'll say, in a way, I salute this return of Marx. I fear it will be obscured — I note, somewhat terrified, that the discontent developing thanks to the crisis, and affecting ever wider layers of the population — since there's no longer a large-scale, organized Marxist response to meet it — it's the far right that recovers most of that discontent, and I'm not just talking about Marine Le Pen, it's true in the Scandinavian countries, it's true in Holland, it's true, you see it in elections everywhere: having rid ourselves of Karl, as you put it, having had him disappear from the screen for 40 years, means that even those who resent capital because of the crisis end up conflating capital with the Jews — to the point, moreover, that Zionists now tell you that you can't criticize a bank without being threatened with the charge of antisemitism. There's this confusion swimming around now.
11:40 And that's why I often refer to Rousseau. It's not just to go back to it. It's because when you put the small white stones back in place, the ones that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx laid down, you're in no danger of falling into those misreadings. That is, you're not left with an anti-humanist Marx. Thank you.
