English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The text and its era, between Revolution and Restoration 0:00 Here we are, ready for a new reading on the fly. This series which Philippe Moreau had the happy initiative to start. And for today, I intend to read you a truly surprising text.
0:30 I don't think I'm going to spend too much time on voice-over commentary, since the text speaks so well for itself. But I'll still tell you about its author. The text itself is quite simply On the Marionette Theatre. A reflection on marionette theatre. It was already written—Napoleon breaking through under Bonaparte, to quote a line of Victor Hugo. It's delirious.
1:00 Neither in the old regime, since the Revolution had already taken place, nor in the new regime, since the Restoration was not yet in place, but in that extraordinary interlude between the storming of the Bastille—in '89—and Waterloo, let's say. Or between the storming of the Bastille and Thermidor. It depends a bit on one's political views. You can set the cursor, you can say the Revolution ended. It didn't wait for Napoleon to end, did it? Thermidor had already settled the Revolution's account.
1:33 I'll remind you here that I keep saying that, since the appearance of the new regime we live in, which came after the French Revolution—that of the industrial world, of modern bourgeois civil society—we do not live the Revolution, we do not live the counter-revolution, we live permanently the conflict between the Revolution and the counter-revolution. Except that—and this needs to be specified and recalled—I'm contextualizing the period when this text appeared, that is, the very last years of the eighteenth century and the very first of the nineteenth, since the marionette theatre, the marionette show the author alludes to here, is supposed to take place in 1801, so right at the beginning of what would soon become the new regime.
2:31 Well, for now, we're in this great interlude where everything is being churned up between the old regime and the new regime, the dice haven't been cast, no one knows how it will turn out. The French armies are sometimes—Napoleon is entering the Habsburg palace in Vienna, or sometimes entering Jena, at the very moment when Hegel is finishing the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807—the philosopher who will create the philosophy of history puts the final touch to his first great public work of maturity, at the moment when history is knocking at his door with cannon fire.
Kleist, playwright of German Romanticism 3:08 So, an era, as Hugo put it, when thrones crumbled like dead leaves—in the old regime, right? So it's during this great interlude that Heinrich von Kleist, who belongs to the gallery of this era, that fabulous verbal ocean that German Romanticism was—a fabulous verbal ocean, says Armel Guerne, whom I've told you about, if some of you remember, he is undoubtedly the best translator, or at least one of the very best translators, and in any case the one who produced by far the best anthology, if you want to get to know these people a bit, whom we've only recently started talking about—they took a long time to become known to the French public, and we call them the Romantics, but they are much more closely related to what became literature after Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, isn't that so?
4:03 And then our poetic avant-gardes—these German Romantics are more closely related to those than to our French Romantics, but let's not turn this into a literature class; if there are things to add on this point, they'll come up in the course of the text. Kleist, right away, I'll... his life was very short, he died at 35 in a double suicide, he killed himself along with his companion, by mutual agreement between the two of them—she was suffering from an illness, a cancer—and they both killed themselves in an inn on the shore of a lake near Berlin, in the outskirts of Berlin, the Wannsee—See, sea in English, it's not the sea, it's the lake in German—and the innkeeper, questioned by the police when she discovered the bodies, said herself that she was surprised when they arrived, they were as cheerful as larks, cheerful as children, laughing out loud, they asked, and she was a bit surprised that the couple asked her
5:14 to bring them coffee outside, even though it was winter—winter in Berlin no less—and then they heard two gunshots, they found the bodies, Kleist had killed his companion, as had been agreed, then he took his own life right after. But if Kleist is known in literary history, it's certainly not only for this tragic death, that would be a bit morbid—it would be as if Nerval were known only because he was committed to psychiatric asylums, that would be rather dubious. No, he is above all known as the greatest, rather the only great, playwright of German Romanticism, the one who wrote plays, a dramatist, a 'dram'—some of whose plays even crossed Germany's borders, since the greatest actor of the 1950s in France, right after the war, the unforgettable Gérard Philipe, embodying, it seemed, eternal youth itself, played the Prince of Homburg, one of the best-known plays
6:25 by Heinrich von Kleist. He came from a Prussian aristocratic family and, like all young men of that kind of family, was destined for a military career; he spent his whole life between barracks and encampments—I don't want to give you his detailed biography, I'm really telling you the essentials, in broad strokes—and he was diagnosed by a doctor as suffering from morbid melancholy from his twenty-fifth year on. And among those who best introduced him in France, apart from Gérard Philipe who embodied one of his characters, I think of Marthe Robert, whom literature students know well, the one who wrote that work which has become a reference, bearing the beautiful title 'Origins of the Novel and Novel of Origins'
7:26 and who knew Kleist well—or rather knew Kleist's work well—and was his translator, and who even published a book on his work as early as 1955; it took a long time to discover these people. So, I don't want to give you a thesis on Kleist, that would take a lot of time, it would be very interesting, but it wouldn't be a reading on the fly. Let's get to the text—On the Marionette Theatre—a reflection, in fact it's a dialogue, you'll see, between the narrator and a friend of his whom he finds in the street watching a marionette show, and without further delay, I'll take up the text, which is relatively short, it's neither a short story nor one of his great plays—as I mentioned, just the titles, so I said The Prince of Homburg, but there's also little Katie of Heilbronn, Käthchen von Heilbronn, a marvel, sketches for a great drama that was to be called Robert Guiscard, well,
A leading dancer at the marionette theater 8:36 and then the well-known short stories, the most famous of which was adapted for the screen, was the subject of a very beautiful film by Rohmer called The Marquise of O—I'm sure some of you know it. Those are short stories, that's where he excels, short stories and theatre. Here, we're dealing with a reflection, a dialogue, right? So, I'll stop my preamble, and I'll read you the very beginning of this reflection on marionette theatre.
9:10 Spending the winter of 1801 in M—let's say, I don't know, Munich—I met one evening in a public garden Mr. C., dots of suspension, recently engaged as principal dancer at the city's opera. Classical dance, of course, principal dancer at the opera, where he enjoyed keen success with the public. So imagine, today, a great star of the world of classical dance. I told him of my astonishment at having noticed him several times already at the marionette theatre set up in the marketplace to entertain the crowd with little burlesque dramas interspersed with songs and dances.
9:50 He is surprised by this collision between the great, learned art of classical choreography and what is most popular—a show of showmen, of marionettes, in the street. He assured me that the pantomime of his puppets gave him great pleasure and declared bluntly that a dancer wishing for perfection could learn all sorts of things from them, from the marionettes.
10:20 As the remark seemed to me, by its tone, more than a mere quip, I sat down beside him to better understand the reasons on which he could base such a strange assertion. He asked me whether I hadn't indeed found certain movements of the puppets, especially the smaller ones, very graceful in the dance. I could not deny it. I inquired about the mechanism of these figures and asked how it was possible to control their limbs, at every point, as the rhythm of the movements or of the dance required, without having myriads of strings at one's fingers.
10:55 He replied—I'll finish this paragraph, but I won't spare you afterward the details of the manipulation technique, that's not our main interest in this text on marionettes. He replied—but this is very interesting—he replied that I should not imagine that each limb was moved forward and back separately by the operator at the various moments of the dance. Each movement had a center of gravity. It was enough to control that, inside the figure.
11:25 The limbs, which were merely pendulums, obeyed of themselves, mechanically, without anyone having to intervene. I'll finish with what makes the movement of marionettes akin to dance. He added that this movement was very simple: each time the center of gravity was moved in a straight line, the limbs began to trace curves. Often even set in motion in a purely random way, the whole thing took on a kind of rhythmic motion resembling dance.
12:02 So, I'll skip over the long passage where he dwells on the puppeteer's technique, on straight lines and curved lines. He says this: I replied that I had been told this craft was rather devoid of intellect. You didn't need to be a future Nobel Prize winner, right, to operate marionettes.
12:35 A bit like turning the crank of a hurdy-gurdy. You know, the instrument—the hurdy-gurdy is an instrument where the strings are rubbed not by a bow but by a wheel. So you just turn it, like a barrel organ, and it works on its own. Not at all, he replied. The movements of the fingers are, on the contrary, in a rather subtle relation to those of the puppets, which are attached rather like—you see well—numbers to their logarithm, or the asymptote to the hyperbola.
From marionettes to Descartes's automata 13:13 We had started from a street show and here we are, all the same, at the very summit of abstraction. But he believed that even this last remnant of intellect could disappear from the marionettes, and that their dance, passing entirely into the domain of mechanical forces, could be produced by means of a crank, as I had imagined. There were no robots at the time, no great modern machinery, but still, one senses we're getting close to it. Let me note in passing that automatons have existed since roughly the time of Descartes.
13:50 Descartes, creator of mechanism—it's Galileo, his Italian contemporary, who introduces mechanism into physics and definitively drives out obscure and hidden forces, in short medieval magic; it's he who creates modern physics, and Descartes who draws the philosophical conclusions from it—what we call not mechanics, that's for physicists, but mechanism, right? And Descartes already knew about automatons.
14:20 Let's not forget—you'll see right away the connection with marionette theatre—that incredible passage in Descartes' First Meditation, where Descartes notices that we often say we believe we see something when in fact we do not see, we judge—we don't merely see, we judge. You'll understand right away, he gives an example. Thus, I say that from this window I see men in the courtyard—but what do I see?
14:57 Other than, if we stick strictly to what we see, coats, hats. This is the era of the musketeer, so from a distance, a human silhouette was a hat seen from behind with a cloak—who knows what's behind or inside all that. And that's where Descartes says: 'But what do I see, if there are coats and hats that might cover spectres or ghosts moved by mechanical springs?' You see, then, the notion of the automaton already existed.
15:31 And so, but he believed that even this last remnant of intellect could disappear from the marionettes, and that their dance, passing entirely into the domain of mechanical forces—there you have the automatons—could be produced by means of a crank, as I had thought. I expressed my surprise at seeing him deem worthy of such attention this form of art designed for the vulgar. 'Vulgar' comes from the Latin 'vulgum,' meaning the people. Vulg, V-U-L-G, is the root, which gives, in Anglo-Saxon languages, 'folk.'
Mechanical legs and the refusal of affectation 16:05 Well, in the Germanic languages, of which Anglo-Saxon is one, 'folk' either with an F—folk, pop-rock-folk—or with a V in German, 'Volk'—but it means the people. Volkswagen, the people's car. So 'the vulgar' is the crowd. I expressed my surprise at seeing him deem worthy of such attention—in short, engaging in high metaphysics, even epistemology, a scientific reflection on—as he put it—this form of art designed for the vulgar, and that he not only held it capable of higher development, of perfection, but even seemed himself interested in the matter, and he smiled and said he dared claim that if a mechanic wanted to build him a marionette according to his own specifications, he would draw from it a dance.
17:07 I remind you he's a star dancer at the opera and admired by the general public—he would draw from it a dance that neither he nor any other excellent dancer of the time would be able to match. 'Have you heard,' he asked, as I stared at the ground in silence, 'of those mechanical legs that the English make for unfortunate men who have lost their limbs?' Yes, that already existed in 1800—legs, not wooden legs, but mechanical legs.
17:40 I said no, I had never seen anything of the kind. There you have England's lead already in these techniques that would flourish with modernity. 'That's a pity,' he went on, 'for if I tell you that these unfortunate men dance with these mechanical legs, I fear you won't believe me. What am I saying, dance... The range of their movement is no doubt limited. But the movements within their power are executed with a calm, a lightness, a suppleness that strikes any attentive soul with astonishment.'
18:17 Well, already we were surprised that they were fascinated by the marionette show, charmed—no, fascinated. Here, it's downright... a dance performed by a mechanical leg. I said, jokingly, that he had found his man then, since the artist capable of building such an extraordinary leg could no doubt assemble him a whole marionette to his own specifications. 'And what,' I asked, as he in turn stared at the ground thoughtfully, 'would you require of his skill?'
18:48 'Nothing,' he replied, 'that isn't already found here—harmony, mobility, lightness. But all of that to a higher degree, and above all a distribution of the centers of gravity more in keeping with nature.' 'And what advantage would this doll have over living dancers?' the narrator asks, still puzzled. And here we get to the heart of the text.
19:19 You'll better understand now why I wanted to share this with you. What advantage? Because for now, we're not yet in philosophy—though actually, well. What advantage? Above all, my dear friend, a negative advantage: that of ruling out all affectation. The word is underlined, it's in italics. For affectation, when I deliberately do something with an intention, right, appears, as you know, whenever the soul is located at some point other than the center of gravity of the movement.
19:51 Since the operator in fact has no point other than this one to act upon, by means of the wire or the string, all the limbs are, as they should be, dead, mere pendulums, and obey only the law of gravity. An exquisite quality one would seek in vain in most of our dancers. And to make understood how being dead, being the inert brute matter that does not think—that's the essential point.
The young man at the mirror and the comic moment 20:21 There is no reflection, no thought, no affectation, no intention, no feeling. And how that is an advantage for achieving artistic grace, for that is his thesis. And he gives an example. He gives several, and I'll begin with the first of these examples. Here it is. 'About three years ago,' I recounted, 'I was bathing with a young man whose person was then marked by an admirable charm.'
20:58 He might have been sixteen, and barely showed the first traces of the vanity aroused by women's favor. He had a certain appeal to women, as any young man does. Now, shortly before, we had just seen in Paris the youth removing a thorn from his foot—that's at the Louvre, isn't it, a sculpture by Canova showing a young man trying to remove, remove a thorn from his foot.
21:28 A cast of this statue is well known and can be found in most German collections, in copies. A glance cast into a large mirror, at the moment when, in order to dry his foot, he set it on a stool—he was coming out of a gymnasium, gymnasium, gymnastics, all that comes from the root gumnos, g-y-m-n-o-s in Greek, meaning naked, nudity. For the Olympic Games, the Greeks, the Olympics are coming up soon, aren't they?
21:58 For us, that used to be done, of course, with naked bodies, right? He set his foot on a stool, and the glance, as it landed there, made him recall something. He smiled and told me what a discovery he had just made. So, indeed, you see, they had seen in Paris the statue of the young man removing a thorn from his foot, and while drying himself, having set his foot down, he looks at himself in the mirror and finds he resembles the statue.
22:32 It's narcissistic, this kid. To tell the truth, I had made the same connection myself, at that very moment. But either to test the grace that dwelt in him, or to forestall his vanity in a salutary way, to teach him a little lesson, I began to laugh and retorted that he must be seeing things. As if he thought he were the Apollo Belvedere. He blushed and raised his foot a second time to show me the resemblance to the statue, to show me the thing.
23:02 But, as one might easily have foreseen, the attempt failed. You see, as soon as he tries to do it with intention, the grace he had when he did it spontaneously, mechanically, without thinking, without thinking—like the marionettes that do not think—was gone. But, as one might easily have foreseen, the attempt failed. Disconcerted, he raised his foot a third, a fourth time, he raised it a good ten times more, in vain.
23:35 He was unable to reproduce the same movement. What am I saying? What he was doing had such a comic side to it that I could hardly keep from bursting out laughing. Another aside: the laughter, the humor—there is a distance and a lucidity in Kleist, he is not naive, he's not much like a Romantic in the first degree either. Now, Hegel says in his Aesthetics that when something starts to take on a comic coloring, in the history of art, the comic moment is always the expression that an aesthetic cycle is coming to an end.
24:15 great Greek tragedy ends with the sneering laughter of Aristophanes' comedies over the ruins of Athens, right, invaded first by the Macedonian Empire, Alexander, and soon by the Roman Empire. The Old Regime ends in the laughter of Voltaire. Remember Alfred de Musset's famous line: 'Do you sleep content, Voltaire, and does your hideous smile still hover over your fleshless bones?'
24:49 Laughter, as with Alfred de Musset himself, one of the last French Romantics—I'll dwell on him a bit because he's no longer much read, whereas before, high school and middle school students of my generation knew his works by heart, since he was on the curriculum. Unlike the earlier Romantics, he didn't take himself very seriously, he had self-mockery—I'm continuing my reflection on the comic—he had himself called 'Prince Café,' and he used to say he thought he wasn't a very great writer and that, to be a great writer, he lacked either a great romantic passion or a great misfortune.
25:31 He had both, because of George Sand, with whom he suffered a very great heartbreak—she was cheating on him with an Italian doctor, as she had done with Chopin too. And so, Musset, you see, when Musset says 'I see the moon over the steeple in the village,' that's very Romantic—except that he says 'the moon, like a dot over an i.'
Lost grace and the fencing bear 26:02 You see, this slightly, almost caricatural side shows that Romanticism is passing the baton. So, what he was doing, the movements he was making, had such a comical side that I could hardly keep from bursting out laughing. From that day on, so to speak, from that moment, an incomprehensible change came over him. He started spending whole days in front of the mirror. So he stubbornly persists in the contradiction of believing that the more he deliberately tries to redo the movement, the less well he will do it.
26:34 But the attraction diminished each time. An invisible and inexplicable force seemed to constrain, like an iron net, the free play of his gestures. A year later, not a trace remained in him of the charming grace that had once been the delight of those around him. Even today there lives a witness to this strange and unfortunate event. He could confirm word for word the account I have just given. On this point, said Mr. C in a friendly way, always this one, the dancer who lingers at the marionette theatre, I'd like to tell you another story.
27:10 So, again to illustrate, once more, that the less one thinks, the more chance one has of achieving graceful movements. So I hope you'll easily understand the connection with yours. During a journey through Russia, I found myself on the estate of Mr. de G, a Livonian gentleman. Livonia, Courland—these are regions that now roam somewhere in the distant borders of Russia, Finland, Belarus. These are very large spaces, sparsely inhabited.
27:43 And during a journey through Russia, I found myself on the estate of Mr. de G—I don't know, of Gavrilov—a Livonian gentleman whose sons were then diligently practicing fencing. Sons of the aristocracy, like that, training in the art of arms in the cellars of their forefathers' castle. The eldest especially, who had just left university, prided himself on being a fine blade. As I found myself one morning in his room, he handed me a rapier—a heavy sword, right?
28:13 Not the foil, the rapier, it's a bigger one. We fought, but it turned out that I was superior to him. Passion led him further and further astray, almost every hit I landed struck him. And finally, his rapier flew into a corner. Half joking, half stung to the quick, he said as he picked up the weapon that he had found his master. He acknowledges that his opponent is far superior to him in skill. That he had found his master, but that in this world everyone finds his own, and he would take me to the one who would be mine.
28:49 His brothers burst out laughing and cried, "Let's go, let's go, let's go down to the woodshed." The woodshed is where they used to put the logs—it's the cellar. They stacked wood there in those days. There was neither gas nor electricity. "And taking me by the hand, they led me to a bear that Mr. de G, their father, kept in the courtyard." So imagine the bear chained to a wall—not chained entirely, but with one paw kept free. When, astonished, I found myself before him, the bear was standing on its hind legs, its back leaning against the post to which it was tied.
29:29 Sorry, I said a wall, it's a post. Its right claw raised, ready to strike, looking me in the eyes. That was its fencer's guard. When I saw myself facing such an opponent, I didn't know if I was dreaming. "But, but, attack," said Mr. de G, "go on, try to hit him." Once I recovered from my surprise, I lunged with the rapier.
29:59 The bear made a very brief movement with its paw and parried the blow. I tried to throw it off with feints; the bear didn't move. Feints—I make a movement, but I don't actually strike, you see. I lunged again in a pass so quick that it would infallibly have hit a man's chest. The bear made a very brief movement with its paw and parried the blow. I was now almost in the position that the young de G had been in earlier.
30:32 The bear's seriousness finally unnerved me—blows and feints alternated, I was covered in sweat, all in vain. Not only did the bear parry, deflect all my movements like the finest swordsman in the world, but—something no swordsman in the world could match—it didn't even fall for the feints. When I pretend to make a move, the bear doesn't react at all. It didn't even fall for the feints, standing there, staring me in the eyes as if it could read my soul.
Grace in the absence or the infinity of consciousness 31:08 Its paw raised, ready to strike, if my attacks were merely feigned, it didn't move. No wasted effort. "Do you believe this story?" he asks the narrator. "Certainly," I cried warmly, "I would believe it coming from anyone, so plausible it is—all the more so coming from you." "Well, my dear friend," said Mr. C, "you now possess everything needed to understand me."
31:38 I turn this phrase back to you. "You possess everything needed to understand why I chose this text and why we've arrived here at the summit, in the plural, of thought and philosophy." Whereas we started from what seems most trivial, a secondary art, a street show, the marionette theatre. We see that in the world—look at what a generalization this is—in the organic world, the living world, plants, animals, humans, in the organic world, the more obscure and weaker reflection is, thought, the voluntary exercise of thought, the more radiant and sovereign grace spreads.
32:28 Look at animals and the movement of birds. Yet, just as the intersection of two lines starting from the same side of a point, after passing through infinity, suddenly reappears on the other side, or as the image in a concave mirror, after receding to infinity, suddenly comes back right in front of us, so too grace—which, according to him, is only attained when one abstracts entirely from thought and reflection—so too grace, when consciousness, the consciousness that usually prevents it—forgive me, I'm pausing deliberately to insist now because this is dense—so too grace, when consciousness has, so to speak, passed through an infinity, is there once again.
33:13 So to attain aesthetic perfection, one must either not think at all, or have infinite thought—but not think halfway, three-quarters of the way, in short, what we do almost every time. So that grace appears in its greatest purity in that bodily conformation which either has no consciousness at all—a body, a stone, a body with no consciousness, a stone—or has infinite consciousness.
33:48 That is to say, grace appears in inertia, in matter that does not think, or in God, infinite consciousness, but not in between as we are, as creatures—we are in sin, in disgrace, that is, grace appears only in the puppet—we come back to the marionette—or in God. And so we had started from the theatre in the street.
The tree of knowledge and man's incompleteness 34:18 So, I said, a little dreamily, that we would need once more to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. You know, this is the act of Eve and Adam in the earthly paradise—they tasted the tree of knowledge. Let me open a parenthesis. What does this have to do with our text? God says, God forbids in Genesis, in the Genesis account, the two first human beings, Adam and the woman formed from his rib—since Eve was made, if I may say so, by God from one of Adam's ribs, according to the biblical account.
35:04 You all know this account: it's forbidden to taste a certain tree in paradise. It's a paradise because there they never had any needs—if they needed something, it hung from the trees or was there in the garden at their disposal. There's no lack in the earthly paradise. So what made them leave it? It's that the serpent, the devil, the serpent, the cunning one, manages to convince the woman, Eve, to taste that tree, and the argument to persuade her to transgress the divine prohibition—not to touch anything they wanted, everything in paradise being at their disposal, except the fruits of that one tree, the tree of knowledge.
35:58 The serpent tells them, in effect, that if God doesn't want you to touch it, it's because if you taste this fruit, I quote, "Eritis sicut deus scientes bonum et malum"—you will be like God, knowing good and evil. You know what happens next: Eve tastes the fruit, finds it so good that she gives it to Adam to taste too. For the moment there's no catastrophe—except that suddenly God calls Adam, and Adam says to him, "I don't want you to see me, for I am naked."
36:36 And there, God understands that they have tasted the tree of knowledge because up until then—well, it may seem like I'm getting lost in detail, but no, the essential point is that the biblical account of Adam and Eve in the earthly paradise—everyone knows roughly the twists and turns I've just mentioned, except for the essential thing. The essential thing is that it expresses perfectly—Rimbaud was right to say that theology is serious, he who was not at all a religious zealot—the passage from animal to man. The animal doesn't care about being naked, does it?
37:11 It doesn't hide to avoid showing its nakedness. God recognizes that they have tasted the tree, and you know that all the changes that follow are extremely famous: you shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow—until then they had had everything at their disposal without work, that's indeed the animal world—but now you shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, that's the beginning of technique, of the tool, of the instrument, of the machine, of technology, which was the subject of my livestream last night. At the end, he says, you shall bring forth children in pain, and it's true that childbirth is much more problematic for humans than for almost all other mammals, and that explains many things.
37:57 I'll mention in passing that, scientifically speaking, it is now established that the human species, all of us, come into the world a bit earlier than would have happened had man not, in the course of evolution, reached the stage of bipedalism—because becoming bipedal narrowed the bones of the woman's pelvis, which made childbirth much more difficult. As a result, we are all born a bit premature, and the fontanelle—for those of you who have children or have seen newborns—the fontanelle is one of the signs that we are born unfinished.
38:37 What we're looking at goes very far. We understand why relation to the other, social relation, is vital for man, because if he had only his natural part, the human species wouldn't be viable. Take it from an old African, so to speak—I spent years in countries where, in the savanna, I saw little wildebeest, little gazelles, fawns, barely born, falling from their mother's womb to the ground, sometimes falling a meter, and after a few clumsy movements, within a few hours, two or three days, were ready to bolt with the herd if danger appeared.
39:18 And us, how long does it take us to stand on our legs, to walk? It takes years. That's unfinished. You shall bring forth children in pain. That's why—I return to this text—you've understood the point of speaking about the Garden of Eden, haven't you, and about the tree of knowledge. So, I said a little dreamily, that we would need once more to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, not to ask forgiveness for having passed on to knowledge, for having given up instinct, on the contrary, for thought, you see, for reflection, for knowledge.
The last chapter of the history of the world 39:59 No, on the contrary, we would need once more to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, in order to fall back into the state of innocence. You see, we've reached the end of this strange text. And what does he answer? The dancer, without a doubt, he replied, this is the last chapter of the history of the world. And yes, you see, I'm not taking you out of Hegelianism—the last chapter of the history of the world is the attainment of absolute knowledge.
40:31 There you have it. Listen, I hope that—if I've managed to convey my interest in this text, let me take the opportunity to pay tribute to Jocelyne Magne, who is our contemporary, don't worry, who lives in Toulouse, and who kindly sent me this magnificent edition of this text, which I knew from an anthology, the Armel Guerne anthology, with beautiful illustrations. The montage I owe to Philippe Moreau will let you see a few of them, and I take the liberty of mentioning her, knowing this will embarrass her—she who taught for almost her whole life—Jocelyne Magne, and who has been very generous to our fund, both for me personally and for the fund for the English translation of Michel Clouscard.
41:33 So, it's partly with her in mind that I decided to talk to you about this text today, a text that has been familiar to me for very, very many years, and which had swept me away from my very first reading of it, long ago now. Thanks to Philippe Moreau, thanks to his production, thanks to you for your kind attention, and we'll talk again about knowledge and grace.
42:05 Thank you.
