English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
A region steeped in history: barbarians, monks and Clovis 0:02 It's the abstract... I'm always very glad each time I come back, once and for all, I'm a Corsican in love with the countries of the North, and as with us the North begins beyond Nice, you see what I mean, and I also have a preference for the northeast — I notice that when I wander at random I always end up going in the opposite direction from the sun's course, that is, against time, especially as one gets older it feels good to gain a bit of time, and toward the East, toward Germany, toward the east, retracing the route of the great invasions — oh, there I am already in history — so I'm always very glad to come back, especially since this is precisely a region I'd say marked by history, it's a bit trivial to say so.
1:12 because it's not the only one — in a country like France, you realize that near Belfort one could say the same thing, I was speaking of invasions at the Belfort Gap, in the Alsace plain it seems that after the Thirty Years' War there had been so many deaths, so much decimation, that Colbert had brought in Hungarians from Central Europe to repopulate Alsace — that's why Tokaji wine is still found in Alsace, you see, these are regions loaded with history — but your region too is on the path, the path of barbarism if I dare say, the barbarian invasions — sorry, barbarian — that produced a very fine civilization, in fact a very fine civilization from the moment the monks told them ora et labora, prayer and work, because barbarians weren't people who stopped to dig, they were people passing through, they were nomads, they fed themselves a bit on the conquered territory and then moved on — until these pagan barbarians suddenly found Christian monks who told them
2:22 ora et labora — our civilization begins at that moment, when the Germanic barbarian — generally Celt or Germanic, it's the same thing, though now people make distinctions — all these were steppe peoples come from the East in waves, the Celts arrived first, 2000 years later they're called Germans, the Gauls, all this comes from the East, because once you reach Brittany, that's the end, you can't go any farther, so they stopped there and started digging — it's hard for a barbarian to finally decide to put down roots, to stop burning things. You know the most illustrious of them, Clovis, don't you — French history in principle begins with Clovis, before that it's what's called the dark ages, so I can't tell you much about that, I'll come back to it later in a more philosophical way, but for now these are materials we all know. Now Clovis, everyone knows, right, the anecdote of his baptism, his baptism — the barbarian, you know the story — for Clotilde's beautiful eyes he said, I'm willing to become Christian if your god makes me win the battle — well of course he won the battle and converted, especially since Clotilde had told him
3:33 you won't marry me if you don't become Christian — up to that point these are fairly classic deals for the time — and then at the moment of the baptism, Remigius, Saint Remi, the bishop of Reims, the phial of Reims — that's where it starts, the vestments — you know our kings aren't legitimate without the anointing from the phial that's in Reims — you know the words Remi said to the king, lower your head, proud Sicambrian, burn what you have worshipped and worship what you have burned — and yes, up to then he was burning convents, churches, because there was gold inside — it's a Corsican speaking to you, plunder, the mafia, we know about that, or wreckers too, you know, we have that in common with the Scots — poor regions, when a ship passes loaded with riches, they make fake lighthouses, fake fires on the coast so the ships wreck themselves, then they loot everything inside while massacring the crew — it wasn't me, it was our ancestors, yes — I'm already deep in historical thickness, let's be serious, I'm telling you stories when I'm here to talk about history, and not even in general — I just said about history since you've already talked about it
The philosopher begins by questioning words 4:43 within this series of talks, but focusing specifically on this question: is history a subject matter? Right from the start there's an ambiguity here, because you see, sometimes "history" designates precisely the matter — because "matter" too, I can bounce off that, I'm sorry to bother you with words but I was asked to speak, I'm not a historian, I'm a philosopher, and a philosopher isn't a philosopher unless he begins by questioning words — that's his difference from all the other disciplines. Other disciplines begin with the thing they're talking about — a zoologist deals with animals, a botanist deals with plants, a philosopher says: what do you call a plant, what do you call an animal, and how do you tell the difference?
5:32 Here I'll linger a bit — I don't seem to be talking about history, but you'll see it's important for defining the notion of matter. You'll tell me, we know perfectly well — if a chicken walked in here I'd know it's not a plant. Yes, I know that too, but it's not always that simple. Coral, what is it? Is it a plant or an animal? Ha ha, it's not obvious, because you'll tell me the chicken moves, gets around like us; a tree is planted there and doesn't move anymore. Coral doesn't move either, and yet it's classified among animals. And plants move too, but from bottom to top, not left to right, you see, it's not so simple. Is a banana tree a tree or not?
6:17 It's a plant, you see, that's not obvious, because a tree — take away the wood and it's no longer a tree, the woody part, legno, since we're Italian, for wood — that comes from trees. A banana tree is a giant herb, you agree? So it's not simple when you look closely. Same thing here — from what point am I in history? First we need to establish distinctions. General rule in philosophy: concepts are like underwear, or rather like elastic waistbands — I mean by that that if they're too loose they're no longer useful, the underwear falls down to your ankles and it's lost its function, and there you are in trouble. So a word mustn't be made to mean everything, because then it means nothing anymore. It has to be limited, it has to be — how to say it in philosophy — determined. I said "limit" and here I say "terminus," you see, it's the same — it needs to be defined, not left undefined. So, first distinction: history is not all of time — you can guess we're necessarily going to talk about time, because if you open any dictionary, you'll say Pagani is wearing us out, we're opening a dictionary
7:27 and that's it — it would be simple if all problems, liberty, democracy, could be solved just by opening the Larousse to find the truth. We'd know it. But it's true that it's a good start, a way of doing basic self-documentation, that's fine, but it only bounces the problem back. What do dictionaries tell us? History is the study of the past, of past events. Already this raises enormous problems. It means the study of something that doesn't exist. What does the philosopher tell us? What is past no longer is; if it no longer is, it's not the future, it's not yet the past — it no longer is. There is only the present that is — you agree? I'm being a bit abstract here, but I need to show you these disciplines aren't simple. History no longer is, and we wouldn't speak of history, there would be no historical science, if — fortunately for us — from the past something had been wrested that is still present. We still see the pyramids of Egypt, you see what I mean, there are remains because they've endured up to today, up to the here and now. If it were only the past, we couldn't make a science of it — it no longer exists. You see, for example, all the problems this raises, all the problems tied to time. So I'm not going to
8:37 pull the same trick on you about history that Saint Augustine pulled on us about time — he's an immense philosopher, I have great respect for Saint Augustine, one of the fathers of the church, but one of the shrewdest, if I may say so. What did he say? He said a famous sentence about time, one of the most beautiful ever said about it, and at the same time one that shows his great humility — a cardinal virtue among Christians, humility, not modesty. Modesty is a pose — I play the modest one because it looks good, it'll win me some sympathy. No, I prefer the vain man who overdoes it, who puts on a whole show but knows he is nothing — that's humility. You see, it's in relation to oneself; humility, unlike modesty, isn't in relation to others. So there he was, humble, Augustine, bishop of Hippo though he was, and about time he said this — watch closely because we'll find it again with history: time — when nobody asks me what it is, I know what it is; when someone asks me, I no longer know. You see, that's humble. But it's the same with history — it seemed simple at first, you see, and already with my little difficulties we can see it's complicated. So for now I'm going to work on accumulating
9:49 the elements that show us it's problematic, this notion of history. First, the one that directly answers your question, but more to open it than to close it — namely, is it a subject matter? But the notion of matter itself refers sometimes to the object of the discipline — I said earlier, animals are the subject matter of zoology, plants are the subject matter of botany, so there the word "matter" designates the object — and sometimes "matter" designates the discipline itself: mathematics, literature, history, geography are different subjects, different disciplines. There's already an ambiguity: do we shift from the object to the subject, from the thing spoken of to the one who speaks of it? You see, it's not simple. First thing then: is it a subject matter — well, it's both the matter as subject, that is, the act of speaking about it, the study of past events, and at the same time the past events themselves. Why?
Writing marks the end of prehistory 10:56 because if you look closely — and all historians, despite all their differences, agree on this — history begins when prehistory ends. That sounds silly, what I just said, but it's important. So you all know what event marks the end of prehistory and the beginning of history — what is it? Thank you, madam — that is, from the moment there are scribes, intellectuals, intellectual labor, scribes who began to write — these were already historical disciplines, because most of the time at the beginning it was the pharaoh's exploits, he defeated the Hittites and crushed them — it wasn't always true, but still, they had to show that the pharaoh was the strongest, the most beautiful, and the best. I tell you this because from the very origin we see that history wasn't made to tell the truth a priori — it was made to please whoever employed the historian, at least at the origin. Then it made progress — I'm not saying you can say just anything in history — but we're always somewhat marked by our origins. It took a long time for history to break free from what's called hagiography — graphy, to write, in order to celebrate, you see
12:06 that's what were called chroniclers in the Middle Ages — every king had his chronicler, and "the king rose, he did such and such," and he negotiated with the great mamluk, because we already had complicated relations with the Orient — and France even had closer relations than any other nation. Francis I made an alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent — he wasn't stupid, to outflank the Germans, Austria — I'm thinking of another sovereign who's talked about rather little, I'm making these digressions to put flesh and blood on these abstractions, otherwise I wear you out with abstractions, so this gives a bit of a rest now and then — a sovereign talked about less, but much less known than Francis I and Louis XIV, is Frederick II — no, no, not the Prussian one, who's interesting too, but no, Frederick II Hohenstaufen — has anyone here heard of him? Yes — he's a blond with blue eyes, you can guess, when you're named Hohenstaufen there's a good chance he's blond with blue eyes — only here's the thing, he's a blond with blue eyes who went to Germany only once, to catch a sore throat, and never went back, he hated it — he lived where he was born
13:18 that's a bit unusual for a sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, 13th century, and well, this Kraut — if I'm doing it on purpose, I have affection for him, that's why — is still known today for his works on falconry, on hunting with birds of prey, with illuminations, splendors, we have manuscripts of inestimable value — and he was the first to enter Jerusalem without a blow struck, in the middle of the Crusades, in full confrontation between East and West — this clash isn't new — he entered without a blow struck because he spoke Arabic, he spoke Hebrew, he's the one who founded in Palermo the first university in European history. I'm lingering on Frederick II — these are fine figures after all — and he dared to appoint Jewish doctors to teach medicine in Palermo, because Jewish doctors were at the forefront of medicine, and they later went on to Spain, where they built the great tradition of medicine — in short — and he was friends with the great sovereign of Jerusalem, Saladin, Salah ad-Din, and so he entered without a blow struck — well, to tell you
14:29 well, people talk less about that king than about the throat-slitters of the time, you see — that's why I lingered a bit on this detour, I'll close the parenthesis — thank you very much, madam. So if writing marks the end of prehistory and the beginning of history, it's because history — that is, as subject matter in the objective sense, meaning the events to be studied — begins from the moment the historical discipline becomes a form of writing, you see how the two merge here. We no longer say in our time "savage peoples," "primitive peoples" — that means nothing. A people can be primitive technically compared to us, in relative terms, in output per unit of time, for example, and surpass us from an aesthetic or moral point of view — I mean, these are relative terms, value judgments, "primitive." Whereas with writing we have an objective standard — that it appears in China at roughly the same time, roughly between 4000 and 3000 BC — writing arises rather in the East
15:40 and even in the Far East, and above all in the Middle East, mainly everything around China, the Middle East, of course Mesopotamia, and Egypt — and there we have the first, the first inscriptions, the first stones that speak, and the first written things — you probably know this, or some of you know it — the first things ever written weren't ideas or thoughts, they were calculations. First you had to do the accounting of my goats, my wives — excuse me, Corsican things that can't help but follow goats with wives, it's terrible, it's macho — and of my kingdoms, my riches — they were accountants first, and since it was on pebbles, calculum in Latin, calculus, calculum, that's where it comes from, we find it again with kidney stones (calculs) — and history begins when it's written. Before that, I'm not saying we have no elements — huge progress has been made
16:50 on Neolithic habitats, on the nutritional resources of Cro-Magnon man, on whether we might have in us — you must have seen this on the internet, well-made documentaries — we also have some genes we share with Neanderthals. For a long time we thought they were separate lineages; now we know there was a period when Homo sapiens, that is us, lived alongside Neanderthals, and there was interbreeding on both sides. It's been calculated that there's about 3% Neanderthal genes on average in each Homo sapiens — the proportion increases in certain regions of Asia, or decreases, very little in Africa where there were very few Neanderthals. So there were events, studies have progressed, carbon-14 dating methods etc., by isotopic measurement — but since there's no writing
Music, the desert and the birth of monotheism 18:00 we don't make history out of it — orality was the main mode. I came here, thanks to your invitation, to give a little talk on history through music — "the music of history" it was called, it's still on the internet I believe — and I tried to show that after all, what people felt coming out of the Middle Ages in the 16th century, or entering it at the end of Antiquity, whichever — I mean, it might be the music of each era that best expresses what people felt. Monuments, painting show you what's seen from outside, but what people lived inside — perhaps music, even more than texts, expresses that best. That was my starting hypothesis, and I'd love to know what music Neanderthals listened to by the fireside — the rhythmic element must have played a part, but not only that. I lived quite a long time in desert countries, and I was struck to see a kinship — well, deserts, I mean between the still slightly green regions and the regions where there's no more greenery at all, the desert
19:10 proper — there's what's called in development economics the agro-pastoral zone, because it's too dry for farming but there's still herding, on endless steppes — Abraham grazed his flocks on a land without limits. That's how a study by Hegel on the spirit of Judaism and its destiny begins — Abraham, the one who founded everything, including for Muslims, who call him Ibrahim, it's the same man, everything begins with him. In the Bible it's said he came from Ur of the Chaldees — that's far from the promised land, very far from Israel — Chaldea is deep in the Persian Gulf — Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, and for a long time he wandered with his flocks. I mention this because the desert is the infinite, the undetermined, there are no contours, no limits, right — and it's in this kind of setting that one understands — I'm lingering a bit because I had the chance to live in desert countries, in black Africa, sub-Saharan Africa if you want to be politically correct, which makes Africans laugh, because White people aren't stupid — and when you're in desert country, you understand
20:20 that the religions of transcendence — we're in history here — the religions of transcendence, or of monotheism, there are three of them, I give them in chronological order: Judaism, Christianity, Islam — all three were born in a tiny geographical handkerchief, which is the desert. That can't be a coincidence, certainly not, because when you're there you realize that in this backdrop of nothingness, salvation can only come from above, or from nowhere. Whereas in Greece, as soon as you see a little spring in the greenery, there are nymphs beneath these springs, you see, paganism isn't far off — not to mention Tahiti — these are animated natures and divinities often based on the production of everyday life, deities of agriculture, of climate, of rain, of plants, of springs — but there, there's nothing, nothing, and that's where monotheism was born, right — and to illustrate it in the biblical text, I don't know if you remember the very first words — as it's written, it's part of the history of the Jewish people, and so part of our history since we've inherited a good deal of that religion — what are the first words the Eternal says the first time
21:30 he appears at Sinai to Moses, before the Ten Commandments, even before saying the unpronounceable "I am who I am" — before that, what does he say, the first sentence — does anyone know? Take off your sandals, because you're on holy ground — yes, first, the desert, that's it, it's the sacred. In the city we draw the curtains and can do more or less as we please, but "take off your sandals, you're on holy ground," under the eye of God, extraordinary nothingness. So it's no accident that it began in this kind of territory. Writing — I'm speaking of writing, I haven't yet said alphabetic writing, which is a fabulous advance — imagine, if the Greeks had had only pictographic writing there would have been no Greek miracle, there wouldn't have been that agility of thought, philosophy, mathematics, that power of abstraction which only the alphabet can give. Imagine the poor little Egyptian schoolboy, he has 3500 signs to learn — how many do we have? 24, 26, depending a bit on the language
The alphabet, numerals, and nature which is not history 22:40 but with these 24, 26 you can make all possible combinations. Likewise, you see what we owe to the Arabs, to Arab civilization, right — from 0 to 9, ten signs, that's all, to express every number. Imagine if we'd stayed with Roman numerals — what a bunch of dimwits — I love the Roman Empire, it's a great civilization, but in mathematics there isn't a single great Latin mathematician. How could there be, with a writing system like that? It's not serious — 1 is a stick, 2 is two sticks, 3 is three sticks, at 4 you start mixing things up, you have to add letters, then it gets confusing — imagine, 1227 sticks, you'd get completely lost. And that's nothing, 1227 — true, in astronomy there are numbers far bigger. We have 10 digits — and with that, six — what dimwits — and with that we express every number. You see the difference between the sign here and what designates the digit is nothing but the way of signifying the number, the quantity. All this to linger a bit on the revolution that writing was, and which marks the passage from non-history — call it proto-history — to history. It's not cut with an axe
23:51 it's not like a December 31st at midnight when we passed from prehistory to history — there are intermediate periods of proto-urbanization, all this has made huge progress in archaeology, that's very good, and finally the great criterion is there. So phenomena come together like writing, urbanism, the passage from the countryside, from the bush — as they say in Africa — because the countryside already presupposes 10,000 years of history that has worked on nature to create the Norman bocage or the landscapes of Haute-Marne with that pretty alternation of fields and forests — it takes long, long centuries of history and many valiant woodcutters and stone-breakers. I say this because if tomorrow someone asks me to sign a petition because there's a magnificent Romanesque chapel in a wheat field and McDonald's wants to make a parking lot there, I'll sign the petition, as anti-ecologist as I am — sorry, I'm known as the most anti-ecologist man in Europe, apparently — I'm not a nasty ecologist, because I will sign the petition, I'm not stupid — but in doing so, and here, where I'm not in discourse but in reality, I'm not stupid
25:01 I don't lie down under cars, blissfully inhaling their exhaust fumes — don't worry, it's not nature I'm defending, because I'm making this parenthesis about breaking stones — neither the stones, nor the chapel, nor even less the wheat field, are nature — they're human labor. To make a wheat field you have to break the stones, run the plow, come back, be stubborn, stop when it's muddy and come back — and the chapel, imagine all the manual and intellectual treasures in the chapel's design and its execution — it's to man that I pay homage, it's humanity I'm protecting, not the planet. The planet will still be here when we're all dead, it was here long before we existed, it wiped out the dinosaurs without batting an eyelash. I'm lingering because I'm on the subject — you think I'm straying because we're talking about natural history, a bit metaphorically — I'm not sure nature is a history. What repeats itself is not of the order of history, you see — already even after the appearance of man, it takes millions of years, since I believe we're now at
26:11 between 3 and 5 million years for the appearance of man, roughly — and before even arriving — well, so there was man long before there was history. I'm fulfilling my contract — I told you, history mustn't mean everything, otherwise it means nothing anymore. So we've seen it doesn't mean time in general; now we see it's not the time of nature — there's the time of nature, there's evolution, Darwin, there's evolution of course, and not only of living beings, moreover there's the evolution of galaxies, of stars, etc. — but that's not history. So what's the difference?
Surveys on 1945: legend takes over history 26:47 now I'll stop being abstract and start from an example — you see I go almost to the Big Bang and now come back nearly to the contemporary era, because it's more familiar to everyone. It's not that far back — I'm going back to the end of the last world conflict. I consulted in writing, you see what I noted, because I couldn't believe my eyes, but to make sure I'm not saying nonsense — the first polls by IFOP, which wasn't quite called that yet, took place as early as the end of 1944, in the postwar period. There's a specialist, Frédéric Dabi — you don't have to remember that — who specialized in studying the history of polls and opinions. So it's precious too to know that we started recording your opinions — it took time to get to writing, it took time for writing to become alphabetic, and before your opinions were written down, it took even more time. It's recent, after all. They asked the question — this was in France, it was done in several European countries
27:57 but I'll give you the results for France. What is, in your opinion — we're in 1944 — the nation that contributed most to the defeat of Nazi Germany, with, in the lead — since the others are such small percentages I won't mention them — three countries stood out: the USA, the Soviet Union, and England. The USSR — answer 57%. 57% of respondents thought it was the USSR that played the biggest role in defeating Nazi Germany. USA 20%. The same question was asked again in 1964 — I'm jumping ahead, I was born in 1945, I'm starting to reach a certain maturity — anyway, in 1964, the same question is asked: USA 58%, USSR 20%. That's completely reversed — that's interesting, after all we're talking about the same events, the Second World War, it's not just a difference between two polls
29:07 it's more than a difference, it's a reversal, because in the meantime legend had taken over history. And you know the legend — you have to bear with me, I bear with it too — I went to see it too, like you, The Longest Day — you see the legend, there was Nazi barbarism, then America arrived and delivered us — no, no, no, it arrived in 1944, when the Soviets were at the gates of Berlin, with already 30 million dead behind them. So I'll say it, I would have been the first shot under Stalin — I say this to be clear and not to make you think I'm telling you nonsense, so I'm telling you clearly that if we passed under the Nazi jackboot, it's now because of the greatest sacrifice ever made by any people in the history of humanity, since we're talking about history — that of the Red Army and civilians. We've seen this because the Germans weren't ones to be gentle. This is to show you how complex history is — from the moment it's written, as I told you at the start, we write for the pharaoh, we don't write for pure scientific objectivity, you understand why I insisted on the scribe, I seemed to be dwelling on it, so I'll repeat it, it's someone who wants to note it down
30:17 May '45: USSR 57%, USA 20%. June — what did I say? I said '64, sorry — June 2004, that was when the landing was being celebrated, it was actually the first, and moreover the first decennial memorial anniversary of the 21st century, in June 2004 — and there it reverses, so USA 58% and USSR 20%. And yet this is our history, without which we can't even understand what's happening in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine I mean, not to mention the Baltic states — I recently heard that we must understand the Baltic states, they're anti-Russian, well of course, they suffered under the yoke — oh really?
31:03 Really? I know they tore down the statue of the Soviet war memorial — the Soviets left 200,000 men in Lithuania to liberate it from the Germans — and replaced it with a statue of the Lithuanian SS man who collaborated with the Germans. Well, one has to be careful with history, otherwise it catches up with us — I mean, if we don't study it, it catches up with us, and we're surprised, oh how did Trump get elected, oh Brexit, oh the French referendum "no" — in all three cases nobody predicted the result, you agree?
31:37 it's because we were being told stories about history — otherwise we don't understand the peoples. And I'm not saying those three results please me — I'm telling you their common point is that they weren't predicted by those who tell us History with a capital H. That's what I wanted to problematize. I have a third example to problematize further, I promise I won't frustrate you too much — I'm telling you what history is not, it's a bit — it's the negative side of philosophy, we start there, but I reassure you, philosophy is not skepticism, I promise that in exchange, afterward we'll try to build a history — but together, afterward — I'm not going to impose mine on you, I'm not going to do what I'm warning you against. Now, "history written by the victors," as you rightly said — but careful, yes, that's fine, we can say history is written by the victors, but it's not that simple, because the Soviet Union and the USA are two victors of World War II, and yet we're not told their history on equal terms — they must not tell the same thing, right, to Russian schoolchildren as what's told to us. You see, already in Russia it's called the Great Patriotic War, World War II, there you go
Hermann Kant, The Auditorium, and Brecht's poem 32:48 So one more anecdote, still, before moving to the more positive part of my talk — you need to keep an eye on my timing, keep an eye on me, because I want to give the floor to the audience — what would I do without the audience, that's good, as Lacan said, before signifying something, every speech signifies for someone — things don't answer on their own, only someones can answer. This example I took from a novel I recommend to you — even though it was published by Gallimard, in the NRF, these are collections, it's not obscure — but a somewhat forgotten author, this was in the early 1970s, this author is named Kant — I can already see it coming — a philosopher speaking to you about history, and you're talking to us about Kant? No, it's not the philosopher Kant, it's not Immanuel Kant, it's much less well known, it's Hermann Kant, a novelist, but a novelist from what was called East Germany at the time, or the German Democratic Republic, whichever you prefer — but who wrote so well, such a good novel, that even Gallimard in the West, not especially known for pro-Soviet sympathies, decided to publish this superb story
33:58 its title is Die Aula, in German, "the lecture hall" — the Germans kept the ancient terms well for university matters, you go eat at the university restaurant, the Mensa, and you go listen to the professor in the Aula, the lecture hall, that's what it's called, Die Aula. Hermann Kant's pitch, as they say now — I'll summarize the story very quickly, you'll see how deeply it plunges into the question that concerns us this evening. The narrator, speaking in the first person, is tasked with giving the closing speech at the ABF — what is the ABF?
34:35 the narrator — we're in East Germany, in the late 1960s, roughly, or mid-1970s — and closing — what is the ABF? It's the university — I won't say it in German — the Workers' and Peasants' University, founded in 1946 on the devastated ruins, you can imagine what Germany was like then. I had a German wife with whom I remain on very good terms, Leo, who is 10 years older than me, so she experienced the war, she saw the Soviets arrive at the house, she saw all that, and at the same time she told me the Nazi authorities, when she was 8 years old, proved to her parents with a certificate that she was indeed Aryan for three generations. She knows the period well, and she told me it got to the point where they didn't even have paper string to make parcels — that's for civilians who suffer in wars, you see, what a state. So the idea of founding this ABF, that is, a university for those who had never had — for the social classes who had never had the chance to be schooled, let alone go on to higher education — was in a way a revolution
35:45 in society, right, and so the passage I want to quote you — I don't want to dwell too much — it's their first history class, you see, people arrive, about thirty years old, who left the field, the workshop, the factory, to attend their first history class, when they had started out expecting a life where they'd never go near university walls, except maybe to sweep the sidewalk in front. And of course the professor is someone just out of the camps — it's the novel — and he tells them: so it seems I'm supposed to teach you history, well I think I'm going to teach you to unlearn. I quote, I quote the novel: it's important in history to learn to unlearn, thus you have learned this — and moreover, the proof that you're going to learn to unlearn is that I'm going to use a poem to tell you what history is. You're surprised, not serious? It's a poem, and he reads a text that begins like this — it's very short, I reassure you: they say the pharaohs built the pyramids, who saw
36:56 the pharaohs bend over the sand? They say the kings built Thebes of the seven gates, did anyone see the kings hauling the stones? And when the Great Wall of China was built, where did the masons go at the end? Then a finger rises and says, sir, I believe the poem is by Brecht and that it's magnificent — yes, but don't interrupt my lecture, the professor answers — but see, see what he wanted them to understand: you must learn to unlearn. We're taught that kings built the pyramids — it's not the kings who built the pyramids, it's millions of anonymous people. And cathedrals are the same — I admire those whose faith made them sculpt saints, gargoyles, devils and good gods, if you like, in places nobody will ever go check, without signature, without anything, you see, with such care, such devotion, and we don't even know their names, they didn't sign. You have to wait until the Renaissance, the 16th century, with individuality beginning to appear, before you see names marked, Tiziano, Titian — but that's recent, that's modern, you see, I wanted
Space conquest: which "we"? 38:07 to quote this passage from this novel where, in mise en abyme, there's a quotation of a poem, to problematize even more radically, you see, what the subject matter of history is, right — and this will be my last example, then I'll go back to generalities, because I'm between the abstract and the concrete, since too abstract is tiring, and too concrete and we don't move forward enough — because the concrete is very complex, we don't move fast enough — so I'd still like now to tell you: we often hear this expression today, "we have reached the stage of space conquest," which is true, which is exact, if you like — true in the sense of exact — though what does "we" mean here — go tell that to the Papuans of New Guinea who struggle to control fire, and you tell them, today we orbit the Earth in satellites that also let us have communications on our mobile phones — that's it, you see me — and here I'm not saying this
39:18 to discourage you, on the contrary, we're making progress — we can't answer the question of whether history is a subject matter if we don't say whose history, of what. We clearly see that we're going into space, that's true for some, not true for the Papuans — and I mention the Papuans because it's an exceptionally primitive case, without any value judgment, meaning, I specify, at the purely technological level, at the level of mastery over natural constraints, if you prefer, for reasons — being an island, having 3000-meter mountains, and jungles — that's three reasons already for isolation, right, and progress circulates less in confined places — it's still what Rousseau tells us, comparing Corsica and Switzerland when he drafts his constitutional project for Corsica, he says the common point is being isolated by mountains, you see, isolate — and so what am I trying to show with my Papuan story, that I took an extreme example, but an immense majority
40:28 of the sub-Saharan continent, of black Africa, if you don't want to speak like international organizations — this is what's called the continent of orality. Literacy is still a rare chance in black Africa — I had dream students in black Africa, you understand why, it's such a social promotion to sit on school benches that no one's going to bother the teacher, on top of that, you see what I mean, it's a promotion, they're attentive, eager, they stand up when you enter the classroom, they say "welcome back" and "get well soon" when you've been absent two days for the flu, for a bout of malaria — so this is to remind you that there's still a huge part of the population of black Africa that barely has access to writing. So what does that mean, today "we" know digital modes of communication, all the better, but who is "we" — so let's try to answer the question, we'll say, well wait, let's not overreach either, we'll say "we, the developed peoples"
Value judgment, existence judgment and development 41:38 so in economics — I don't know what history and economics are, they're related disciplines — I don't know of any economy studied by economic science that isn't inscribed within a determined history, whether it's the economy of the Inuit or that of Morocco or that of Kamchatka — I mean it's always the history of a determined people, that we can detach the economic sector and analyze it with its own particular determinations. So in economics we say "developed" so it won't be a value judgment — if it's a value judgment we're no longer in science. Let me make a small parenthesis because it's important to be clear: value judgments are opposed, in philosophy — since we've called on a philosopher I have to philosophize a bit, it's useful — value judgments are opposed to judgments of existence, it's very easy to remember because said like that it sounds abstract, but it's actually very concrete. If I say this stadium measures 600 meters, sorry, 400 meters, the Olympic track — if this stadium measures 400 meters, this track measures 400 meters, that's a judgment of existence, if you don't believe me
42:48 you measure it, we quickly agree. Now with "well made," if you like — if I say this track is well made, the word "well" introduces a value judgment, you see the difference clearly — but you don't quite see it yet. I'll take a second example, I'll come back to the stadium afterward — no, no, I'll stay with the stadium — what does "well made" or "badly made" mean? In fact I'll ask the question you'd ask too — it depends, is it for playing football, ice hockey, or athletics — admit that these aren't the same standards, not the same specifications, how to put it — value judgments have no meaning unless we specify the end that gives them meaning. If the end is to play ice hockey, then of course we'll check if the temperature is cold enough that it won't melt and all that, fine. If the track won't fall apart at the first race, if it's solid tartan, there you go — it's not cinder track like we had before, we gained a few tenths of a second thanks to tartan. So I'm going to introduce a very important distinction, second example.
43:58 Is rain useful or is it harmful? You see that this doesn't mean anything—it's a catastrophe for the beach operator, for my cousin who has a beach hut in Corsica, it's a catastrophe for him, and for the farmer it's a blessing, including for my other cousin José, who has a vineyard—I'm making this up, I could have a cousin José, or whatever, or Doumé, it's always the same name—you see this doesn't mean anything here, harmful, useful, if you don't ask for whom, for what purpose. "Useful" comes from "ut," and "ut" in Latin means "so that"—it's the Latin "pro," a programming—it's not something objective, it brings in a subject, someone, not just something that pursues a goal. Yes, I'm making this somewhat abstract detour, but it lets us see things here more rigorously and more clearly. So when I say "we are going to the moon today," but "we" means the developed peoples, which is already a bit more precise.
45:08 A bit less vague and therefore a bit less false than the first statement. I made this detour to clarify that "developed" is not here a value judgment, so we need to give a scale of measurement, as we did for the stadium track that measures 400 meters. In international organizations, we say—we move from underdevelopment to development when agriculture stops occupying the top rank in the gross national product. It's obvious that for millennia agriculture was almost the only economic sector—almost, there was a little embryo of craft industry, I don't know—and industry comes very late. In the so-called developed countries it's obvious that industrial income, even service income, is not beyond industry, which is a prerequisite—don't think that Amazon is something immaterial, there are huge factories, ventilation systems, you know this better than I do, data centers that require enormous cooling and a lot of handling. So you see, developed countries means
46:18 those who have been produced by this historical threshold where industry is what's beyond it—tertiary, quaternary—I once worked for a consulting firm called "Quaternaire Développement,"—why not "quatnaire," there we go—but anyway, it means we're no longer at the level of Malian peasants, or worse, the Sahelian woman—sorry to keep repeating this, but I can't help paying tribute to the woman of the Sahel, the pillar of the African economy, while every morning she gets up to go fetch—she walks 10 km to find water in a country where there is no water, where water is so scarce—wait, that's just the start of the day—afterward, when she's done fetching water, she walks 10 km on foot to gather wood to heat the water, because there were eco-friendly aid workers who decided that using coal, gas, all that, would be a catastrophe, it would disturb the natural balance in these still-pristine countries that live in harmony with nature—I'll calm down—so she walks 10 km to gather wood to heat the water in a country where trees are rare. That, believe me, and even regulations
47:30 she mustn't get caught taking certain trees, and after that she starts pounding grain, the day really begins with a child on her back and almost one in each arm. I wanted to pay a small tribute, when I say that agriculture is the main resource, the main resource of the economy of developing countries, not to say underdeveloped—I don't know, we say "developing"—it's a tribute to all that, I mean a lot of sweat. And so it's certain peoples—let's say France, China, the United States, Russia—that go to the moon, that are, well, in space exploration, each has its specialties. It's not the Corsican shepherd who goes to the moon either, you see. This is important—that's where I bring back Brecht's poem, you see why I have it, the one that says: they say the pharaohs built the pyramids—did anyone see the pharaohs bending over the sand?
48:40 So it's the peoples who make history, who built the pyramids—yes, that's interesting. So I haven't just moved from humanity to focusing precisely on one people, or one culture, or one race, one color—it's not white people who go to the moon either, that's too abstract. The Japanese are more developed than the Hungarians, who are white—economically, I specify, no value judgment, GNP per capita, that becomes an existential judgment, it can be measured. So I'm problematizing: history of whom, of what? And now I can go back to Saint Augustine, he was right to say: time—when nobody asks me what it is, I roughly see what it is; when someone asks me, I no longer know. And here I'll make you understand what he means with an extremely simple example, but extremely simple so as to introduce us to something more complicated: yesterday I was sick, today I am well—in short, I have changed. A simple example.
For there to be change, there must be a fixed point 49:51 This sentence, incomprehensible from a strictly logical point of view: "I have changed." In this sentence there is, on one hand, the assertion that something has changed—my health, for example, was bad yesterday, it's good today—and at the same time a word, "I," which is always the same, whether sick or in good health, it's always the same "I"—there, the opposite of time is being affirmed, what does not move, what remains—it's always my self I'm speaking of, the same self, unless I'm threatened by psychosis. I'm being serious—that's often what distinguishes psychosis, madness, the kind we lock people up for, if you prefer, because if we say "the crazies," that's a bit vague, but psychosis is not neurosis—neurosis, depression: "It's serious, doctor, I need help, I can't cope anymore"—that's actually a good sign, I'm going to ask to be treated, that means I'm still lucid, I know I'm sick. Whereas the psychotic says: "I am Napoleon, go to hell"—that one doesn't see that he's sick, he says it's you who are sick for not understanding that he is Napoleon. That's psychosis.
51:02 For him, it's not certain that it's the same "I"—it's the loss of identity: I am not "I," I am Napoleon. You see why I brought up psychosis—it's because it's not obvious that I am I. Well, I'm reminding you of what Galileo—the first one, the one who founded scientific physics, before raving about nature—from Galileo on, one can make a science of nature, "physis" means nature in Greek, that's where physics comes from—Galileo was the first to establish relativity—no, that's Einstein—Pagani gets it wrong, Einstein is relativity of time, Galileo had already established the relativity of motion. Einstein and Newton before him knew very well that Galileo was the founder. What does that mean? You've all seen it at the train station: when you leave, you don't know whether it's you or the train next to you that's moving. Sometimes it means: for there to be motion, there must be a fixed point. You see the connection with "I was sick, today I'm well"—for there to be change, there must be something that doesn't change. It's strange, what I'm saying—there must be a fixed point. If I'm in Holland—let me radicalize the example, I'll take Holland—
52:12 because it's flat, and also because I like it, it's a good country—I'm a Corsican who loves the countries of the North—I'm in a tulip field there, and I see canals everywhere, right in the middle of the country you never know where the water is. I see a barge going by—actually I barely see it, I see the man walking on his barge, I assume he's walking from front to back at exactly the speed the barge is moving relative to the field—he'll end up standing still, you see. If there's no fixed point, no reference, what in physics we call a laboratory, relative to which I judge whether there is motion—we can't decide on motion otherwise. What do we call it in French? "Solid ground"—yes or no, that really means what doesn't move, while we're actually moving at 30 km a second—that's a lot—around the sun and all that, everything is moving. How come the water doesn't spill out of the glass, you know this, or the glasses—in physics, the principle of inertia—it's because everything moves at the same speed, and from Galileo onward we can't decide whether we're at rest or in motion—it's not that we can't know.
53:22 it's too complicated—it's much more radical than that, it's that it's a false problem, it's badly posed. It's the same for a physicist, for a scientist: rest and motion, when the motion happens at the same speed—you know this, when a train is—say I imagine a good TGV where there aren't too many jolts, or a plane—it's even in advertising, you know that you can leave a pencil standing upright, or a coin, and it won't fall, to show that during the flight there's no vibration—not at takeoff, not at landing, but at cruising speed. That means: when everything moves at the same speed, being at rest and being in motion are the same thing. The difference is when there's going to be a change in speed—that's called, in physics, an acceleration—it's not the everyday meaning, where "accelerate" in a car means going faster, whereas slowing down is also an acceleration in physics—it's a change of speed, negative acceleration. There, I won't dwell on it, I'm not here to talk about the natural sciences but about the human sciences—and yet, history of whom?
French identity, the Franks and the birth of democracy 54:15 History of what? You understand why I posed the problem, you see where I'm heading. We talked about French identity not long ago—how do you want to write the history of France if we haven't defined something that doesn't change throughout the changes that the history of France studies, which is "Frenchness"—I don't know how to say it—you see, because that too took time to appear. When I told you about Clovis, nobody was talking about France, they were talking about the Franks. You know what that means, "Franks," in the European languages—"frei" in German means what?
54:49 Well, free, there you go—"free," "frei," free—what does that mean? Democratic liberty? No, but these were throat-slitters, that can't be right, that doesn't mean that—it means: the one who is in battle and has won, therefore he won't be a slave, he'll be the master, he remains free. That's a somewhat troubling conception of freedom—it's a "free world," quite an odd free world. I'm not singling out one people or one nation—almost all peoples went through this, through relations of force before establishing, more or less, relations of law. I'm opening a parenthesis—you'll tell me, oh, he's going to talk to us about Rousseau, The Social Contract, that the strongest man is never strong enough to always be master unless he transforms his strength into right and obedience into duty. That's magnificent, that's historic, that's when we truly pass from one world to another—at least when it's put into practice, which is often the case, I'm generalizing—that's where it becomes very interesting, I'm generalizing because once one of my African listeners told me: "You're lucky in Europe, you don't have corruption like we do, you have democracy, you can develop." And since he was in pain, I still wanted to do him some good.
56:00 I tried to tell him what I truly thought. I said: don't be fooled, here it's crooks who govern—I'm not alluding to anyone, I'm not doing party politics, you can put in whatever parties you like, that's irrelevant to me, even without putting in any, that's not the question—but what's good with us compared to you is that there are several crooks who govern and who eye each other warily. It's true that with you there's only one, or one family or one clan that runs the whole country as it pleases—obviously that's a bit more, well, that's more troublesome. In other words, you need counter-powers. Democracy was born like that, when another crook said: and wait a minute, the taxes, what are you doing with them?
56:37 "I want my share too"—yes, that's it. That's to say it wasn't established in the name of values, it was first of all balances of power. We all went through barbarism, that's what I mean—there's no original advantage at that level, we all went through it, and then gradually we got organized, thankfully. I'm saying thankfully—I'm not lamenting that there are several crooks in power, it's never better than when there's only one. I was very worried during the referendum on Europe, watching—I was listening to France Culture, I followed a little something, especially at 5am, because France Culture doesn't interest me at all at other hours, except for the Collège de France lectures, which I recommend for insomniacs, that's not a coincidence in my opinion, if you're studying at master's level—there it's quite good, you can learn everything about 15th-century Persian writing, anyway. But on the other hand, I was surprised to see that at prime listening hours, when the news, the debates around the European referendum happened, there wasn't a single one defending the "no" side. So when I said plurality, we're not out of the woods yet. And how many newspapers in the United States predicted Trump's victory, you know this—there were 187 that said
57:47 he was going to lose, and there were 2 that said he was going to win. I don't want to lecture Africans by saying "with you power is too monochrome"—I'll close my parenthesis. This is important to relativize the concepts a bit. So I took these radical examples to show that it's not the history of one people when we say "we are going into space," it's not the history of one race, one color—so what is it the history of?
Dogmatism, skepticism and relativism 58:20 We saw that the Japanese—I'll give you an example—were more developed than the Lithuanians or the Hungarians, and being less developed is not shameful—once again, you can be an immense musician and have economic handicaps, that's a different matter. So of whom, of what do we write history? You'll tell me: of humanity. But we've seen that humanity set out in a very unequal way, and that today the Papuan of New Guinea does not have the same history, does he,
58:53 as the one who just died, held—you know, the poor first American astronaut who just died, and who at age 82 had volunteered for one last space flight to show that old age was still, well, we weren't done for—sorry, 77—that's my Corsican side, I have to exaggerate, sorry—well, he wasn't from Marseille, otherwise I would have said 150 maybe—thanks for the correction, I thought I'd heard he was 80—77 when he died?
59:26 No, when he made the flight? When he made the flight. He died at 95, there we go, there we go, thank you. So there's humanity, that's where we are now. If it's the history of humanity—and here I'll move on a bit to the positive part, I have to, before warning you against one of the scourges of our era's dominant thinking, a certain relativism. I said "a certain" because I try to be honest and careful, because relativism is sometimes useful for combating dogmatism. Very quickly, in the Socratic manner—very quickly but clear: you ask in the streets of Athens "what is beauty" to the first dogmatist you meet, generally one who hasn't traveled much—it's a metaphor, you can travel inwardly without moving—he'll say: beauty, there you go, I built the Parthenon, that's beauty, I sculpted the Venus de Milo, beauty is that. Why isn't the sunset beautiful? Yes it is, it's very beautiful, it has nothing to do with it—I'm looking
1:00:36 I'm looking at both, the Venus de Milo, the sunset, not at all, not the same colors, but you're right, yes, we need to problematize. Socrates, that was it—it's clever—the dogmatist is the one, you see, who has a representation in his head and doesn't budge from it, whereas his opponent—well, he's not a philosopher. A philosopher is someone who asks questions, not someone who has ready-made answers, right, it's not someone who looks for—the philosopher looks for problems for his solutions, whereas the opposite of the dogmatist, who is not a philosopher either—that is, as long as we're in dogmatism we're not yet in questioning, in philosophical concerns—and then, at the other extreme, someone who's also not a philosopher, but who is the opposite of the dogmatist, is the skeptic, his old adversary. The dogmatist, when you ask him "what can I know," answers everything; the skeptic answers nothing—there's no truth, it's relative to each person, that's relativism. The wine seems bitter to you, it is bitter; it seems sweet to you, it is sweet—that's Protagoras, what he said: each individual is the measure of all things. That's nice, it's very fashionable in capitalist countries—I'm not cursing capitalism, I'm not praising it either, I'm making a factual judgment—I note that if I'm for free enterprise, the free market, and everyone in his own bubble
1:01:46 and on his own island, in his own Robinsonade, as Marx says, isn't that so, and no one bothers me with taxes, with the state, with regulations, with taxes, with unions, there's a business—the freedom of the fox in the henhouse or the wolf in the sheepfold, however you want to put it, there I'm being more pejorative—not all capitalists are like that, but objectively, as a factual judgment, this encourages skepticism, because each individual is master of himself and there's no universal—that's what I'm fighting. There's no universal in relativism, there's only the particular: the wine seems sweet to you, it is sweet, it seems bitter to you, there's no wine in itself. In short, you and I have nothing to share, nothing in common—I'm not telling you we should take communion, I'm playing on words, you noticed that—but we are in the process of communicating, I hope you'll ask me questions, that will give me the signal. And if we're communicating, look carefully, look carefully at the word, picture it in your head, the word written out, look closely—it's written inside it, there's "common" in "communicate." If we're communicating, it's because we have something in common, contrary to what—we still need the skeptic to make us despair and lock each of us in our respective bubbles.
Communicating, human language and Robinsonades 1:02:57 If nothing else, the French language—there we have a common linguistic code, otherwise how could we understand each other? We might have other means, sign language, but we need something in common in order to communicate—otherwise we lock women in with women, men with men, the Hutus with the Hutus, the Tutsis with the Tutsis, Shiites against Sunnis, and you see how you find again the terrifying news of today, the war of each against all—we have to convince ourselves that we have nothing in common. And here I can sweep in front of my own door, because in Corsica I'm tired of seeing written on the walls "French, go home," and underneath "Arabs, go home," by the same people—that means only the Corsicans are good, well, poor unfortunate souls, there we go. So when I say "humanity," you see it's still problematic, because I affirm it—I think it exists, humanity—I'm not going to prove it, because that would be another interesting debate—it exists, I think there's something in common between the Bantus, the Papuans of New Guinea I was talking about, Mozart, Einstein, etc.,
1:04:07 and Hitler—no reason it should only be in excellence, it's human, man is capable of the best as of the worst, because man is the animal that speaks, and Aesop had already seen in Antiquity that language is the best and the worst of things, because with language you can communicate, expand knowledge, you can also slander, lie. It's interesting, Aesop, the one who inspired La Fontaine's fables, the fabulous fabulist of Antiquity—20 centuries later, an immense poet, one of the greatest of the West, what's his name, Hölderlin, said: "the most perilous of goods, speech, given to man." So, I already think, for example, that this very particular form of communication that is language—of course you'll tell me, like the students do: "but sir, animals speak too, I've seen it on TV, animals talk"—you can't compare television and some poor thing at home, that's not fair, and you're citing an authority you don't have, let's be serious. Yes, animals have modes of communication, that's clear, and even very developed ones when you think of dolphins or bees—do you see, does anyone here know
1:05:18 a bit about the language of bees, have you read things about it—what data are they able to communicate? They do a dance and manage to convey a latitude and a longitude, I believe—sorry, they do a sort of dance in the shape of an 8, and manage to communicate—bravo—a dance in the shape of an 8 that conveys a latitude, a longitude, a spatialization, a location, that is, the dance expresses the direction the swarm should follow the scout bee in to reach the loot, to reach where there's pollen, a rapeseed field, and also whether it's far or near, by the frequency, by the speed with which they trace the 8. That's quite sophisticated, when you think about it, isn't it. Nothing to do with human language though—you'll see the differences, they're enormous. First, it's an innate behavior, whereas I wasn't born with French-language chromosomes—I mean by that, you as well as I, had we been born among the Chinese, raised by Chinese speakers, we'd speak Chinese—it's not chromosomal, the language, the ability to speak
1:06:31 maybe yes, maybe—if we're not talking about the rule, it's evolving—the possibility of speaking, the possibility is not an actuality—I won't develop this, otherwise it would send me into the in-itself and the for-itself in Hegel, but it's interesting for those who say "but everything's already there"—no—well, yes, everything's already there if you like, that's fine, we can still make progress, that's the lazy person's view, thinking everything's already there—it's like a plant: you water it, you tend it, you graft it, you work on it, all the same. All right, let's not stray, the example matters for the rest of the discussion, and you understand why I hold a bit of a grudge against relativism—it locks us up a bit in particularisms. I alluded to the term Marx coined to talk about this—he was mocking the bourgeois economists a bit, and said they were telling "Robinsonades" when they say that originally men decided to group together in society because they realized that to hunt the mammoth it was better to be several than alone—it's true, to hunt the mammoth it's better to be a society than an individual—but that's not how it happened, that is, Marx says, he imagines that originally each producer
1:07:41 was isolated like Robinson on his island—you understand why it's called a Robinsonade—exactly like today's enterprise, in other words they project their present ideal onto it: each producer, we saw it earlier, free enterprise, I'm my own master on my island, Robinson is master of himself, even when he finally meets a human being it's to establish a master-slave relationship. It's interesting, profound, this novel that redoes the origins of humanity. So you see, the Robinsonade is typical of illusion—it's not just different from the truth, it's the inverse of the truth—we project the present, realities that are only valid today in the modern bourgeois economy, onto the origins. Marx admires the progress the bourgeoisie has brought about—don't put words in my mouth that I haven't said, and that he didn't write—compared to feudalism—but it projects this modern present onto the origins, that's what he calls the Robinsonades. Let's try not to do the same thing, and not to isolate each culture in its own bubble. So I affirm humanity, that's where I was, and I therefore presume there's a universal—but not a universal in the spatial sense—sorry to become
1:08:51 a bit abstract again, but not spatial in the sense that I can say a spatial universal when I say the moon is a planet and not a star, that's a spatial thing, because it has in common with all other planets that its light doesn't emanate from itself but only reflects light coming from elsewhere, from the stars, which produce their own energy, their own light, etc., like the sun. Where am I going with this—I'm saying I don't want to give an empirical definition of man—it's not enough to open your eyes to see what's common between all men. Take even a microscope, you won't get there, no more than for knowing what a table is. I say this because when I would ask my African students "what is a table," they were a little disappointed—I thought in philosophy we'd talk about profound things, eternity, death, God—I'm asking what a table is, frankly that seems to fall a bit flat—but I wasn't disappointed afterward, because they'd answer, just to get rid of the question: a table is something you can see clearly, if you use your eyes it's rectangular, it's made of wood, it has four legs—have you never seen round tables?
1:09:52 Ah yes, ah, it's not the shape, all right, let's grant that. Ah well, it's not the material either, because there are tables that aren't made of wood—there are iron tables in bistros, gold tables at ministers' offices or at the tax office, paper tables in schoolchildren's notebooks—we call them multiplication tables. No, let's be serious—so if it's not the material, if it's not the shape, then they were panicking, there's no more table, the word is there and the thing disappears. No, I won't keep you waiting—a table, you know what it is, it's a function, you know this obscurely, and now it becomes clear, but you suspected it—it's a function, it's what serves to write, to eat, and for that it has to be reasonably flat, indeed—and so I turn everything around, I'd like to reveal your freedom in this domain. I'm still in language. If you look carefully, God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures. If we're on a picnic, as we did at Ermenonville, right, and we don't have one there—we benefited from little tables that were in the park, a bit like highway rest-stop tables, which was very nice and pleasant—but if there aren't any, you've all picnicked like that outdoors, it's very pleasant, I recommend doing it, at my place in Corsica—the Corsicans are a bit annoying, they know tourists bring in money—
1:11:02 they won't bother you too much, but by a mountain stream it's a marvel—when you're tired of salt water, you go rinse off, but 20 minutes by car there's a crystal-clear stream, a Canadian-style landscape, but a Canada with 28 degrees and a blue sky—I tremble with emotion just thinking about it. Well, I love these picnics, so we'll choose a table, and I see a rock that's a bit flatter than the others, and I say, you say, "this will be our table," and you're doing what Adam did, to whom God had given the privilege of naming the creatures—the table doesn't preexist an intention. The object, any named object, doesn't preexist a human intention—there's a function, a purpose, if you want to be a bit more philosophical, a bit more abstract, a goal behind every concept—it's "what serves to"—that's the truth of the table. After that, you make it out of paper or whatever, it's not the function you're pursuing, exactly—a work table for an engineer isn't quite the same conditions as—what's it called now, in kitchens—a workspace? Yes, work table, very good. So I say the same for humanity, it's a notion to be constructed, it's not with the eye, you see, there
1:12:12 had I taken a microscope to examine the table, that wouldn't have advanced me in the concept of table—I'd have found molecules of wood, big deal, and I'd have missed metal or stone tables entirely, or plastic ones, so. So when I say "humanity," it needs, once again, to be built—that's what history is made of. Now I'm going to be positive, I promised you, because there isn't much time left, and here I'll appear a bit more dogmatic—that is, I'm going to make grand statements, big divisions, I'm going to try to construct a universal history—I don't have much time to do it, but I'm going to do it somewhat dogmatically on purpose, so that with your questions you'll bring me, of course, the discussion—and in "discussion" there's "dis-" as in "dispute," there are disagreements, and that's very good and fortunately so, and it moves me forward. So there we are, and the one philosopher I'm going to cite here is Hegel, because I wrote a little book on him that will sum up my point—I'm telling you in advance so we don't get lost in details, and so the trees don't end up making us lose sight of the forest—for him, there is a meaning to history, and it's freedom. A meaning doesn't mean we're going to reach it,
One, some, all free 1:13:22 you know, a meaning is an arrow on the road, it doesn't mean we'll get there—we could have an accident first, there could be an atomic war that compromises everything man has done for billions of years, or, if you prefer, a natural danger, a meteorite pulverizing us, and our freedom evaporates in a flash. So, when there is a meaning, when progress happens in history, it means we've moved from a less free situation to a freer one—let me explain, and here I'll quote now this crucial phrase, this famous quotation, which has the advantage of accounting for the totality of history—I'm summing up everything I've told you now, from the Eastern origins right up to today, today for a Japanese person or a Californian, doesn't matter, or a Chinese person, so, the Orientals knew that only one is free, the Greeks knew that some are free, the moderns know that all are free—there, it's clear, because you have the meaning, we can agree or disagree but it's clear. The Orientals, to repeat, knew that only one is free—the Emperor of China, the Pharaoh, the King of Kings in Persia—the one who holds all the records for titles, the Negus of Ethiopia,
1:14:32 the Emperor of Ethiopia, called the Negus, called King of Kings, called descendant of Prester John, called Lion of the Tribe of Judah, called—I would have liked to give it some time to have myself called that too—that means charismatic societies, as we say in historical sociology, where there is one individual who has practically all power over everything else—the emperor, of course, Caligula, Nero, the Roman emperor. There you go, we began with empires—not man, man is prehistory that had already existed for a long time, I'm talking here about history—history began with extremely authoritarian societies at that level, then progress in great strides from the East, that is, from 6-7 in the morning, it's a metaphor—the East is that, it's where the sun rises, it's the dawn of humanity, we owe that to them, otherwise we wouldn't be here—I'm not talking about the geographical East, I'm not talking about the Chinese of today, I'm talking about historical China, the era well before the Ming dynasty, so the era of bronze drums as we say, in very ancient China, the sun rises
1:15:42 in the East, so if I compare all universal history to a day, the East is the morning—next stage, at noon, sorry—history pauses for an instant, there's a halftime, on Greece, and if you'll allow me, I'm going a bit too far on purpose because you have to go a little too far to be more true, on Delphi precisely, because the Greeks said that Delphi is the navel of the world—the middle, noon, the middle of the day, noon, Delphi, because it's the holiest name, it's a bit of a joke, I'm not being very serious here—but what is serious is that, at noon, in the Greek world, there's a balance between total servitude and total freedom—there's an equilibrium, meaning: for the first time there's a society—not the whole society, don't get too excited—there were about 20% free men to 80% slaves, roughly, in Athens. This is not the slaves of Rome, who were made to fight with dinosaurs—well, dinosaurs, I'm exaggerating—with panthers and bears, it wasn't as abominable as that, it wasn't the decadence of Rome yet, they were treated better, as slaves, because there was reading
1:16:55 for a Greek citizen, someone they'd call a slave, they would say: read us the 23rd book of the Odyssey aloud—we didn't read silently in bed like that, it was orality, it's beautiful. So a slave who knew how to read—and the Romans later had Greek slaves who were more cultured than they were, to read texts to them. So the Greeks know that some are free—let me comment on the precise wording—we went from "one only" to "some," that's progress, isn't it, because for the first time political power is going to depend not on the whim of one man who can say "I am the state," as Louis XIV said, but power will depend on the one who has managed to convince the others through speech, that is, at the parliament, at the Pnyx, at the agora—that's progress. So don't say democracy was born in Greece—there was an embryo of democracy, an enormous progress. For "some" it's already huge—history is never all at once, you shouldn't be too disappointed, it has stages, there had to be stages, we saw it earlier, I said we needed ten scoundrels
1:18:05 eyeing each other warily to begin to have a chance that corruption and democracy—well, integrity, sorry—make progress. I recall in passing that the head of state who changed Upper Volta's name to Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, whom I knew personally, in fact I nearly published his memoirs since I worked for Hachette, that would have been quite a coup—unfortunately he was killed just before the moment I was going to get the final proof approved—he named his country, that's why I'm mentioning it—Burkina Faso has two different languages, two different ethnic groups, precisely to build the unity of his people, so there aren't Bobos here and Mossi there, there are Burkinabès, a national universal, that's already something. So Burkina means "integrity" or "honest," depending on the translation, in the majority language, Mossi, and Faso means "country" in Dioula, a language coming from Mali, yes—so, country of upright men. I'll tell you, this will be my last aside on Sankara: for the first time I knew Africa as a very young child, my parents worked in colonial administration, and I knew
1:19:16 before independence, during it, and after, and for the first time I saw an event in Africa—ah, but history, an event in post-independence Africa—up until then it was regimes: the heads of state who achieved independence were toppled by generals, the generals were then toppled in coups by colonels, the colonels by captains, the captains by corporals, and since it's soldiers running a country, you shouldn't be surprised by the result. And there, for the first time, I saw ministers driving Renault 5s—imagine that—whereas in Côte d'Ivoire a mere assistant, a central director, drives a Mercedes, and then has a 4x4 at home for his wife—and there I saw ministers driving Renault 5s without an entourage, traveling economy class when going to meet the heads of state of the North. Country of upright men, country of dignified men—he didn't last long. I'll close my parenthesis on Thomas Sankara—I'll continue, I have a small extension—a book has just come out that I recommend, called "Une nuit à Majunga," it's a small pamphlet of not even 80 pages,
1:20:27 written by François de Negroni, a great Africanist who's a friend, and who had the chance to know Sankara when he wasn't at all yet destined for a career as head of state, but as a young officer to whom he was giving sociology courses as part of the cooperation agreements between France and Upper Volta, at the time in Madagascar, where there was a military academy where young officers from various African countries received additional training complementary to their strictly military training—it tells, this admirable "night in Majunga," the dialogues between the author, François de Negroni, who was a cooperation worker, and this young officer whom he immediately saw was different—there you go, "Une nuit à Majunga." So when I say "humanity," you see, I come back to Hegel who gave us a program there, you see, we can discuss it, but it has the merit of being clear, and above all of giving history a meaning—that can be dangerous, giving history a meaning—I've given a meaning that suits me, and very quickly I'm in totalitarianism, that is, everyone must converge toward more or less the same thing, you see, I'm making the antithesis myself. The great advantage with Hegel is that he pits back to back those who say history has no meaning—there's a beautiful line from Shakespeare, I won't give you the whole thing here—that it's a tale told by an idiot
Neither absurdity nor totalitarianism: meaning as freedom 1:21:37 how does the line go—I'm getting ahead of myself—"life's but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"—well, say it again, it's beautiful, this line—go ahead, if it's Shakespeare it has to be declaimed—"life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing," there. So we could say that's it—it's one of the characters who says that, Shakespeare—it's not Shakespeare's own opinion, it's his opinion at that moment, through that character—but Shakespeare is all his characters, that's what's magnificent, as in the subject he is each of these characters, even the women, he is all of that. So he is the epileptic and he is the great banker—no, no, there's that on one side, the antithesis, that there is a meaning, but a meaning meaning that everything converges toward the civilized white man—there was a time when when someone told me what man is, roughly speaking, man is something that is white, adult, and rational—the madman, the child, and the savage were not part of humanity. You see, we have to be careful, the word "meaning" can be a trap—all the rivers in a catchment basin, as we say geographically, converge toward a
1:22:48 single watercourse that will gradually form a river, isn't that so, with the confluences of all these streams—there, this is how you pit both back to back by saying there's a meaning, so that seems to give apparent grounds to the danger of totalitarianism, but this meaning is freedom, and there it's the exact opposite: this meaning is to move toward the individual, toward as many free individuals as possible. So the Orientals know that only one is free, the Greeks know that some are free, the moderns—in his mind it's linked geographically to the West, but not at all historically, freedom can migrate, the proof moreover is that it migrated to America starting in the 17th century—and European humanity, and above all, it's tied to the West, we'll see afterward what's called problematic, and to its religion, Christianity, which puts an end to Antiquity—that's the historians themselves who are in consensus about this, whether you deplore it or welcome it, that's everyone's opinion. I say this because there's a neo-paganism
1:23:58 that's baring its claws right now, if you look carefully at the return of far-right ideas, well, why not, I mean there's a neo-paganism—I mean that the Christian god is totalitarian, transcendent, the one and only—I had read this, there's plenty of it, you can read it on any internet site, we must revive the pagan gods, in Brittany with a solar cult on June 21st, I'd seen that. And my wife told me that in the Nazi era she had good memories—she detested the Nazis, she's from the post-war generation, as soon as she got her baccalauréat she told me her dream was to come to Paris, smoke Gauloises, drive a 2CV, and listen to jazz—you know, I'll finish the personal anecdote quickly—she has two brothers, one is in Australia, the other in Spain, and she's in France, she's from the generation of post-war Germans, so to tell you she's beyond all suspicion, but still, it wasn't her fault—when she was little, her parents trained her to go kiss the Führer at Nuremberg, well yes—and she told me she had very fond memories of the Hitler Youth, she was just a small child, because they had campfires on the 21st of June, they celebrated the pagan gods. There you have it, where I'm going with this—the pagan gods, the tin-plating of it, we need to be careful, it's coming back into fashion. I have nothing against the pagan gods, I'm against the resentment that brings them back up in these periods of recession and crisis that we're living through,
1:25:08 where the mud rises to the surface, you see, I want to warn you. And so Hegel, on the contrary, says that Christianity—let's set aside the metaphysical, religious point of view, we're not dealing with the matter of belief, that's another very profound topic, but that's not what this is about—what is its historical function, Christianity's? It's that it abolished slavery—maybe that wasn't even its intention at the start, that's not the question—but by saying "you shall not bow before anyone," before any man, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, unto God what is God's," I mean, you only bow before God, that is, before something that's never there, so you bow before no one. And it's true that we move into the Middle Ages—it will be gradual, once again, it's not on December 31st at midnight that we passed from servitude to freedom, that's not how history works—there was serfdom, wasn't there, during the Middle Ages, but it's not the same as slavery—the Church intervened, I'm defending certain functions of the Church here, there were moments when the Church played an extraordinary civilizing and progressive role, I showed it earlier with "ora et labora," being a barbarian warrior, he builds and cultivates a bit
1:26:18 that's how we got the Champagne vineyard, well not only the wine-grower but also because it was a monk, Dom Pérignon—and above all the fact, you understand, that Christianity spread like wildfire in Rome, especially in the part of society that was enslaved, because of this discourse that promised salvation, consolation for suffering, etc., to the point that even Christianity's fiercest adversaries, like Nietzsche for example—it's a defensible view, I'm not making sharp value judgments here—but Nietzsche, for example, says that Christianity, democracy, Christianity, communism, all that, I'm lumping it together, are slave moralities, envious of exceptional beings such as we no doubt are. Thank you. So, we've covered—if you will, if there were to be a universal history, we'd have to examine in each case what freed us—but be careful, that can be the passage from chipped flint to polished stone, I'm not just talking about great civilizations—that's an enormous progress too.
The material means of freedom and the appeal for questions 1:27:28 It's not just about moving to polished stone — moving to the bow is an enormous progress, because you know, hunting with a spear like that, hunting big game up close, hunters often didn't come back, many didn't come back from the hunt, leaving their skin there. With the bow, we started to have projectile weapons — that was huge. The horse collar — you know, in the Middle Ages that caused an economic boom, when they started putting on the collar that allowed the horse to pull the plow without choking. When I say freedom, that's what I mean — it's not just having ideas of freedom in your head, no, no, there have to be the means to become free, because Rousseau saw very clearly that for freedom to begin entering into feelings and into the mind... There, I think I've been clear in the last part, but since it's more systematic, it's more debatable, so I'd like you to give me your opinion on it. I'll say one last sentence to encourage you to speak up: there are at least three reasons to intervene. To those who teach, I recommend listening to what I have to say about this.
1:28:39 There are three reasons for students to raise their hand — here's what I mean. First, we haven't understood, and we'd like an explanation on a point, the priority reason. Second, we've understood, but we'd like to know a bit more about a point that seems more interesting than the others. And third, finally, we've understood, we've thought further, but we don't agree. So you surely have one of these reasons. So, I'll hand it over to you. Thank you, Dominique. Thank you all.
