English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Bach's coffee cantata and the cafés of the Revolution 0:00 I've been caught red-handed pouring myself, if I may be allowed this rather casual, familiar vocabulary, pouring myself another round of coffee. I had seen in an old medical dictionary, of the kind you used to find in families, under the entry "coffee," everything written that you can imagine.
0:38 And at a certain point, in conclusion, it said that taken in measured doses, it is an excellent remedy against fatigue. I'm going to drink more and more coffee because I'm more and more tired. No, I'll stop pestering you with that. But still, still, you see a musician like Johann Sebastian Bach, and yes, this is what's called a detour.
1:12 You know very well that when I start making a detour, it's because we're about to get to the heart of the matter. He's not known for talking about coffee, him — he's the man of a cantata every Sunday, for Easter Sunday, for Christmas Eve, for whatever you like, an oratorio, a cantata, sacred music, commissioned by the strict Protestant consistories of Leipzig, who kept an eye on him — watch out, these are Puritans. It was absolutely forbidden to write opera.
1:44 Opera, that's prostitutes, that's homosexuals — I'm speaking to you the way people spoke at the time. That's why we have no opera by Bach at all. Even if he makes up for it a little in certain cantatas, with a dialogue sometimes between the soul and Jesus, where there's a love duet. Anyway, what does this have to do with coffee? Well, among the nearly 200 cantatas he wrote, on religious texts, we've lost an enormous number of them. We have 200 preserved, each one a masterpiece, and in each one, if it had been composed by any other musician, it would be placed among the greatest works.
2:19 He wrote them like that every Sunday, on commission. And among these cantatas, on sacred texts, for occasions corresponding to the religious calendar, he wrote two or three, I believe, secular cantatas, on secular subjects. There's the hunting cantata, and there's the coffee cantata. Yes indeed, there's a coffee cantata, by none other than the utterly serious Johann Sebastian Bach.
2:49 You can't imagine what it was like when coffee burst into households in the 17th-18th centuries. And in this cantata, we see a duet between a father who scolds his daughter — you drink coffee and you're a fallen girl — you'd think she was smoking joints. But Papa, I can't do without it. That's the subject of this cantata. You see? You thought I was joking, that coffee is a serious matter. And at the end, there's a rather fantastic final chorus, where the father drinks coffee, the grandmother drinks coffee, the grandfather drinks coffee, the cat drinks coffee.
3:27 Germany is going to the dogs. Not bad. All right, let me close this parenthesis on coffee with the fact that the revolution — the Revolution, when we say "the Revolution" plain and simple, with a capital R, without specifying — if it's the Cuban revolution, the Revolution, we know it means 1789, the French Revolution — it was prepared in what textbooks call the salons and the cafés. I'm telling you all this because I have a lot of thanks to express, so many that I won't give them all — I won't waste your time — but there are a few I wouldn't want to miss.
4:20 First of all, to Adrien Ribot, who's in front of me filming — he came from Aubervilliers by bike to come film me in Cachan, all across the Île-de-France, north to south. No, honestly, and then I complain about I don't know what — I'm lucky after all. And what's more, I'm always surprised by the quality of these edits. So a big thank you — thanks to Adrien, you'll have noticed we've resumed a regular rhythm.
5:00 Our series of videos — here's where we are, I'll tell you clearly, tonight we're going back to the format of answering questions, because there are so many backlogged questions that it's never wasted time to do a Q&A session to catch up a bit. And especially since I've just received a few, one of which — I'll give the pseudonym, it's Alias — I respect their anonymity.
Hegel in 1805: the pin factory 5:34 Alias would like me to go back over this early text of Hegel's, an excerpt from First Philosophy of Spirit — that's the title, published by Presses Universitaires de France, in the Épiméthée collection — a work written in 1805, during the Jena period, the most fruitful period of Hegel's life at that time, which was going to lead in 1807 to the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, no less — but asks me to go back over this passage, an excerpt from this text "First Philosophy of Spirit," because when I read excerpts from this work without saying it's by Hegel, people tell me "but that's Marx."
6:19 And Alias tells me, "I sense something important in what he says about money, could you go back over it and clarify?" Because it's said in Hegelian terms and rather abstractly. After all, I'll read you a very short excerpt, you'll see. He even talks about what happens in a factory — these are the first, the earliest stirrings of the industrial revolution — a factory where pins are made, that's the example he uses. Isn't it?
6:49 "In an English manufactory, Hegel, 1805, First Philosophy of Spirit, Presses Universitaires de France — yes, I've had the book a long time, it's falling apart a bit, but don't worry, I keep it carefully in an envelope. In an English manufactory, 18 men work at making pins. Each has a particular task and only that task. A single worker could perhaps not produce 20 pins, nor even a single one."
7:24 "These 18 distinct operations, distributed among 10 workers, yield a production of 4,000 pins a day. Now, for this work, these 10 men, had they worked in a team of 18, would produce 48,000 in a day. But the decrease in the value of labor" — but listen, I'm not saying who wrote this, people tell me it's Marx — "the decrease in the value of labor is directly related to the increase in the volume of objects produced."
7:54 "Labor becomes all the more absolutely dead. It becomes the labor of a machine. The skill of the individual worker becomes all the more infinitely limited, and the consciousness of the factory worker is degraded to the lowest degree of stupefaction." There you have the whole critique that Marx makes of the merciless exploitation, of the greatest gulag of modern times, that is, of the 19th-century English factory. If you'll allow me.
8:28 But yes, yes, yes, your child, your kid who's 9 years old, in this context of the English factory, is already slaving away in the factory near the furnace in the steelworks, near the molten steel. Already, adults don't live to old age, you know, under those working conditions. Imagine the kids — but the bosses, especially the Quakers, the religious ones at the time, would say, yes, but meanwhile the children avoid being hooligans in the streets. There's always a good reason, a human right, a children's right, but...
9:02 All right, I won't get carried away because it's going to upset me. So let me repeat this passage — we haven't gotten to money yet, I'm getting there — the skill, the skill. "The skill of the worker becomes all the more infinitely limited, and the consciousness of the factory worker is degraded to the lowest degree of stupefaction. And the connection of a single kind of labor with the whole infinite mass of needs becomes altogether impossible to see, and turns into a blind dependence, such that often a distant operation suddenly disturbs and renders superfluous and unusable the labor of a whole class of men who, through it, satisfied their needs."
9:42 Striking — you'd think he was illustrating the way England — look it up, every historian knows it — ruined the Indian textile industry in the 19th century, by producing the cotton cloth that at the time was so important in Indian production that a piece of cotton cloth was called "an Indienne"; a German woman going into a shop that sold fabric by the meter would say, give me 4 meters of Indienne — it was ruined by Manchester.
Money, existing material concept 10:17 Isn't that so? All right, that's not our subject — it's just to say we're very close to Marx here. And now I get to it. Careful, this is a passage I'm going to read you that's all the more important because it ends with an allusion to an animal metaphor, the wild beast, which inspired Michel Clouscard's title that you know — you see, I'm getting to the end of the volume, it's the second-to-last page.
10:49 "These varied labors aimed at the satisfaction of needs taken as things must likewise realize their concept, their abstraction" — to realize, that is, as the word itself says, isn't it — it has to stop being concepts and enter into the existent, into the real, right? — "their universal concept" — if that seems a bit complicated to you, don't worry, what follows explains what precedes — "their universal concept must likewise be a thing like themselves."
11:23 In other words, Hegel sees, in a way that Marx will brilliantly develop in his theory of value, that among things as different in terms of use as a pencil — I'm just saying anything — a pencil, two kilos of beef, a railway wheel, you see — there's something common circulating through all of that, which makes them, and this is the first sentence of Capital, "an immense accumulation of commodities."
11:53 Aristotle, who was the first to raise questions belonging to what today we call political economy, had asked himself the question — but he says, this is strange, how can I exchange a bed for three pigs? That could happen at the time, it's not barter. He says, it's not possible, because Aristotle, being a philosopher of substance, sees no relation whatsoever between pigs and a bed — so it took 2,500 years for Marx to show what all these things have in common.
12:24 It's that all these commodities are the product of labor and presuppose a labor-time that allows all of them to be measured and compared. Now, this is well known in Marx, it's classic — but do we know that it's found under the pen of the young Hegel in 1805? I'll pick up again and won't stop: "their universal concept, of all these things, must likewise be a thing like themselves."
12:56 You can feel money coming — "a thing like themselves" — this isn't a notion or a concept or an idea, you have a banknote in your pocket, it's a thing, but a thing which, as a universal, represents them all. "Money" — and this is underlined, in italics, in the text — "money is this existing material concept, this is no longer in my head, it's no longer a concept in my head, money is this existing material concept, the form of unity, or again" — listen carefully, this is the most philosophically important part — "the possibility of all the things of need."
13:38 I'll come back to this fragment of the sentence and you'll see where it leads us, but for now let me finish this admirable paragraph: "Need and labor, elevated to this universality, thus form, for themselves, in a great people" — this was the beginning of the industrial revolution — "an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that moves within itself of a dead reality, a life which, in its movement, stirs in a blind and elemental manner" — this is capitalist civil society — "and which, like a wild animal" — there's our wild beast — "needs to be continually tamed and mastered with severity."
14:26 Hegel is not, mind you, a fascist liberal. So I come back to this fragment of a sentence, "money is the possibility of all the things of need," and there we open the doors of an immense philosophical gateway, and you understand why money drives people mad. You know, the discussions that matter most in life — love, religion, money, health — you know, as if all that could be separated.
The possible, the real, the necessary, and indeterminate desire 15:06 The health of those who don't have a penny — you know, health is expensive. The possibility of — why do I insist on this passage, "of all the things of need"? Because there's the word "possible" in it. I'm telling you this for those who like to work on precise things. In philosophy, in general logic, there's what are called the postulates of modality.
15:40 You can forget that. What you shouldn't forget, though, is what the three stages of this postulate are. It's when, broadly speaking, you want to try to anticipate the future. There's the possible, in order, the real, and the necessary. A piece of knowledge — that's already something — when it makes a statement that avoids anything impossible, for example, a contradiction. In mathematics you can already throw that in the trash, just imagine.
16:10 Mathematics is A or not-A. There's nothing in between — "You're my friend, I'll give you a special price." No, it's A or not-A. It's a piano or it's not a piano — well, so to speak. But that's the possible. As long as there's no contradiction, at least what I'm saying might not correspond to anything real yet. But there's no contradiction. I can say a castle with 200 million rooms. It doesn't exist. But there's nothing contradictory in that notion.
16:41 On the other hand, if I say a castle that occupies no space at all, that starts to get strange. There you go. So, the statement has to be possible. Then, a reality has to correspond to it. So we move from the possible to the real. But science needs more than that. It doesn't want just any real, like that — oh look, it's nice out; oh look, it's raining. No. It wants laws that allow us to predict all that. Just as, since Antiquity, we've already known how to predict eclipses.
17:11 Now, at the level of today's astronomy or astrophysics, we can predict the eclipses that will happen in a million years, and those that occurred over the last three million years. It's extraordinary. This powerful capacity for anticipation means that there is necessity in nature. The opposite of chance, if you will. There is necessity. I haven't eliminated chance — I'm saying there is necessity. The possible, the real, the necessary. We're at the possible, at the first stage. Money is the possibility of all the things of need.
17:41 What does that mean, then? Now I'm going to get concrete, because I'm being a bit demanding tonight. I just asked you for an effort of abstraction. Let's rest on a concrete case. You wouldn't have understood this concrete case if I hadn't first trained your minds a bit to abstract, with my three stages of modality — namely: I've just been paid. That's an impersonal "I."
18:13 But still, each of you knows this rather happy moment. You've just received your pay. There you come back from the cash machine, you've withdrawn some money. You've been waiting for it for days because it was the end of the month. You all know that. Ah, it feels good. I can finally... What? Precisely — you're beginning to understand possibility, but not yet reality. I don't yet know what I'm going to do. This money puts me before all the possibilities I could acquire, all the possible acquisitions I can make, with this given sum.
18:54 But I don't yet know which ones. So I am in my undetermined desire. I am at the heart of anthropology. This is not thirst. That, we share with the animal, when we're thirsty. You know that you die of thirst faster than of hunger when you have neither one nor the other, when you have neither food, nor drink, nor water. It's especially the lack of water, isn't it, that is the most fatal.
19:24 That, we share with the animal — it's a determinate need. That means the object of this need is clear, it's water. When the water is there, the need is over. Good. It feels good when you're thirsty to drink. The second gulp is less good than the first, you know that. The third is less good than the second. We get bored rather quickly with this satisfaction of needs. Fortunately there are thousands of years of history to add frills to need, isn't there?
19:54 All right, I'm serious. I'd like the union leaders to reflect on the example I'm about to give. When prehistoric men began to paint on cave walls, that added nothing to the satisfaction of needs. It's not that a wonderfully rendered drawing of a bison — I'm thinking of Lascaux, of course, of Altamira in Spain, or of Chauvet more recently. It's extraordinary animal painting. Imagine the means they had.
20:24 You couldn't buy paintbrushes at the shop next door back then. Well. But it's not the image of a bison that makes me eat bison meat — it was more likely aurochs in Europe, wasn't it? So it serves no purpose at the level of animal, natural need, cave painting. What does that mean? And why am I bringing up union leaders?
20:54 Because when the bosses tell them, "listen, you have the bare minimum for survival, consider yourselves lucky, that's already something" — but how? The bare minimum for survival — I just said that had already been surpassed back in prehistory. Are we supposed to consider ourselves happy in 2025, to have the good fortune of receiving from capital the bare minimum for survival? But that's sordid. There, that's a little reminder in passing to say "possibility of all the things of need." But possibility — for now, I'm not disappointed by the object.
Money makes it possible to defer self-knowledge 21:31 For the good reason that it isn't determined yet. I don't know whether I'm going to have a good meal, show off, invite friends, buy — pay for the woman I love a ticket to take her to the place she dreams of. Provided she dreams of it with me, not with someone else. And so you see the infinity of possibilities. I could also spend 1,000 euros on chewing gum at one cent apiece, I'm just saying.
22:03 I don't recommend it, for your teeth and all that. Where I want to come back to is this: what is magical about it — but also, you know, there's such a thing as black magic, there's a negative side, I also have a warning to give about money — is that, since the sum I have at my disposal does not specify the determinate satisfaction I'm going to make with it at the first expense — a ticket, flowers, a meal, a tailored suit, whatever you like — since money doesn't express that, and it's not its function to express the particularity of this or that determinate need.
23:03 In that case — and here I come to something I haven't said yet. I told you this is a major philosophical stake. So, thanks to money, I can postpone until later what? The principal imperative of philosophy, which Plato recalls in the Apology of Socrates, and which was inscribed on the pediment of the temple at Delphi, the most sacred place in Greece — when people came to consult the oracle, there was written at the entrance of the temple, as you know, Gnothi seauton — Know thyself.
23:38 I don't need, I don't need to know if I... what desire is the most important, the priority one to satisfy. I have money, all right? Right now I'm making myself a meal, afterwards I'll take a little trip, you see? That's what's magical and dangerous about money, it's that it lets me put off self-knowledge until later. What should I be doing with it? I'm not talking about those who have urgent needs or who are rushing to bring their dying mother the medicine that will save her, I'm not talking about that.
24:13 I'm talking about—you saw my example—the average guy who gets his pension, his pay, his salary, his dividends, if he's... an order from the employers and so on. It's that money lets me defer, put off until later, defer, postpone self-knowledge, the effort to know oneself which is the whole program of philosophy.
24:50 We didn't see that one coming, starting from money. There it is. That's the answer I give to Alias, who said this passage seemed obscure to him. Indeed, it's not obvious. But you understand the metaphor of the wild beast, don't you? If I disregard the importance of knowing oneself and of knowing what would be the best use, the best way of realizing this possibility, which for now is only a possibility with no realization at all.
Bourgeois civil society, a wild beast to be tamed 25:34 If I disregard it, I fall into the terrible world of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft. I say it in German not because I'm a Heideggerian, don't worry about that, but because there's almost a play on words there. Bürger means bourgeois in German. But not in the sense in which a man of the left criticizes the bourgeois. It always looks good to criticize the bourgeoisie, the bobos, etc. As if I were on the left because I criticize the bourgeoisie. But in German that can lead to misreadings.
26:11 Bürger also means the inhabitant of the town, of the city, a Berliner. Bürger, in German, means a citizen of Berlin. Quite simply, an inhabitant of the city of Berlin. And where do you come from? Frankreich, I come from France. Ah, you're a French citizen. But here it's more extensive than "bourgeois." It doesn't matter whether the guy is a worker or a boss, he's a citizen of such a city, of such a country.
26:44 The word is broader, so you can be a Freiburger, a citizen of Freiburg. Why do I insist? Why? Because he compares bourgeois civil society to a wild beast, so watch out, because that's almost frightening. That's like a thriller.
27:14 Need and labor raised to this universality—that all commodities, as I told you earlier, a kilo of beef, I mean, a beautiful dress, what circulates through all of that, what is universal in all commodities, is the fact that it crystallizes, that's the term Marx uses, labor time, right? Production time. Raised to this universality, they thus form for themselves, in a great people, an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that moves within itself as a dead reality—it's starting to get worrying—a life which, in its movement, agitates itself blindly, you see, blindly, one could say, let's gather the members of government, the members of parliament, and democratically decide, look, here's the budget we have, what would be the priority?
28:13 We're going to vote. No, wait, that's a dream. I'd love for it to be like that. But if we did that, capital would say, but you're Bolsheviks, this is dictatorship, there mustn't be a single purpose, everyone has whatever purpose they want, the opposite is totalitarian. You see everything we can see starting from the study of money at the heart of bourgeois civil society. All right, I'll go back: need and labor raised to this universality thus form for themselves, in a great people, an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that moves within itself as a dead reality, a life which in its movement agitates itself in a blind and elementary manner and which, like a wild animal, needs to be continually tamed and kept under strict control.
29:08 And yes, there are those who say "Look, the most capitalist country is China." Oh really? I thought it was run by the Communist Party. Yes, but it's sold out. Oh really? When there's overheating in the construction industry—I'm talking about current events—an overheating that in economic terms means money is circulating a bit too easily, the Chinese executive intervenes, it tames the wild beast with severity, even if it means sending two or three bosses who made enormous deals and then laid off all their staff while sending the money somewhere to tax havens, to prison.
29:50 No, no. There's state intervention in a democratic regime. Civil society isn't left to its own devices. This civil society which ended up putting the Nazi scum in power, remember, in the 1930s in Germany. Thank you very much anyway, Alias, for this question about money. Let me sum up the essential point in case anyone got confused.
30:21 What makes the strength, the magic of money, and what drives some people crazy, and what concerns everyone at this level, is that it embodies the possibility—understood as unrealized—of all the things of need. So it lets me satisfy either this or that, for an equal amount. So I don't have to know whether the important thing is this or that.
30:52 I disregard it and I move from one to the other. And that's how the relationship to money and to this almost metaphysical dimension, right, of a kind of self-mutilation somewhere. I fight for people to have money. I'm not making some religious speech cursing money.
A question on Clouscard, Gastaud, and the dialectic of nature 31:24 No, no, no. I fight for people to have it. Right? But not in a way that's, as we said, blind and elementary. There. On that note, I'm going to move on to questions of a completely different order, since—while I get my sources back—here they are. I have two questions revolving around what we might call ecological issues, and more precisely the famous dialectics of nature.
32:03 Right? As I've often talked about this, as I've often answered questions revolving around this issue—is there or is there not a nature—there are passages I'll skip because I've repeated them often; on the other hand, I'll dwell on others that are almost unprecedented, especially through this long question for which I thank our dear friend and comrade Tesseron, T-E-S-E-R-O-N, if I may greet him here because of his faithfulness, because of his humility—he keeps saying it's complicated, it's difficult, the texts, that he doesn't have the training for...
32:42 He keeps—I won't say self-deprecating because it's not humiliation, he grows, doesn't he?—by having this thirst for knowledge and this impatience with the difficulties of what Hegel calls the "Anstrengung des Begriffs," the strenuous effort of the concept. I'm sure our friend-comrade Tesseron—our comrade-friend, as I'll put it—understands very well what's meant when Hegel speaks of...
33:14 the strenuous effort of the concept. So here's what he tells me. Hello, Mr. Pagani, two questions, perhaps they're the same question twice? In the introduction to L'Être et le code, Michel Clouscard, following Hegel, denies any dialectics of nature. There, it's clear, there is no dialectics of nature. That's Clouscard. Georges Gastaud, in Lumière commune—a monument, I couldn't recommend it enough, published by Delga, in eight volumes.
33:47 Georges Gastaud, in Lumière commune, following Engels, makes a great deal of it, since this dialectics constitutes the ontological basis of Marxism. What do you think? Page 148 of volume 4 of Lumière commune, Georges Gastaud gives his view of the Hegelian philosophy of History. It doesn't seem to me—as he's humble, he's not sure—it doesn't seem to me to correspond to yours, which appears to me to be rather a philosophy of the coming to consciousness of freedom in History, passing, among other things, through the sublation and even the victory, implicitly, of freedom over natural determinisms.
34:37 I can die in peace, there are people listening after all. You see, that pleases me somehow, because it's someone who says "it's complicated, I don't understand anything," but if everyone made a quarter of the philosophical effort he's just made, that would be quite something, that would be great progress. In this sense, the Hegelian philosophy of History has no reason to culminate in some Prussian state. So I'll skip this, because there were people at the time, you understand, in the bourgeoisie, in the reaction, on the right, broadly speaking, on the theoretical, intellectual, ideological right—especially, Marx would say, because talking about Hegel is awkward, since you end up talking about Marx, that's what people don't like about Hegel, it has nothing to do with what Hegel actually says—the simple fact that Marx said he was by far the greatest bourgeois thinker he'd ever encountered, to the point of saying that compared to him the others are—I dare not say it, but it's said in five letters—in a letter, regarding Hegel, the French theorists,
35:50 well, are—what you're thinking, what you imagine—so, those people, in order to blacken Hegel and drag him to the right, say that he was the official philosopher of the Prussian administrative monarchy. I won't go back over that; if you're interested, I won't say there's nothing to it at all, but these are settled matters—read an old classic of Hegel studies called Hegel et l'État by Eric Weil, excuse me, I pronounce it in German, Weil, W-E-I-L, Eric Weil, where he shows very well that none of that corresponds at all to Hegel's text; on the contrary, Hegel was hunted by the Prussian police, watched by informants in his classes—not to see whether he was taking advantage of his teaching to spread French ideas, since at the time "French ideas" meant, rather, the storming of the Bastille, right, than a hymn to the Prussian state. Well then, in this sense, and here our friend, comrade Tesseron sees very clearly
37:00 the misreading: the Hegelian philosophy of history would have no reason to culminate in some Prussian, Fukuyama-esque state—you know, that Japanese man who said, at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall, "this is the proof," right, another dead end, including Hegel, that Hegel was right to say that the bourgeoisie, bourgeois civil society, is the ultimate stage of all universal history and that now history is over and there will be nothing more—you understand, with everything that's happened since, before the invasion of Iraq, before the...
37:30 Well, in short, the war in Ukraine, etc. Again, what do you think? I want to finish by thanking you for the hours you've helped me save by listening to you. At the beginning of this one you say that Clouscard is the greatest Marxist thinker of the postwar period. How frustrating that is—you'll tell me why he says that's frustrating. I, who struggle to read L'Être et le code—and here I admire, as with Tesseron—he's saying that for him, at times, it sounds like Chinese.
38:10 And so, I tell him he's the greatest Marxist thinker. But if I don't understand it, that means I'm missing out on the greatest Marxist thinker. No, don't worry. I can see right away that our friend Tesseron understands the essential point. Let me reassure him on this: it's perhaps not me who holds the essential truth. I'm certain I'm not alone in that. Of course. Unfortunately, Clouscard's thought is very difficult to access, despite the still-scarce clarifications when compared to the content available concerning the works of Marx and Hegel.
38:43 There's much more of it than on Clouscard. Brought by Christian Riochet, Aymeric Monville, the Delga editions via the Ateliers de la Praxis, the contributors of... I don't know, these are sources you know, of course. It's all the more a shame for those... Sorry, I think few people have access to the full theoretical richness of Clouscard. It's all the more a shame for those who hold political convictions and are trying to defend communism. Because I'm convinced, as you are, that Clouscard is very important.
39:15 Some prophetic passages in his writings are good evidence of that. Perhaps the most striking, if anyone was ever a prophet—there was Rousseau, but well, when Rousseau says in the 1760s that we're approaching a state of crisis and a century of revolution, just a stone's throw from the storming of the Bastille, that's worth its weight in rebellion. Clouscard, in the '70s, when he writes Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, already anticipates what's happening right before your eyes.
39:46 How many governments in Europe would not be in power if it weren't for the support of neo-Nazis? Think of Austria, think of Italy, where it's someone from the far right who heads the Italian government. Think of the Scandinavian countries, think of what Germany is becoming, which dreams of nothing but revenge for Stalingrad now. Some people dream of that, really—one should go see.
What does the concept of nature add to that of matter? 40:17 So, don't worry, some prophetic passages in his writings are good evidence that he has a lot to say. You see, this long question—I won't answer the substance, the dialectics of nature—well, I won't repeat what I've already answered, but I'll be very clear, right?
40:48 No, I'm not one of those—and here I give credit to those they name, Gastaud or others—who say that dialectics is not confined solely to the world of history and man, that there is already a dialectics independent of man and history, right? So, they say "nature," I don't; I say a dialectics of matter. I've often asked those who go on about the dialectics of nature—I've told them, I'm well aware there's a dialectics of matter, a mountain is material, after all, however natural it may be.
41:30 But what is the concept of nature? That's my question. It's quite simple. What's strange is that for this question, as simple and short as it is—don't worry, I'll formulate it—I still have no answer. And it's been years; I've asked people who are cultured, intelligent, and sharp. Could there be an ideological blockage in the sense Marx gives to ideology, in the sense Freud gives to the unconscious, in the sense Hegel gives to the negative?
42:07 So here's my question. What does the concept of nature add to that of matter? Here's what I'm starting to answer clearly for our friend here, to reassure him. I'm not one of those whom Georges Gastaud rightly criticizes in Lumière commune or in other publications, for that matter.
42:37 Likewise, I give credit to Engels when he speaks of a dialectics that is not confined and limited solely to the anthropological sphere, that is, to history, to man and his historical movement. Except that this dialectics, which is independent of man—let's not be idealists—I don't call it the dialectics of nature. We're in philosophy.
43:08 The way we speak and the words we choose—we're walking on eggshells. We have to be careful. I speak of the dialectics of matter. So let's take a closer look. A hammer is not a meteorite. Nothing to do with each other. Yes—both are material. A hammer, though made by man, with a form that implies thought—you know the famous passage where Marx says what immediately distinguishes the most clumsy architect from the most skillful bee is that the architect has the house in his head before producing it in reality.
43:50 That's called thought—having something in one's head before even producing it in reality. A hammer, a meteorite: both are material. So let's be rigorous, let's agree on how we speak. Here's a proposal I'm making to you: could we not agree that there is a large set that includes all of that—what I call nature, man, history—there is a large set called matter,
44:22 within which I make a partition, as we say in mathematics, into two subsets: a matter that owes nothing to man, which we can now call natural matter, and a matter, right, which would never have come about without human activity, that is, production. Starting with the first chipped pebbles.
44:57 So why? The animal—that is, what's most natural—the animal too, you know, there are monkeys that take a stone and crack a nut. Yes, bravo, good to know. There are even more complex things. I can add fuel to your fire. There are birds—we say a birdbrain, you've heard that. There's nothing much in there. "Featherbrain," as we say, with a touch of sexism, as if bird-brains were being lumped in with birdbrains, there's nothing there. Well, there are birds that take a pin—a pin, see my slip—a thorn with their beak.
45:32 A pin is natural, historical, spiritual, artificial, historical, anthropological. A thorn is not. They take a thorn, they stick it into a hole where there's a larva, and they pull. You know, like pulling out a little sausage on a stick at a cocktail party. That's complicated, isn't it? Yes. A monkey that takes two reeds and fits them together like this to reach a fruit it can't grab with a stick that's too short—say, that's complicated.
The tool and the instrument according to Tran Duc Thao 46:08 Yes. So what do I mean? That it's man's privilege? It's that the tool is more than the instrument. The tool in man is more than the instrument which, undeniably, the animal also has access to. What's the difference? Here I refer you to the person who best theorized this difference, a great Marxist, alas not widely enough disseminated—the opposite, you'd be surprised, since from the 1970s onward the powerful ideological counter-revolution, right, which was first called structuralism, then afterwards—let's not even talk about it, because with the entropy, well, there were still, there were some solid people in it, even if it was ideologically insidious, but then there came the New Philosophers, you see what follows, the BHLs and company.
47:05 No, seriously, this philosopher, whom everyone has done their best to forget, is a Vietnamese man, Tran Duc Thao, who published—I'll give you the reference, at Éditions Sociales, if you can find it, I haven't checked recently, I check often, but it's been a while since I looked—the title is Recherches sur l'origine de la conscience et du langage, where he shows—now let's be serious—what we were missing for the difference between the animal instrument and the human tool: what characterizes the human tool from prehistory onward, as I've verified in the Sahara where you find piles of arrowheads, is that the tool has what he calls a typical form, that is, a type, which implies, as Marx says so well, having something in one's head—there's a model in the head—when there's a gust of wind in the Sahara, you suddenly see dunes shifting and you see things appear that had been hidden for perhaps thousands of years, right, under the sand, and you see there,
48:15 because the Sahara was heavily populated at a time when it was much greener than today—I'll take this opportunity to wage my battle, not against ecology (what do I know about ecology, I'm not a scientist), but against ecologism, against the discourse of people who are just as unscientific as I am, or even the discourse of some who have a scientific training, sometimes even a solid one—but scientific training has never prevented ideological blindness.
48:45 On subjects that are their specialty, yes, a scientist, whatever their ideology, knows better than I do, right? The laws governing the spin of the electron. But on the other hand, I mean, one of the greatest physicists of the entire modern world—he's dead now—I'm thinking of Werner Heisenberg, the one who contributed most powerfully to that bible of contemporary physics, quantum theory, and who created what's called the uncertainty relations, according to which one cannot know both the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time—I won't dwell on it, not only because it's not my field, but especially because it's not our subject—who is one of the greatest physicists we've ever seen.
49:39 And at the cutting edge, really—what was at the cutting edge of physics at the start of the 20th century? From the very beginning of the 20th century it was Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory in the so-called Copenhagen school. He had sympathies for the Nazi regime. Immense intelligence—even the kind of intelligence at work in the so-called hard sciences—absolutely does not guarantee that my understanding—that's what intelligence is, intellectus in Latin, Verstand in German—
50:11 You'll see why I use several languages. Because German clearly distinguishes Verstand, understanding, and Vernunft, reason. We have to go beyond understanding. Understanding is ideal in the sciences, in the hard sciences in particular, for understanding the laws that govern objects, not the laws that govern subjects such as you and I. You see how we come back to things through this fine question from our friend Cesserons on the dialectic of nature.
50:45 Blindness is not blindness of the eyes, it wasn't that Heisenberg's eyes were suffering. It's that in his unconscious, yes, the Jews, the communists, all that—if Chancellor Hitler could rid us of them—he wasn't a bastard, he wasn't the Nazi who denounced people, no, nor was he a torturer. He had sympathies for the regime, you see. So I come back to Tran Duc Thao, I don't know, whether I'm moved just thinking about it, and when I was in Niger, I saw in the desert like that, collections of arrowheads surfacing which all exactly, you'd say they'd been designed on the same model, the same pattern, as we'd say today.
51:29 You see, there was one who gave the model and afterward, they manufacture. That means there's a thought inside it, it has to penetrate the animal's body with the force of the bowstring, to the point of cracking bones as it passes. All that prior thought is needed to produce, not just the object I have at hand like the monkey who takes the pebble that's lying there to crack a nut, which is already...
The social production of existence: man is not a species 52:01 An earthworm doesn't know how to do that. No, no, that's remarkable. But we are as far from the tool, aren't we, as the earthworm is from the monkey. There you have it. So there is a dialectic of matter, whether that matter be natural or whether that matter be historical, that is, presupposing a world produced by man—I'm making reminders. The text of which I often say it contains the most Marx in the fewest lines, the famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the original title of Capital, or rather originally—that is, Capital was supposed to be called, originally have as its title, Critique of Political Economy, but Marx never stopped, up to his last breath, revising his thought, never satisfied, never convinced that's it, that he'd covered the whole question.
53:00 He died in harness, our Marx, and progressed each time. So, in this preface, it begins with that most famous sentence: in the social production of their existence, men enter into necessary relations, independent of their will, relations of production—I'll suspend the quotation here to go back, because we slide over it, it's so enormous that we slide over the stakes in "the social production of their existence."
53:34 Ah, what do we learn? That man's existence is not content with biology, no, it's a production—there's no man before production through history and technology, there's no man, there's an animal. I'm not saying there's nothing, I'm not an idealist, I'm not saying it fell from the sky, all right? But as long as it's this animal that doesn't produce its existence, but is content, like the badger who is born equipped with claws to dig a burrow, and who its whole life will shelter in that burrow, which is why you rarely see badgers except at night.
54:12 or like the polar bear who is born white, which is why in the Antarctic spotting it is a bit complicated—luckily it's not in the Amazon, it wouldn't last 24 hours, it would be spotted like a sore thumb, to make a bad pun. The animal has its specific equipment, each species specific, and the epithet comes from species. But man is not a species, for he digs burrows and tunnels.
54:45 If you knew the work the tunnel-borers are doing in China, things that even the pharaohs—well, the engineers in that pharaoh's service—never dared imagine. Man digs underground passages like the badger, and much more powerfully. He can live in Greenland, he can live in the Amazon jungle. He is not a species determined by a determined biotope.
55:16 We always come back to the same things. He doesn't adapt like the animal to a certain biotope, at the risk of dying if that biotope is suddenly disrupted by nature, a natural catastrophe, or by irresponsible human activity. Well yes, I'm ecological when needed. I'm anti-ecologist when I'm not naturalist. But then, but then, that means man is not specific, he is general.
55:52 I'm playing on the terms species and genus, dear to Darwin, aren't I? We change genus, we take off from the zoological sphere and superimpose an anthropological sphere onto it. I didn't say we take off in the sense that we have nothing more to do with the animal. Me, until the end of my life, I'll have to eat to live. That owes nothing either to history, nor to culture, nor to technology, nor to production. But that doesn't define man, because a fly too has to eat to live.
56:23 An earthworm has to eat to live. That in no way defines what makes man specific. There's no point recalling these things when it's to reduce anthropology to something largely inferior to man. It's not a value judgment—inferior chronologically, an earlier stage of evolution, if you prefer. We come back to precise things with this immense question about the dialectic of nature. So you see, we learn in this opening line of the 1859 preface, "in the social production of their existence."
57:03 Ah well, wait, wait, let's dig further. So we've just learned—and it's huge—that our existence as human beings owes nothing either to biology. I mean, it isn't reducible to the biological contribution. Careful, I'll be extremely clear. Without nature, nothing I'm talking about would exist. Starting with me, with man, etc. But that's not why man is reducible to something natural.
57:33 You're beginning to understand the nuance. I will remain an animal until the end of my life, every time I need to eat to live, that is, until my last breath, or to breathe. Simply, that is natural. There, I am an animal. But if there were only that, I don't see what would distinguish me from any animal species. On the other hand, when I build pile-dwellings in prehistory—it's complicated, you know, these aren't caves, it's more developed than caves—pile-dwellings on marshes, it's complicated.
58:03 there, one can take refuge against predators or hostile tribes, there, on marshes, that's how it is—these gave rise to cities like Venice, or Vannes, or Amsterdam. I seem to be joking, no, no, I'm serious. Vannes, founded by the Veneti, yes, Venetia is the region where Venice is, in Italy, Vannes in Brittany, where we find this same need to take refuge in a setting that is neither land nor water but a mixture of the two, but at least such that it would be hard to find us there, wouldn't it?
58:43 Afterward, that gives you what you know, particularly in Venice and in Vannes, which is a very beautiful city. So there, dialectic of matter, yes, but I mean, in the thousands of pages devoted by Marx to his own work of theoretical elaboration, find me how many pages linger on the dialectic of nature, show them to me, I don't know them, God knows I've hunted down everything one can know about Marx, I'm not the only one, but still, find me the pages that say yes, yes, in the galaxies, carbon—we don't concern ourselves with what isn't our domain, let's leave nature to the physicists.
59:33 On the other hand, where Georges Gastaud is right is that the physicist must be corrected when he steps outside his scientific competence and when he takes up everyday language, which is much more treacherous—we're revising things here. When I say y equals f of x, I'm in mathematics. Y is a function of x, y depends on x, y is determined by x—all that means the same thing, y equals f of x.
1:00:04 They took precautions since antiquity, mathematicians did, they distrust everyday language, that's where I was. The one I'm using with you right now, with everyday words like tablet, man, nature, animal—these are everyday words. But these aren't words that have the univocity and precision of the terms adopted by mathematicians, which aren't words but algorithms, mathemes if you prefer. f, plain and simple, equals, isn't that so?
1:00:35 The word "equal" is a word, but the sign that shows identity, which lets you say if A equals B, then B equals A—that's a matheme. So our comrade Gastaud is right to come and correct the physicist who would come and exploit his prestige, I don't know, of Nobel Prize winner, etc., to suddenly assert things that go beyond or fall short of, without even coming from his own competence.
1:01:06 And to bring out for us, in fact, what is irreducibly and unconsciously religious wherever nature is valorized while man is demonized. That is indeed the dominant contemporary idea, it seems to me, well, in that little confined world called the West, you know that's not my own name for it. But among us, in the West, what is the dominant discourse—there was a great battle over pesticides, wasn't there?
1:01:40 It's about showing that what man does is bad, what nature does is good. I'm caricaturing, I'm caricaturing. You understand very well what I mean. What's serious, and I'll finish there on this question, is that we don't pay attention to what words say. Wrongly, you're right, but what they say—if we speak in the place of words, who's going to speak, frankly? Where do I want to come back to? Nature, what's the root?
Nature and birth: feral children 1:02:11 N-A-T. You have it in "nativity," in "native land," yes or no? How do you say Christmas? Nativity in Italian, natale. Nature is what my natural part is—it's the part I have at birth. Yes. At birth, feral children are not men. You know, this has been studied, the Mowglis, the few descendants of human beings—it's not that it happened for particular reasons, it's not something that only happens in India, there are cases in Poland, there have been bear-children, pig-children, there's been every kind you can imagine, and there have been studies on this—I refer you to the book Les enfants sauvages [Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature] by Lucien Malson, in the 10-18 collection, which produced a fine dossier on this subject.
1:03:12 We find that we've never been able to teach them to speak, that they walked on all fours. A being like that, we don't call him a man. You see, we come back to important things. So there you have it. Without nature, we would not have existence, but if we take only nature into account, I exist, but not as man, not as a human being.
1:03:42 There you have it. So, man—it's not that on December 31st at midnight of some year we suddenly passed. We went from animal to man with thought. No, it's not like that. It is at every instant that I'm talking to you about the efforts, the immense projects being undertaken within humanity. I speak of projects in the positive sense. I come back to China, don't I? The twelve labors of Hercules, aren't they?
1:04:12 What's common to all that? It's the fact that it develops a space proper to man and which is not reducible to functions of merely wanting to eat, drink, sleep. Come on, I'll finish on that. Every time in Africa I saw lions, and I saw them often, they were sleeping. Sleeping. Let us leave man the unimaginable pretension of wanting to do a little better in this life than drink, eat, sleep, and reproduce a bit more.
1:04:52 Read the immense, magnificent bouquet of the literature of love, simply, and you'll see that there is indeed something else besides drinking, eating, sleeping, reproducing. Thank you, dear friend Testeron, bravo for your efforts. One small reproach: you underestimate yourself when you say Hegel's texts are difficult. You're right, Clouscard's too. You know more—allow me to say so, I'm not here to evaluate you in any capacity, but still, I note that you know more, in the way you formulate your question, than many of those who claim to be professional philosophers.
An accusation of Nazism and Nazi naturalism 1:05:33 I'm playing on the word on purpose. There you go. Well, we'll continue, if you like, in the ecological sphere. So, let's change tone a bit, you'll see. So, listen, I'll refrain from giving his name and even his pseudonym, because the question I'm going to read you is so damning that I hate, you see, harming physical persons.
1:06:05 I fight against discourses against moral persons—capitalism, for me—but not against physical persons. Now he says this: Mr. Pagani is still just as off the mark on ecology. Why not. In the line of the lamentable Luc Ferry—I don't know what he's alluding to, Luc Ferry is a man of the right, he doesn't hide it. But lamentable? If most of those who are eco-conscious had a tenth of Luc Ferry's culture—literary, historical, philosophical—that would already not be bad.
1:06:44 Even if he's an opponent of mine politically. But he's not lamentable. "He recycles Nazi propaganda"—that's what I supposedly do, me, Pagani, on the subject of ecology. So that, well, I haven't heard that one in a while, but it's fantastic. So now it's become Nazi to criticize ecology. Or else I've understood nothing, but it seems to me that the very first nature protection reserves, Naturschutzgebiet—I can tell you that in German—I've seen them, in Thuringia, Thuringia, what's called in German culture the green heart of Germany, the Nuremberg region if you prefer, all that.
1:07:24 That's where the first fauna and flora reserves were created. I'm not saying it was wrong to do that, I'm saying it was done under Nazism. It's not more ecological—careful, I didn't say, I just made the mistake—it's not more ecologist than the Nazi. But I didn't say ecological. Again, I'm not a glaciologist, I'm not a climatologist, I'm not an astrophysicist, but there are people who seem to be all of those at once. I never believed science had ever been so specialized.
1:07:55 And as Gaston Bachelard says very well in Rationalisme appliqué, there are those who make a great fuss about the Library of Alexandria—admirable for its time—but who say it was a loss for humanity that it burned down. And Bachelard says: if all the physics of an era could be wiped out in a single library, that means it wasn't very developed, because today no fire could wipe out everything published—not only in books, but now on microfilm, in whatever you like, digitally, in physics.
1:08:29 So these people who are specialists in everything—it's contradictory, either you're a specialist or you're a generalist. So there are those who are ecologists in the sense that they study the environment. I'm looking for nature, for now, I don't see it, it's my environment. Ah well, wait, you're cheating there, you're inside a house built by man. But I open the window. It's nice, there are trees, I have squirrels. That's a park, there's nothing natural about it. The trees that are there are planted, the flowers are...
1:09:02 Come on, you know the rest. We're always in contact with an environment. If ecology is the science of the environment, I have nothing to say, but it's the science of everything and nothing. You can't be a specialist in everything within the environment. Some things belong to chemistry, others to astrophysics, to solar activity, to volcanism. You can't be a specialist in all that. A single lifetime is barely enough to be an astrophysicist. It's not serious.
1:09:33 You see? That's to tell you again that when I'm told it's Nazi to criticize ecology, that overlooks the fact that what's fundamental in Nazi ideology is precisely the natural. It's putting nature well above history and man. It's an anti-humanism. Never forget that. It's often said to attack sovereigntists.
1:10:04 I'm somewhat against isms in general. Sovereigntism, I'm often wary of it. It's often right-wing. But on the other hand, I will always defend sovereignty, which is one of the greatest revolutionary achievements since Rousseau modeled it in The Social Contract and the French Revolution put it into action at the level of a people. And it spread to many peoples on the planet. What is it, then? The fact that a people doesn't want to depend on another people, whether its capital is in Brussels or a military organization like NATO—unless it does so freely, in full sovereignty. That's what elections are for. No, no, no—in 2005 we were presented with a European constitution to approve or reject. We rejected it. They imposed it on us anyway.
1:11:06 That's serious, what we're seeing. No. Nazism, but above everything Hitler cites—not nationalism, I'll drop that—but going beyond sovereigntism into nationalism, "Germany above all," yes of course, but Hitler said—these are quotations, look it up, I'm not speaking in his place, in any case I speak from sources—he supposedly said it's not the nation that matters most, it's the race. That goes far, because the German nation, fine, but yes, the Norwegians and the Swedes are the same race, they're Nordics, blond, blue-eyed, all that. Hitler had nothing—blond, blue-eyed, nothing—those are the poor wretches who do the damage. When you look at Göring, you have a hard time recognizing the blond dolichocephalic superman, with his paunch—I have nothing against fat people, but I do have something against fat people who say
Environmentalism and neopositivism, locks on capitalism 1:12:16 that what matters most is race. You see, a naturalist notion—it's by nature that I'm black or white, or that I have slanted eyes. It's extraordinary that I was accused of being a Nazi for being anti-ecology, maybe to cover up what there is of Nazism in ecologism. "In the line of the lamentable Luc Ferry, he, Pagani, recycles Nazi propaganda on the subject of ecology. For a more relevant analysis you can read the analysis 'Were the Nazis Ecologists?' by Samy Bounou." Are we going to trade Hegel, Marx, Kant, Rousseau for who exactly?
1:13:02 Samy Bounou, sorry, Bounoua, excuse me, but what business is it of his—someone steeped in the dominant ideology, isn't he? "But it doesn't surprise me that Mr. Pagani is stuck on this subject." You haven't seen anything yet on this question, you'll see, I had to reread it to believe it. "Stuck"—I'm stuck on the subject of ecology, why not, everyone has their limits, maybe I have a blind spot—but no, that's not all he says, because "from a certain age"—here we go, and he gives us 30, maybe—he adds, maybe, "thought stiffens, becomes sclerotic." We really do wonder what Einstein was doing at 60, frankly, we should have gotten rid of him earlier, he'd become useless. Past 30, you're sclerotic, and me, I'm no Einstein, so yes, he must be right, I must be stuck in my thirties, right?
1:13:59 "Maybe at 30, thought stiffens and becomes sclerotic—except, however, a few old men, yes, Kant, well well, and a few others." I have nothing against Kant, but this fraudulent use of Kant, like of Nietzsche, doesn't surprise me coming from certain pens. "That doesn't detract from the fact that Mr. Pagani is very pertinent on other subjects, I'm not talking about ecology." Well, that's not bad, that one. There you go, I wanted to tell you that. Come on, I'll be serious: if capitalism is still here—and this is a serious thing I'm about to say, and I won't prove it here, I'll prove it a bit later in other videos, because the stakes are enormous—it's thanks to the sound ghetto in which young people are locked up. Let me sum up a lot of what I often repeat: ecologism, that is, the deification of nature and the demonization of man—in that sense, I'm not talking about the sciences that are part of ecology, I'm still not a glaciologist—and neo-positivism
1:15:09 that is, admitting as scientific only those sciences that deal with external objects and that refuse to see that there is a logic just as rigorous when we speak of subjects—I've developed this from analyses of certain texts of Nerval's prose, for example, I'll certainly come back to it—but there, I wanted to show the gravity of what's at stake. Ecology is one of those locks by which capitalism still maintains itself, otherwise everything collapses. I'll give just one example to close this dossier: there's supposedly overproduction, too much of this or that being produced—good news for management, this ecologist discourse which says that, frankly, we've wallowed in a consumer society, because what management wants isn't to provide jobs—management thinks there are too many jobs, too many parasites, too many civil servants, go on, you hear it every day in the liberal parties, no matter whether they claim to be of the right, the left, or the extreme center.
1:16:19 The nuances between center-left and center-right—you're good at spotting them, me, with a magnifying glass as powerful as a telescope, I can't manage to see the difference, the extreme center. All that needs to be retained from this dossier is that this way of refusing to know anything about what comes from the subject, and of admitting as scientific not just the movements of the stars, which is fundamental—me, I wouldn't be alive here if it weren't for the hard sciences, I'm not saying the slightest word against the hard sciences, I'm saying that limiting science, knowledge, the opposite of café-counter opinion, strictly speaking, limiting it only to objects external to man—well, how do we stay stuck in nature—it's a way of repressing, of never having to face oneself. There you go, thank you for your questions, look.
1:17:29 All these revisions that they cause us — because when I give my lectures I try to cover, sometimes I won't say I skimp, although it often happens that I think so, but I can — or else the lecture lasts four hours, so thanks to your questions I can go back over the points I went through a bit quickly, and as we've just seen, dig into, as for instance regarding money, right, the possibility of all the things of need, that intoxication I feel when I have my pay in my pocket and I don't yet know what I'm going to do with it and all the possibilities are open — it doesn't last long, but it feels good. So, an immense thank you for your questions. I'm well aware that I'm far from having answered all of them, and I'm continuing. I've found a little method to try to speed up catching up on the time lost with regard to answering questions: I take the oldest questions and the most recent ones — we'll surely end up meeting in the middle after having answered all the questions. So, thanks again.
1:18:39 To Adrien, for being kind enough to come and do such good work — even when his back is turned, that is, when he abandons me — and thank you to you, and thank you to our comrade Testron who has made us make great progress. I'll see you next time, and we're going to talk about the association's resources — I'll tell you quickly, since it's not tonight's topic — at the start of the new term, because the association's treasury has reached such a low level that we are at the mercy of a cash-flow accident, of a piece of equipment breaking down, deteriorating, I don't know — these are the usual issues in associations, don't worry. But all I can tell you before the new term is that those whose membership dues are not up to date, it is extremely urgent to try to bring them up to date, because we have no other income apart from a few donors whom we will never thank enough, and whom I will never thank enough. Thank you a thousand times for your attention,
1:19:49 for your patience, and see you next time, quite soon, I...
