English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Unity, plurality, totality: the category of quantity in Kant 0:27 Yes, so the notion of totality, of totalitarian, of totalitarianism. Yes, we need to understand it properly. We've been hearing about it for 50 years, and Hannah Arendt somewhat brought it back into... We're going to talk about it because it's one of the locks on which... Yes, that's something... It's still very much present right now. That's it, we're forbidden from talking about a lot of things in the name of that, but it's set up as a... We're timid with this word... Yes, like a bit of an anathema, that's it. Very quickly, I... As soon as we talk about the people, we're totalitarian. So I'll perhaps give the floor to Dominique so he can clarify that for us.
1:01 As you said very well, the question is vast and I don't intend to settle it tonight. You can well imagine, but it's not my job to settle things. Thank you. Questions, my job is rather to broaden the initial questioning, that is, to show that the problem we were discussing until now is only one aspect of a broader problematic, etc. And not to put a final point on it. I need you for that. As long as there's a final point. Simply, I'd like to be clear about the areas where I might have...
1:34 ...a bit more expertise than elsewhere, I'll say in philosophy. We need to be a little rigorous here. I beg your pardon, I'm going to be abstract for a minute, but it's very simple. Much simpler than many exercises our children do in primary school that exercise their intelligence. I'd like... We find in Kant's table of categories, I won't get lost in that, but just these details, the category of quantity. You'll see the connection between this and totality. Which he divides into three parts, of course, like all logicians.
2:07 Thesis, unity, a pebble, unity. Antithesis, plurality, several pebbles, a pile of pebbles. Synthesis, totality. You see, totality comes third. It's a plurality brought back to unity. I can't say that pieces of gravel scattered on the ground like that make what you call, what we call, you and I, a totality. On the other hand, a plant—you immediately say a totality. A plant, an animal, a work of art, from which you cannot take away a single part—imagine, if in a Vermeer painting, extremely balanced in terms of light, you take Girl with a Pearl Earring, which everyone knows well, which is stunningly beautiful—I'm talking about the work, not just the girl.
2:57 If you remove the little glaze, the little touch of... I'm not a painter, I'd like to be... This glaze that's on the lower lip—the painting loses all its charm. In a totality, you cannot remove a part. The totality is immediately altered. That's what makes it a totality, not just a plurality. There's a pile of pebbles, you remove a pebble, it remains a pile of pebbles. Whereas if you remove my cerebellum, nothing is left of me. So, first clarification—there, that's it for the abstraction, but it was useful to see things clearly.
Totalitarianism, a part crushing the whole 3:29 Totality is already a synthesis of the other, plurality, where each thing is external to the others, and vice versa, and of unity, which always... which gives order, but which is a bit empty if there's only unity, I don't know. So, first answer to situate things a bit. Now, this admirable concept, as Bertrand reminded us just a moment ago, has become extremely dissuasive because of its epithet 'totalitarian.' Every culture must be shut up within itself.
4:02 There's Corsican culture, there's Bantu culture, there's Shia culture, Sunni culture—you've seen that causes quite a bit of damage, hasn't it. Hutu culture, Tutsi culture. And then, if appalling practices exist within a culture, we must respect them, because it's part of their culture—while we're at it, this stuff means nothing. So this false plurality, which we're endlessly told about in the name of a value I do appreciate, which is diversity.
4:32 As much as I value diversity, I don't confuse it with the mere plurality of the pile of pebbles from earlier. So what makes the difference? Precisely between a people and a crowd. We see this well here. A crowd is a plurality. I'll remind you all the same that the elaboration of what I somewhat bluntly call an abject operation, a dirty piece of work, is when the notion of 'totalitarian' was worked out in political discourse to discourage anything that might oppose, near or far, the status quo we've been suffering under for several generations, which is capitalism or the market economy.
5:17 I'm not saying liberalism—liberalism is the fig leaf capitalism would love to be called. 'I'm not a capitalist, I'm a liberal.' Do you hear that? Fine. There we go. It also has excellent sides. Marx made the finest praise of capitalism ever made, at the start of the Communist Manifesto, compared to the old systems, when he pays tribute to the bourgeoisie for having liquidated values in which humanity had been struggling for millennia. And that's what he's talking about. So I'm not demonizing capitalism.
5:48 We suffer under it, it's the regime we endure and which is currently drenching the world around us in blood. And so, I care a great deal about clarifying this point. I mean, the concept of totalitarian as we know it in philosophy, in so-called political philosophy since the end of the war, was worked out by Hannah Arendt, indeed, who was a student of the most Nazi of philosophers. It's troubling. I'm not putting anyone on trial for demonization. I'm not saying she's a Nazi—something changes.
6:18 But it is troubling, it should raise our suspicions, shouldn't it. And I know someone who is very pleased about the invention of this concept: Hitler's ghost. Because until then, after Nuremberg, Hitler—it's a metonymy when I say Hitler, the Nazis in general—had really become absolute evil. Well, when I was young, that was absolute evil, the Nazi. Now he's a bit drowned in the mass. No, well, now it's 'the totalitarian,' there's no distinction between Nazism and communism. It's a strange confusion, all the same. I don't know.
6:48 In nearly two weeks, on Red Square in Moscow, there will be the anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. So there's no misunderstanding about what follows, I remind you, I've already said it, but I'll repeat it: I would have been the first to be shot under Stalin, talking the way I talk. Because to make me speak under someone else's orders, you'd have to get up pretty early. But there it is, I can say foolish things, but I own them. Well, I like the way there is to say it. So, I'm not... And even if I were in Moscow, I'm not sure I'd vote for Putin.
7:19 I'm quite certain of the opposite. That's not the point. I note that the fact we are not under the Nazi boot today is due to the greatest sacrifice any nation has ever made in all of human history: the 30 million Soviet dead. That's not what we tell our children. Our children have—not you, not me, but the media—they're told, no, no, no, it's the landing. D-Day, the Americans—I'll say I pay tribute to the 50,000 kids who fell on the beaches of Normandy. No question of casting the slightest shadow on their heroism, their courage. That's not the point. We would even have wished they had arrived sooner, as the Soviets had been asking for three years, to open a second front.
7:52 Let's move on. I'm simply saying that when the Americans land, the Soviets are at the gates of Berlin—it's over. The Americans land to prevent Europe from falling into communism. Because just before the war, the bourgeoisie preferred Hitler to the Popular Front. We must remember that all the same. And Hitler always had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office, whose principal admirer he was in Europe. Well, that's been rather forgotten now. Because now, they'd like to persuade me on the contrary that anything opposed to capitalism is Hitlerian. In the 1950s, for me, it wasn't Saddam Hussein, it wasn't Assad, the devil—it was Nasser.
8:26 There was the Suez crisis. Those whose hair is the same color, or the same absence of color, as mine must remember it. Do you remember? Nasser—he was really appalling. In that country, Egypt, one of the most socially dramatic, with its... now it's over 60 million, but already there were about twenty million people concentrated on this little green ribbon along the Nile, with the rest being desert. It's the only useful part. And which has no oil, unlike the countries not far away, overflowing with resources. It had only one thing that brought it money: the canal, the Suez Canal.
8:59 And for the first time, there's a head of state who says, well, what if we took back the canal, since it's on our own soil. He was immediately branded a new Hitler, already, in the Western chancelleries. And they made war on him for having dared to give his people the only means of getting a little money—every ship in the world passed through there, didn't it? And the tolls went to the canal company, that is, to everyone except Egypt. I'm showing you this to make the point that we're not fools, I mean, it's extraordinary, this way the dominant good conscience has of demonizing anything that, near or far, might oppose it.
9:34 So, the people—that's not it, that's not a part. So, thank you for bringing up this notion of totalitarian. And now I'll be much more precise in my conclusion, and more exhaustive. As it's presented to us, the notion of totalitarianism amounts to making us believe that everywhere, the individual is oppressed by the group, by society. In short, the part is oppressed by the whole. That's indeed what you meant to suggest earlier. That's more or less how things are presented to us, of course.
10:06 Well, there it is, we must always be vigilant and defend the part against the whole. What I observe is that the monstrosities we rightly denounce—Nazism, Stalinist purges—the monstrosities we denounce under the historical cover of totalitarianism do not correspond at all to a part crushed by a whole, but exactly the opposite: to a part crushing the whole. The single race that wants to crush humanity, the race. The superman, the Aryans, the dolichocephalics, blond—well, the whole portrait of Hitler, tall, blond, slim, indeed.
10:40 We must move past that. The single party, today, single thought, runs from left to right—that's why Marine Le Pen is making a fortune, I mean, she has it easy picking up the French flag from the trash bin where the left had thrown it, it's true. Yes, because the others are the same, it's single thought. Valls, Macron, Bayrou, whoever, I mean, bravo Bayrou, that's not the point. But they all say more or less the same thing. Oh, I'm not part of that, I'm apart, I'm not in there, as Marine says, the UMPS.
11:14 But Bayrou says, oh, the big parties do their scheming among themselves, but I'm apart from it. De Gaulle used to say, there's the left, the right, I'm above the parties. You know, that's not how they distinguish themselves. So let's be careful. What's monstrous in 1940s Germany or in the Soviet 1930s, the great show trials in particular, is the fact—not that the whole crushed the part, but that a part crushed the whole. Because the whole is you and me. Because if totality were in power, as the anti-totalitarians would have us believe, especially on the other side of the Atlantic, moreover—if totality were in power, that would be good news.
11:48 That means, Madame Bertrand, we'd all be in power. But when we say everyone is present, doesn't that mean no one has been left out, yes or no? Totality in power would be a good thing—that's not the case. It's a part that oppresses the others. You know, people say now, since we just got the figures, after the 2014 fiscal year, that 10% of humanity consumes 90% of the wealth. I can't help that. There. You asked me questions—so yes, that's in the film, we talk a little about the relationship of the whole to the part.
The political animal, a contradiction between instinct and institution 12:18 We also talk a lot about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, since we met in Ermenonville. Well, if there is one thinker of the people, it's certainly Rousseau. And notably, even when one doesn't know Rousseau well, one at least knows that famous social contract. We have a rough idea, there, the social contract. Now we'd need Dominique to shed a little light on this notion, which seems entirely abstract. And then, perhaps to clarify a point related to this idea of the zoon politikon.
12:52 Again, you saw a bit of it in the film. The people who came to the philosophy workshop last time, we talked about that, about the political animal. It's Aristotle who theorizes this. But then, how, if we define the human being as a political animal—that is, naturally made to live together, roughly speaking—how could it need a contract after all? That is, the contract is rather the opposite of the natural.
13:23 It's something conventional, artificial, abstract. So, can Dominique, notably regarding Rousseau, shed some light for us? If it's too complex, too... But sometimes we need to be a bit complex to get back to things that might be simpler, in order to spell them out. But anyway, don't hesitate to make comments. So, how can we reconcile this notion which may... It might seem contradictory. We're made to live together. So if we're made, roughly speaking, to live together, why would we need a contract, to enter into a contract together?
13:56 It should be obvious. We should all love one another, we should all... And then we realize there are conflicts, etc. Well, it doesn't quite work that way. So either we're not zoon politikon, or we need to go through an artifice, which the theorists of the contract will seize upon. So, Dominique, can you help us untangle a bit the apparent contradiction there might be between the political animal that everyone seems to be, there, and the social contract, Rousseau's famous notion of the social contract?
14:35 Indeed, we never understand why it would be necessary to establish an institution where instinct suffices. I'm playing a little with the roots of words here. You'll never find in legislation a law that prescribes not keeping your hand on a lit gas burner. There's no need for institutions for that, because you pull it away quickly if by accident you leave your hand on the gas. What am I saying here? I'm saying that laws only prescribe what we would like to do spontaneously.
15:07 Laws only forbid what we would spontaneously have preferred to do. When I say laws, regulations, I'm speaking very generally, including table manners. When I say to my neighbor, 'you go first,' to my female neighbor, 'you go first,' perpetuating a tradition, a courtesy—I have a way of taking upon myself the animal part. I'm hungry too, I've been waiting a long time for it to come, the dish. If I were a zoon, an animal, but not politikon, an animal that was purely natural, I'll come back to that.
15:42 I would rush at the food as soon as it arrived. It seems France has the most domestic animals of any country in Europe, so I imagine almost all of you have your dogs, your cats. And you've certainly noticed that a dog, even one that adores its master, knows—if a dog, whatever you make of it—when it has its bowl, it growls, if you approach it while it's eating, I mean, even with those familiar to them, they growl, they bare their teeth a little. You certainly never see one dog say to another, 'you go first, old fellow.'
16:12 It's unthinkable. So there's a small trap in the notion of zoon politikon that comes from Aristotle, who had seen very clearly that the specificity of man—he knew about species, Aristotle, he's the one who founded the division into species two thousand years ago. And there's a trap, which is that when we're a political animal, we get the impression that politics is part of the animal's nature. No. It's an animal, but one which, by being political, has something completely monstrous, in the Greek sense, that is, hybrid, hubris, compared to all other animals.
16:47 ...is that the political side contradicts the animal side. That's what I just showed with my 'you go first.' The institution of marriage rules out my going to wage war in the neighboring village to grab women. It's not a matter of force, you see, that's what gets instituted. Sexuality is an instinct that is not at the service of the individual. It's an illusion we have, as I tried to point out earlier, we saw a bit of it in the film—sexuality is at the service of the species.
17:22 On the other hand, marriage is a properly human institution. I'm not saying it's good, it's bad, it's a problem, everyone does as they wish. We talked about freedom as a last resort with our stories, but there it is, I mean. So, being a political animal means assuming a permanent contradiction. When I say a contradiction, it's not to say that man is the neurotic animal. He's certainly the only neurotic animal, that's for sure, when he is. But it means that a contradiction is rich, it's a challenge. Someone like Hegel will say that the highest unity is only obtained when one has confronted the supreme contradiction.
Natural liberty and civil liberty in Rousseau 18:00 Spirit only wins its truth by finding itself in absolute dismemberment, if I remember correctly. There we are. And then, after all, for those who are Christian, it's clearly stated in the Gospel: whoever wants to save his life will lose it. So there's a part that man had to lose, agree to lose, in the contract, right, for the sake of living together. A great poet I love very much, the poet Hölderlin, contemporary of Hegel and Hegel's fellow student at university, moreover, who is roughly contemporary with Napoleon and the wars of the Empire and the Revolution, has this laconic little aphorism: cities are founded at the fall of the river.
18:38 You've noticed, everywhere—Heidelberg and so on—that cities are established where the river has a little drop, a little fall, a little cascade. That is, man must give up a bit of his voracity, individual man, his initial voracity, for the sake of living together. But he gains so much. And here I'll cite the text from earlier, when Rousseau draws up the balance sheet of what man has lost and gained in passing from what he calls the state of nature to the civil state.
19:08 And it's the text that, I'll quote for you, immediately follows the one Bertrand had the presence of mind to include in this film—by coincidence, that fit very well. After having said that in the state of nature man was a stupid and limited animal, and it is only in the civil state, when he doesn't abuse it, that he becomes an intelligent being and a man, he says: so as not to be mistaken in these compensations, let us start from terms easy to compare.
19:41 You see, here we're really almost in accounting. What do I gain, what do I lose? And he says this: what man loses by being in the civil state is his natural liberty, but he gains civil liberty. And he specifies: natural liberty has no bounds but the strength of the individual. That becomes precise. Each of us is born with a power—we might say elsewhere a power to act, a possibility of acting, a natural liberty—which has as its bounds the strength of the individual. Well, I must say, that doesn't go very far. Fine, I weigh 50 kilos, I'm not very strong, but already when we were babies at birth, it didn't go very far, our liberty, if it went only as far as the individual's bounds.
20:18 Isn't that so? Whereas today we can travel across continents or even to the moon and back, I mean, or through a little sentence like Newton's, appropriate for ourselves the movements of the whole universe, even in galaxies where man will never go. Bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. Full stop! How could this brain of the small animal that is man originally—this reed, the weakest thing in nature, as Pascal tells us—how could it produce a sentence in which it appropriates, without having gone there, all the movements of nature, with proofs, observations, experiments, and confirmations?
20:55 Well, I mean, reducing all that to sheer naturalness—that's where we see it's a bit hasty. So it's worth looking at this passage: Rousseau compares, and he says natural liberty—we lose it, but it's not a great loss, because in exchange we gain civil liberty. How far can my son go through education, or through connection with the heritage of other cultures or of the generations that preceded him—that goes further, doesn't it, than the little cheetah which endlessly reproduces its parents' behavior, century after century, without evolution. So, first thing—and above all, second comparison, he says what man loses in nature is possession, and he gains property. We're not used to making the distinction: a lion, sorry, a lion possesses an antelope in its jaws, it has just caught it, the antelope is in its possession until another male tears it away—I was talking about the cheetah a moment ago.
Possession and property; force against law 22:05 which is almost an endangered species—I was about to say there's almost a certain logic to the cheetah's disappearance, because it only has one cub a year, it's not very fertile. Its famous speed, where it holds the record at 110, 112 kilometers per hour, the fastest land animal, only lasts a few seconds, let's not fool ourselves—it can't keep it up for long. So it misses its prey, it makes 15 attempts before catching one, because the cubs are starving in the den. And when it has finally caught one, there's a lion dozing nearby—I've seen all this—a lion dozing, you've seen that in the documentary, which opens one eye and sees that the cheetah has caught something. It likes to exploit the work of other big cats—the exploitation of feline by feline—and with one swipe of the paw takes the thing away, and the cheetah has to start all over again. Well, there are things that aren't very viable. That's possession, and man gains property—not at all in the sense of our shareholders, don't worry. He says property, which can only be obtained through recognition by the other, because, you see, excuse me, I have this in my hand—all you can say is that I have it in my possession, empirically, you see, I have it in my hand right now. What tells you it's my property and that I haven't stolen it? It doesn't show.
23:15 in the chemical properties, in the colors, or in the shape, whether it's my possession or my property—you see clearly that empiricism never gets you very far. You have to trace the history of this thing that produced it, how it came into my hands, to see who its owner is. In short, I won't waste your time—I own it either when I produced it myself materially, or when I gave, in order to obtain it, money corresponding to the labor that produced it—in principle that's how it should work. So property presupposes recognition by the other. If there's no other, I can always say 'it's mine, it belongs to me,' and he shoves me aside because he's as much a possessor as I am, I mean, it becomes a matter of force. And here I insist strongly: the social contract begins when force disappears in favor of right. We don't suspect the importance of this term, and I'm very worried to see naturalist theories coming back into fashion for more than a generation now, because what reigns in the state of nature is precisely force—I just showed that with the lion and the cheetah, and I don't know if it's true that it serves no purpose in humanity, but what I am sure of is that there are those it would suit just fine. You have the admirable dialogue of Plato called Gorgias, which somewhat foreshadows in this sense Rousseau's thought, without going as far—but the parallel has often been drawn—and up to liberty
24:25 as an absolute principle. But the text of Plato's Gorgias, in which this problem is addressed, features a little proto-Nazi—there's no other word for it—named Callicles, avant la lettre; you'll see that the argument hasn't changed—who maintains before Socrates that the one who should rule the city is the one who is worth more, and the one who is worth more and possesses more is always right against the weaker one—it's the law of the strongest. There, so let's insist strongly on this: as long as it is force that rules—and the great break with Rousseau, to get back to what Bertrand was saying, is not that they say, oh, force isn't good, it's wicked, we must replace it with law—I'm not saying that, because that would be insufficient. He doesn't say that. He says it's false, that's not how it works, it's a lie: if there are stable regimes, it's because there's something other than force somewhere, people find their advantage in it, otherwise power doesn't stay in power for long, if it really has the whole against it, moreover, in relation, in Plato's dialogue I was telling you about, in relation to Callicles.
25:35 What supports the claim that it's force that makes value, true value? You hear that today with losers and winners, it's the same thing, yes, there are some born to win, others born to lose, that's true, that's not so old, and with the crisis it took a bit of a hit, but still. And Plato has Socrates say, well, let's go with it, let's suppose it's force, what is force? Because that's the most important thing. Well yes, physical force—but in that case the city as a whole will always be physically stronger than a single individual, than a king or a tyrant alone, so it's the city that's right against him. No, that's not what I meant, it's not just physical force, I also meant the cleverest, I meant those who have both strength and intelligence. We keep changing criteria—strange notion. There you go, beware of such notions. And what's certain is that it's order that reigns in nature—but that's not a good sign, because it's the absence of freedom. Natural order is the moon turning around the earth—that's neither cultural nor historical nor human, that's natural. Well, the moon has no choice; if it ever occurred to it to say, what if I went and turned around Mars for a change—no, no, no, because Newton said so, didn't he, it's the heaviest body, the largest mass, the earth, that's there, and so it's condemned
26:45 to turn around the strongest, the heaviest one. But that's the order of nature. Man, anthropology, the anthropological order begins when that order recedes—not disappears, recedes—when that's no longer what makes the decision. That's why it was very good that we talked about the Code of Hammurabi earlier, where there are rulings that seem barbaric to us today—cut off the hand, or the ear, etc.—but it was progress that the rendering of justice no longer depended on my whim of the moment, on the prince's whim, on his momentary delusions, but on a text common to everyone. I won't monopolize the debate, it'll surely come back, but to bring us back to this proliferating people that I liked comparing to poplar leaves, because the poplar has an upward movement—when you look at a poplar it has a vertical side that not all trees have, ascensional, a little, when it quivers in the sun and in the wind like that, and a quietly ascensional side that makes me think of what is best in the historical sequences of peoples, happy sequences—there are a few of them. Sorry for this little extension, Bertrand, but it's just to recall
27:55 I was talking about weight just before, gravity, which makes the moon turn around the earth—you see the coincidence—falling is what goes downward, freedom is what goes upward, it doesn't go in the opposite direction—natural order, sorry, it doesn't go in the same direction as—natural order is not human order, there you go. So when I speak of nature, I also mean the nature that's in me, that's what makes me sleepy at night, what makes it hard for me to get out of bed, and what makes me have to eat when I'm hungry. If there are questions—yes, please. Earlier you were talking about music—yes, popular music that comes from the people, and then this deception of the music that's imposed on us—that's the question you're asking me. Well, I agree with you that there are musics that impose themselves on us, but precisely, can't the popular, at a given moment, appropriate these musics in order to make them popular?
Popular music and market music; the Marseillaise 29:06 Maybe not a very good question, musically and philosophically, if I may say so. Yes, well, let me clarify my thought—this is where we see that the epithet 'popular' needs to be examined, that's our subject, and here I'm very glad that you're taking me through music, in this case musical consumption, to see things more clearly. When I speak of Albanian, Corsican, or Eskimo popular music, you clearly see very different things—financially, with a diversity that is, fortunately, a happy one—and each of these musics expresses, to put it quickly, the soul of each of these peoples, just as such a flower or such a plant only grows on a particular soil—some on clay, others on sand, some in spring, others in autumn, etc.
29:59 in a biotope, as we'd say today, a well-determined one. It's in this sense that popular music has a positive meaning for me—it guarantees diversity. And you're saying popular music could use these other musics—the musics of the market, so to speak—to enrich its own repertoire? I'll even go further in your direction: I note that what is opposed to popular music, in language—I'm not making a value judgment, I'm not saying one is better than the other—what's generally opposed to it is 'great' music, or classical music, etc.
30:34 or learned music, most often—'learned music' as opposed to 'popular music' is more precise, because within classical music there are very light things too, not only—but within classical music there is learned music, the Art of Fugue in Bach, mind you, or Beethoven's last quartets. So learned music itself, when you know it well, is irrigated by popular inspiration. If you analyze the most learned pieces of Bach, including the pieces written for solo violin—it's a bit thankless, it's the only one to have caught listeners' attention, music lovers will guess I'm talking about the partitas for solo violin or cello—it takes Bach's genius to fill an entire immense sonic space with just one instrument alone, one that's rarely used in isolation. So, when you analyze these scores, you find rhythms of gigue, sarabande, bourrée, gavotte—all the popular dances—which meant that the listener of the time immediately recognized, by the meter, just as today we can tell it's a rock song and not a rap by the rhythm, we immediately identify it—'I don't understand this music very well, but it's a gavotte.' So there was a link—that's a very good question, it lets me see this about learned music
31:44 still stayed in phase—it's the right word, sound waves—stayed in phase with popular musics, a link that broke at both extremes, that is, with avant-garde learned musics, starting with contemporary music—I listen to it, I like it, because I had the chance to be somewhat initiated, I like Schoenberg, but you have to admit it's music that has lost all contact with the peoples—and at the other extreme there's this market music I was telling you about, which came to flatten, I can't find another word, popular musics, to make their diversity disappear, and I repeat, to produce a second—it's clearly without precedent in world musical history—which means that in nightclubs all over the world people sing more or less the same refrains, which change but are more or less the same meters—I think we've been in binary meter for 70 years, variety musics, I've seen nothing else—you can change the names all you want, salsa, lambada, etc., each time there's been binary plus a little Latino touch for dancing, to soften the somewhat stiff side of the binary. Today it was salsa, my grandmother already had the beguine
32:54 back then it was the mambo or cha-cha-cha, I mean, don't worry, Latino is always there to the rescue, it repeats itself much more than we think. So that was—I don't know if I answered your question, but there are indeed two meanings of 'popular,' not different but opposite: one where we're made to believe something is popular because it's listened to by a large number of people—that comes from the show-business industry—whereas the music of some ethnic group lost in the Amazon forest is authentically popular music even if humanity doesn't listen to it. After all, what do we make of the Marseillaise, for example? Ah, I'll dwell on that. What Louis means, I think, is that well, the Marseillaise comes from above, well, in any case, that's the convention perhaps that imposes it that way, as coming from above—well, it's the people of Marseille—yes, it comes—it doesn't even come from Paris, for once, moreover we call it the song of the men of Marseille—yes, because what he meant, I think, is that something that comes from above, the people can seize hold of it, and it can become just as popular through—of course, through its diffusion, but precisely, isn't 'popular' also what comes from the people, a bit like in the notion of people
34:04 and of obedience to the law that we've prescribed for ourselves, that is, that one seizes—well, the people seizes something, and it's the emanation of that something which is precisely popular. I subscribe to that 150%. Yes, but is that case—is it more popular—that's what needs examining, high, low, high, low, maybe, but when I said earlier that music coming from the market comes 'from above,' that's the top of the heap in the sense—but what comes from above can also become popular—you mean from above in the sense of the social contract, of the legislator, of man, of the people who was also legislator at the same time, that's a moral and legal height, I'm all for that of course, but that's not the case with market musics, they don't come from that height, they come from the height of Scrooge McDuck's gold pile. Yes, so, the Marseillaise, but why not the Alsatienne? What made it the Marseillaise? It's also because there were political decisions—there's a little video about that if you're interested, if you look at the bookshop, Librairie Tropiques, it's a bookshop that holds quite a few debates in Paris, that's where I had the pleasure of meeting Bertrand in person for the first time, and a bookseller very concerned with public debate, in the 14th arrondissement, highly recommended—yes, on his website
35:15 Librairie Tropiques, 14th arrondissement—look it up, you add 'la Marseillaise,' that's enough—there was a program devoted to the very origin of the creation, in Strasbourg, of the score and the lyrics, and it's very, very interesting when you see, for example, that the line about impure blood watering our furrows—you know, the enemies of the republic in every sense, internally, supporters of the old regime, those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as historians say, but also today even in certain Anglo-Saxon models who think that the French model is the origin of all the ills the planet suffers from—you know that we're suffering from the crisis because of the French model, I thought it came from subprime mortgages in California, but anyway—so, briefly, to illustrate what the opponents of the French republican model think, there's this horrible passage: that impure blood, as if a people could wish, in its anthem, for its enemy's impure blood to flow—you know, we knew, that 'impure blood' is exactly the opposite of what it's made to say. You know, nobles used to be said to have 'blue blood'—that meant, no, we sacrifice our lives for liberty and the fatherland, that means our impure blood waters our furrows, you see, that's the people right there
Is one freer in nature? 36:26 Yes, yes, sir, glad to see you again—thank you—I'm smiling, forgive me for smiling, but it reminds me of an oral exam I gave for the philosophy baccalaureate, to an Ivorian—I know you're from the region, well, a bit further off—and since he had answered very well on the text he'd been examined on, trying for an 18, I asked him an off-syllabus question afterward: in your opinion, are we freer in society or in nature? It's a bit the meaning of, what do I gain by trading the small freedom of movement I have alone in the clearing or in the forest, in order to go confront others with all the multiple regulations one can imagine—so of course
37:38 I knew he was going to answer me as many do—we're freer, of course, in nature, it seems to me I can go left, right, etc.—I said, yes, but that means how long before you're hungry? Ah yes, that's true, we forget that side of nature too, there are constraints as well. So I'll answer your question now precisely: there are constraints in nature, for example you have to eat to live—that's not the only one, but let's keep that one to see clearly—and then in the human world, the civil state, as Rousseau says, you have to obey the red light, for example—that has nothing to do with it, but if you look closely: 'you have to eat to live' admits no exception, whereas the red light—now don't go repeating this—starting from there, what I'm saying is, we're in France, we're a bit prone to cutting corners, it's 3am, I'm a bit tired—no, you shouldn't do it, not you young people—there you go, sometimes we're tempted, one can run the red light, one shouldn't, but one can, you see the difference—whereas one cannot live without eating. The illusion of believing we're freer in nature, which admits no exception to its necessity—fasting had lost
38:48 exactly, exactly, exactly, so that's one way of answering your question, that's one way of answering: we have the illusion of thinking we're freer, why? Because—and here I think I'm going in the direction, it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong—we suffer so much injustice in the social state we live in, and betrayal of the contract, that when we suddenly find ourselves in the forest picking mushrooms, or nothing at all to pick for that matter, we suddenly feel very free, and we're right to, because we're taking a break from the appalling history of what Rousseau calls servitude and domination. It's not society itself that's being rejected there, it's precisely this society defined by the relation of servitude and domination, and not by contract and freedom. Rousseau doesn't have such an excessive hatred of society, but of this particular society. Please, madam—yes, Anne-Marie—don't you think there will always be men who dominate others? That's what we're made to believe. The important thing isn't that they want to, it's that they manage to dominate. Of course—no, no, but I know that, that's what we're made to believe
39:58 So it's repeated to us, we have in our heads that capitalism needs there to be villains, and so for you it's natural—no, no, no, no, it's linked, of course, but you're right, I grant you that, myself included, we've all been parents, we want children at some point to do exactly, to the second—but the problem is the right political regime isn't about eliminating that, we can't, you're right, but it's about eliminating their ability to impose their will—which is not at all the same thing, you see. When I spoke of the Code of Hammurabi earlier, that was a bit to make that understood—of course I see something that pleases me behind the shop window, I don't have the means to have it, I want it, that's not a reason for me to break the window and take it for myself, there are rules, it's a bit the same thing—I want my neighbor's wife, I resign myself to it, if you will, institutions exist precisely for that. So you're right to say there will always be a part that wants to do what pleases me rather than
41:08 what I ought to—if I may restore this nuance, which the film explains very well moreover—the problem of the institution is to ensure that not everyone does whatever pleases them. The example of the lazy man who stays in bed and the one who gets up—I have nothing against the one who stays in bed, I have nothing against pleasure, I'm not a Midwestern evangelical puritan, absolutely not—or an ecologist, it's not that whoever takes pleasure, he thinks there's a danger—we understood, excuse me, I can't help it, no but this is the last time—I was just walking in a splendid spot in a forest with an ecologist, I think it gives him pleasure—yes, no, no, that's fine, now there's acid rain that's crowning these forests, there's an airplane, in fact he doesn't like going into the forest. Well, I don't know if that quite gets at your question, but I agree with you on the observation, of course there's an animal selfishness, it seems to me, at the start—but human institution exists precisely—man's irruption into being is meant so that there isn't—not only that it be natural that there be something else—it's an extraordinary challenge, that's the image of God, if I were Christian, if I were religious—I don't know, careful, one thing
The film's images and mutual recognition 42:18 and his image are very different, but the image of God in man is that of freedom nonetheless—you hear the wind, you don't know where it comes from nor where it's going—there's the spirit, that does resemble freedom quite a bit. Yes, Claude—a question I'm not quite sure how to phrase, but well, I—I'd like to talk especially about the images: so you're in the forest, you're discussing, then we come to structures made by men, dwellings, factories, and we see people, we see them twice, we see them at the La Noue market and we see them in front of the big fir tree at the town hall—they're people, they're crowds. The relation between all that, the structure remade by the people, the factories, the houses, the dwellings, the housing blocks, the men, and then the crowd that's there, blissful, waiting—the relation, in the image? Yes, well, the idea was indeed at the start to film the people who work, the people who have fun
43:28 the people, but it was—yes, but it's also the physical people, that is, on the town hall square—yes so it was indeed both the people gathered on the town hall square—it was the Charlie marches, it was the day after, it was the Charlie demonstrations—but it's also the canal, where you don't physically see any people, the canal and the factory next to it, indeed, because that's a product, there, that's where the relation is—it's not simply, I mean, it seems to me we've a bit lost—we get the impression that maybe we're falling back again into this story of a rupture between nature and culture, etc.—well, that's—but we live in a world of men, made by human beings, and when we see the canal we might not immediately have that idea, whereas it's true that the towpath, well, these are human productions, I mean we live in a world of men, we're surrounded by things, objects made, produced by human beings, so
44:38 the idea behind the images was that, it was to show—and that's why we end on the little Paris of a fine gentleman in the working-class neighborhood of La Noue, a small shopkeeper who spends his whole life making what I showed you, that absolutely astonishing little Paris, to show how much we perhaps don't fully realize all the quality, all the historical work, everything that preceded and everything that had to happen to get here—we don't realize it, we're born into it and we get the impression it fell from the sky and was just given to us like that, but not at all, it took blood, sweat and tears, millennia, since the Neolithic—that's the idea. Now the people, more precisely—it's true we would have liked to, we'd thought about waiting until March because there were elections—well, because 'people' is a political notion, right away we make a political, even a politicking, connection—we would also have liked to film people leaving a factory for real, but that wasn't possible, we had some little issues even—but anyway, that was the idea
45:48 it was to find spaces where we felt at once that there was a result of historical becoming and something profoundly human—but whether that be with people gathered together—it's true that as for the market, I don't know if the crowd that's filmed, whether that's 'the people' or not, I don't know, there always has to be, anyway, a notion, there has to be a common principle, I mean it's not simply an addition of persons that makes a people, I don't think, otherwise it would be a heap of pebbles, there you go, that would be the heap of pebbles—so the common principle, I don't know if we've really pinned it down and found it, but I don't even know if, as I speak to you, in our societies, we've found it. In fact I think the people is still a notion yet to come. If I may just insert a small point—I can't find it for anyone, but if there's one lead I can offer to go a bit further in elucidating it, it's mutual recognition, the concept I was alluding to earlier—every human society is human
46:58 insofar as there is mutual recognition that I am dealing with a human being, with someone, and not with a something—all of a sudden, you see how important the greeting is—the greeting is very, very important, as in traditional societies generally, where people take their time to greet one another. In a crowd on a boulevard you can't greet everyone at 6pm, but it's very important—when you see, in a country of the Sahel, in the desert immensity, a Tuareg all alone on his camel, far off, etc., and who sees you, from far away, a human presence emerging like that from nothingness—then you realize what mutual recognition means, and why the greeting is so important. So, I think the path toward what is common to every human society, and what makes there be a people and not merely an aggregate, a pack—you know how you say 'pack' in German? Gang—Wolfgang, which was the first name of the marvelous Mozart, means pack of wolves, a pack of released dogs and dobermans, careful—yes
48:08 a people is not merely a pack, so a people also must not be unanimist, I'm warning against that too—you see, I'm trying to strengthen the notion—a people is not plurality, I think we've understood each other on that, it's not the heap of pebbles, there has to be a unity that brings it back to a totality, but a totality in motion—that's where you must not become totalitarian—a totality that evolves, that is not closed. But on the other hand, it mustn't be too united either, because that abominable thing, lynching, whether physical, alas, or merely media-driven, always happens against a backdrop of unanimism—it's good that there be agreements, differences among people, that's fine short of going all the way to war. But I wanted to insert this point—mutual recognition—what makes us recognize each other mutually, even, as being human? You know, that's not obvious everywhere. When the first orangutans were brought back to Europe—it's Diderot who tells this—there's a bishop who sees an orangutan that had just been brought back from Java, in a cage, he looks at it a bit puzzled—for theology it matters, man has a soul
49:18 animals don't, and the bishop said, 'Speak, and I shall baptize you'—'In the beginning was the Word'—there you go, I'll stop there. Yes, Samuel—I appreciated that too, it's too broad, it has too much activity—if we take, for example, Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix, it's a very beautiful representation of the people, but it's very insufficient—we won't say 'the people' if it's just the moment of taking the Bastille, I mean, that's entirely—we're being reductive—there would be, for example, a painting, I don't know, you see that beautiful painting, I think it's, well, women sowing, with rakes, that's it too
Racism returns with unemployment 50:35 but precisely, that's a way—not a comprehensive one—of wanting to force things a bit. I'll give you this question to complete what's missing from our title, not that it's missing, but what I thought I'd find: there was the demonstration the day after January 11th, we were there, we took part as individuals, we drew close to other individuals, the gaze, reciprocity—there were demonstrations because there were job losses or workers' demands, we take part in them—I thought we'd find that echo in the idea of building an identity, to escape the heap of pebbles, but well, Charlie is a bit that, still. Yes, but I thought we'd see it clearly—well, there were, there wasn't a big demonstration in the area, there wasn't one at all, there wasn't one at all—we wanted to, in Saint-Dizier there were people, about what, Charlie you mean? Ah, there was a record number, no no no, locally
51:45 we wanted to film mainly on the town—yes, yes, there are conflicts in other towns in the region, but we wanted to focus on the town, going from Hermenonville to Saint-Dizier, we did Hermenonville-Saint-Dizier—it's true we could have gone, I don't know where, the path is unique for the talk. Yes, it's complicated for such serious matters, especially like racism, do your statistics, historically, quite simply, don't take my word for it, check and measure—every time there have been periods of unemployment, we see racism come back, we must never forget that, it helps frame the problem of racism properly—it's not a race problem, racism is obvious. Recently—I won't give you his name—but I have a Corsican compatriot who calls me all worked up—I won't tell you which little village, tiny hamlet, we were 240 inhabitants, and now there are 45 Portuguese—I said, well? He didn't find any danger, but I told him, what is it—he works, he's building houses, he's doing even better than us, the Portuguese are fine, he knows how to build houses, it's always been that way
52:55 Corsica is what, where do you come from yourself—I mean, we're almost all—there were only 10,000 of us after the great plague in Corsica, if you don't mind my telling you between us, there are only 10,000 Corsicans left after the great plague. So the fantasies about whether we come from Aryans, Semites, whatever, that makes us laugh—afterward, to repopulate Corsica, everyone came from Italy, mostly, then Spain, the Maghreb a lot, it's a mixture, you see, we're all mixtures, but we forget all that as soon as there's no more full employment, why? Because immediately it's the visible minorities who attract attention—'I don't have a job because you're here, because you took my job'—we always start by attacking whoever comes from elsewhere, isn't that right, and who's 'taken' from us—look at what's happening in Kenya right now, it's appalling, in Kenya, in South Africa it's appalling too, but in South Africa, a country where black populations suffered like nowhere else from apartheid and racism, nowhere else, perhaps except at a certain time in the United States before segregation—a black minority that suffered so much, going back to the time of slavery, and now it's those same
54:05 Africans who are attacking the skin of other Africans, accused of coming to take their jobs, the poor souls who come from Somalia, fleeing the conflicts, from Eritrea, I don't need to draw you a picture, that's human misery. But you see right away that racism is not at all what we're made to believe, it's not a matter of race—racism—Arabs are very, very well received in France, don't panic, I'm not finished—when they check into the George V, the one called the King of Morocco, and those who are emirs in the port of Nice, the port of Nice, or when it's those who finance PSG, you know that well, it's not a question of being Arab, don't worry, or black. There, me, a Corsican, I was taken for a foreigner in Germany, they didn't know I understood German, they thought I was a Turkish migrant worker, I understood what they were saying, that's how it is. So, if you don't want there to be racism, there would need to be plenty of jobs. Now, I wanted to highlight a passage in the film that left me somewhat despairing, notably when you talk about Pascal and qualities—yes, since Pascal tells us, and admits, like me
Pascal: we only love qualities 55:16 that we've never loved anyone, well, and that we've only ever loved qualities—so it was that question of the self, of the other, and Pascal's abyssal interrogation about the self, which is absolutely—which can turn you upside down and make you see the world differently once you've really grasped it. But well, if you have things to say—I know you're still, I know you're a great Pascalian too, a reader of Pascal, you love Pascal a lot—so Pascal says that indeed, when you say 'I love you' to someone, you don't actually say 'I love you' to someone, you say 'I love your beauty,' 'I love your intelligence,' 'I love your liveliness,' and Pascal says the self doesn't exist, you cannot love someone's self, you only love qualities. Do you remember his argument? Because it's quite convincing—we love the person, so we press him: suppose you say, 'I love her little face'—and he answers, yes, but the smallpox that's going to ruin the face, without changing
56:26 the fact that it's the same person, means we no longer love her—so we said we loved the person, whereas we already no longer love her once she's changed her look. Well, that's what makes people say we love qualities, etc., but it's not as hopeless as all that, it's actually a very good starting point—for a famous title—for the Sentimental Education, because perhaps we're a little unfair when we're in love, there are ages in life, how should I put it, but placing on the shoulders of the person opposite you, isn't it, the solution to all the problems we suffer in life, isn't it—perhaps that's not, it's not at the moment we love the qualities that we're fair to the person who's there, that's what I mean, it's not at the moment we're in love that we're most attentive to the specificity of the person who's there, I don't think. I have nothing against love, I notice that you're very young, that this despairs you, very young—but it's a fascinating problem, I can't develop it here, but it's fascinating, meaning—take another reference, me, who's rather in the Marxist tradition, quoting, of all things, a Jansenist Christian like Pascal, and now I'm going to quote the anti-Gaullist right, which is even more formidable
57:38 but it must be said, he's a wonderful individual, it's Saint-Exupéry, isn't it, who says somewhere, 'man is a knot of relations'—that's a lovely image, the knot, because a knot, when you undo the knot, there's no string left; when the knot is truly undone, there wasn't something that was there at the center—that's what Pascal says, there's no such identity at the core that obsesses us now—French identity, masculine identity, what is a woman, what is a man, what is a Hutu, what is a Tutsi, the young, the old—there's plenty of that stuff, I mean, we're made to believe it's people in their forties taking jobs from the young, that in short we're dominated by men—me, I've felt dominated by Mrs. Bettencourt, Mrs.—what's her name, the one who heads the IMF, Lagarde—and by Mrs. Condoleezza Rice from the Pentagon, who bombed Iraq without authorization, Mrs. Merkel, in the papers said to be the most powerful woman in the world—we'd have to cite men too. I'm not rebelling against women, don't worry, I'm saying these are stupid problems, they've put—I'm a Corsican speaking to you, I know what that is, unfortunately for the ladies of France, and the young ladies elsewhere too—it was a Corsican who wrote the Civil Code, Napoleon
Descartes's piece of wax and the identity of rivers 58:48 well yes, and until a fairly recent period, a mother with a baby couldn't cross borders without paternal authorization—well, that's Mediterranean, I told you—well, it's good that this is disappearing, don't worry, but this is simply an interesting matter of persons and qualities, it's the old logical relation between substance and its attributes—what remains of a substance once you've stripped it of its attributes? Do you remember the piece of wax in Descartes—it's an admirable passage, because Descartes is honest, he starts like you, like me, he says, what is this bottle—he talks about a piece of wax, because at the time there was no EDF, there was the candle, then the wax, beeswax, it smelled nice in the study—and he says, for example, what is this piece of wax? He says, I'm not talking about wax in general, because those notions are confused, but about this particular piece of wax—and he defines it, like you, like me, spontaneously badly, because—I should have said, spontaneously, he starts by defining by observing it—so it's something that's white, that's cubic, in short, through all its sensible qualities, for the eye it's white, for the ear, when you strike it, it makes a certain sound, etc.
59:54 and he says, but now, even as I speak, one brings it near the flame of a candle—the white becomes yellow, the sweet honey smell becomes a burnt smell—he doesn't talk like that, Descartes, I'm summarizing—and whatever way you strike it, it will no longer make any sound. And Descartes is a great philosopher when, going to the next line, he says—does the same wax remain after this change? That might seem to you like splitting hairs—no, this is where man begins, where the human animal poses a question like that, he's saying, in effect: you asked me what wax is, I answered it's a white cubic thing and all that; there's no more white, no more cubic; do you maintain the wax was that, because if it was that, there's no more wax—or else you must say there's something invisible that persists, that was white a moment ago, is yellow now—Bertrand, who was a young schoolboy, is now an adult, but what makes it the same person, I recognize you, Bertrand? It's interesting, the question of identity, you see we can never pose it apart from difference—identity is—well, there, I'm opening up paths, I don't want to close anything—it's in time, it takes time to produce it, effort, and the few identities we hold dear, we also owe them to the work of our predecessors
1:01:04 believe me, and to our own work too, but there you go, identity requires time. And one last image: nothing resembles—I'd say all rivers, all watercourses, resemble each other at their source—have you ever gone hiking and, when you go back up to the source, you see little trickles of water on every side slipping between your feet, who can say whether it's this one, that one, or that one that's going to give rise to the Seine or the Amazon—it's once they've already joined together that they start to form a river, not at the origin—at the origin they all resemble each other, at what's called in geography a catchment area—at the mouth too, they all resemble one another, except in size—the mouth of a small river reaching the sea is always a bit marshy, a bit flat, with little deltas, even if it's 800 meters wide or 200 kilometers like the Amazon, that's not my subject. So you can compare them; it's where each river is individual and has its own identity that lies in the detail of its course—you can't superimpose the meanders of the Seine onto those of the Nile, etc.—that's where identity, it's an image I'm using, true identity is not at the origin, it's in the whole movement made since the origin, we didn't have the choice
1:02:14 I myself was born into the colonial world, because my parents, like many Corsicans, it was a colonial administration—it wasn't out of any taste for colonialism, there was no choice—and so, but it's the career one makes from there, the course one takes, that's what makes identity, there you go, it's an orientation if you will, toward the true personal unity. And I believe that what we love in people, to come back to what rightly terrified you in Pascal, is this permanent oscillation between a unity that one senses and that at the same time escapes you, because it is, fortunately, never spatially defined, fixed here and now, I don't know quite what exactly, and the almost nothing. Yes, please, madam—I hope so, otherwise we'll get bored—I found everyone, and everyone is what torments me, well, not only everyone, what questions me in philosophy, as I understand it, too
What is philosophy for? The question of purpose 1:03:24 what's philosophical, and the research, the questions, etc. Actually, my question is basic, it's simple, it's—but actually, what does it lead to, what's the use of it, in our human situation, especially nowadays, in a very complex world, etc.—it's good to be able to think, to be able to reflect, etc., but actually, just regarding the notion of the people, I heard the gentleman say we can't really define it, that's it, it's all and it's nothing, and it's little scattered pieces here and there—so I say to myself, well, why so much energy, and what does it lead to, what's it for—that's my question, it's straightforward, so why did you come? Well, precisely because I'm very interested in the big questions—yes, but since apparently that's not—no, but that's a profoundly philosophical question you're asking, exactly, I don't find it shocking at all, it's at the very basis of philosophy, Dominique asks himself that, all philosophers ask themselves that—I have Schopenhauer's line who says philosophy brought me nothing, but it spared me
1:04:34 a lot—there you go, so I'll let Dominique answer, what is philosophy—it's funny, it's the example I usually use with high school seniors, often in science-track senior classes they're given this assignment, it's not from me, but it's a classic bac question: hasn't the development of science and technology today made philosophy useless? That's not far off—it's not your question exactly, your question isn't reducible to that, but it's not far off, you see. Well of course, most students rush to the striking words—science, philosophy—they'll check Wikipedia, or look in their notes, without seeing that the philosophically important word is the one that isn't impressive like that, that goes unnoticed because we're used to it, we all know it by heart, it's the word 'useful.' You're asking me, what's philosophy for—I'm asking you, from when do you decide that something is useful for something? What's music for? Yes, but not only music, of course, but not only—I mean if instead of philosophy we were talking about rain, for enthusiasts, and I ask you, do you think rain is useful—you'll answer me, as a reasonable person, listen, that's a silly question, it's a catastrophe for the beach-goer, for the one who has a restaurant on the beach
1:05:44 and a blessing for the farmer coming out of three weeks of drought. Those words, useful, useless, mean nothing, immediately they mean nothing by themselves if we don't specify—as I just showed with the rain example—the goal being pursued. So there, I could tell—you tell me this stadium is well built, I have no idea, you haven't told me if it's built for football or for ice hockey, those aren't the same requirements, not the same specifications, you see clearly. So, it's not to be clever that I'm saying this to you, but I'm completely turning your question around: to know what something ought to serve, what is useful, you have to philosophize, that's exactly what it means to raise the question of the purpose. And the purpose is what? Ah, well I know, I know what I'm doing in life, my purpose is to go to school, I'm in senior year—why do you go to school? Well, to get my baccalaureate. And why do you want your bac? To get—we no longer know in the end, we must ask the question of the end, that's it, from time to time, that's philosophy. Otherwise it's perfectly useless in the ordinary sense, that is, it's not more useful—I quite agree with you—there's even a famous author in the 1960s who published Why Philosophers
The luxury of leisure and the division of labor 1:06:54 Jean-Jacques Revel—we're receiving—isn't it a luxury, some social strata that have the time, I think that's it because they're comfortable, but it's true, given the misery in the world at the same time and all that, I think that's why you're right—well, you're quite right about the luxury, it's not at all shocking, your questions are fundamental, not only have I spent 34 years in some of the poorest countries in the world, so I'm attentive to what you're saying, and I had, as a classmate, excuse me, it's terrible when you're in a nice air-conditioned villa, you're white, expatriate, and you see your classmates who were with you in class studying their lessons, the same ones as yours, by streetlight in the street—excuse me, it's terrible when you're at your parents' place, when you're a high schooler, white, expatriate, comfortable, and that was indeed the case, in his air-conditioned villa, and you look out into the street, at nightfall, in Cotonou, in Lomé, in Dakar, at your classmates you saw during the day, revising the lesson you have in common, by the light of the streetlamp
1:08:05 because there's no electricity at home. So you see, I'm very attentive to what you're saying, but that's not specific to philosophy, it applies to any theoretical, abstract effort, that presupposes luxury—and you're so right that Aristotle illustrated exactly what you're saying, he said mathematics began to develop in Egypt because there the priestly caste enjoyed leisure—first sociologist, Aristotle, you see, I'm giving you full credit—but it's not an undue luxury, there's also a division—a division of labor. I might perhaps have wished, I don't know, to subjugate crowds with my piano playing, my desire for domination, you see, through piano—it turned out I probably wasn't a good enough pianist, so I settled for philosophizing instead. As for Plato, he didn't want to do philosophy—the almost emblematic philosopher, isn't he—he wanted to do politics, like all the young men of the great Athenian families, the young wolves as we'd say today, isn't that so, and it's his political failures that forced him, as a kind of damnation, as he himself says, to turn away from his original goals and take the theoretical detour instead, there you go
1:09:15 but yes, that's a very good question actually, moreover there are many philosophers who are anti-philosophers—Rousseau never stops criticizing philosophers, Nietzsche too, and Marx as well—Misery of Philosophy, that's a title by Marx, Misery of Philosophy—and, up to now, men have only interpreted—well, philosophers have only interpreted the world, they should transform it, and now they've tried to transform it. So there have also been many philosophers who have set themselves against a kind of—I don't know, we always have these images of philosophy as permanent meditation or things like that, or of guys who all day—sorry to jump in, but power in general also has an interest in conveying this image of the intellectual who's up in the clouds, it's less dangerous, someone who doesn't concern himself with our affairs—yes, and that goes back to antiquity, because Thales, you know the story, they say that while looking at the stars, Thales fell into a well—so, from antiquity onward, the crowd mocks the one who, absorbed in his speculations, doesn't even see what's beneath his feet—quite so—but conversely, can't we also say that great philosophical theories are, in fact, at the origin of great upheavals
1:10:25 historic ones—if you take Marx, well then, can we say that's useless, Marx? Well, there were, as it were, a few concrete and direct consequences. And Rousseau, the century of revolutions—25 years earlier he announces, he prophesies, we are approaching the century of revolutions, we are approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions, there you go. So without Rousseau, I don't know if we can say without Rousseau there'd have been no French Revolution, but still, there's a preparation of minds that means there's an intellectual ferment that occurs at a given moment within a society, which is then picked up by the ruling powers, the clerics who are steeped in all that, and then it produces ripples in society, and then we arrive at great ruptures, great changes, which are also—there you go—in the fourth century BC as well, which you find in Rome—there's an eclipse of about 1500 years, yes, roughly, about a 1500-year eclipse where theology is very strong, but the Renaissance, what is it, the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance—have you been to Florence, no—well, you just need to go to the Uffizi in Florence, you understand right away, you just need to see a David, whatever it may be
1:11:35 And you say philosophy is good for something, well, there it's necessary, you're seized by something, and then what do you take up? You take up the Enlightenment behind you, you take up the century of revolutions that you're talking about, well, this century that has no name but is the 19th century, the century of revolutions—we see clearly that thought in itself, in one sense as in another... I never thought that Hitler didn't know how to think—it's constructed, it's in Mein Kampf, well, even if of course... I'm insisting on this because this current situation is serious, you're so right that it's one of the main dangers today in France—I'm talking about it because of the rise of the National Front, I'm not saying it's the main danger—the ideological void of the childhood camp, the parents are convinced, but no, that's not it, it's that for too long we tended to make people believe, especially in the generation of Mitterrand as it's been called—which isn't even that old, is it—that the far-right man was the stupid redneck who has no ideas, as you were saying—no, no, the right worked, worked on its revenge since Vichy—I meant to say they're not idiots, it's not just my brother-in-law Claire, there were great intellectuals.
1:12:45 like Heidegger, who nonetheless said that we have a duty of Eros toward the Führer—yes, if you don't mind—yes, absolutely—so it's true that the intellectual ferment, of which philosophy is part, also has consequences that are extremely direct, perhaps we don't measure them, that reason in history needs a certain amount of time to emerge a little, but we realize... but I agree with Dominique on this point about "what's the use"—it worries me when people say "what's the use." I always say, when people ask me that, they also ask it about music—what's the use of music? There you go—thinking, what's the use? Music, what's the use? Dancing, love, what's the use? And you'll notice that all useless things—without useless things we'd be pretty bored, wouldn't we? But it's the question of usefulness, it's true that it's an important question in philosophy, the question of usefulness. Madam, I didn't hear what you said, sorry—absolutely, yes, madam. Nietzsche said that without music, life would be a mistake, for example—sir, madam.
Action or thought? Faust, the tool and language 1:13:55 He wanted to say something, I think you intervened, I didn't hear—yes. There's more to it than that, I went a bit fast about racism, it's not just unemployment, but it's a way of posing the problem, of not letting oneself be locked into fantasies—it's a problem, of course, in relation to an economic problem, we have to think about it, it's not useless. The proof that it's not a notion of race—I come back to this, actually you're making me think about it again—is that I myself, who am Corsican, was, how can I put it, in my own home in Corsica, called a non-Corsican—I'm a peripheral Corsican, me, a non-Corsican, because I had lived abroad for a long time, sometimes I'll take the job back up when I return, you never know—it's always the same stories, and yet it's the same blood and the same names, the same language, the same color. Yes, yes, to come back to the notion of philosophy—I think the ordinary man, to manage his daily life, needs, needs to arrange himself within the events
1:15:06 that he undergoes, and once he has partially met his basic needs, at some point he asks himself about meaning—as simple and basic as that may be—about how to arrange this daily life so as to be in step with his environment, so that life is more or less as pleasant as the day before. And that brings me to a question: which comes first, action or thought? I appreciate that, there are good questions, the level is rising more and more, it's going to become... I can answer, oh yes, of course, I think you're going to enjoy this one—yes, very, very good question—not too long, but yes, there.
1:16:16 No, no, I refer you—he doesn't come often, but when he does I don't... anyway, take the best-known German writer, Goethe, also a contemporary—you see—of Rousseau, practically of Bonaparte, very marked by his generation. His most famous work, Faust, whether one has read it or not—Goethe's Faust—right at the beginning his character, there's a scene where he says, well, I'm going into his den, into his laboratory, his study, whatever you want to call it, Doctor Faust, that is to say... well, Faust says: I'm going to translate the New Testament—it's an obsessive problem among Germans, you know, Goethe's greatest political act was translating the Bible into German—and there he is, and he says: In the beginning was the Word. That can't be a good translation, because the Word—how can the Word... I can't say the Word moves mountains, and it does move mountains, that's not possible. So, in the beginning—it's a bit your question—so he says: in the beginning was, I would say, Force—that seems a bit more concrete, Force as the cause of things.
1:17:26 I say, but force is also found in unworthy things, and he says, there the spirit inspires me: in the beginning was the Deed, period. Yes, that happens, like your question—it's essential, actually. I'll set the two side by side—I didn't say both are wrong, both are right in a way—I'll see about that—don't despair, madam, behind you, not at all, there's progress each time, but you still have to go through stages. What I'm trying to say is that in both cases we're dealing with an action: in the case of the word, people often say "those are just words, we need to move to action"—but there are people who spend 40 years suffering because of words they heard. When we mention anorexia, I'm thinking especially of the girls here because statistically they're more affected—they suffer from words, absolutely, from internalized words, because they hurt. There's a man
1:18:38 who kept calling his daughter a slut, terrible, his daughter a slut—when you have a daughter who's 11, 12, 13 years old and starting to grow up, there are words that hurt, and even sometimes words that were meant to please and that can lead astray. I'm not going to hide, we're all adults and children here, you understand well what I'm talking about. So already this separation between words and acts isn't so clear-cut. But I think the act that produced the passage from zoology to anthropology—that's what interests us—from the natural universe to the human, cultural, historical, or as one might say spiritual universe, depending—and if we agree that there's a break, I won't answer to those who say there isn't—a break, we always find the same things. Do you remember Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey? We get the impression that it's the making of the tool that suddenly marks the passage to anthropology, we see it clearly—but at the same time it's the passage to speech, at the same moment, because it all comes at once, you see, for example the tool and language.
1:19:49 Both play a fundamental role in human evolution compared to other animal species—the tool and language have this in common: they both give presence to what is absent. So I don't know if we can oppose them, you see what I mean. I say "leopard" to you and already something not present is there in your representation—extraordinary, language—I'm speaking to you of a third thing that isn't there and that I make appear, you realize? Show a monkey a photo of a banana, it moves on to something else right away—only man is like that, captured by the image, he recognizes it, identifies a banana—sorry, you taught well, exactly, the mirror stage. What did you—yes, Hervé, I was wondering, what would you think, for instance, of those somewhat forgotten civilizations, so to speak, untouched by modernism, who find themselves a bit like in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, with an object that isn't
1:21:00 from their own civilization—a Coca-Cola bottle, if I remember correctly, a Coca-Cola bottle they don't know how to use, which arouses admiration at first, then jealousy, and ends up causing deaths. Is that a Marxist film? No, it's a film made by white South Africans—no, on the contrary, the film was criticized for taking the apartheid situation a bit too lightly at the time—a very good film, very funny, quite ironic—yes, it's really a dominant white point of view to say that it's the tool that brought disorder into the world. When someone is murdered by someone else with a knife, it's not the knife we send to prison—you were saying earlier, it's important, the evil lies in a person, in an ill-intentioned person—the most beautiful invention can become a weapon in the wrong hands, exactly, because with the same knife I can operate on appendicitis and save someone from peritonitis, or I can make them die within minutes. So I refrain, unlike too many environmentalists, from putting the means on trial—behind the means, the user is hiding.
1:22:11 It's him, it's you, it's me who must be called into question—not the tool, whether it's a knife, a club, a chipped flint, or a nuclear power plant. It's with tools—that's not what sows discord, it's the way we manage them collectively. Well, we'll take one or two more questions, and then we'll bring the debate to a close—if there are any, or if there aren't. Yes, you were talking about mushrooms, you like that—in the notion of property, private possession, there's something that strikes me about existence, it's the notion of use, because for me use takes precedence over ownership. And how does that fit together—possession, property, use? Where does the term "use" fit in in all this—use value?
Use, property and the ideology of limited resources 1:23:21 Yes, of course, use—not to indulge in etymology, but just to locate it—"us," "uti" in Latin, meaning, hence "utile" (useful)—actually, a thing that is used, by definition, is unusable in itself. We come back always to this notion of purpose and end that I was talking about earlier, which is the human world par excellence, the fact that I can transcend the here and now to project myself toward a purpose, an end. So I don't know if I understood correctly what's at stake in your question—could we reduce property to use, is that basically what you want to ask? Is use not a sufficient foundation for property, is that what you mean? For example—ah yes, but only if it's not contested by others, it's always the same, like in Locke, isn't it, because we're in the abstract, as madam rightly said earlier, we're not committing to much. On the other hand, when it comes to a well during a drought, then you can't tell someone who wants to quench their thirst that use dictates it's rather me who gets to use it, you see what I mean. And you have to have seen, at the end of the dry season—since I'm talking again about south of the Sahara—
1:24:31 but it's just an image—when the ponds get smaller and smaller, you know, with evaporation, and there are only 7 or 8 crocodiles left in the pond, there's fighting when there's not enough for everyone. There's nothing worse—and forgive my obsessions, but I don't forgive the top 8 powers of today, in the richest countries where we live—I didn't say we are rich, but we live in the richest countries, where life expectancy is nearly 90 for women—42 years in Niger, the life expectancy where I spent a few years, next to Mali—and yet these are the countries where people live the longest, etc.
1:25:10 and where we're always watching out, always afraid of the danger of the carpet that's going to give us leukemia, or of... so, you see, what we're saying here is really, really important—that's why you're right to bring up use here. What frightens me in today's ideology is that we're always made to believe that resources are limited—because people say that more and more often, we used to believe everything was possible, now we know that the earth and its resources are limited, we're only just beginning to touch the edges of the universe, aren't we, and we say resources are limited—it's because, politically, some would like—and this terrifies me—to reduce humanity to that pond of crocodiles I was telling you about, where there are only 8 crocodiles left in the pond and one of them will kill all the others in order to survive. Those aren't relations between men, that's not relations between men. There have never—there are 20 times more people on earth than there were not so long ago, there has never been such food production, with today's production we could feed humanity twice over, at least. There's an African proverb that illustrates this a bit: a grain of millet is always wrong in front of a hungry hen. It's nice, it's an African proverb.
1:26:20 I don't know it, I didn't know it—no, no, I do know, I know this African proverb which says—it's when he says to Europeans: you have the watch, we have the time. I find that very beautiful. Well, we're going to thank Dominique—thank you, my regards—thank you, Bertrand—thank you, you were engaged—and thank you for your patience—thank you.
