English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Reading of the presentation of the Phenomenology of Spirit 0:00 A quarter of a century apart, there appeared what are no doubt the two greatest and most revolutionary works, at least since the Cartesian revolution, of modern philosophy: the Critique of Pure Reason and the Phenomenology of Spirit.
0:34 Kant and Hegel present them respectively as propaedeutics to philosophy, understood as a scientific system of reason that is immanent and responsible to itself—but propaedeutics in which this reason criticizes or tests itself while justifying the claim that it can constitute itself as science, that is, by already exercising itself in a scientific manner. That is why Kant develops the critique of rational metaphysics as a critique that is already itself metaphysical of metaphysics, while Hegel will similarly deploy the phenomenological introduction to speculative science as an introduction that is already scientific to that science.
1:16 The status of the two works is thus that of a rational discourse made more complex by reason's reflection into itself, an anticipation of itself, as it systematizes itself at its own level, through its other—non-reason, or the experience that it presupposes or presupposes of itself. Such a reflexivity of reason's self-affirmation increases the difficulty of a mastered reading of its discourse. And this difficulty is at its height in the case of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which grounds the systematic self-positing of reason through the experience of itself, an experience grasped not only, as in Kant, in the apparently most rationally elaborated actual spiritual life—that of objective theoretical reason and universal practical reason—but across the whole extension of that life, from what seems infrarational to what presents itself as suprarational, from sense-certainty to religious mysteries.
2:16 The immensity of the field explored by the Phenomenology of Spirit, which runs from the identity of the most insignificant, punctual intuition to its most all-encompassing, reconciling identity—both negating the discursiveness or differentiation of the understanding—demands of the reader the fullest assumption of the thinking reunion of differentiation and identification of rationalized content. A reunion which, in Hegel, constitutes precisely reason itself.
2:47 To match the totalizing density of what is being read—the extreme richness compressed into a few hundred pages—there must be a constant integration in the reading of the Hegelian text, certainly one of the most difficult there is, and perhaps, by its very totality, the most difficult of all. The totalization of meaning in this summit of philosophical speculation that is the Phenomenology of Spirit is itself so totalized, its mediation with itself so thoroughly mediated with itself—that is, rendered almost immediate—that one struggles to restore the intermediate steps that would make manifest the identity of the moments discursively underlined by Hegel and make understandable the link between them.
3:29 The analytical fixing of the operative mediations is therefore always more or less risky. What exactly, in each case, in the determination of a given moment, is the element that gives it its meaning and links it to the next moment, and through which element of that next moment? This fixing is never fully assured. In the end, and no doubt more than in any other philosophical reading, nothing is ever absolutely settled in the understanding of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Which both necessitates and makes impossible, both justifies and condemns, any commentary—especially one as lightly sketched as the presentation attempted here, and the notes added to the translated text.
4:07 But the speculative density of the text is even more formidable for the translator than for the commentator. The difference between languages—that is, between cultures, and first of all between experiences of the world in its living reality—makes them totalize differently, in each of their originally linked signs, in their very difference. The discursive appropriation of these experiences, the varying interpretive emphasis placed on this or that semantic nuance, may lead to the choice of different translations, all equally permissible grammatically.
Today's world is still Hegel's 4:39 That is why the translation of a text like the Phenomenology of Spirit knows itself to be doomed to a heightened precariousness. Well aware of such a fate are both the presentation and the translation of Hegel's flagship work undertaken here. So, you're speaking of an event, namely the new paperback-collection edition of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
5:09 It is an event, if one considers that the Phenomenology of Spirit is a work that still needs to be read today. Hegel had written it because he believed that his time needed such a work. And insofar as—moreover, and quite generally, but you know this is one aspect of my conservatism—I consider that the world of which Hegel said that, in its imminence, it was the imminence of humanity's most rational situation, characterized politically by the existence of a politically strong but socially and culturally liberal state, one that knows how to free from its authority, while remaining watchful of certain limits, a social life—
6:20 marked by a twofold movement that is still its own today, even more intensified, a twofold movement of growing individualism and growing universalism or globalism, confronting the essentially national and definitively national reality of truly instituted human communities. So, let's go back to Hegel.
6:53 I say that—but you know, you've already heard me make these hardened remarks—that the world in which we live, in its most developed elements, and as regards sociopolitical reality, the world in which we live is still the world that Hegel, in its imminent realization in his own time, considered to be the true, definitive world, one that humanity should no longer strive endlessly to reform, but should instead use as an effective means, since it is through it that everything can be done, even against it—a world through which, then, the fundamental conditions constitutive of a free existence were gathered together.
7:57 Freedom has conditions of various kinds. It is not abstract; it consists of a certain number of freedoms of different orders. These different aspects are rationally linked, and it is this world that Hegel presented as the definitive world—one on which human attention should therefore not continue to be fixed in order to keep reforming it, but on which it should instead rely in order to resolve the empirical problems of spreading such a sociopolitical model, the empirical problems, that is, of realizing that ideal.
8:50 I think that the critique Marx made of the modern world remains valid. Marx's critique of capitalism, as a critical understanding of capitalism, remains absolutely true. From that point of view, Marx's analysis does not need to be revised or transformed in anything negative that Marx says; his critique remains true.
9:27 You know that my reservation concerns the positive aspect of Marx's message. When he is negative, a negator, he is right, and the present-day world confirms that truth. But history has shown that Marx's positive statements or propositions have not been borne out or confirmed. This, moreover, poses a considerable problem, one that calls into question the identity of the negation of the negative with the positive.
Against intersubjective expressionism 10:11 Hegel wrote the Phenomenology against adversaries, thinkers whose successors are still here. Those against whom he wrote the Phenomenology are still present. More than ever. Even more present.
10:42 More than ever. That's what I— We meet again. More than ever. If you think of China, what has replaced capitalism with so-called socialism in various places has not proven positive; it has been replaced by something which, to my mind, is even more negative, namely what is called societalism, that is, intersubjective expressionism.
11:28 Hegel criticized—and in the closing passages of the Encyclopedia, I'll show you, as well as in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, it's present there too—he criticized intersubjective expressionism, which wanted to assert itself as the dominant mode of thought. Intersubjective expressionism is what we live in today.
12:03 People don't so much want to express things—that is, to compress things so as to draw out and bring forth their unifying meaning—they don't so much want to express things, that is, to extract the concept of things, as to express themselves.
12:33 To put themselves on display, to make themselves seen, but not to conceive what they see. It's a kind of disease of the age, the disease of this multiplied, redoubled, reinforced subjectivism that is intersubjectivism. The category—I say this often—that essentially governs the present, our present, is that of interaction or reciprocal action.
Renan, Taine, Jaurès, and the great nation 13:14 The Phenomenology is the demonstration of the coming into existence of a coexistence of men that would be realized within national states. Renan, incidentally—Renan, who was Hegelian along with Taine—they had considered erecting in Paris, on one of the most important squares of Paris, a statue to Hegel.
13:54 A subscription had been launched through the Journal des Débats at the beginning of 1870. Had there not been the conflict with Germany at that time, Hegel would have had a statue, on the basis of the Hegelian corpus of the day, which they had understood—they had been able, at that time, to appropriate it and measure its full positive scope, which it seems became very difficult afterward.
14:24 That's right. And that's what Jaurès would later rediscover, grasping the totality of the Hegelian message by pointing out that Hegel's praise of the nation-state, possibly independent and sovereign, and so on—that this praise in no way meant, on his part, an occultation of the social fact, since it was precisely the socially liberal character of Hegel's thought that Jaurès emphasized when he undertook, a few decades after the conflict of 1870, to restore the image of Hegelianism in France.
15:23 Hegel's sociopolitical philosophy is what had seemed to Jaurès very positive in the Hegelian message. So, the affirmation that there is a reality of the whole, and that social—and a fortiori societal—interaction presupposes the existence of national realities, a national reality that is not the one nationalism proposes, since the nation Hegel had in mind is the great nation, what used to be called the grande nation, that is, the one that had made the French Revolution.
16:18 The big nation. Sorry? The big nation. Yes, the great nation is the one that made its revolution, and on this point Hegel never wavered, even though he condemned the excesses of the Convention. But these excesses did not at all diminish in him the admiration he always had for the event of 1789.
16:50 It was a magnificent dawn. It was a magnificent sunrise, and so on. Kant had already pointed out that all the spectators of the event, wherever they were, whatever regime they lived under, had felt a sentiment of enthusiasm and exaltation for the event of 1789. So the Phenomenology justifies this, underlining not only these objective aspects but also the subjective awareness of the historical process; the Phenomenology thus justifies the endpoint of history, namely the coming into being of a national political state, unsurpassable as such, despite all the necessary collaboration and cooperation among states—a national state
End of history and objective conditions of freedom 18:00 that is particular as such, unsurpassable, holding authority, yet knowing how to liberate from itself a social existence allowing citizens to be, first of all, a human being, affirming in themselves, on the one hand, singularity, and on the other, essence as Marx says, generic—that is, universal. The singular human being is universal, as the nourishing support for the citizen, who is himself attached to the particularity of the national state. So the Phenomenology carries out this justification; it justifies the historical process, the reality of the institution—finally—of the rational state, which for Hegel is the whole, indeed the structure
19:10 objective structure conditioning a free existence, for if history has developed as it has developed—not chaotically, but despite pauses, regressions, back-and-forths—it is because the element or medium in which it unfolds is the natural medium that fosters all these irregularities, or what appears as an irregularity with respect to the meaning of the historical movement. So he thus justifies this historical process, which is essentially animated by man's search for the realization of his freedom. Man is essentially a free being; this expresses itself first
20:20 subjectively through whims and so on, but there are objective conditions that allow for the full exercise of abstract freedom, that is, of free will. Free will is not without objective conditions; it deceives itself—one believes oneself free when one is not. There are objective conditions that make good the sense of free will, and these objective conditions, which form a system, history realizes progressively. But for Hegel a moment arrives, inaugurated moreover by the French Revolution, a moment when humanity has grasped—at least in some of its most advanced elements or groups—has grasped what the objective rational conditions of freedom were. That moment, inaugurated by the French Revolution, is to say
21:30 that at that moment, history, insofar as it had been driven by the realization of freedom in all its forms and in its systematized, united forms, culminated in humanity's becoming aware—even if only in limited places—of itself, aware of the objective conditions that form a system. There are economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions, nothing happening in the world except through the force of the political, since that is where power lies; consequently, politics is the condition of everything else, even of that—of what it allows to be denied of itself, because there are social measures that make political life
A philosophy of the true and of a concrete logic 22:40 more difficult, and so on. So this history is finished, and for Hegel there is no other history possible—perhaps that is where the critique of Hegelianism can begin, in an age where the notion of meaning is the dominant notion. Hegel, through the Phenomenology of Spirit, reminds us that the first and essential notion concerning existence is that of truth. It is not a philosophy of meaning; it is a philosophy of the true. The true, which is subject
23:50 to a logic—but a logic that is not the abstract logic of identifying a diversity external to itself, but a concrete logic, a logic that not only does not despise the diverse and does not abstract from it, but welcomes the diverse into itself, the diverse in all its sharpness, that is, the different and even the contradictory. It is this true thought that is, for Hegel, the essential objective, and the Phenomenology of Spirit is not merely descriptive; it justifies the fact that man, in his existence, must take on all the moments of a true existence, and it shows that there is an order
25:00 verifying each of these moments, and the order in which they succeed one another; it reconstructs its thematic—the conceptual, if you like—and afterward it reconstructs human existence to show, coordinated with the grasping of truth, a truth that is not only theoretical but also practical. It shows that one must pass through the different stages that the Phenomenology of Spirit enumerates in order to arrive at an absolutely rational consciousness, one that understands things, understands the limits of human existence and the very conditions of its progress. That is what the Phenomenology of Spirit is: the demonstration of true existence through the necessary traversal
26:10 if you will, of all these fundamental moments—it is a setting-right of existence according to truth, whereas in the world we live in today, what matters is not the true, not truth, but mere signification. People strive to give existence back a superabundance of meaning, a superabundance of experience, a kind of unordered dilettantism that allows one to enjoy everything, but Hegel is not interested in that; he is interested in a true existence, that is, one allowing man to fulfill
From Schleiermacher to Ricœur: hermeneutics against Hegel 27:21 his existence in all its hierarchically ordered dimensions, dimensions which must all, to some degree within that hierarchy, present themselves. The anti-Hegel is the philosopher of meaning par excellence, of signification par excellence, who was Ricœur—to my mind he is the most totalizing, the most complete representative of a non-Hegelian existence. You see, meaning—but accumulating experiences, meanings, what does that give you?
28:31 Macron—what use is that? Sorry, it gives you Macron, an avowed disciple of Ricœur. Yes, it's dilettantism, you see. But we're living it—hermeneutics has absorbed philosophy, you see, interpretation. It had begun before Ricœur, it had begun before Ricœur, if you like; it began with Hegel's greatest adversary, who was not Marx, who was not Schopenhauer later on, but was Schleiermacher—the one who lifts the veil, Schleiermacher, who begins to lift the veil, who gave rise to Dilthey afterward, and then, closer to us, someone I probably shouldn't criticize since Benaval had wanted him to be part
29:41 of my thesis committee—he came to Paris for the occasion—Gadamer, you see. Read Gadamer's hermeneutics; you'll recognize the philosophy of our age. As it happens, Schleiermacher is coming back into fashion. Yes, yes, yes. But you see, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer—that has been the strongest critique of Hegelianism, because it attacked the very concept. Marx attacked Hegel, but while remaining within the element of the concept; he didn't attack it, he criticized it. Yes, he did attack it. Well, still, it is a critique—true, not merely verbal, especially when he was young. Yes, while remaining Hegelianizing his whole life. When I read Capital, insofar as I consider myself Hegelian, I feel at home; it's not only the first chapter—the whole of Capital is Hegelianizing.
30:53 So Marx was an adversary of Hegel; Schopenhauer too, later; but Schleiermacher, who was giving his lectures or his sermons at the very time Hegel was giving his lectures in Berlin—already Hegel was lecturing in Berlin, sorry, at that time Hegel was giving his lectures, yes, Hegel was giving his lectures—Schleiermacher, the philosophy of interpretation, the philosophy of meaning, opposed to the philosophy of the concept or the philosophy of truth, because what justifies a meaning is that it be lived, that it be experienced, that it exist. You see, what counts is the subjectivization of the object, in the sense that one must enrich one's experience—the philosophy of meaning, the philosophy of the symbol, is the philosophy opposed to the Hegelian philosophy of the concept. And the lineage
32:03 does indeed go back to Schleiermacher—moreover, as I was saying, it will come back to me, it is said that it is from Schleiermacher that one feels the...
32:48 A seminarian. Sorry? A seminarian. Yes, of course. Yes, yes. So, the Phenomenology, you see, is a work that sets out man's fundamental lived experiences. Yes, sensible experience, perceptual life, recognition, that which made it—spirit, namely communal spirit—it is a reconstruction of the subject.
Lived experience restructured according to the true, against authenticity 33:23 Yes. Yes, but precisely, what is essential is that lived experience be restructured according to the truth of human existence, so that man strives to live without contradicting himself. Yes. Whereas hermeneutic philosophy simply wants to describe the multiplicity of lived experiences.
33:57 It's lived experience as such that counts, that's why it has to be as rich as possible. What matters is to experience. What matters is to draw out a meaning, whatever it may be, from what the world offers, but not a true meaning. The notion of truth has been eclipsed by that of authenticity. Authenticity was the conformity of self, not to being, but the conformity of self to itself.
34:33 You see? That we really live what we live in the most subjective, the most personal way, etc. That brings us back to the identities so fashionable today. Yes. And to the pedagogy of self-fulfillment. Yes, of course. Children are not fruits.
35:14 That's better than that. So, the Phenomenology, then, which is a work that speaks only of lived experience, only of the odyssey of consciousness, speaks of it in a way radically opposed to everything that constitutes... All right, I'll say the word, since it's the one that sums up the thing well, phenomenology. Phenomenology, the study of the phenomenon, of what appears, of what appears to me, of what manifests itself to me.
35:54 The essential thing being to live truly in accordance with what happens within us, with what we experience. This form of self-identity which is a manifestation, well, quite excessive, of subjectivity. Hegel's last thoughts were directed against intersubjectivism.
36:28 Each one in our time, he says, wants to express himself. To speak the loudest. A philosophy of self-expression. Each one puts himself on display, etc. That is what the Phenomenology of Spirit—which is nevertheless an extraordinary phenomenological work, at the antipodes of contemporary phenomenology—because what interests Hegel in lived experience is the experience of a man who wants, well, to be, that is, to overcome contradiction, that is, who wants to live truly.
37:23 Meaning has obscured the true. And we... In... If you like, there's a text by Ricœur, at the beginning of his book on interpretation. There are a few pages that are dazzling, if I may say so, in that they perfectly describe this phenomenological approach which precisely aims to express oneself instead of expressing things conceptually.
38:06 Philosophy of the concept and philosophy of meaning. That's the choice that must be made. That's the choice that has to be made. To turn back from this unbridled phenomenology, you see, to a philosophy that solidly links together principled ideality and the most solid empirical reality, that is, ontology or even the theological and the political.
38:44 We have this Hegelian system which ontologizes politics or politicizes ontology, and facing it the philosophy of the in-between, etc., the philosophy of meaning. So, phenomenology has been lived, but in its truth.
Being, speech, and pure personality 39:15 That's why the Phenomenology of Spirit is the absolute negation of all modern phenomenology, of what has been called phenomenology since Husserl. That's why for Hegel what counts is not origin, because origin is being. Being which merely is, and because it is only being, it is identical to non-being, that is, it destroys itself.
39:55 You see? It's only children who always have the word "is" on their lips. Yes, yes. So we start from being—the Hegelian anchoring is extraordinary, you cannot start from anything else—we unveil it. Because what is man, what differentiates man from the animal? It's that man is the one who says what is; he becomes man when he aims at that which, for him, is of being. Man is the being who speaks; the animal, filled with itself, absorbs being, desires it, ignores it, consumes it. Man can say.
41:05 it is, and to say "it is" is to place at a distance from oneself precisely what is, because what is is not me, it's something else. So we start from being, and Hegel asks under what conditions—what must be added to the meaning of "being," which is the most indeterminate meaning there is—so that what this meaning, in its abstraction, says, namely "be," that is, not to contradict itself, not to immediately pass over into non-being—what must being be in order to be, instead of overturning into non-being? And Hegel ends up showing, at the end of the Logic, that it can be only if within it, as principle—and one can envisage this in different ways—there is what he calls...
42:16 pure personality, that is, this being reflected into itself which is called a person—well, a person who as such is nothing, because "person" [personne] is "no one" [personne], that is, nothing—think of Polyphemus, etc.—but there is this reflection into self, this reflexive movement which is the principle of subjectivity, you see.
A philosophy of freedom, a horribly difficult book 43:26 So you have in the Phenomenology a treatise on the development of consciousness, of the subject, or of spirit, which remains faithful to the requirement that constitutes it, namely, to grasp being, to grasp of being that which is not contradictory in itself, on which one can therefore rest by adhering to it, in order to escape contradiction oneself, to find oneself again in what is—whose other name is freedom. There you have it: all of Hegel's philosophy is a philosophy of freedom, and the Phenomenology of Spirit is the description of the liberation of human existence.
44:36 in quest, then, of its true fulfillment. Hegel's Phenomenology is once again the radical negation of the entire contemporary phenomenological movement. That's why one must constantly reread the Phenomenology of Spirit; it's a difficult task, it's a horribly difficult work. One must not... that's why I've always had great esteem for Kojève, who took on certain chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit head-on in his book, which relaunched Hegel studies in France—the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel—the philosophy, sorry, the Introduction, the Introduction, yes—it's very difficult. You think you understand, and then in the end you realize you haven't understood. You can spend your life saying "the Phenomenology of Spirit"—we're still far from it, it's...
45:47 It's really difficult, a mind like Hegel's, and that fills me with admiration. Yes, let's insist on that, because we're also here to promote, among all those listening, and beyond even those present, the reissue in paperback—yes, with a... you did... you told me, I'll pass you the floor, I'll come back to that. Yes, you went back over it—you told me, "I cleaned up both the notes and the critical apparatus." Yes, yes, I tried. You worked hard again. Yes, but I—well, I should speak in the past tense because now—I enjoyed working in my life, you know. I got interested in Hegel because I understood nothing and I felt that this was nonetheless where one had to... you see, when I understood, I found again that this is what should reassure those who persevere. I had started—it's to encourage them—I had started, one has to work. I first wanted to do work on Spinoza, I had, I had started, it's not simple, yes, yes. Hegel does say that he wants to begin.
The work of translation; Losurdo and equality before the law 46:57 with Spinoza, but one must absolutely not stay there. I probably didn't stay there enough. Yes, yes, but Spinoza is quickly gone through—one can still nourish oneself on Hegel even now, in every respect. Yes, precisely, following the tragic announcement of the death of our friend Domenico Losurdo, I too was rereading his recent, well, his books on Hegel, and it seemed to me that he had insisted, in relation to what you were saying, on the point about liberty, equality, fraternity—on the fact that all of German idealism insists on this notion of equality, if only equality before the law—and Losurdo situated himself entirely within... I think that if one can try to present his thought, I think he's not simply a Marxist who tinges his thought with Hegelianism, he really is someone who lives within German idealism and who then finds again...
48:08 the movement as it develops, because he remained faithful to that German idealism in the sense that it too was an immense dawn, since it is the theoretical counterpart of the French Revolution, and it is a world beginning again in a certain way through the autonomy of reason—perhaps, of course, Descartes had created this beginning, which Hegel absolutely does not contradict, on the contrary he affirms it very well—but this equality of all before the law completely distinguishes German idealism from the liberal tradition as Losurdo retraced it, since he made its genealogy; he showed to what extent this liberalism was tainted by feudalism, by social inequality—one thinks of a Locke, for whom reason depends precisely on one's wallet, does not exist among slaves, justifies slavery—but that, of course, is well before German idealism—but Burke, with whom people like Kant and their German representatives were confronted, of course, who also existed, the "gueureuses" [?] etc., are liberals in the classical sense of the term.
49:18 in the sense of the era, and against whom precisely this Hegelian national state was created—that is, what we accept as the national state, with, as you said, a certain intervention by the state and a form of private initiative, is a modern conception. We were able to obtain this form of liberalism precisely because there had been a historical contradiction with a very strong Hegelian anti-liberalism, which Losurdo insisted on, in polemic with Ilting, even with Jacques D'Hondt at certain points. Well, there's the real first objection, and otherwise I wanted to really thank you, because what you say about the Phenomenology, precisely, made me think again of our friend Losurdo—the Phenomenology of Spirit against phenomenological approaches, the philosophy of the concept against the philosophy of meaning, I really think—excuse me, I can't help thinking of Losurdo right now, but that's normal, of course, our generation read him, we wanted to rediscover Hegel by reading him, because that's how he led us to it, and inevitably we find these points.
50:28 of passage, but what's striking, precisely, what you illustrate so well, is renouncing personal incursions, now, in the rhythm of the concept—that's really the very essence of the... against this philosophy of Erlebnis, that is, this philosophy where one must accumulate a certain number of experiences, lived experiences, and where that would make sense—but it wouldn't at all, precisely, one would lose that notion of totality, of concept, of truth, it seems to me. That's what Losurdo himself did, since he tried, precisely, in a difficult period for his political family, this great reconciliation with reality—the great Doctor Zhivago, precisely—he renounced his personal incursions, he tried to explain where societies stood that were not precisely communist but were socialist—but socialist, he saw that it persisted, he saw that it persisted in China in very, very surprising forms, but it persisted, Cuba it persisted—he tried to analyze it in what it is, precisely, thinking the state as it is, and thinking precisely these socialist states—that, but it's because he was Hegelian that he did it, and there—but at the same time, precisely, and in relation perhaps—I know, I don't want to be excessively critical.
51:38 in relation to the thought of a Badiou, which is extremely suggestive and makes us reflect on all these problems, but it seems to me that on the contrary, Badiou's strategy was not precisely the Zhivago affair, it was on the contrary fidelity to an event which for him was the Cultural Revolution, on the model precisely of the Erlebnis of the event, and even including a reformulation of the subject—and what interested him precisely was what you were describing in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, that is, this journey of the subject faithful to an event which he reproduces within himself—but I'm sure that precisely here you make me understand to what extent—and I found it absolutely fascinating in your presentation—this philosophy of meaning, one must go back precisely to Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer perhaps, this sort of phenomenology of meaning against the phenomenology of the concept, and there I think we would really find all the stakes, including in our progressive philosophy in France, I think we would find them there, I found that extremely suggestive, what struck me.
Schleiermacher as translator, the Aufhebung, and a hapax 52:50 is that, on the other hand, you pay tribute in your book, in your presentation, to Schleiermacher as a translator, as a theorist of translation. Well, if you like, Schleiermacher was a good translator but he was a bad theorist of translation. He opposed two kinds of translation: either I bring the thought of the one I'm translating back to myself, or I efface myself before him. In reality the translator must always be inhabited by these two contrary requirements and try to manage empirically. You know something about that. I know something about it. I think Schleiermacher translated texts, he was a good translator, but unfortunately—well, fortunately—he translated better than he said what good translation was. He opposed...
54:00 two ways of translating, whereas in reality the translator who doesn't try to elaborate a philosophy of translation but who simply does his job honestly, the translator must try to carry out both imperatives at once, to obey both these imperatives, that is, translation is always a rough-and-ready compromise, it's always empirical, you see. One must be wary of people who make a philosophy out of their practice, whatever it may be. What matters is the practice, not... that's what I do, and often with its mark of indeterminacy, they are bad theorists of their own practice, you see. May I praise your translation precisely because you won't do it yourself? What struck me is that, after all these translations there have been of the Phenomenology of Spirit—whether Lefebvre, whether Labarrière and Jarczyk, and Véran, Hyppolite—it's at the same time that you find a certain simplicity, that you add something new. Take the simple concept of Aufhebung, when you show very well...
55:10 that if Hegel wants to give it this double meaning, this speculative chance that the German language allows, he adds "erhaltende" to "Aufhebung"—so it's in this sense that one must say, without the first, "preserving"—does that mean that for him Aufhebung is essentially negative? You see, essentially negative—otherwise you show, to make it clear to people, that it wasn't the simple meaning of Aufhebung, that is, suppression. People don't like the negative, they don't like assuming it—well, that's the mole, you know—they want to be re-enchanted, that's what I hear all the time. Yes, but Dominique, you demolish everyone, we want to be re-enchanted, you're pro-negative. What I mean is that this translation also has this simplicity which is the fruit of long work precisely to manage to find again... whereas it seems to me that certain recent, earlier translations only complicated things, well, in comparison—so that's why it's at the same time entirely readable, it comes after a whole long tradition, but I found—but I didn't emphasize it.
56:20 that was discourse on my part—the translators, I found, some retranslated since without saying why, but there's a hapax legomenon in German, which one might be surprised at because the French equivalent is quite common: "Hubertägliche" [?]—all the translators of the Phenomenology before my translation, all had acted as if it were "Hubertäglich" [active]—all of them, Hyppolite included, they had all made this mistranslation. That's remarkable—it falls to me—it simply means "ephemeral," "Hubert" and "epi," you see, "hêmera," the day, ephemeral, "Hubertägliche"—well, I found...
57:30 I found the whole state of it before, active, so we put it, we always—it's almost a play on words—but I consulted an old German dictionary, "Hubertägliche," a hapax in Hegel, once. Ah yes, it's indicated as such, and the Germans are the champions of the dictionary—there, an old dictionary from the tenth [edition?], it's a good dictionary, but all the French translators got it wrong. I didn't point it out—when they retranslated afterward, they corrected it. That amused me. I'll pick up on what Aymeric just said, because it's the best way to introduce what I wanted to bring up to comment on Bernard Bourgeois's introduction, when you insist on the clarity of this translation, and I never forget—it's even the essence of my remarks—that there are young readers.
A mediating work: Bildungsroman and pedagogical tradition 58:40 a transmission—I never forget, well one must never forget that we're talking about this edition, that is, an edition that is "über-mediating," "über-vermittelnd," over-mediating. What do I mean? First, that Hegel writes the Phenomenology in the middle of his life—it's no longer the young Hegel, it's not the Berlin Hegel, it's the middle, it's a mediation between his youthful romanticism and then the final stage of the system—I didn't say the sclerotic stage, the final stage—and secondly, he says, and he spends his time saying, particularly in the Preface, that it is a mediating work in the pedagogical sense: it is a matter of, I quote the famous formula, "bringing philosophy down to common consciousness and raising common consciousness up to philosophy"—that's admirable, this double movement. In doing so, he takes up the torch of a tradition, I'll gladly note...
59:51 your little apparent fumbling about Descartes, the chronology and the French Revolution, that one might perhaps have to go back to Descartes—that's interesting—I mean he takes up the torch of that immense pedagogical enterprise that was the Encyclopédie and the Enlightenment century, in the pedagogical project of the Phenomenology, which is explicitly a work of what is called in Germany a Bildungsroman, following on from, and Rousseau's Émile, which are the great models of the era, a bit before, and especially Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, with which Hegel's whole generation was steeped—and the pedagogical is always present, and that's a tradition—I'll interject to point this out, if I may—that goes back to the Renaissance: the pedagogical is always the antechamber of the political. It's no accident that it's from the Renaissance, the 16th century, Rabelais, you see how we get to Descartes, and Montaigne, that the pedagogical problem rises to its zenith, the high points of Rabelais's novels.
1:01:01 it's the new education to which Pantagruel is to be raised—Rabelais is pedagogy: one must stop eating nothing but coarse meat like the barbaric lords of the Middle Ages, one must also eat vegetables—I'm a doctor, I went to Montpellier, I know—it's a matter of how to make a man, well, seriously, it's humanism, so the whole man—Montaigne, need I say more, "a well-formed head rather than a well-filled one," etc.—and then there's, this is where chronology has its meaning, I try to be Hegelian in this triad of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, I try, thanks to Hegel and thanks to our translation which sheds light on the matter, that this critical movement of the 16th century in relation to the Middle Ages—that is, where the relation to the Middle Ages, vertical, of man to God, was essential, central in the Middle Ages, it's called theology, it's called religion, that relation—whereas from Machiavelli, of whom Hegel is the first modern reader, one must never forget, from the Renaissance onward it's the relation of man to man and not of man to God, the political relation, which is going to take on more and more importance, and there.
1:02:11 that this movement of the Renaissance, which will be taken up again in the 18th century, is blocked in the 17th century by the longest reign in the history of France, by the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV—so, for the posterity of Descartes to explode, one had to wait for Madame de Maintenon and for the last years of the 17th century to make themselves felt—it's no accident, it's the first great social text of our literature, but social with extraordinary force, it's the famous text on the peasants by La Bruyère—it's from the end of the 17th century, where he compares the peasants, and we see in the countryside animals scratching the soil, and when they lift their heads we see that they have a human face—it's a violence—and they spend their lives producing the bread that we consume in their place—there, all the same, that's not... that's not absolutism, is it. Well, Hegel inherits all of this pedagogical tradition, in the sense—of course Rousseau's Émile being the culmination of all that—where it's the antechamber of the political: it's not a matter of educating, of fulfilling the child, so to speak societally, but of producing the future citizen. It's in the sense...
The Encyclopédie, popularization, and Nerval as martyr of the sign 1:03:21 that the pedagogical is the antechamber of the political—we see this very well in Émile—so, to come back to it, I say, through historical detours, to congratulate myself on this event that is this translation, because the fact that it's in paperback is the third moment of mediation, it puts it within reach of a large number of people—it's a popularization. What was the immense work that was the Encyclopédie of arts, sciences, and crafts, the reasoned dictionary of arts, sciences, and crafts, to use its full, exhaustive title—what is it if not the greatest enterprise of popularization of modern times? It's not Newton's equations, it's making available to as many people as possible the results obtained by Newton, by Galileo, by Lavoisier soon, etc.—and of course through the techniques of craftsmanship and manufacture—it's the true, and not meaning—there, there, exactly. So here I'm starting to have a slight critical inflection with respect to an earlier discussion, it's clearly semantic, I admit—I lived through the era...
1:04:32 of structuralist terrorism, so it's not very important, one can call it whatever one wants, I'm not terrorized by an insurmountable signifier. I mean, you oppose—a very nice dichotomy—a philosophy of the true and a philosophy of meaning; I would say, in place of "philosophy of meaning," "philosophy of the sign," because when you read Ricœur and the phenomenologists, I mean meaning constantly slips away, that's what you were saying moreover, we're always flooded by a plethora of signs. I just finished, throughout this whole year, trying to popularize, to introduce certain philosophical ideas through a short story by Gérard de Nerval—introducing absolute knowledge and absolute rationalism through the work of a madman, isn't that right—known rather for introducing dream into literature rather than reason, it was a paradox—even though it's happened that people say that in his works there was not always a lack of reason, even if they sometimes lacked reasoning—where I wanted to get to, by making this shortcut.
1:05:44 is precisely, not to make an apology for Nerval—psychologically he doesn't need me, he's a marvel—but I mean, at the level of meaning precisely, Nerval is a double failure: psychic suicide, madness; physical suicide, hanging. Why? Because he spent his time seeing signs everywhere, and in this sense he embodies the most deadly form of the modernity in which we're struggling—so it's not to make an apology for him, he's a bit of a martyr if you will, a martyr condemned to the horizon—the insurmountable horizon of the sign, behind which there will be no meaning circulating, there is no meaning to be seen—it's a bit what we've inherited from structuralism, and also in a certain sense from the deconstructionists. There, I didn't want to monopolize the floor, but I pay tribute to the mediating function—we're going to pass the floor to questions from the audience. I had a question, to try to find out if I understood correctly, a bit pedagogical.
Man, the being who says "it is"; nature and artifice 1:06:54 but a question of pure philosophy, if I understood correctly, when you say that it's—well, if I understood correctly—being, there is no being that has meaning except when there is a being who says "this is"—we pass from the essential to the... it's that, someone truly alive, the phenomenology, something that lives—we can all be beings, an animal, a beast, and a being, but there is being only when among beings there is someone who says it, "this is," to designate truth—there is a human subject, it happens to be human, but there is true being only when there is someone who says "this is," that is, who speaks the truth about something, and not to live in the sense of being full of meaning, full of... is that right? Yes—not to express oneself—no, but to express, well, what the senses provide, a vision, a sound, etc., as being, that is, as what is not me. If you like, man is this being.
1:08:04 who can posit being, that is, what he is not, you see, that from which he is at a distance—it's the exteriorization which is—it's transcendence, you see—to posit being as what he is not, that from which he is—if I were to speak like the philosophers, that from which he is withdrawn, etc., that from which he excludes himself, whatever you like, with veils, with mournful tones—well, rejoice: man is this being who can say "it is." If I may, let me also answer the same question to extend what you just said: if you replace "being" with "nature"—I say this because it's still the most widespread value on TV panel shows, I can't stop in a pharmacy without hearing "guaranteed organic," "natural product," whatever—I mean, so to paraphrase what Bernard Bourgeois says, but by translating "being" as "nature," which is not too much of a betrayal of Hegel, because nature...
1:09:14 is immediate being, it's pejorative being in Hegel, in that it's immediate being; true being is being that is absolutely mediated, isn't it, that is recognized by the subject—without wanting to recall all that, nature can only exist for a being who has come out of it. It's exactly the same thing—you want an animal to be conscious that there is a nature? Only a being who has come out of nature can utter the word "this is natural"—look, these are natural breasts and not artificial breasts. I could have said flowers, excuse me, a being who has become abstracted from it—there would never have been artificial flowers, we would never have needed to say, "but I guarantee you these flowers are natural"—let's reflect: this presupposes the appearance of artifice, for one to be able to speak of nature. I wanted to make a small comment—sorry, I want to make sure I don't lose my train of thought—I was thinking of Clouscard: history precedes nature. That's what I'm getting at, to understand well, including...
The abstract is an extract, the concrete a totality 1:10:24 Dominique's reflection, the relation to nature and the abstract—there's one thing that needs clarifying for newcomers, there are surely some here, and perhaps among those who will listen to us later—I'll explain afterward why I insist on the request for clarification that I'm going to ask, that I'm going to solicit—one must understand well that what Hegel, who operates all sorts of reversals, as has already been mentioned, calls "abstract" is not at all what we usually, commonly mean by "abstract" and "abstraction"—it's rather what Dominique just described, precisely, this movement of abstraction whereby one separates oneself from determinations, etc.
1:11:10 So I'll let you speak to clarify this point, because I don't want to have the pedantry of taking it upon myself to provide these explanations. The abstract is an extract, that is, it's the partial. The concrete is what is the product of "concrescere"—"crescere," to grow, to differentiate itself, and "con-," together with—that is, a differentiating that is together with itself, that is, that identifies with itself. The concrete is the identity of a diversity or of a difference, that is, the fully concrete is synonymous with total, you see?
1:11:58 Basically, to put it simply—forgive this bit of popularization—one must imagine that it's roughly the opposite of what one thinks of, of what comes to mind when one thinks of "abstract things"—in abstractions, etc.—in Hegel it's exactly the opposite. Yes, I can give an example, because one must be pedagogical—I mean, if someone asks me "what is Mozart?" I'd rather think of "an Austrian"—one could say the same of Hitler—it's not inaccurate, but it's abstract. There, it seems very concrete, we've really taken it in the sense one usually means, we're in the determinations there—well, this was—what was in philosophy from Descartes on, but it was a great theological problem, even well before him, it was even the theological problem par excellence, the one confronted by both his successors like Spinoza and others and his predecessors: is man free, by what is he determined, if there is no God or if there is God, etc.—determinations, that was the theological-philosophical question par excellence, and that's why Hegel begins his course by saying...
The whole or totalization: Sartre, and Losurdo on the concrete universal 1:13:08 well, "Descartes came, and everything began anew." There, I give you back the floor. No, no, but that's good. No, but I insist on this: concrete/total are synonymous, abstract is partial, it's an extract. The true and the whole are always concrete. There, so the problem is to know—it's the choice—what comes first: is it the one, or unification? Is it the whole that is a filled one, or totalization? Sartre, who is an absolute individualist—there's no individualist more absolute than Sartre—he repeats this: Sartre only envisages totalizations, but never a whole. One can affirm that the whole is primary, even if it's a whole that is in itself extremely abstract, because these two dimensions, identity and difference...
1:14:18 are juxtaposed and not articulated together—but progress is what makes one pass from a relatively undifferentiated whole to a whole that is differentiated within itself, you see—you go from an undifferentiated whole to a whole that is more differentiated, progress lies in a differentiation, in a determination. Or else one can affirm, as such, that what comes first is the non-whole, so the individual, and consider that the process he carries out is that of a totalization which never succeeds—for Sartre there is never a whole in actuality, no, it's to that extent absolute individualism. Aymeric, did you want—yes, yes, I'm very, very glad to have this distinction.
1:15:28 etymological, of the concrete, concrescere, for the determination of the whole — but it's true that I always think back to Losurdo, and forgive me for bringing him up, I don't at all want to speak in his place, but simply by immersing myself again in his texts, I realize that this search for the concrete universal, which is the Hegelian mark as opposed to the abstract universal — indeed I think he was aware of this at one point within his own political family. What did he conclude from that? He concluded that there was a learning process in Marxist or communist-leaning circles, and he concluded that there was precisely a rediscovery of national elements that had persisted over the long Braudelian duration, if you like, and he liked to quote Fidel Castro saying, 'we have rediscovered the nation,' which for abstract internationalists — and I know there was a certain generosity in that internationalism in the middle of the war of 1914, it meant something — but rediscovering this sense of national particularities and respect for each one avoided precisely those somewhat millenarian excesses that Losurdo never stopped pointing out. He talks about it at the beginning of the revolution, people like Bloch or the young Lukács who wanted the transformation
1:16:39 of the revolution into absolute love, the end of money, etc. — people really thought that would disappear, and he always held on to — again, Versöhnung, with Hölderlin, reconciliation, stop me if I'm wrong, but reaffiliation, that is, with all this concreteness, all this — and that's what brought him back, I think, to a defense of socialism, that is, as a passage point toward communism, since communism never took place. Whereas, on the contrary, maybe in fact in your presentation you seemed to me very close — it will surprise you — but at the same time he has just published his correspondence with Althusser, which is Lucien Sève, who said that he, in a sense like you, wanted to remain faithful to the Marxian text, saying but in any case to be faithful to Marx it's that the liberation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves, and in any case we can only be there once we are literally in communism, and Sève concluded from this that the word 'socialist,' not appearing for example in Marx nor even in the critique of the Gotha Program, because we were victims of a collective slippage from that point of view, we had to make the state wither away now by other means — but from that point of view, whereas Losurdo, for his part, made a defense of socialism, perhaps of all socialisms
1:17:49 I don't know which ones he preferred, but above all today we really see a national diversity, whether it's — I don't know — the Venezuelan experience, even if you like it or not, or North Korea has kept its own autonomy, it's been sanctified that this exists — it's like Mont Blanc was for Hegel: North Korea exists, so it must be thought — but that's precisely because Losurdo wanted to think the concrete universal. There, that's a very brief comment — precisely, we talked about the universal earlier, we talked about the abstract, the concrete — we simply forgot to say that of course what interests Hegel is precisely not the abstract, he's rather disparaging about it, rather harsh, it's the concrete, and so the concrete universal — could we perhaps, since we're not too far from the conclusion, bring up what is in fact a kind of synthesis of this whole little debate, the concrete universal — at the outset I would have liked us to talk again about the unhappy consciousness
The concrete universal and singularity 1:19:00 but we won't have much time, maybe another time — but the concrete universal — I'll just cut in, not to interrupt but rather to serve as a pedestal for it, it's just because, for the young listeners, it's always my concern — we need to bring in the concrete universal to show how much it is a synthesis, to recall that the universal and the concrete were always opposed before Hegel, so recall Aristotle's famous phrase: there is no existence except of the universal — sorry, there is no knowledge except of the universal, there is no existence except of the individual. I don't serve the ladle to man in general but to a particular man, you see. So we get the impression that the idea of man is an abstraction we all have in our heads, taking common points among all men, and the idea of tree — there's a trunk, there are branches, there are roots, and so on, the banana tree, the oak, and then the Doberman and the Dachshund and the Saint Bernard, all that — and so if you take Aristotle, I'm using him as a springboard, literally that means: if there is existence only of the individual and knowledge only of the general, that means the general does not exist, the universal does not exist, is never concrete
1:20:10 and that the individual is unknowable — if you take it the other way to say the same thing. There, now let me hand it over to you, you can guess the tremendous synthesis Hegel makes by daring to speak of a concrete universal — that the most concrete is what is truly universal. If you like, the true for Hegel is — it's not the universal, it's not the particular, it's the singular which is the unity of the universal and the particular, that is, true reality is always a unity or a totality — total and singular are synonyms, they say the same thing, you see, it's not the universal that exists, that's abstraction, it's not the particular either — we are particulars but not really singulars
1:21:20 because we are not sufficiently particularized, we are a synthesis, if you like, an extremely superficial one, of a set of determinations or differences, but singularity is something other than universality and particularity, it's what is truly, by itself, a whole — and what we call the individual in general is not a whole, it depends on everything else, it reflects its milieu, influences, and others. Nothing is harder than being, in the strong sense, an individual, that is, a singularity. You see, for that there is a totalization but there is no whole — it's an absolute individualism, Sartrism, that's extraordinary, there has never been anyone more individualist — yes
Individual, communism, and liberty, equality, fraternity 1:22:35 actually you're always harsh with him — let me pick up this hot potato that's between us — not that either, we're not — we're not doing this, we're not doing teddy-bear kissing, some old fool, I don't know — for me it's that we clearly see the ambivalence of the notion of the individual. You just cited pejoratively the empirical individual, the individual in representation, which is anything but individual — we agree on that. What Bernard Bourgeois just said about the singular as a synthesis of the abstract universal and the supposedly concrete particular — you find it condensed in chapter 7 of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right as nowhere else, with such clarity — I say this for those who want to find the text again, where he says very clearly: particularity reflected upon itself is thereby elevated to the universal, that is, to individuality. But what I would like now — I'll put it polemically between us — is that if I am personally a communist, I'm not talking about a party, if I am deeply communist, it's because
1:23:45 for me it's the system that has the best chance of bringing the individual into full bloom. It's true, I remind you of the text of The German Ideology: individuals have always started from themselves and always start from themselves — Marx is an absolute individualist, if I may say so. But I just wanted to specify that we had a long discussion the other day with Bernard Bourgeois where I realized that in fact his concern — Marx's negation — he came back on it a bit, because, moreover, in his presentation earlier he specifies it, he says Marx is quite right, but it did not lead to its promises, roughly speaking — and the problem is that, the problem is that there is ultimately no reproach to make of Marx but of the misunderstanding or misuse, or the fact that the process — the contradiction in process that continues, which is history — has not allowed the spirit, if you like, to fully realize itself. But that would mean — and here I resume the polemic, on Dominique's side — but it comes back
1:24:55 in another form — so this history is not over, since we may know everything, even with Marx, but we're still missing something, since we're not managing to realize it. I contest your principle a little, because it wasn't going to be — ah no, that's not what I said, I didn't say that either — my conclusion is the one I've just given, that is, and in contradictory form, that is, it implies — you can interpret your critique this way too — that history precisely is not finished, since spirit has not yet fully revealed to itself everything it had to know in order to reach the end of history, and so present forms are not yet sufficiently full of what is necessary to realize it — what troubles me a bit is this idea that the future could arise
1:26:05 with no link at all to the past — that, I believe no one defends, none of us claimed that, and even less so — Marx even less so. Am I putting words in your mouth — yes — ah well, yes — no, or else I expressed myself badly — but no, no, it's quite the contrary. Moreover, as you might imagine I think, I believe we must think the individual as a result of the process and not only as a starting point. He says 'men speak of individuals,' fine, but the individual is precisely the outcome. Let me give a very simple example: while I'm speaking there are hundreds of thousands of children in India and in the subcontinent — there are some elsewhere but it's mainly there — in the subcontinent, I mean Pakistan too, children of 6 years old making bricks, bricks all day, all year, to pay off their parents' debts. How do you expect an Einstein or a Mozart or a Clifford Brown — I have to make a musical reference — to arise out of that? How could that possibly arise? There can be no individual — it's alas a leveling-down through misery. So the individual presupposes — and that's where, regarding equality, I find that sometimes it has to be treated a bit like the fifth wheel of the carriage — I don't want either
1:27:15 to caricature you, but well, you know the limit I set — equalization, yes, that's at least a measure of prudence, that's true, at least that much, a prudent man must — that's true, but I'll just — I don't want to hold the floor, there's the room with other questions. Your progression and order are excellent — liberty, equality, fraternity, that's your plan — except that I take it in reverse from you, that is, it seems to you there's an entropy from liberty to fraternity by way of equality, we go down a bit on the scale of values. I believe, on the contrary, that the wisdom of the French Revolution lies in having stated it in this order of progression: liberty is power in the Aristotelian sense, without which there is nothing — I agree with you, there, I agree with you, I ask nothing else — the mediation of equality is needed for it to pass, to move from essence — it is the essential — but from essence into existence, yes — and from there, it produces fraternity as its result. That's an enrichment, not a fall, agreed. The only limit I place on the affirmation of liberty as a condition
1:28:25 of equality as conditioning the fulfillment of liberty is that in the name of equality we should not call into question the affirmation of liberty, because men can unlearn. There's no disagreement between us on this — he does say clearly that all societies that have tried to oppose the appearance of individual liberty are doomed to fail — but let's equalize as much as we can, that's at least an elementary prudence — but in the name of equalization, let us not, as has been done in history, compromise the full affirmation of liberty. That's the principle: liberty is conditioned, but that doesn't mean that in order to realize what conditions it, we may deny precisely what is conditioned. I understand, it's a good question, there
Hegel's Aesthetics and the end of art 1:29:35 on that point, agreed. So, are there other questions — yes, I have a question just for Mister Bernard Bourgeois — yes, thank you sir — this may already be virtually contained in what you said, but I'd like to hear you on this: how do you explain that Hegel, this immense mind, as you recalled — ah yes — ends up making his last work, and his longest, on aesthetics — well, one of his last — yes, it's lectures, in terms of number of pages it's the longest, but it's lectures — yes, it's lectures, it's lectures, and lecture notes, all the lectures and courses — meaning he had stopped producing a work treated the same way. Of course art is for him a fundamental dimension, but it's not the absolute dimension, it's not the last word — that's precisely the paradox that interests me, knowing why he devoted so many pages, even if they're lectures, and the place of aesthetics in Hegel's system
1:30:47 That's a subject — achieving equality of conditions at the level of artistic feeling is undoubtedly the most difficult equalization there can be. It's harder to equalize the conditions of the sense of art than to equalize the conditions of the sense of religion or the conditions of the sense of philosophy. Art is something else, you see, we're tackling the faculty of judgment, as someone said — if I were being mischievous, which I take care not to be, I'd say one could say of art what I was saying earlier of nature and what Bernard Bourgeois said of being: it's when it's finished that one can make an aesthetics of it, it's once we've come out of it. We are museum-maniacs, we moderns, from the end of the 18th century onward, then the 19th — we all have at home a painting of this, an African mask — no era ever did that, each era was immersed in its own time aesthetically. Before — I mean, Racine has his Greeks speak like people of Versailles, I mean — it's only in our era that suddenly we stroll through the whole history of art
1:31:59 and all the better — I'm the first to pile things up on my walls too — but I mean that means, in some way, that it's a museum-like relationship, I mean this barbarism toward art, it's not the relationship of Fra Angelico painting the Virgin and the Saints. It's amusing because it brings us back to a discussion we had very recently about Annie Le Brun and her last two books — you inspired me earlier — and in one, where she discusses in 'Trop de réalité,' it's precisely the museum-like aspect that's brought up from a critical standpoint, and in the last one it goes even further, but it's perfectly consistent with what you just said and what both of you just said — she points out that we are now in an era where there is no longer any relationship between the citizen and the art being made now, that is, there was the museum period where there was still an art — with many quotation marks — 'contemporary,' but now, with the art of the contemporary era, of contemporary art, there is no longer any relationship of the citizen — the true one, the one being evoked — except the relationship to meaning, that is, it has to be signed with a meaning, and it's become combinatorial
1:33:09 that's the only thing that matters — but with art in the sense of Hegel's aesthetics, among others, that's not even in question anymore. The period of the last decades, the last 40 or 50 decades — and that's the meaning of her book — is marked by this frightened, terrified observation that we've precisely come to that. So it's rather amusing that we come back to that. So you see the interest — on a more prosaic level, because with art we're in the poetic — on a more prosaic level, we're all going to go on vacation, most of us, to visit past civilizations, starting, in my case, in Corsica for example — ah, that's nice, that village with dry-stone roofs — few of us have spent our vacations in gleaming factories, I note that — it confirms Hegel. And what does he say about art? The death of art doesn't mean there will be no more artworks — he keeps saying throughout the Aesthetics that art will never stop perfecting itself — I'm answering your question — and developing, but it has lost its function of representing the absolute. I'll go both to the relation
Fragility of the end of history: totalitarianism and the adversaries of reason 1:34:22 on the relevance today of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the question of the end of history in Hegel. It seems to me that the end of history in Hegel is something rather fragile, and we see this clearly today — well, Mister Pagani spoke of Hegel's adversary in the Phenomenology, Mr. Schelling — there are many neo-Schellingians today who don't know it, and finally, after having attacked October 1917, we now see them increasingly attacking 1789 — because ultimately isn't the end of history in Hegel something extremely fragile that is threatened today, why do we say it is fragile?
1:35:00 Fragile in the sense that it defines conditions — precisely, yes, the conditions of liberty — these conditions of liberty are exactly what the young man reminds us is being challenged and criticized today. I'm thinking of the historians of The Black Book of Communism, of Mr. François Furet, who, having missed October 1917 — what was really behind it was 1789, that's what was being targeted, hence the abject bicentenary we lived through, where it was the counter-revolutionary Chouans who were in favor. There's a kind of fragility in that, and I was recently watching a video of Georges Labica with Jean Salem, a conference he gave at the Sorbonne, where he arrived, rather interestingly, more than 10 years ago, near the end of his life, at a conclusion that doesn't seem to me so far from yours: that, after his past as a communist militant, he kept this idea that democracy was indeed today what had to be defended the most, because it was in fact what was most under attack — there was a kind of, how to say, a reunion of the two struggles, of 1789 and 1917, of Marx and Hegel, that history finally
1:36:10 willy-nilly, joined together — yes, it must just be made clear that this democracy that needs defending is what today the same adversaries you mentioned call totalitarianism. We must be clear in today's words: it has become — this form of democracy that Hegel salutes, this appearance of the absolute, necessary, historical conditions of liberty — today that is what is called totalitarianism, and indeed Hegel himself is a totalitarian, of course — in philosophy it starts, it's Popper who begins with Rousseau's general will, and that's the start of totalitarianism at that point. The young man — I don't know your first name — yes, sir, Sarq Victor — thank you — I mean, I would answer his question with a famous quotation, that it's the end of prehistory — I believe Marx's answer allows us to avoid the muddles one can make with muddled interpretations, sorry, I'm repeating myself, of Hegel — I mean, in both cases, they agree, Hegel and Marx — there is indeed an end at Hegel's time, of course, but for one it's the end of history — a question of predicate — for the other it's the prehistory of history as meaningful history — you can't say
1:37:20 that there are no more events — there never will be again — right, but that comes a bit — you mention Popper, I'm going to be on a thesis jury in a few days in Lyon on Popper and Bergson — interesting, yes — 'The Open Society,' according to NATO, is Vichy's favorite author — that's interesting — and according to Popper — yes, that's nasty for Bergson — Bergson is worth more than Vichy — well yes, Bergson is still worth more than Popper — yes, quite — yes, Popper — yes, I don't find that serious, he says Bergson is Hegel — some used to say Bizet was Wagner when Carmen came out, I swear, the masters — ignorant masters didn't wait for Rancière to take center stage, the ignorant masters have been there for a long time, Popper among others — no but I'm telling him, Bergson, Hegel, there, we won't be able to develop it further — I'm not against Popper, no, it was more to have your opinion on the question of fragility, finally — yes, reason, that is
The institutional stronger than the participatory 1:38:30 it's for the extinction of Popperism, that's about it — yes, around 10 pm, yes — I don't know if there are other questions but we're approaching the conclusion — but yes, the answer to the question is: what is being attacked, what is threatened today — you spoke of it right away — Hegel's adversaries at that time, whom you described, are still present today, they are the ones the young man just described, and what is their battle horse or their battlefield? That's — and this has already been going on, let's say, for about fifty years — the dead dog, at the very least, is obviously behind Hegel — rationality of course, Descartes, Marx naturally, even Christianity — we'll go back rather quickly, thanks to Furet, as far as Robespierre, the French Revolution — we're already in totalitarianism — and then we'll go back even further with some, of the Deleuze type, as far as Plato. So these adversaries, they've always existed, that's what I mean — how do you recontextualize them
1:39:41 historically in this particular moment — that's more or less the question — are you worried, because it's this anxiety, this fragility of the concrete universal, ultimately, that is continually being challenged by these reactionaries — because that's what they are, reactionaries, obviously — it's no surprise that they have a bit of trouble situating themselves between left and right today, they're stuck on the fact that they're much more reactionary than those they call right-wing — yes, listen, I think the institutional, which is the target of what one might call — how could one put it — the participatory — I think the institutional is stronger than the participatory, which moreover benefits from the tolerance of the institutional and can only develop in a pacified environment — yes
1:40:51 consequently, I think that if the participatory can scratch the institutional, the latter is nonetheless much stronger, and it's the institutional that allows the participatory to agitate in vain, though that's all it asks for anyway — I'm not very worried. I've just heard a nice paraphrase of a passage I like very much in the preface to the Philosophy of Right — you can see what I'm going to say — where Hegel says all those who criticize the state, or who conceive how the state should be, in fact draw their livelihood from the state, they benefit from it of course — there's no liberalism about the state. I think the relationship of neighborliness doesn't jeopardize the relationship of co-citizenship. So I'm relatively optimistic, I don't expect the worst, but I don't expect anything very good either — the worst is never certain, so
Sense and the true, the hero, the imaginary in power 1:42:01 one question, it will be the last one because time is running out — good, both — go ahead, we need to come back to a distinction — he tells me there was meaning, he tells me there was — that it was true — we have a bit of this distinction — and second, it's that making the sacred right of heroes to change the era — the sacred right of heroes to be able to change the era, that's it — yes, that's it — today does he have no ethical view — should I interject an answer before yours — but Clouscard had given his final-year philosophy students, when he was a philosophy teacher, he had said: here are three types of ideal for humanity — the artist, the saint, the hero — which one do you prefer? That's not the topic of your question — yes, that's it — he said, I'm sure you're going to choose the artist because of the dominant ideology, and I will correct you by showing that it's the hero who goes furthest. There, who said that? Clouscard, being increasingly rediscovered, good old Clouscard — and on the first part of the question, we developed it quite a bit, but meaning versus truth — yes, no
1:43:11 the absolutization of meaning — I'm not for nonsense or misinterpretation, of course, but we are in an era where meaning is absolutized relative to truth. What interests me is not meaning — we're immersed in meaning, I take meaning in every sense — the meaning we give is truth — we're immersed in meaning, the important thing is to know what is the true meaning, that's all, truth is the only thing that's true. If I may, I'll add a small comment I often make, related — I don't know if we didn't discuss this the other day — it's what Lacan, who was a fervent Hegelian, at least for a long period of his activity, clearly evoked in his discourse, in his jargon, when he brought up a political question
1:44:23 since it was a question of class — since it concerned neurosis, the great neurosis of the 20th century, but it was the great neurosis of the middle class, of the petite bourgeoisie, that's clearly what he was talking about — and he explained this neurosis, that is, this repressed contradiction of not wanting to say to oneself what in reality one absolutely did not want to know, which was linked to the confusion between what he called the imaginary and what he called the symbolic. We find the same structure of distinction, the same contradiction as the one you mention — I don't know if that clarifies your understanding of this universe of signs that invades us and to which we all have to give, in an imperious way, a meaning, regardless of whether it's true or not — and I would say, personally, that this is what we experienced a great deal starting from the end of the sixties, with the proliferation of what would come to replace philosophy, broadly speaking, in a very widespread way — what would give an appearance of popularity to philosophy, what we would call personal development, and which would be
1:45:34 introduced, mediated, propagated by extremely effective agents who are simply the sophists of the 20th century — the sophists, they produced — there, the sophists who are not at all interested in truth but who are there to satisfy the public, to re-enchant it, to please it, to give it what it wants to hear, meaning precisely, to interpret its signs, to feed its fetishism — did I not solicit your interpretation? No, no — well, I don't know, I hope that clarifies this issue concretely today — agreed, since we're coming out of a commemoration of '68, of May, we're coming out of it since we're in June — I just spoke of the imaginary and the symbolic, you recall a famous slogan, 'imagination in power' — yes, yes, yes, absolutely — look, look at the footage of the ceremonies in Nuremberg in the 1930s and you'll see that imagination in power is terrifying — you can't tell me that's reason in power, all that Roman-style grandeur, etc., and the torches at night — that spoke to the imagination, that's reason
1:46:44 and the symbolic, for goodness' sake, was it being called upon? No, I mean Pascal, who believes these are just slogans — but there was the real — but they are — well then, I think we can conclude on that, unless you'd like to add a conclusion, and we'll move on — so, bravo, thank you, and let's move on
