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The question of desire and the critique of the theory of affects 0:00 So we're back for the fourth letter of Dominique Pagani's alphabet. Bearing in mind that so far we've only done two, because B as in Baroque got canceled by the chat. The chat decided—it decided that it wasn't clear, something like Pagani doesn't know anything about music after 1945. So, we'll talk to him about it for real. One day we'll invite him onto this channel and he'll explain his baroque-with-rock, R-O-C-K, stories to us a bit. In the meantime, let's move on to D as in Desire.
0:34 So the letter D now, but maybe we'll stay a little bit on this subject of consumption, because in the end, isn't there also, behind consumption, this specter of desire hanging around—D as in desire—that's been hanging around, again, since the 1960s, when we supposedly entered a society of desire? So maybe my question is going to be a bit more philosophical. What exactly is the place of desire, philosophically or anthropologically speaking? We know this goes back a long way—philosophers have long wondered, since Plato, about this notion of desire, through Spinoza as well, of course.
1:13 So what meaning can we give to this notion of desire in today's society? I'd like to know whether he had the names in advance or not. Because he looks very concentrated there, we don't really know whether he's discovering the question on the spot or not. Because if he's discovering it, it's quite impressive to answer this kind of question in 8 minutes. What does that bring to mind for you, D as in desire? Come on, let's go, D as in desire. Since Plato, through Spinoza, it's easy to talk. Because if I'm to believe... I don't want to keep hammering on poor Lordon.
1:47 And once again, I give him credit on many points. But there again, referring to Spinoza? Uh... Ah, he's taking shots at Lordon for the second time! I like that! I like it! Ah, that's got balls! He takes the opportunity to offer us, as in this latest publication of his, a logic, a theory of affects. We could take Lordon's terms, inspired by Spinoza—genus us, desire. Right? Conatus, libido in his buddy, the disciple Bourdieu.
2:24 And so, with illusio, well, all the same criticisms. And... But still, as you say so well, I mean, as if it were new, he says a theory of affects, right, that's it, we've supposedly thought too long in terms of the concept, that's not true. As you said very well, philosophy has never stopped taking desire as an object of reflection. From Plato right up to today, through Descartes's Treatise on the Passions, of course, I'm going to talk about Spinoza since it goes without saying: we do not desire things because we judge them to be good, we judge them to be good because we desire them.
2:55 It's desire that comes first, including for knowledge. A pre-Freudian sentence. We judge things to be good because we desire them—it really is the libido that comes first, and our judgment is somewhat determined by it. There's something rather materialist in that, actually, in pointing out that there aren't great values existing independently of the fact that there are individuals behind all that, and that these individuals have desires and a tendency to move toward things. So, desire today. If I reason in post-Hegelian or Marxist terms—because I don't want to leave out that contribution—the content of human desire is supplied, on one hand by nature, on the other by history, in a way that's very hard to disentangle.
Desire supplied by nature and by history 3:41 I mean by that—I'm taking the word in a broad sense—suddenly I'm hungry, that's at least natural, it's not something I decided, it's not anthropology, it's not cultural, it's not a matter of contract. Some will avoid the word desire and use the word need instead, which is fine, it allows for distinctions—needs, which allow the human animal to survive and reproduce its condition. Until it has exhausted its strength trying to do so.
4:11 Some say the animal merely subsists, only man exists, right? And then there's this material added to desire, as history develops—I didn't say progresses, I'm not making a value judgment—as history develops and grows more complex, material supplied by history itself. It's funny that Pagani, like that, does something almost postmodern, telling us, no, I didn't say progress, I said historical development. I wasn't expecting him to say that, it's quite surprising, because it's rather classic among Marxists—the meaning of history, progress—no, no, historical development, there's no value judgment behind it, it's not better.
4:49 That is to say, my desire for this drink isn't only to quench my thirst—it's the aperitif, it's the friends, it's relaxation, or it's the peace pipe we pass around; it's not tobacco just for its chemical composition. And whatever virtues nicotine may have, or virtues or harmful effects, doesn't matter, but there's also another reason. We remain in the symbolic field, like everything cultural and historical, and there I refer to one of Clouscard's greatest masterpieces, the most overlooked one, the famous Treatise on Mad Love that he wrote toward the end of his life.
5:25 Few Marxists have written a treatise on mad love, in which he refers to the myth of Tristan, and I remember him asking me for the libretto of Wagner's text—we say the poem, in Wagner's case, since he wrote it himself—where I was stunned to see the anthropological relevance, just as Lévi-Strauss had seen the relevance of Wagner in the overture to The Raw and the Cooked, when Lévi-Strauss says that Wagner is the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths. And Wagner died—talk about desire—in Venice, with his hand trembling, a heart attack, but just before, he was preparing one last essay, whose title was The Feminine in Man—you can't get more topical than that, there's the question of gender, etc.
6:01 The Feminine in Man—he barely had time to write desire, love, tragic, and bam! The heart attack, you couldn't make it up! I like Pagani for that, he's a bit like Henri Guillemin, that is to say he says things that may be partly false, but a bit romanticized—you get the impression he was right next to Wagner and saw Wagner die while writing The Feminine in Man; you sense something rather true precisely in the fact that it's surely very imprecise, a bit mythological, but it's funny.
La Rochefoucauld and Racine's Phèdre 6:31 You couldn't make it up. And we also know that desire plays a central role throughout the whole Ring cycle, right up to Parsifal, anyway. So, once again, what's most overlooked about desire, especially by today's intellectuals, is its historical content. When La Rochefoucauld says—one must always refer to what are called the French moralists, who are neither philosophers, nor professors of morality, nor those who preach moralizing—La Rochefoucauld says: I know some who would never have been in love if they had never heard love spoken of.
7:06 That doesn't mean: I know a rare few who prefer words. No, it's a general rule. The proof is that at the very same period, exactly, in Racine, in Phèdre, when Phèdre makes her famous—perhaps the summit of our poetic language—her famous confession to Hippolytus, and she evokes, in a kind of fantasy, that she might have met Theseus back when he was young, well anyway, the impossible—as always, desire seeks the impossible—when he was coming to kill the Minotaur; she only ever knew an old Theseus, a bit worn down, with graying temples. She says to Hippolytus, speaking of his father: 'When from our Crete he crossed the waves, worthy object of the wishes of the daughters of Minos, alas, what were you doing then?'
7:49 'Worthy object'? Really? So the daughters of Minos, that is, she and Ariadne—there aren't 36 of them—were already in love with Theseus through the mere legend that preceded him. So I'm answering Theseus. The guy on the left is excellent, you never know if he understands too much, and he worries—whereas Pagani takes these long detours through space as soon as you ask him a question, we don't really grasp the answer there, it's really a long detour, he starts quoting Racine word for word. Honestly this kills me, it really does, because I've watched a lot of Pagani in my life and we recognize him so well in this.
Wisdom and knowledge; more Marxism in Proust 8:23 That question, all right? It's all well and good for modern philosophy, think of Deleuze, who put desire at the center of thought, but honestly, I call that a stab in the water, because I repeat that it has been at the center of philosophical inquiry ever since it has been the search for sophia—that is, not merely knowledge, otherwise philosophy would be at the CNRS. Scientific researchers can also seek knowledge, by definition. But wisdom—that is, precisely what concerns desires. If I want to know, I ask the scholars.
8:54 But if I want to know about the world around me, and how many satellites there are around Jupiter, I ask the scholars. If, on the other hand, I ask whether I'd do well to marry Annabelle, or whether I'd do well to send three ships to Asia Minor right now, whether it's the moment to declare war—there I'll consult a sage, not a scholar. And it's not necessarily the most learned person who will give me the best advice. It's not the one who knows exactly how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara who will advise me best on marriage or on declaring war.
9:25 So, desire has always been at the heart of philosophical reflection. It's fine—I'm picking up my thread—for modern thought to have refocused on that, after the heyday of the French epistemological school, Bachelard, etc. After the war it was rather the scientific that was at the heart of the debate. But I note that this happened at the expense of the content contributed to desire by history. Because one had to be anti-Marxist at that time. It was the great era of the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution. And so, it's inevitably a formalist philosophy of desire.
9:58 It's fine to talk about desire, but it's wrong to strip it of what gives it its concrete content. And I note, to finish—it may sound like a quip, but still—I note that there's more Marxism in Proust than in all this so-called radical thought. Proust is a good novelist, he observes, he observes reality well. And in reality, he sees clearly that the complexion of the young... The famous reality effect. ...girls on the pier at Balbec, and there we're far from the working class. That kind of fluid beauty that passes from one to another, despite their own physical differences—somewhere he links it well to the new habits of sport and comfort that were spreading among the new strata of society, which can produce, in abundance, beautiful legs, beautiful hips.
10:38 Well, if you wrote that today, in some little collective—I'm talking a bit like the way people say 'we' now—we'd be taken for mechanistic Marxism, and yet it's Proust who wrote it. That's what I have to say about desire. Well, we took a few detours, I don't know if you liked it. But it's not uninteresting, all the same, to recall that desire is something rather fundamental, even if it doesn't seem so, because we often see philosophy as something relatively cold. Something a bit rigid, and at the same time, we're not helped by figures like Immanuel Kant, who come across as a bit, I'll say, autistic—you get the impression they're not very much into emotion, let's say.
11:19 And it's interesting that he recalls this role of wisdom, that is, that the philosopher is not the scientist, but is also a bit the scientist, meaning he's interested both in wisdom and in knowledge, he's interested in both. That's why there are disciplines like ethics, that's why we can ask the question, what is happiness? What is happiness is not really a scientific question in the hard-science sense. It's not uninteresting, but I see the chat is skeptical about this one. We'll do another one next time.
