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Return to Hegel in Jena: possible, real, necessary 1:00 "Dear comrades, dear subscribers, and even dear 'camaramis' — there are a few like that, it's a word I invented myself, comrades who are friends, that's it — who will recognize themselves." "I won't say I'm delighted to see you again, because you'll tell me, you say that every time." But it's becoming more and more true. On the other hand, what's exceptional this evening, for once as they say in French, is that tonight's subject picks up again from the last recording I did with Adrien, which was going around, a session answering questions on the topic of gender.
1:42 And among the questions we had selected, most came back a bit to naturalist, ecologist files, let's say, since we recalled the problems that arise when we talk about the dialectic of nature. You see, I'm getting straight to the heart of the matter. And I had taken the opportunity to draw your attention to a very important passage, an extract — I recall the exact title — from one of Hegel's early works, let's say, the last part of his early writings.
2:27 So, that's it, we begin to see the outlines of his system taking shape, which won't change much from that point on. The last period is the Jena period, for those who know these files well. You know that there, unlike France, Germany wasn't centralized, everything didn't happen in Paris or Berlin. These young men — Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin — were sometimes in Weimar, sometimes in Nuremberg, sometimes in...
2:59 There, Hegel would end up in Berlin, but at this point he's in Jena, where there was tremendous effervescence at the time of the German Romantics. First of all because, philosophically speaking — I open a parenthesis — if you go to Weimar, and I can't recommend it enough, one of those small university towns in Germany, it's set in a very pretty region, Thuringia, which the Germans call the green heart of Germany, right? Of course, you must, three kilometers from Weimar, go visit — you mustn't miss visiting — the Buchenwald camp.
3:36 In Weimar you have the summit of German humanism, with Goethe and Schiller; three kilometers away, the summit — or the depths — of barbarism. And it was during this period when he was in Weimar — I say Weimar, I mean Jena, they're ten kilometers apart, and all of that is the Thuringia region. And in this work, First Philosophy of Spirit, that's the title the editors gave this book, which wasn't published in Hegel's lifetime — I had used it a few years ago under the title 'A Text by Marx Written by Hegel.'
4:24 I won't dwell on that too much, because I developed it sufficiently in the last recording we made with Adrien, which should be — which is online now — but I had insisted on the fact that if I don't say who the author is, and I read extracts from this text, many people who know Marx's body of work well say, "But this is a text by Marx," and no, it's a text by Hegel. That's a little stone, so to speak, that I'm throwing into the garden of those who, following in Althusser's wake for instance, are so keen to decouple Marx from Hegel.
5:03 It would be so much more comfortable, wouldn't it, to have a Marx who owes nothing to dialectics. Let's not get sidetracked as to why I'm coming back to this, when I've just gone through, following quite closely, almost line by line, a passage where Hegel talks, among other things, about money. Money, the possibility of all the things of need, I quote — I had gone into some detail, but if I'm coming back to it, it's because I often didn't have time; when I rewatch, review what we've recorded, I tell myself, hey, there I should perhaps have talked about that.
5:51 That's a bit the downside of orality, if you will, you see. And, well, I'm sorry to make you work — I'm not saying abstract things, because all this is very concrete — but I'd like to insist this evening on problems that, until now, seemed independent of one another, and that we're going to connect tonight. The problem of money — I remind you what result we had reached, and I stress that there aren't that many pages devoted to what I had brought up.
6:32 Forgive me, it may sound pretentious, maybe I've got it all wrong, but in any case, it's not something that circulates much in Hegelian studies or Marxist studies. Namely that when Hegel says that money, I repeat, is the possibility of all the things of need, I had insisted enormously on the possible, opposing it to the real. Those who have studied philosophy know there are famous passages where Kant talks about 100 Thalers, 100 dollars.
7:03 You know that "dollars" comes from "Thalers," the Austrian currency. You pronounce Thaler the Anglo-Saxon way and you get dollars. Yes, anyway, 100 dollars, 100 francs, whatever. Whether I have them in my pocket in a real way, says Kant, or whether it's 100 possible dollars — I don't know, it's the same definition of 100 dollars, but the stakes aren't quite the same. But that's not the point here. It's to oppose possible to real, the third stage being necessary.
7:34 Let me recall the three postulates of modality, as they're called: the possible, the real, the necessary. There. The weakest being the possible, in terms of knowledge. There you go. A statement can claim to be scientific when it is at least possible. For example, when it doesn't contain contradictions. That's how we define the possible, in terms of general logic.
8:07 If I say, if A equals B, then B equals A. There. No contradictions. However, I still don't have anything real — possible, potens in Latin, or power. All these words come a bit from the same root, don't they? Physicists know very well what a potential difference is, for example. I was saying potens, power, potency in Latin.
8:40 The potential difference. Well yes, there's water at 800 meters, there's a hydroelectric plant down below at 200 meters, there's a dizzying turbine going down like that, right? And the energy comes from the difference in potential, thanks to the waterfall that sets in motion, right, the rotors, the blades, then transforms the mechanical energy into electrical energy — that's not our subject.
9:12 But you see, the potential is what was possible, as long as the water stays up top, right? There's a potential for mechanical energy, it needs to fall in an actual way. And science needs first for a statement to be, to correspond to something possible, that is, I repeat, to contain no contradictions — but that's the minimum. Then, this logical coherence — coherence in a word, non-contradiction — this logical coherence needs to correspond to something real.
9:50 If Pierre is Paul's brother, then Paul is Pierre's brother. And finally, third stage, science needs laws, rigorous things. Third stage, the necessary — the possible, the real, the necessary. Sorry for these somewhat abstract reviews. But you see, these are the three stages that lead to what is most necessary, namely the law, the physical law. All bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the square of their distance.
10:21 That's not long to write. Not long at all. But when Newton writes that, for the first time, the human mind takes possession of almost the entire motion of the universe, including in galaxies man will never reach. Or even at the speed of light, it would take millions of years to get there. Can you imagine what power, the power of the human mind? One little sentence. All bodies attract each other in direct proportion to their mass. Roughly, the bigger mass attracts the smaller one.
10:53 And in inverse proportion to the square of their distance. The further apart, the less the attraction is felt. And that's how you connect things that had never been connected before. The movement of the tides. Because the movements of the Moon exert an attraction on the part closest to the Moon, that is, the surface of the oceans. And so on. You see? There, we reach the necessary, the law. But now I come back to the possible. It's the first degree, so to speak.
Money and the intoxication of the indeterminate 11:23 Isn't that so? Well, money, says Hegel, is the possibility of all the things of need. You'll tell me, you're going on about it, you've said it 500 times already. But yes, because... You have to get used to taking words literally. You see? That means... the possibility of the things of need. That is... I've just been paid. You've all known that moment. I hope you'll know it again. I've just gotten my pay.
11:53 I was starting to count the days. Because at the end of the month, unless you're loaded, as we say in good French, end-of-month can sometimes be tough. There, I've just been paid, so I go to the cash machine. I have money in my pocket. I've taken out a good chunk of it. But I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with it. There's nothing real, as use value, corresponding to that money. On a 5, 10, 50, 100, 1000 euro bill — I don't think it exists, but even in coins — nothing indicates it.
12:36 With that, you're going to go buy flowers for Valentine. Or maybe you'll finally go see the Aleutian Islands. That's not Polynesia, the Aleutians are freezing. You see, so, the possibility, I repeat, of the things of need, but it's not yet determined. And so I have a kind of euphoria that we all know when we've just gotten paid. Because once I move to an actual need, and I act on it, it stops being a need, I fulfill it.
13:13 For example, I'm thirsty, I have a glass of water. There, when I drink the glass of water, I've satisfied, in an actual way, not a possible one, the need, the need called thirst. You see? But when I don't have it yet, when it's still undetermined, and money is exactly that, it's only the possibility of doing all that, I've had a kind of intoxication because I can't yet be disappointed by what I do with my money.
13:51 You know, studies have been done on people who won huge fortunes in the lottery jackpot, and it turns out that most of them ended up badly. People aren't prepared for it. When you're on minimum wage and suddenly, I don't know, however many millions of euros fall on you, it's not... There you go. You ask the question, what would you do if you suddenly won 50 million euros? Men will say I'll buy a house for my mother, my sister, my wife, I don't know. Maybe I should have started with my wife. It's an impersonal game.
14:22 And that's where I send a third to the Secours Populaire. Those are good militants. Well, look, you see, all these possibilities, do you understand what "possible" means? None of them is yet determined in the banknotes. You see? I won't dwell too much on this because we saw it last time. It gives you a bit of a dizziness, an intoxication. It doesn't last long.
14:52 But, and this intoxication comes from the fact, once again, that I'm not yet confronted with the gap between what is somewhat imaginary in my desire, in my aspirations, and the harshness or disappointments that can come with fulfilling it. Do I need to draw you a picture? Look at what happens when a couple separates.
15:23 There's a ceremony that used to be classic, in the days when it wasn't texts or emails, it was letters. There's the exchange of letters. Here, I'm giving you back your letters and you give me back mine. That's how it was, when a couple separated. That meant you're no longer the recipient, right, of what I wrote. You don't deserve for me to say I'd love you my whole life, that you're the most beautiful, etc. In the end, you're a bitch. Mind you, that's a manner of speaking. But it's someone being crude because they're disappointed.
15:54 Or someone else, I mean, after all, you're a jerk. There, whereas she had said — I heard this once, someone who said we shouldn't fly on the same plane together, because it's not good. Families — if the plane crashes, all the family members die together. And excuse me for telling you about my own life, that's rare, but the girl had told me, we don't care about life, it's you I love. So we might as well take the same plane. You see, idealism. She ended up dumping me — she was right.
16:25 She had her whole life ahead of her. And I was starting to have mine behind me. So, there aren't all these problems of clashing with reality as long as the money remains — money that hasn't yet been used to buy the object of a need or a desire — for now, I'm not distinguishing between the two — or determined. And when it's not determined, when it's undetermined, there's a side to it — replace "undetermined" with a synonym. There you go, you found it: undetermined equals infinite.
17:00 I understand there's an intoxication, you see, that money can drive you mad. Of course, someone with colossal wealth doesn't worry about what to do with it, because he can do this and that, whereas most of us have to choose a bit later, to select what we're going to do with it all. But today, what I want to show you — I'd like to start from where we had arrived, that is, that when I have money, I can put off what I called the other day self-knowledge, which is still the main imperative of philosophy since its founding.
Socrates, the oracle of Delphi, and self-knowledge 17:51 We didn't expect that, starting from money and civil society and exchange, we'd end up at Socrates, at the founding of philosophy. But yes! You read Plato's Apology of Socrates, where Plato has Socrates tell how he came to philosophy. Socrates answers with an extremely famous passage, right? He had gone to consult the oracle — you know, the Greeks, when they have problems, they go consult the oracle.
18:24 At Delphi, the most sacred place, the navel of the world, the Greeks said. The last one to say, 25 centuries later, will say that Frankfurt is the navel of the world. That's where the European Central Bank is. That doesn't glorify all that much. So, people went to consult the oracle, and Socrates — the oracle had told Socrates, Socrates, you are the wisest man in Athens. Wise, you know, has two meanings: wise, knowledgeable — when we say someone has great wisdom, he knows plants, mushrooms, animals.
18:55 There's knowledge within wisdom, and originally all this is a bit undifferentiated. All of it is in the word "sage" in French, "wise" in English, "weise" in German. You see, both meanings are in there, since "weise" gives rise to "Wissenschaft," science. You see, pure knowledge this time, as much as wisdom. So, Socrates, you are the wisest man in Athens. Socrates says, but I was astonished, I had the impression I couldn't understand why it seemed to me there were people far more competent than I was.
19:30 For example, a general of the Athenian army, a commander, knows the art of war better than I do. A great painter like Zeuxis, a great sculptor like Praxiteles knows aesthetics, beauty, what beauty is, far better than I do; a brave soldier will know what courage is. I don't know all that very well. And so I started asking questions, interrogating. I'll recall the best-known passages, so I'll go quickly.
20:02 I asked an artist, a great painter, what is beauty? Beauty is the Parthenon. He says, why can't a sunset be beautiful? Oh yes, but that has nothing to do with the Parthenon. True, that's a nuisance. Socrates — they ended up doing him in because of this. These questions are a nuisance. The guy thinks he knows, obviously. And Alcibiades, isn't he handsome — he was indeed, how shall we say, a good-looking young man of Athens, who tried to seduce Socrates and never managed to.
20:35 That's told in the Symposium, I'm not making this up. And I, the most beautiful young man in Athens, wanted to seduce the wisest man in Athens, and it didn't work. So, yes, how can things that are as different to the eye as a sunset, a film actress, a beautiful poem, etc.—how can all that bear the same name?
21:05 And so I realized that the artist didn't know what beauty was. He produces it, but he doesn't know what it is, he can't define it. Same for courage, same for virtue. And so I began to understand what the oracle meant, good grief. It's that I know that I know nothing. The others know nothing, but they don't even know that they know nothing. Here, "know" is meant in the strong sense. It means you can't give me a univocal definition of beauty, for instance, or of happiness.
21:39 So, the others don't know that they know nothing. So, in the end, I'm the man who knows the most because at least I know that I know nothing. Well, there you go. But, what was inscribed at the entrance of the temple? That's more than... That is the oracle's permanent word. It was written on the pediment of the temple. That means that whatever reason you came to consult the oracle for, you must never forget its first imperative, its Pythian imperative.
22:11 Because that's where the Pythia at Delphi made her prophecies, and the oracle comes from the fact that the place is sacred because there was a serpent, a python, which is at the origin of the sanctuary. But in any case, what was inscribed? Gnôthi seauton, know thyself. And what have we just seen? That with money, I can put off knowing what I want. It's clearer now, a bit clearer. Knowing whether it's better for me to buy 5,000 euros worth of chewing gum at a penny each — you never know, it could happen.
22:49 Or whether I should buy tickets to the other end of the world with the person I love, and so on. I'm not obliged to know what grounds my desire, what is the truth of my person. Because money lets me try all sorts of things. Beforehand — damn, that wasn't what suited me. In the meantime, I enjoyed it. That's where we'd gotten to. The philosophical balance sheet of money, isn't it?
Neopositivism, the dominant ideology 23:19 It's that thanks to it, I can remain in the negation of myself, of my depths. And there, and this I didn't have time to say last time, and it's what I'd like to bring tonight, it curiously reminds me of another trial — trial in the theoretical sense, not a criminal trial, I'm not being convicted — I mean a critique I had made of the dominant ideology.
23:49 You ask a lot of people who claim to be Marxists what the dominant ideology is, the main one, and they always say idealism. And you know I disagree. Of course, Marx, the young Marx especially, fights idealism. Agreed? He's much more nuanced toward the end of his life, especially when he issues that famous warning in the second edition of Capital, where he's defined, with a clarity his relationship to Hegel had never had before.
24:24 And as for Lenin, you know that in a famous passage, which is the culmination of his reading of Hegel's Greater Logic, so of a philosopher classified as an absolute idealist, no less, not subjective idealism, Kant, Fichte, not objective idealism, Schelling, I'll go quickly, look it up, all that's on Wikipedia and in ChatGPT, whatever you like.
24:54 No, but Hegelian absolute idealism, that's how it's classified, you see, so that should be the worst possible thing for a Marxist, and Lenin gets to the last chapter of the Greater Logic, which is titled the Absolute Idea, that smells more of the good Lord, doesn't it, things like that rather than productive forces and relations of production, and what does Lenin say—this passage is quite remarkable, I quote it word for word, well in French, in translation—fifty years after Marx, nobody understands Marx, no one has read the whole of Hegel's Logic, so not a single Marxist half a century after him, all that's in the same passage, and above all Lenin says this passage is Hegel's most idealist and at the same time most materialist passage, there, I won't dwell on it, I've often said this, it's not my subject tonight, so for now, I remind you that idealism is not the absolute ideological enemy right now, because that depends on the era—at one time it was the apostolic religion, the Roman religion, later Protestant, no matter, or Islam, whatever you like, or the cult of the Pharaoh,
26:05 which was the dominant ideology—I say the dominant ideology now is what we might call neo-positivism, you know, the little Swedish girl, what's her name, Greta, I'll say Greta Garbo, good Lord, no, little Greta Thunberg I think, you know, when she says, at 14 years old—it's wonderful to be 14, I'm not saying that to belittle her, but that's not really the age at which one has, say, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in physics—she says, listen to the scientists. What does she know about it?
26:45 I don't know much about it either, the equations that govern, say, motion, the spin of the electron, as they say, but what does she know about it? But you see, there's a cult of science without knowledge of it—you'll never hear me say a word against the content of the hard sciences, but there's a discourse that invokes the hard sciences and has nothing scientific about it, that's what I call neo-positivism, and which I now situate and define a bit more clearly: it's wanting to reduce everything that is properly scientific—and it must be scientific, so I'm in favor of that—but wanting to reduce it solely to knowledge of objects external to us, the opposite of 'know thyself,' you see how this is starting to become orderly—that astrophysics deals with galaxies, I have nothing against that, on the contrary, I'm passionate about it, the little I manage to understand of it I find fascinating, I want to know what comes next, does it all start with the Big Bang,
27:55 or what was there before, I have no idea—what are the laws that govern heredity, in biology, changing disciplines, why are gases compressible and not liquids, all that's fine, but all that is knowledge of things that are external, external, that are not proper to man, that are external to him. So if I come to consult the oracle and say, tell me, is the universe spherical, cylindrical, or flat, what does it answer me? Know thyself. What are you looking for? Let me remind you—do you know what pre-Socratic thinkers were called, I'm not saying philosophers, since philosophy begins with Socrates, that would be contradictory, but who were nonetheless very important for philosophy, that's why they're great thinkers if not philosophers, but they weren't called philosophers at the time,
29:05 do you know what they were called—the Thaleses, the Anaximanders, the Anaximeneses—Anaximenes placed air at the origin of everything, Anaximander placed the indeterminate, precisely the indefinite, Democritus—what fantastic audacity for the time—said that nothing exists but the atom and the void, and everything else is commentary, meaning excrement, gold, love, all that is combinations of atoms, that took some doing at the time, then later Pythagoras, everything is number. Do you know what they were called? Physicists. You see why I say knowledge of the external world—because they had all written a book that's been lost, we have nothing of theirs, we have fragments, in Aristotle where we have the most, sometimes we have a page and a half, that's enormous. I say that to poke a bit of fun at those in Heidegger's wake who swear only by Parmenides, by Heraclitus—we have a few statements, enormous, interesting, fundamental, but I mean, that doesn't make a book, it's fragments you can make say anything,
30:15 I'm pushing it a bit far, but it's a bit like how Nostradamus's quatrains get interpreted. They were called the physicists. And as for Socrates, it's said—I'm not confusing myself, look at the coherence—Socrates brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth, and yes, that's in the literal sense, don't look for anything fancy, it's not a grandiose formula. Before Socrates, people wanted to know what causes the rainbow, they had their heads in the sky, are the stars we see up there holes in a sieve, because there's a great light outside the dome that encloses us—people thought that at one time—or was it the moon?
31:05 People had their noses turned toward the sky, and that doesn't date from Greece, it comes from desert countries—if one day you're in the middle of the desert at night, look up, the sight is worth it, it swarms with stars with a sharpness—and it's no accident that the first proto-scientific, astronomical theories about the sky come from the Orient, from desert countries. Back to my story: Socrates brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth, meaning he stopped asking whether the earth was a cylinder, a sphere, or something flat, and he became interested in how I should raise my child, what is virtue, how to make the city just—he brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth. Know thyself: the oracle turns the question we came to ask back into the throat of the questioner that we are. Well, neo-positivism breaks with this tradition, it's not philosophical,
The denial of the subject: the spotlight and Oedipus 32:16 it would want rigor to be devoted only to what is outside us—there's a negation, in Freudian terms I'd say a repression, you can see where I'm going, in terms of negativity, a denial, toward what in philosophy is called the subject, the opposite of the object—and yes, a spotlight, it shines in my garden, on every last pebble, and the more powerful it is, the more it lights up the tiniest blade of grass, and here it's the spotlight itself that's in question, unless there's a mirror, the spotlight doesn't light itself, does it?
32:57 In any case, we must stop rummaging around in the external world in order to understand the self, and the finest example of this is the tragedy of the most unfortunate of the Greeks, isn't it—the tragedy of Oedipus, you know? No author of a detective novel has ever devised a plot as incredible, as surprising, a suspense as successful, as that of Oedipus Rex, Sophocles' most famous play along with Antigone—Oedipus being Antigone's father—namely that it is the guilty man who leads the investigation from start to finish, and who doesn't even know that he's guilty. Not even in Agatha Christie, don't you find, or Ellery Queen, I don't know, the great detective novel authors, don't you find that? Now what does he do once he finally knows the truth, Oedipus, namely that he is the guilty one, that he's the one who killed Laius, without knowing it was his father, so the story goes, what does he do,
34:08 you all know, a bit of culture, he gouges out his eyes—tragedy runs deep, nothing is left to chance—what use were his eyes to him? Eyes are for seeing what's outside. They're very useful, mind you—take a forest, or a beast stalking prey, eyes matter, otherwise it doesn't eat, of course—but eyes are for the external world, you see, the coherence of what we're discussing tonight—but eyes are not made for knowing oneself, for that you need something else, you need reflection, if we want to stay with optical metaphors, it's like suddenly putting a mirror in front of you. So what do neo-positivism and money have in common? Now that's unexpected, isn't it? It's that both give us an occasion to ignore ourselves, they reinforce our tendency not to look too closely at ourselves,
35:19 and I'll go so far as to think—and I bring together many things that I often dwell on but don't relate to one another, here I'm relating them—you know my hobby-horses, when I criticize not ecology but rather ecologism, that is, the naturalism within ecology, which is very different—ecology is the environment, that's not my specialty, I'm not a glaciologist, I respect all that, there are dangers, it must be taken seriously, it must be dealt with—but on the other hand, to say that man is abominable and that nature is too well made, that has nothing to do with science, that's called religion, and it's ecologism—yes, man is so badly made, isn't he, that God sent the flood to drown him, then afterward, in Sodom and Gomorrah, he sent fire, or the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, so that men would kill each other because they no longer understand one another—man has long been demonized, that's religious, it has nothing scientific about it. On the other hand, I haven't said that man was perfection either,
36:31 but man is like language, like speech, of which Aesop, the great fabulist of antiquity who inspired much of La Fontaine's Fables, said that speech, and thus man, is the best and the worst of things—now there's someone profound—yes, with language one can slander, send innocent beings to their death, but through speech I can also educate, save, pardon—ego te absolvo, in nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti—that's how the sacraments end in the Catholic Church, to convey the priest's power—ego te absolvo, I absolve you of all your sins—speech serves all that. So it's neither about deifying nor demonizing man. As Spinoza admirably says, it's not about laughing or crying, it's about understanding, and once we've understood, whether it makes us laugh or cry is everyone's own business,
37:41 that's something else, so let me come back to it—we didn't expect this—is there something in common between money and neo-positivism, which is the dominant ideology of the world—there is indeed a link—of the capitalist world, yes, I don't say Western, you know I like words that designate real things, and since the earth is round, the West is wherever you want it to be, so that doesn't define anything very precise—unless, without going along with the current, I'm a Westerner too, so I'm not criticizing that, no, no, here we're criticizing the policy of the leaders of what's called the West, so I prefer to say Atlanticist imperialism, to speak precisely, you see. But there is indeed something in common—it's no accident, it appears to us tonight, that it's no accident—neo-positivism is what in the 19th century was called, to criticize it, scientism—it's not science, real scholars are not scientistic,
38:56 a relation with money: in both cases, I must abstract from the subject, from the one behind it, everything that is desire, need, purpose, goal, organization—and that's no small thing—everything that is meaning. That's what I wanted to insist on tonight, and I take this opportunity to say that all this comes to us from a text of Hegel's—for the first time, indeed for the first time, a philosopher had read the first drafts of political economy that were beginning to be published in England, with the works in particular—unfortunately we've lost his commentary on Steuart's Principles of Political Economy—and so, you see, before Marx, he had understood that one of the keys to the riddles philosophy has posed since its origins was to be sought in man's praxis, in his practice, in his creation of value, as it would later be called,
Family, civil society, State 40:07 and now, Hegel, in his political philosophy, distinguishes three stages—I'll come back to this now, and you'll see it's a way of continuing to speak of this framework common to neo-positivism and to money—I give you these three stages: the family, civil society, the state. Every society must pass through these three stages, I don't know—let me take it first in a linear way, we'll see afterward that it's not so simple, but for now, to make it easier to understand, at the outset, let's not complicate things—the oldest, the family: every child that appears, appears within a collective, an embryonic collective called the family, whether that family is united or not doesn't matter, the child has a determinate father, a determinate mother, this father and this mother have cousins, brothers, uncles, there, the family is nice, the family, but I mean,
41:17 a society—what are called primitive societies, an odious term, because a society can be primitive at the technical level, that's the case, I don't know, of the pygmies for example, technologically anyway, but can be superior at times to us aesthetically or morally—so, a friendly piece of advice, when you want to refer to these peoples with a general term, say societies without writing, that's what's agreed upon in the human sciences when you don't want to make a value judgment—primitive means a bit 'I'm superior,' no. Now, when you look closely at primitive societies, the family is more important than in a modern society. What drove, say, migration from the provinces to Paris throughout the 19th century in particular? Above all, of course, it's employment, there's no more work, but not only that—there's the fact that a young woman, a young Breton woman, in her village, can't go give a friend a kiss in the evening without the curtains being drawn on the windows, who's that, who's that—she feels freer
42:28 in the anonymity of the big city—that's what I'd like to talk about, bourgeois civil society, the modern world, which appeared with the industrial revolution, and which means, to speak in scientific and measurable terms, that societies, or the number of people in the city, is larger. In England, no question, for example, it was the first to undergo the industrial revolution, and when I was studying, already only 3% of the English population was employed in agriculture—I don't know if you realize, there were far more in Russia at the time, in France, a large rural society, but even in France it has considerably shrunk, mechanization, that's another topic. Where I want to come back, what I want to talk about, is bourgeois civil society, to relate it to what we've just said, both about money and about neo-positivism—in both cases we've seen there was a repression of the subject, I don't want to know anything about the subject. Now, if you look closely, in the Hegelian triad,
The ambiguity of the middle and the extreme center 43:38 the family, civil society, the state—civil society is in the middle, it's the middle term, middle, I take it here in the sense of the hub of a wheel, it's the center, the middle. And you know, I've told you often enough in other contexts, you have to be very careful, there's nothing more ambiguous than what is in the middle. Let me repeat my fundamental example to make it understood: if I take a segment AB and take the midpoint M, I can't be simpler—let's do a thought experiment—if I take AM and paint it red, and if I take MB and paint it blue, point M will be purple, that's what the middle is, you never know exactly what it is, it's not frankly red, it's not frankly blue, it's reddish-brown—oh, let me take two extremes, the communists and the Nazis, and then along comes Heidegger's groupie, Hannah Arendt, who says it's all the same, communists and Nazis, and then we get a big muddle,
44:48 called totalitarian societies—good news for the Nazis, isn't it, they're no longer alone in being damned in history, the communists come to join them in history's dungeon—and the European Union has validated, hasn't it, this monstrous amalgamation, lumping together the main victims—there are still 30 million Russians who died to free us from the Nazi jackboot, and it wasn't only Russians, it was members of the Soviet Union.
45:23 I don't want to deal with all the topics at once, it's not my fault if we keep coming back to the same issues. Now, civil society is the middle—beware of the middle, how many times have I warned you against the worst of political parties, the worst of all, those situated in what I call the extreme center. Besides, I notice the expression is starting to catch on. I'm very pleased—I don't hold a copyright on it, but I note that I've been talking about the extreme center for a long time now, the worst thing there is—you know, between Giscard and Mitterrand, center-left, center-right, if you see nuances there, good for you.
46:05 They gave us the same society, the one we live in, where France is reintegrated into NATO's integrated command, yes or no? Where France obeys the laws of the European Commission in Brussels, yes or no? Under de Gaulle, a man of the right whom I always voted against, it wasn't like that. What wouldn't I give to have a quarter of that right-wing! No, no, now it's the extreme center that rules us, since the disappearance on the right of Gaullism, on the left of communism—we get the worst of it.
46:36 Because when there's an extreme, at least it's not trying to please everyone, it has to exaggerate—there's still some good in moderate people, but these aren't moderates, I'm telling you they're extremists, that's why I call it the extreme center. All those who had collaborated during the war, who had handed people over to the Gestapo, they kept a low profile, watch out, in 1945 they kept a low profile. The real culprits—not the poor girls whose heads were shaved because they'd slept with a German soldier to get food, no, no, I'm talking about the real culprits—who kept a low profile, and when they got back into politics, they called themselves 'various moderates,' center-left, center-right, no affiliation.
Bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Heisenberg, and blindness 47:18 Look, those were the official labels that filled the benches of the National Assembly. So why did I make this long digression? Because I remind you that money, as Hegel studies it in his first Philosophy of Spirit—I'm summarizing a bit of everything—appears with the help of what was entirely new historically, the industrial revolution had just occurred in England, and Hegel is the first who philosophically wants to take stock of what this historic emergence implies.
47:56 And he studies for the first time—I'm obliged to say it in German, though I know none of it, otherwise we'll get tangled up in wordplay. In French, it's called bourgeois civil society. That's what Hegel studied, then later Marx—bourgeois civil society. Except that it's only in French that we add 'bourgeois' to civil society, because in German it's 'bürgerliche Gesellschaft.' 'Gesellschaft' is society, 'Bürger' is citizen/bourgeois.
48:26 'Bourgeois' comes from a Germanic term, 'burg.' And that's where the ambiguity lies. It's not the bourgeois in the sense of the right-wing guy that Bégaudeau feels leftist against because he's always bashing the bourgeois. No, no. Bourgeois originally meant an inhabitant of the town, as opposed to an inhabitant of the countryside. So when you say 'Berliner Bürger' in German, it doesn't mean a reactionary right-wing bourgeois guy. It means a citizen of Berlin. He could be a prole, an aristocrat, a bourgeois, right?
49:00 Unemployed or a member of the great German employers' association, one of those bosses from IG Metall. So there's an ambiguity. Hence, to avoid it, in French we make a redundancy, as they say in linguistics—we say 'bourgeois' twice, 'bourgeois civil society,' whereas it's said once in German, 'bürgerliche Gesellschaft.' I seem to be splitting hairs, but the stakes are enormous, because it's in the middle.
49:33 I've just warned you against what is in the middle. It's monstrous, the middle. It's monstrous, a science that never looks toward the subject, and that uses rigor only to exert power over objects. I remind you that in the Third Reich there were very great scholars. I always use the example of Heisenberg, because he's certainly one of the fathers, one of the most important, of quantum theory.
50:05 So what could I possibly criticize him for at that level? What do I know about it? There he's far better than me, isn't he? We also know he's behind what's called the uncertainty relations, through which—I'm trying to get to the essential so as not to say anything stupid—one cannot know both the position and the speed of an elementary particle at the same time. An immense figure, perhaps one of the greatest physicists of the entire modern era.
50:35 But he had sympathies for the Third Reich. So we're beginning to understand what's lacking in civil society—one can have an intelligence, not intelligence with a capital I, but an intelligence in the domain of knowledge of the external world, that to which people want to reduce scientific knowledge, and be, not blind—for it wasn't Heisenberg's eyes that were diseased—but rather have blindness, which is quite different from the blindness of not being able to see.
51:15 It's not an eye disease, this blindness. It's when I don't see what's blinding me, I don't want to see it, because it dazzles me, I don't want to see it. So that's what I wanted to add from the last session—that what may characterize today's dominant ideology, and that's why I put this image at the start of this video, this image of a kind of painting by a so-called naïve painter, the Douanier Rousseau, this female figure on horseback who seems to be wreaking havoc across the whole earth—it's because the old man of 80 that I've become has never seen a world so close to war.
52:07 And what war? Because there have been wars. It's called a vale of tears, as Scripture says. No, this is the war of which Einstein said there wouldn't be a third world war, or if there is one, the fourth will be fought with stones. We'll have gone back to a time when Cro-Magnon man would seem modern. It's because this blindness of being in the middle like that and constantly fleeing oneself—I'm going to relate that to one last point.
Popular music and structuralism: the evacuation of the subject 52:45 But first point, money. Then, neo-positivism, that's the negation of the subject. So far I think we're following. And now, why—here I go with my hobby-horses—why, besides the fact that I often come back to a critique of ecologist naturalism, do I also often attack the sonic ghetto in which generations of young people have been locked up? Why am I stubbornly opposed to people-music but never to popular music?
53:23 And yes, this is not a translation of that. Listen again to the wrong note we owe to Alyosha and you'll see the distinction isn't complicated. But what's the connection here? What does it have to do with the negation of the subject? I once questioned someone—no, I won't give the name, whom you know, whom I love very much, but who's a great young philosopher, author of a work on Hegel—and anyway I was asking him because he listens to rock like his whole generation, and he told me to justify it, 'you understand, when I listen to that, I forget everything.'
54:10 Yes, including yourself. There are kinds of music that let you always be outside yourself. There are 3000 of us doing that in a concert hall, or at the Isle of Wight. You see what I'm relating here. There's always that with it. But there are other kinds of music, quite the opposite of those, that go left, right, that are fast and then suddenly slow down.
54:40 Music where suddenly I recognize myself. No, I don't merge into a collective all sharing the same tempo, the same rhythm. No, no! There, suddenly, I find myself again. There. I won't say more about it tonight, but I've shown to what shoals—plural, what shoals, with an s, perilous shoals—this repression, I can't find another word, of the subject has led us, whose latest avatar in the history of contemporary and recent philosophy is structuralism,
55:20 which flourished in the 60s and 70s, and which had Lévi-Strauss saying—he's a great thinker, careful, these aren't idiots, I've shown you that one can be a scoundrel without being an idiot, and this isn't quite a scoundrel either—but someone who began the process of de-Marxifying the university, by concerning himself less with what is historical. He says so himself.
55:50 He says, I specialized in peoples without history. A nice pun—it means at once peoples who are not in history but who moreover don't make trouble, don't cause a stir. That's not what I wanted to quote. Above all he said that his system boils down to—listen carefully, this is him... well, actually it's Ricoeur, but he endorses Ricoeur, who said that Lévi-Strauss was, I quote, 'a Kantianism without a transcendental subject.'
56:22 Well, there you go, the subject is evacuated. What does Althusser say—that Marxism is a process without a subject? It's incredible, they didn't coordinate with one another. Lacan—I'm bringing in different people, I'm not lumping one with the other, they're all different, but they have something in common—it's no accident that they were talked about the most precisely when structuralism was fashionable, something circulating that's shared. Lacan, in one of the most important passages of that great compilation of his principal works titled the Écrits, Lacan has a chapter called 'Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire.'
57:07 Subversion of the subject. In Derridean terms, one would say a deconstruction of the subject. That's why. And that's what I'd like to end on. It's not some whim of mine to suddenly go after those who go after the subject—it's that we're only just emerging from those who, on the ideological front, illustrate what we've come to today.
The ideological front and the 1859 preface 57:39 And this time, unfortunately, on all the other fronts as well, the economic fronts, the military fronts. Because in philosophy, let's not have any illusions, it's not the ideas of philosophers that run the world. But on the front—the battle is also fought on the ideological front. Don't forget that, because many Marxists also make this mistake. It sounds like I'm criticizing Marxists. No, no. I'm criticizing those who aren't Marxist enough. Many Marxists say, well, the essential thing is the infrastructures, it's the productive forces, then there are the relations of production, even if that's a bit more mysterious.
58:17 And there you go. And then the rest is ideas, it's stuff, it's nonsense, it's fantasies, it's culture, it's literature, it's Paganini, Nerval, music. When Marx distinguishes the two in the extraordinary 1859 preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—sorry, the title, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the famous 1859 preface, of which I always say it's where you find the most Marxism in the fewest lines, to encourage you to jump on it—he defines, indeed, he begins by talking about infrastructures: in the social production of their existence, men enter into necessary relations, relations of production, which correspond to a certain degree of development of the material productive forces of society.
59:09 it's so well known that I'll go quickly, though I'm not skimping. But there, and upon which is erected—well, there, the dream world, of ideology, of superstructures—it's not, except that Marx puts a full stop there, that's the schoolbook Marxism if we stop there, but he doesn't content himself with being schoolish, he moves to the next line and says: at a certain level of their development, at a certain degree—it depends on the translations—the productive forces of society come into contradiction with the relations of production within which they had moved until then.
59:51 Until then, the relations of production had been the expression of the productive forces. Right? The feudal relation of production corresponds to productive forces that are of the order of the plow or animal traction, which comes down to much the same thing. The relation of production of antiquity, the so-called slave-based relation of production, rests on a fundamental productive force which is the slave. The bourgeois relation of production rests on the machine, on the industrial world.
1:00:23 Right? So the relations of production are only the expression, the reflection, in somewhat more mechanistic terms, of the productive forces. Except that here Marx says the opposite. At a certain moment, the productive forces—let's say, when we moved, right, from animal traction to the steam engine, precisely at the time of the industrial revolution—there's a leap forward in the productive forces, but that's not to say that that year, at midnight, we passed from feudalism to the bourgeoisie and the modern world.
1:00:58 Isn't that so? There's a tension that comes from the fact that the new productive forces—in other words, the time of productive development is not the same, it's much faster than that of mentalities, of what's in people's heads. I always recall as an example that a great deal of Roman law is still in our legal systems. And not only in France, in Europe, but everywhere. That's still 2,500 years. It takes much longer to move, doesn't it—the superstructures, mentalities, if you prefer.
1:01:30 or everything that's in the mens—mens is the understanding, the mind, I don't know, in Latin. It's much slower to move than the passage from computing—that's not so old—to artificial intelligence, you see, which is even more recent. It moves fast, doesn't it? We are still very, very, very far from grasping all the upheavals that these new productive forces will bring about in our interiority, in the superstructures.
1:02:09 There you go, I don't want to dwell too long, not that the format is too long, because many of you have told me you concentrate better on a format that runs under an hour and a half. But then again, others tell me that what they prefer is my detours. Anyway, I mean, for now, tonight, I wanted to focus on this return to a subject I had already addressed, but by digging deeper and connecting things that don't seem to have any relation to one another.
1:02:40 Very quickly, to sum it up one last time: money, neopositivism, the sound ghettos of the music people, right? In short, in everything that's an occasion to draw the curtain over what is essential for each of us, which is ourselves. Know thyself. There you go. Well, I thank you all again for being present and I hope you'll continue to follow us.
1:03:19 Let me remind you—sorry for this little refrain that keeps coming back—that come the fall, I'd like to sound the call a bit regarding our financial problems. There's nothing insoluble about this problem, don't worry, but still, I mean, so that the dues are up to date—but we'll talk about it more substantially in the fall. In the meantime, I'm very glad you followed this episode and I'm of course looking forward to your comments.
1:03:52 This will be the occasion for a new round of answers to questions. Once again, many thanks to Adrien, to Pierre-Alain, and see you next time.
