English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Evil taken as a whole, from physical suffering to history 0:00 Thank you for being here, thank you for keeping faithfully to our appointment and for being willing to continue our bouquet of flowers of evil, so to speak. And you remember that we used a text by Baudelaire, that's why I allow myself to stay in the same semantic field, last time, the cracked bell, taken precisely from The Flowers of Evil. And so, I had promised you last time, because I had gone into developments that required an incompressible amount of time, I had skipped the questions, and I had promised you that this time would be a session of answering questions.
0:47 I confirm it to you, I'll just make a small prelude for those who are either new, joining the train mid-journey, or, even among the regulars, may have trouble finding their bearings with this difficult theme, where I seem to alternate between philosophical references that require an effort of abstraction and, on the contrary, allusions to the most immediate current events.
1:18 So, I'm going to go back a little to what I would like to serve as the nucleus for this cycle on evil. I remind you, and I'll never repeat it enough, that I said long ago, and I repeat it today, that a philosophy which does not pose the problem of evil directly, or most often indirectly, is not worth a minute's trouble. I don't need to insist on the somewhat solemn character of this statement, I don't like making grand gestures too much, but it's to show you the importance of what's at stake.
2:03 But at the same time, immediately, one sees the disproportion between the importance of what's at stake and the abstraction in which I leave it for now by saying "evil." So this is where I remind you that I take it in its entirety. That is to say, both "Ow, mommy, boo-boo," I hurt, I hurt. I pricked my finger with a needle, I have a lot of nerve endings at my fingertips, it hurts.
2:35 Physical suffering, isn't that so, has no limit, other than fainting or death, doesn't it? But what relation is there between pricking the tip of your finger with a needle, and the essence of evil, isn't that so? Or the empire of evil, as Bush used to say, before invading Iraq without authorization from the UN, isn't that so? Iraq is far from having recovered even now, and yet it's been many years, hasn't it?
3:07 I could recall the... almost 500,000 deaths from famine due to the embargoes on that poor country. If only it were the only one in the region one could call "that poor country." So, I go from "ow, mommy, boo-boo" to historico-political evil and theological evil. So, when I say give it a nucleus, how do we give unity to all that?
Apocalypse: evil as the one who accused our brothers 3:40 No, not to do one and then the other afterward, in a somewhat disjointed way, precisely. For that, listen, let's go back to the essence of evil, isn't that so? The prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated, for his essence is falsehood. I'm referring to this passage, well-known, not to you, bunch of unbelievers, since most of you, in your age group — I'm thinking of the many young people who are kind enough to listen to my talks — very few of you went to catechism, isn't that so?
4:25 So we don't know the texts. And yes, I've noticed that some who follow my videos, to inform themselves, go and look at these texts, without which one doesn't understand many allusions, sometimes simply in the French language, isn't that so? The story of Adam and Eve, we don't need it. Well, anyway. So, yes, yes, yes, evil, the ancient serpent, these are periphrases that are in the Bible.
4:56 Revelation, when finally, in the lake of sulfur, at the end, even the devil is defeated, he falls into the lake of sulfur, isn't that so? It doesn't say "the devil," it says "there he is, defeated." The prince of this world, the ancient serpent, the one, listen carefully, the one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. Can you imagine? I'm making a reflection on evil, I'm not straying off with this example.
5:27 In the Revelation of John, the same one who wrote the Gospel of John, of Saint John among Catholics, of John among Protestants — since I'm Corsican and lazy, Corsicans have that reputation, legend has it. I want to say a word, it comforts me, the Gospel of John. No, I'm thinking especially of Johann Sebastian Bach, who, good Protestant that he was, says "Johannes Passion," the Passion of John. Yes, it's the same one who wrote Revelation, not to be confused with Saint John the Baptist. This religion of which we're told, you know, especially in neo-pagan, neo-Nietzschean, sub-Nietzschean circles — because Nietzsche is worth much more than that, I keep repeating it, for those who believe I'm being dismissive toward Nietzsche.
6:07 In my opinion, it's they who are dismissive toward him by reading him through Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, and Heidegger especially — but that's my point of view. That's not the subject tonight — in that discourse, we're made to believe that it's the religion of guilt, of the spirit of gravity, of sad thoughts. Macron once said, denouncing us, denouncing us as having sad thoughts. He wanted to show that he had read those who talk about Spinoza. Whereas here, it's in the Gospel, it's the New Testament after all, these aren't texts, commentaries, they're canonical texts, isn't that so, of absolute Christianity.
6:52 It's even the very last lines, Revelation, after the Acts. And there, how is evil characterized? The one who accused our brothers before the Eternal. Evil is not defined as sin, but on the contrary, as accusation, as the act of condemning. I'm not interpreting it, I'm quoting the text. There he is, defeated, the ancient serpent, the one who accused our brothers before the Eternal.
7:24 So what, a Nietzschean Christ, we no longer know where we stand, isn't that so? You see, that's all I wanted to condense before answering your questions, giving priority — among all the questions I'm behind on, including some by years — to those related to the cycle we're dealing with, and to those who are kind enough to ask questions about my latest talks.
7:59 But that doesn't prevent me from taking up older questions too. So I return to evil, of course, not the child's hurt, the mommy boo-boo — although, we'll come back to physical suffering. Because there, I was making the point in favor of the Christian text, against this sub-neo-Nietzscheism I'm talking about, for whom it's the religion of guilt, hence the spirit of gravity.
Greek immanence, Christian transcendence; hubris 8:36 In short, you have to let loose, and good for those who have the means. But that's not what it's about. It's generally opposed, of course. That's what Nietzsche does first, opposing it to the Greek world, isn't that so? To the world of ancient Greece. So, let's not get our wires crossed, let's be clear. In the Greek world, it's true that the Greek world and the Christian world are in an inverse relation.
9:06 There isn't a difference between these two cultures. They say exactly the opposite of one another. The divine is not God. God is not a very common notion among the Greeks. The divine, for the Greeks, is what surrounds us. So here I introduce the philosophical distinction between immanence and transcendence. There is an immanentist conception of the sacred, of the divine, of the gods if you prefer, in Greco-Roman antiquity, but of course, in Greek culture at its culmination, and especially as the ideal type, one might say elsewhere.
9:50 The divine — there are nymphs in the springs. They are not... whereas in Christianity, it's said "my kingdom is not of this world." You see what I mean by an inverse relation of one to the other. You take the first, multiply it by minus one, and you get the other. That doesn't mean better, but in both directions. There you go. The gravest fault among the Greeks is hubris. You know it, it's the driving force of all the tragedies, of the great Greek tragedies, of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
10:23 Tragedy there. And hubris, I say it in Greek, not to show off, I'm not called Heidegger, I don't go in for that. I say it because there are hesitant translations. To remember, nonetheless, I'll always start with everyday language. Let me open a small parenthesis. You see? If I ask an ordinary German on the street, when I'm in Germany, what is Erscheinung? It's the word that Kant uses to say phenomenon.
10:54 It's complicated, the phenomenon in Kant, isn't it? There's the noumenon and the phenomenon. Except that the man on the street isn't going to tell me "it's the opposite of the noumenon, it's space and time." No. He'll tell me, "ah, phenomenon, it's, I don't know, a ghost, an apparition." Yes, it's not appearance, it's apparition. It's more active. It's something that surges up like that. Well, hybris gives "hybrid" in French. And everyone knows what a hybrid is. It's a monster. Ah, that's not Greek. That's not Greek.
11:25 If there's one walking around with a man's body and a bull's head, he must be eliminated. That's the Cretan world. There's still a remnant of the Orient, of Egypt there, you know. Among the Egyptians, there's this magnificent — careful, I'm not saying the Greek city is more beautiful than the Egyptian one. There's an unequaled sense of mystery in Egyptian art, for example. But the themes are very different. In Egyptian art, it's not just a matter of the form of man, the Gestalt — I'm caricaturing a bit by saying the Apollo Belvedere, isn't that so?
11:57 Yes, I am indeed Greek, but I've got the white marble and my wrinkles, I struggle a bit, but there you go, you see what I mean. So, he doesn't have a dog's head on a man's body, or a jackal's like Anubis, I don't know, the one who presides over the judgment of the dead, isn't that so, the jackal. Or the reverse, an animal body with a human head, the sphinx, lion's body, man's head. No, no. The Greek world doesn't like hubris.
12:28 Hubris, if you want a one-word translation that I propose, you can find better, is excess, immoderation. It's the sense that's present every time. If there's tragedy, it's because there's a fault that must be purged. "Purge," that's from "cathar," which gives "catholic," "cathartic" — you know, "Cathar" too, who thought themselves even purer than the Catholics — it's the C-A-T-H, which radically means "pure" in Greek, and which we find in "cathartic," meaning to purge.
The Bacchae: Pentheus too ethical, the Symposium, Dionysus 13:09 The advantage of translating it as "excess" is that in tragedy it's always a matter of correcting a crime characterized by the adverb "too." Icarus flies too high. One will be too greedy, or one will be too moral, I'm thinking of the hero of a fascinating tragedy by Euripides called The Bacchae.
13:44 The Bacchae are the women who wander about, especially during the sacred night, the Dionysiac nights. It's not that all blows are permitted — that will come later with the Bacchanalian carnival, where you can do what you want provided you're disguised, so you won't be recognized the next day. But no, it was serious among the Greeks, there was blood. The Bacchae is a tragedy whose central character — forgive me for laughing, yes, because I'm talking about Bacchus, Dionysus, drunk, yes, no, it's not the same, it's spelled P-E-N-T-H-E-U-S — Pentheus, king of Thebes, whose excess, what is it? He is too ethical.
14:31 He doesn't want, in his city, any homosexuals, transgender people, excesses, breaches of good morals, as decent folk would say — he's the one always by the bell that's never cracked, you know, the one. "Happy the bell with the vigorous throat," living to the rhythm of the bell, there, well. Yes, for now, why not, there are people like that, except that doesn't make a tragedy, except that he goes so far as to ban, in his city, in Thebes, the cult of Dionysus.
15:05 Because that god isn't presentable in company, he isn't presentable. Have you seen how Plato's Symposium ends? It's serious, you know? And it's in that dialogue that Plato gives us his theory of the beautiful, for reflections on beauty always manage to end up talking about Eros — it's the discussion on Eros, and he always manages to bring it back to beauty. A little reminder in passing, it's not our subject, I'll go quickly.
15:36 How does the Symposium end? There's a postlude — Plato is a fabulous director, he's a filmmaker. The philosophical discussion is over, Plato has brought in the idea of beauty through a woman. There's the doctor who comes and gives his theory of beauty, the doctor Eryximachus, who says "well, we need to talk about it, but before drinking, because afterward, you see, it's precise." But in the end, when it's a matter of defining not this or that beautiful object — not the beauty of the Parthenon, or a sunset, or such-and-such an actress or actor, no.
16:10 But of the beautiful which is in itself, by itself, eternally united to itself, in the uniqueness of its formal nature — these are extraordinary passages. Here, it's a woman, the stranger of Mantinea, a city like that, who comes and says to Socrates — not Socrates there, huh, Socrates? — the one who directs his gaze toward the fabulous ocean of the beautiful. Well, no, it's an admirable passage. That's over, that discussion, we've had it.
16:40 And then the postlude begins, it's Alcibiades, isn't that so? The one who did everything to seduce Socrates. The most beautiful young man in Athens did everything to seduce one of the oldest. Isn't that so? Because he wanted to appropriate his wisdom — well, read the Symposium, it's worth it. He's very disappointed because he goes to bed with Socrates, and Socrates does nothing. Well, anyway, I won't say more. Let's be serious. And he arrives there, dead drunk!
17:10 You see, I was talking about Dionysus, supported by flute-playing women. The flute is always linked, isn't that so, to excess, to the Bacchic, the Dionysiac, whereas Apollo's lyre, on the contrary — Apollo, Dionysus. You see how all this becomes dialectical. Apollo is order, harmony, measure, precisely. So he arrives, supported, crowned with ivy. There, you need to know all this, these are the symbols of Dionysus — ivy, of course, everything to do with grapes, the vine tendril, etc., but also the pine.
17:47 The pine — and what do the pine and the ivy have in common? Go on, there you go, you've found it, it's always green. It doesn't wither, we're in autumn, no, not for the pine, not for conifers, isn't that so? These aren't deciduous plants, you see? And, well, listen, since I'm going around the Dionysiac field, it makes me a bit ribald. Let's go, then, to the tip of the Île de la Cité, in Paris, that tip where you have a square called Square du Vert-Galant.
18:24 They say it refers to the famous... of Henri IV. There you go, sovereigns are still supposed to have a more imposing one than ours, isn't that so? There you go. Just to tell you that green is always linked to vigor, to form, to power, there, all these fantasies. So, back to my tragedy, The Bacchae. He bans the cult of Dionysus.
18:56 Now, this is where we see how complicated it is, excess and the metron. The opposite of excess is the metron, measure. Of course, the key word — is that all the gods must be honored. If you skip one of them, you're not observing the right measure. You shouldn't wallow all the time in orgy. You shouldn't worship only Dionysus. But you shouldn't exclude him from the city either.
19:28 Even if the guy comes a bit from "the great replacement." Yes, I hear you gasping. With my anachronism — not at all. In mythology, it's said — look at the pictorial representations of Dionysus — he's always on a chariot drawn by wild beasts, whether panthers or tigers, precisely to show that he comes from far away. He comes from a tropical, oriental world, said to come from the banks of the Ganges.
19:58 Yes indeed, I'm talking about "great replacement." That excess isn't Greek at all. He comes a bit to sow disorder at the end of the Greek world, you see, to the point that Hölderlin went so far as to write a series of poems in which there's a comparison that keeps circling in this triangle between Dionysus, Christ, and Heracles. The three who did good for mankind. First, because — this is in the Bible — the fruit of the vine gladdens the heart of man. That's not me, I'm not pushing people to drink, it's written in the Bible.
20:31 It's one of the first things Noah says. After the flood, when he lands, he begins by planting a vine. I don't know — yes, we get that from the Orient. And when he lands, he says, the fruit of the vine gladdens the heart of man. There you go. Heracles spends his time purging the earth of the monsters that prevent man from living there.
21:02 And Christ — let me draw you a picture, you see, and this is where he has that magnificent image, Hölderlin, the clover leaf. You see, the clover is trilobed. I don't know, the three there. Dionysus, Heracles, Christ, a clover leaf splendidly verdant. You see. So this apparently long detour is not a detour. I want to point out how imprudent it was of Pentheus, political power of the city, to want to skip over a god.
21:39 Of course, the god's vengeance will be terrible. He will be torn to pieces, torn apart by dogs, by the Bacchae, isn't that so? Because Dionysus will appear in the form of a magnificent young man and will seduce Pentheus. He will seduce him, make him crack. You see, it's terrible, like in Jean-Saint-Loup. He was for order, like that, isn't that so? Well, men with men, women with women, well, men with women, in short.
22:12 Law and order, as they'd say in Texas. And there you go, it was imprudent to skip over him. And so, he too will put on animal skins, go out with the Bacchae, and of course, the dogs won't recognize him, they'll tear him to pieces. It's terrible. The punishment of excess, I come back to it. I'm not losing my thread. The thread is: Christianity and Hellenism are related not by difference, A different from B, but by inversion.
22:47 Inverse. I showed it for immanence and transcendence. Transcendence: my kingdom is not of this world. Immanence: it's not H2O, there are nymphs. There are nymphs in the water, there. You see? And the ocean is Poseidon, it's someone, not merely something. It's not the post-Galilean world, it's not Galilean-Cartesian inertia. You see, all this that we're reviewing is important. I'm speeding up a bit, I'm going to get to the answers to the questions, but you see the substance there is, since there are parts of evil.
Hippolytus in Phaedra: tragedy on the edge of the circle 23:23 So, evil in the Greek world is excess, hubris. Last example, after this exclusive too-much, if you will, Pentheus, Hippolytus, in Racine's Phèdre, Hippolytus is a good boy, the best match in Athens, he's handsome, he's the son of Theseus, the son of the king, slim, he has all the young girls at his feet, but he's not interested in women, nor in men either, what he's interested in is hunting.
23:57 That's already excess in itself, someone who isn't interested in the city, but who's always out riding beyond the city's limits, "oh, that I might sit in the shade of the forests," you see, when Phèdre says that trying to get closer to him, "following with her eyes a chariot fleeing down the track," that's already troubling, this is someone who lives at the periphery of the metron. Go on, take a city, put the king at the center, Theseus for instance, or Louis XIV, no matter, and you draw a circle around it — a circle, easy to picture — the center of that hearth, it would be a hubris to get too close to it, only the king can be there. I'll make a stylistic parenthesis: it's often said that what sums up the whole style of French literature, if that means anything, but if there's one figure of style that is the most French, it's litotes. What is litotes? It's saying less to express more. Instead of saying a girl is, oh my, so beautiful, you say she's pretty, she's not bad, you see.
25:07 That's typical of French, of French literature — this is a hypothesis of mine, so it needs checking; whenever it's something I find good, I have to be very careful, I need to check it properly, I hate gurus. It means that in the presence of transcendence — that's Louis XIV — you cannot say that he is handsome, that he is intelligent, that she is beautiful, no, all that has to be reserved, you see, for the living god who sits there on the throne. So we calm down, we don't say she's beautiful, we say she doesn't have only flaws, you see, that's it — I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's it. So Hippolytus, what interests him is hunting. His confidant, whom I'll avoid dwelling on because I did a whole cycle on this — I refer you to it — centered around the character of Phèdre, in order to be able to speak of the notion of the subject through the character of Hippolytus precisely. So he only has to bend down to pick up the prettiest girls in Athens, he's the king's son, he's handsome.
26:18 And what's more, it troubles the girls a little, this boy who isn't interested in girls, you see. And the young girl arrives, and there it is — the only one he falls in love with is the one his father has forbidden anyone to approach. Go try explaining that in a university lecture hall, to those who say Freud only spouts arbitrary nonsense — Racine had never read Freud — the only one, because Theseus, this is political, I won't go into it, Theseus exterminated this young girl's family in order to seize power in Athens. He's so afraid that family might reconstitute itself that he forbade anyone to approach the last descendant, so that she would never be made pregnant. So she's under house arrest, there you go. And when Theseus's absence — he's been absent for six months, more than six months — "ashamed, desperate, bearing everywhere the wound with which I am torn, before you, against you, I put myself to the test" — well anyway, I mustn't start, it's so beautiful — and it's not only the falling in love of the girl forbidden by the father, because everyone believes he's dead, there's been no news of him.
27:29 His return will be terrible, the punishment. So there it is — except that she, as it happens, is drawn precisely to that side of him that women apparently don't interest — and she goes as far as to say, I quote, that yes, Theseus, it's easy to seduce Theseus, he's a great womanizer, Theseus, "entering a heart open on every side," but "to bear the sword" — look at the unconscious sadism of this young girl who seems so innocent there, keeping her victims, a poor Cinderella — "to bear the sword, that is what I want, that is what he deserves, taming Hercules would have cost less than taming Hippolytus" — I'm quoting word for word, so no one says I'm interpreting — she goes so far as to say it's harder to seduce Hippolytus, to disarm Hippolytus, than Heracles — go wrench his club from Heracles, he'd have a thing or two to say about that — well yes, it's even harder because he's not interested in women, there you have it.
28:33 And that's precisely why I chose him to talk about the subject — we come back to it — because when he himself realizes that he hates love, the stories of men, women, couples — "I who always thought, I who, contemplating mortals' shipwrecks, always thought I'd stay safe on shore, avoid the storms" — now enslaved, now that she is in love with him, "enslaved now under the common law, by what turmoil do I find myself carried away from myself?"
29:07 Do the same, isn't that beautiful? It's aesthetically beautiful, and then bang — theory of the subject! But no, the unconscious doesn't exist, well there you go: "by what turmoil do I find myself carried away from myself" — I too thought I had no unconscious, I too thought I was a guy who couldn't care less about women, love is for others, that's not for me, what I want is to chase wild boars. You see, excess — everyone is caught in excess, so they're all going to be punished, all those who have a "too much." She's a bit too sadistic, don't you think?
29:45 And he, just as Pentheus made the mistake of overlooking a god, Dionysus, makes the mistake of overlooking Venus, Astarte, whatever you want to call her, Aphrodite. Yes, that's what his confidant tells him — confidants have the advantage of balancing out the excess of tragic heroes, that's how confidants get by, you see — look at the true psychoanalysis that Theramenes, Hippolytus's confidant, performs on his young master, since Theseus said, here, I entrust my son to you, teach him hunting, fishing, combat, etc.
30:25 And Theramenes, the confidant, admires his master Theseus, a ladies' man, and he'd like the son to be the same, well, why not, he's grown, he's vigorous — so he's a bit frustrated to see him only interested in hunting, never in women. And when he sees Hippolytus wanting to leave Trézène, to leave the region where he hunts, when Hippolytus tells him yes, it's not only his father he's going to seek, there's something else, he's fleeing something, the confidant tells him: "I have seen you prefer this stay to the pompous tumult of Athens and the court — what danger, or rather what sorrow, drives you away?"
31:17 You see, he senses his young master is beginning to fall in love, this might be the moment, and he performs a genuine psychoanalysis to make him confess, to get him to spill the beans. He dismantles one by one — one after another, rather — the reasons Hippolytus gives for wanting to leave, as though one could, beyond all measure, break the unity of place in the middle of a tragedy. He will die before the end of the play from wanting to leave.
31:50 The first line is: "My mind is made up, I am leaving, dear Theramenes, and quitting the abode of lovely Trézène." You see, he's already in danger from the very first line. I told you, imagine a circle, remember, with the center, the hearth — the great aesthetic masterworks are the ones that are not inside the circle, within measure. The bell that isn't cracked, remember earlier. The community of those who live to the rhythm of the bell — that's not society, that's a community, good for them.
32:20 And then there are those who are outside, in excess, who will come to a bad end. Tragedy is what always sits right on the circle itself — borderline, as we say now, you see. From the very first line: "My mind is made up, I am leaving, dear Theramenes." He will repeat this throughout the play. When he finally makes his confession, there — he's relieved. So, three acts later, he says to that same Theramenes: "There, the ship is ready, the sails are full, we can leave." You see: "ready to receive you, our vessels await you at the foot of the altar, you may board, sovereign of the seas that must carry you."
The Parthenon, Cape Sounion, and Rilke's elegy 32:57 There you have it, that's the "too much." Well, in Christianity, to pick up my thread again, it's never too much. You see the Parthenon: the columns rise upward, a bit like Icarus, don't you agree? The vertical axis. But then there's the pediment, the beautiful triangle there, with the Parthenon frieze, which immediately tempers that upward thrust. It says: "You may go this far, but no further. Beyond that, it belongs to the gods, not to us."
33:27 And that's why I always give — well, always, there are many new people here, so I'd like to give for their sake, it's been a while since I've brought it out — the example of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, 50 km east of Athens. Good grief, if you go to Greece, if there's one detour not to be missed, it's that one. Go there. It's rare in Greece to see the least Greek thing — infinity. Everywhere else in Greece, no, it's not infinite, it's a bay, you see an island, it's enclosed, a bit like, you know, on the Côte d'Azur, Cap Ferrat, the view, the landscape is nicely unified.
34:07 At Cape Sounion, it's the open sea. You have three indeterminacies, things with no contours: the air, the light — four — the wind, the ocean, right there before you. But that's where the Greeks built the Temple of Poseidon. They turn their backs to it — that's the world of the gods. That fascinates modern people, Christians, let's leave them to it. But for us, there's the right angle, there are columns, it's splendid. Put it into Google Images, at least, "Cape Sounion," that's enough, S-O-U-N-I-O-N, Cape Sounion, image, there.
34:50 So you see, whereas the spire of the cathedral, the minaret of the mosque, that's infinity. I'm not interpreting — in the Gospel it says, "Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." You must identify as closely as possible with the absolute, with God — it's the complete opposite. You must identify with the absolute, you see, which is truly the worst hubris for a human being.
35:25 So, yes, you're used to me disappearing from the field for a bit, not for long, because I'm thinking of one of the most beautiful illustrations of this theme, in a poem by Rilke, where Rilke speaks to you — well, to lovers, like most of you here — I'll say lovers, male and female, since that works out well, because he addresses both.
35:56 No, he's not caught up in the battle of the sexes, don't worry, this isn't some Texan-style compulsion. So, and here's what comes up — it's really something — to illustrate measure, for instance, you see. There. Lovers, in the plural, you see, he summons them in the poem, it's a great register, I'll show you, you see, this isn't a little sonnet, it's grand lyric style.
36:35 So, this is an excerpt from the Duino Elegies, named after the little town in the Italian part of Switzerland where the great elegies were written. "Lovers, you who are enough for one another, from you I ask the secret of ourselves. You seize each other" — you see Rodin's Kiss, so vigorous — "you seize each other, do you have proof? Look, it happens that my hands" — excuse me, I can't help doing the gesture — "become aware of one another, you see, by rubbing against each other, or that my worn face is sheltered within them."
37:22 "That gives me a certain awareness of myself, which nevertheless — that is, contenting itself with only that — would hardly dare to be. But you, who grow in the other's ecstasy until, overwhelmed, he begs you for mercy" — look how beautiful that is — "you who, beneath your hands, become abundant like vintage years of grapes, you who sometimes cease to exist because the other entirely overwhelms you."
37:55 "From you I ask the secret of ourselves. I know there is such bliss in your touch, because the caress holds back time, because the place does not vanish, because your tenderness endures, because beneath it you sense pure duration itself — so the embrace seems to you almost a promise of eternity. And yet, once you have overcome the terror of the first glances, and the wistful waiting at the window" — that's the beginnings, the beginnings of great passions — "and the first walk taken together, once in the garden — are you still lovers then?"
38:36 "When one raises the other to his lips and you drink draught upon draught, oh how strangely the drinker escapes from the act itself" — and here I come to measure. "Have you not noticed with astonishment, on Attic steles" — and there, the Greek reference, the steles, the little sculptures, the friezes — "have you not noticed with astonishment, on Attic steles, the caution of the human gesture? Love and farewell — were they not laid lightly upon the shoulders?"
39:09 I'll tell you right away, this requires a certain visual culture — those who lack it, what a marvel, what a stroke of luck for them to discover what I'm about to point them to: try to search Google Images, "Etruscan art," "art étrusque," that's enough, isn't it? Those couples in Etruscan tombs, the man holds his wife by placing his hand on her shoulder — you'll understand what follows. "Were not love and farewell laid lightly upon the shoulders, as though made of some other substance than with us?"
39:42 "Remember the hands that rest without weighing." The opposite of Rodin's Kiss, you see — that's modern, that's us. "Remember the hands that rest without weighing, despite the vigor that lifts the torsos." It's not for lack of strength. "Masters of themselves" — he meant to say, and this is the lesson I'd like to draw — "thus far extends our domain." That's like the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. Thus far extends our domain. "What is ours is to touch one another thus."
40:15 "More strongly, the gods press upon us." But that is the gods' affair. There you go. So, yes — an inverse relationship. So evil is not the same thing on each side. Evil for the one is trying to satisfy all the gods without overlooking any of them. It's about trying to find — it's complicated, measure, in our tragedies. And for the others it's even more complicated, isn't it — it is our absolute hubris. Finitude par excellence. We are finite through our bodies in space.
40:45 Yes. And through death in time. And we who want to identify with God, with the absolute — "for I love thee, O eternity" — that's the refrain of a beautiful poem by Nietzsche in Zarathustra. It's not "because I love thee, O eternity." So, when I began with the Apocalypse, the ancient serpent, evil defined as the one who accused our brothers before the Eternal, doesn't that sound like a deliverance from something?
The prince of this world, whose essence is lying 41:21 And there, that same John says on Maundy Thursday, in his Gospel, John's Gospel — never has the devil, the essence of evil, been situated with such precision and solemnity. It's Jesus's final conversation, and it's said right there, since afterward comes the Passion starting Friday — it's on that very evening that he says the famous phrase, "Love one another" — there, that's what I still had to tell you, that is my supreme commandment.
41:52 Good, there you go. But before that, he says: "The prince of this world is coming." And yes, the Passion, the suffering, evil, physical evil — I told you we'd come back to the little aches and pains — the suffering of bodies. The prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated, for his essence is a lie. So now I'd like — I told you I'd be concise, so I'll stop with my concrete illustrations. I ask you to make an effort of reasoning and abstraction now that we've grasped well — not yet what it means, because what is it?
42:25 What does that mean? Defining absolute evil, the essence of evil, the very worst — and God knows, given the state of the world, what we're seeing in the news — summing it up as "lie," what does that mean? Is the worst of evil the child who says "it wasn't me who ate the candy"? Still, he's lying, isn't he! Is that what Saint John is talking about? You can see clearly that his "lie" refers to something precise — it's not that, it's not that kind of lie, it's not the lie of the girl — I don't know why I'm being so sexist about it, I mean, of the one who, at the wheel, tells the cop "no, I was only doing 50 km/h"
Privation and negation in Aristotle; the false and the lie 43:02 when he was actually doing 150. It's often women, because they think the guy will cave — I don't know if that checks out. It's not that kind of lie. What the Gospel says is grave — that he has already been defeated, that essence, those lies. So I propose to you a meaning — not a meaning exactly, but a much more precise sense of this phrase: the lie is the privation of truth.
43:35 I ask you now for an effort of abstraction, since we said we'd be concise. In Aristotle you find the distinction between negation and privation — make the most of it. Aristotle is the champion, only Kant equals him at this level, of useful distinctions, dichotomies, you see, that are worth working through. He doesn't like to dialecticize them, that's his issue, because it reminds him too much of the Platonists, but on the other hand he insists strongly on the two poles of each dichotomy.
44:07 Which one am I referring to here — privation and negation. We speak of privation regarding an attribute that is supposed, under normal conditions, to belong to the subject, but which here is lacking in it. Don't worry, it's not that complicated. For example, a man deprived of sight. Sight is part of the ordinary human being, of standard human essence, if you will. So when someone suffers from blindness — by accident, from birth, whatever, or through torture, or through old age — when someone suffers from blindness, we say that the absence of sight in him is not a negation but a privation.
44:55 A privation is something one should normally have. Whereas the fact that we do not have wings like the angels — that is a negation. I begin by laying out this distinction, which is simple to understand. It's not a negation when we're talking about an attribute totally foreign to the essence of the subject in question. Attribute and subject here are to be taken in the grammatical sense, of course.
45:26 In that case — I get to it now, after this tool Aristotle gives us — if we define evil as the privation of a certain knowledge... When we say "lie," what is the opposite of lying? You know, it's what's asked at the start of every trial: you are here to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, etc. Right? So it's interesting to see that if "lie" has "truth" as its antonym par excellence, the reverse isn't true: truth does not have lying as its only antonym.
46:06 If I say 3 plus 2 equals 7, no one will say that's a lie, but people will say, "Wouldn't you like a cup of coffee?" — meaning I'm simply wrong, I'm not lying. There's something to see here. In every case, we're dealing with the false. Whether I lie, or whether I'm simply ignorant of how much, say, 125 times 125 makes — I have no idea, though some people can tell you right away.
46:39 What I mean is, in Africa, you find young people in the street, outside the shops where white people — those with money — go, who will say to you "1237 squared equals," and bang, they tell you just like that, it's extraordinary. And you give them a number, they spit out the answer instantly. It's well known. Truth has two antonyms: either the false, or the lie. The false is...
47:10 I would say the false is not anyone's fault. Even though — and here we find privation again, a bit of a play on words, it's not quite the same root — the false is what is lacking, what falls short. But still, so as not to confuse things, I would say the lie is a privation of truth, not a negation. So that means it's not... the child, that's more like the little sneak, so to speak.
Know thyself: Oedipus, memory, and the spiral 47:41 No, it's more precise than that. It's the one who wants to know nothing about himself. And here we return to the basics of philosophy. Philosophy began — it's Socrates who says it during his trial, in the Apology of Socrates, in Plato — that what inspired him was what was inscribed at the temple of the oracle he had come to consult, the most sacred oracle of Apollo, at Delphi — Delphi, the center of the world, the navel of the world, the Greeks used to say.
48:11 There was written what? "Gnothi seauton" — "know thyself." You see, I'm trying, to reassure you, to show that there's a coherence running through all the cycles I've attempted, thanks to you and your attentiveness, to unfold. Remember that cycle on memory. As I'd like to end my preamble, let me go straight to the end of that cycle, where I told you — after covering the classic issues, memory, its biological side, traces, the senses, stimuli, its parts, localization, third temporal lobe, whatever it is, I don't know.
48:56 I had told you that there's also an approach to memory within the logic of the subject — that is, that deep within us there is also something that prevents us from reaching back to where the effort of remembering would want to arrive. Completely unconscious. How so? Not at all! "I, Oedipus, I do everything. I have even ordered the harshest punishments for anyone who doesn't tell everything he knows about the murderer of Laius."
49:30 Who is the murderer of Laius? It's a whodunit. But it's a whodunit. No author of detective fiction has ever pushed the genre to the masterpiece of deciding that the guilty party is the one who leads the investigation. And, moreover, sincerely, who doesn't even know that he's the guilty one. No, but listen, you see, you understand why he tears out his eyes at the end when he knows? Because his eyes were of no use to him. Because he seeks self-knowledge outside himself. He confuses the human sciences with Jussieu.
50:03 And yes, and the science of galaxies. Careful, I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for physics, chemistry, mathematics. I'm not saying anything bad about that. I'm distinguishing between domains, Kantian terms. That these domains dispute one and the same problematic territory, Kantian, like the contemporaries of Cook's or Bougainville's navigators who were going to discover Australia. So, there are geographical metaphors. But the domain of philosophy is not that of physics.
50:36 I'm starting to get tired of all these philosophers who decide in the physicists' place whether there was a Big Bang or not, whether there's a beginning to our time. It's strange. I wouldn't want to do what Bergson did, for whom I have respect and admiration, especially for his subtlety. You need a lot of problematics, of course, that of memory among others, but who wasted a lot of time and a lot of pages refuting scientific theories that were already well outdated, that were 50 years behind his time. That's Bergson's time, can you imagine, compared to the science we have today.
51:09 The best, the most brilliant physics teacher in Parisian high schools doesn't come close to those working in Nobel-caliber teams at the cutting edge, at the borderline of physics today. To highlight, to try to prove the existence of the Higgs boson. There you go, I remember it. Apparently it was demonstrated, for I don't know how many thousandths of a second, but anyway, it existed.
51:39 We have photographic traces, don't we? Fleeting though it was, of the Higgs boson. That's not the domain of philosophers, since we no longer deal with good and evil, we no longer deal with true and false. You see, you're starting to see it all clearly. So, to sum up, I was apparently doing a cycle on something else, I didn't move from one subject to another, I always circle around the same thing, and there, I come back to it. I asked you to watch the two videos to prepare. You see, I come back to it, in this video where I...
52:13 I illustrate my point with two text excerpts, one from Kafka and one from Baudelaire, on the failure of communication, the failure of the message that doesn't arrive, as language is admirable, to deliver itself. And when a letter, isn't it, fails to reach its destination, look how admirable language is, the post office says it's "en souffrance" [held up, literally "suffering"], it can't deliver itself, it's suffering, and we find evil again, it hurts.
52:49 That's perhaps what I'm doing with you. I keep circling around the same point, I turn back, I come back, I send you earlier videos, but there, it's to show you. Remember that video where I respond precisely to the first one, the 6-1, which isn't in the logic of the subject, the one where I say, in response to one of the audience's questions—it was still in person at that time, it was the good old days before the lockdown—he was questioning me about the notion of cycle, wasn't he?
53:23 I told him yes, but watch out, we can make a synthesis of those who have a cyclical approach to being, don't we? Those who are opponents of progress, there is no progress, it's always the same thing starting over again. You know, as the little old lady says, there will always be rich and poor, my poor sir. Yes, why not, I mean, more seriously, you have the theological justification for this cycle in a frightening text that I mention in this video, so I'll go quickly, a text so frightening that some theologians thought it might be an interpolation in the Old Testament.
54:07 Well, since it would be sacrilegious to remove—already, you must never remove one iota of Holy Scripture, can you imagine—removing an entire book. Which book am I talking about, Ecclesiastes? Oh, you're pestering us with your stuff again, now it's Ecclesiastes, we're not in catechism class here. No, but wait, you know it, but yes, you know the refrain, there is nothing new under the sun.
54:37 It comes back like an obsession in Ecclesiastes. Let me sum up Ecclesiastes for you, but read it, because there's still the beauty of the Semitic style and the great metaphors, but still, there is a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to live, a time to die, a time for war, a time for peace. You see the cycle, the alternation? The anti-progressives, yes. And then there's the opposite, the right.
55:07 The right, isn't it, which makes it so that 1788 is better than 1787. I'm caricaturing. And now I make the synthesis precisely because it's not certain that French musicians of the 1820s are better than Rameau and Couperin. It's even certain—if you asked all the specialists and music lovers, it's better than the specialists on the question. You'd say, we're not leaving? No, it's not bad. Boieldieu, Adam, you see, you don't even know them.
55:39 Auber. Well, before French music came back to the forefront, with Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, yes of course, and Chabrier, whom we always forget in the lineup. No, it's not linear. The synthesis of those who are for the cycle and those who say there is progress, the spiral. And yes, I go around, I turn back, but I don't go back to zero. I'm not in the circular. You see what a spiral is? I manage it so that there's always, coming from the center, there, I progress.
56:13 The circle gets bigger and bigger, I cover more and more things. I don't cancel out the others, they're there, inside, the other circles. The other attempts at a circle, which made an effort, an epsilon, like that, which means the next circle will have a slightly bigger radius. We see things there. And so I wouldn't want to skip over evil. Evil, if it's lying to oneself, but in the sense of self-privation, you see the connection with the unconscious, now, with memory that doesn't want to go back far enough to watch this film.
Suddenly, Last Summer and narcissism as the force of evil 56:51 A masterpiece by Mankiewicz, with—it's a dirty trick, because he's my wife's favorite actor—Montgomery Clift, you know, the one who has that immortal role in "From Here to Eternity." And in "The Misfits," that cult film, isn't it, which is a film of dark legend, since everyone who acted in it died tragically some time afterward. Marilyn first, not with Clark Gable. Well, that film, Suddenly, Last Summer, where it's about treating, in a psychiatric asylum, a girl who was locked up by a stepmother who doesn't want her to talk, actually.
57:33 She's been in delirium ever since she saw her brother butchered in front of her in a town in Spain by thugs. Well, I say thugs, it's more complicated than that. Watch the film. "Suddenly, Last Summer." Every time the doctor, Montgomery Clift, tries to bring her back—"So, how did it happen? What happened? How did your brother...?"—every time, we see the beads of sweat. We sense she's making sincere efforts to come out of her amnesia, her traumatic amnesia, but that at the same time, something in her, the contradiction within the subject—I'm answering questions that were asked of me.
58:15 I'm getting ahead of myself. A force in her doesn't want her to go back to the trauma. Well, if the strength of evil, if that's where evil draws its strength from—I'm going to make some progress now—we've located evil, it's on the side of lying, not just any lie, but very specifically, lying to oneself, and not lying to oneself necessarily in the most conscious way, at the moment of saying, I'm not going to tell them, I'm going to keep the loot for myself. Ah no, that's not it.
58:46 I'm talking about the lie like that girl, who doesn't want to tell her truth. What is the driving force here of the lie? What gives so much strength to the force that prevents us from knowing, from knowing ourselves? No. Whether in general psychology, in everyday language, and especially in psychoanalysis, it's narcissism. We have an ideal image of our ego, which is even called in psychoanalysis, the ideal ego.
59:19 And that everything that would tarnish it, you see, Hippolytus, when his narcissism collapses—me, who thought I was something other than all those couples who always have problems, despair, things, and you make me suffer and I make you suffer. No. Enslaved now under the common law. That's it, I'm no longer narcissistic. I'm under the common law. I'm not that young man who looks at his image in the water, finds it so beautiful, so beautiful that he ends up drowning trying to grasp it, I don't know.
59:55 It's a symbol when I say narcissism. It goes far. It means we all have, you see, an image of the native-born Frenchman, of the blond dolichocephalic, of the Aryan or the pure Muslim, the others are infidels. I'm not saying, you know, that the Chinese or the Japanese had contempt for foreigners who showed up, you know, who didn't fit the narcissistic canon. It can be collective. It's collective most of the time.
1:00:26 Because the image I have of myself is often tied to values that come from my society. It's rare that I imagine myself, isn't it, as a stupid and ignorant murderous pig. Read The Picture of Dorian Gray, there are a thousand illustrations of this tragedy, aren't there, of each of our relationships with the image. Not false, not merely false, but look how precise the language is, deceitful [fallacieuse] toward oneself.
1:00:57 It's not merely false, like when I see a mirage, that's not my fault, but deceitful [fallacieux], that means it deceives, that there's a will to deceive me. "Ces jeunes filles fallacieuses ne font pas une route bien étrange, il faut ajouter qu'il pleuvait," says Nerval somewhere, wandering in the woods of Mortefontaine. There you go. So, we're going to move on to answering questions, but I'd like to point you, before next time, toward where we're going to try to venture—not rush into, we have to go slowly, step by step, it amuses you, complicated—to venture onto this path that I've just tried to open, to reopen, because I'm showing you that almost the entirety of my previous talks for nearly ten years now circles around this same pot which, after all, corresponds to the Pythian imperative inscribed on the temple: "know thyself."
1:01:50 There you go. Thank you.
