English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The Djebel Irhoud skull 0:11 In 1960, a strange fossil skull emerged from the depths of a small mountain range in Morocco. This skull had much to reveal to us. But neither the techniques nor the knowledge of the time made it possible to understand who it was or the importance its story might hold. Driven by the intuition of two French and Moroccan researchers and equipped with the tools and knowledge of the 21st century, an international team returns to the site of its discovery and reopens the investigation.
0:48 It's another... What they then discover surpasses anything they could have imagined. The incredible discovery made by a worker in a mine at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. Could it be a Neanderthal man? No, we are not yet at Homo sapiens.
1:19 Carbon-14 dating places the find at more than 40,000 years old. But precisely how far back does it go? In the 1980s, the French researcher Jean-Jacques Hublin and his colleague, the Moroccan professor Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer, put forward another hypothesis. For them, the skull would belong not to a Neanderthal but to a Homo sapiens, and would be much older. In 2005, the two paleoanthropologists resumed excavations — because you can't just stop at a hypothesis, you have to test it against experience — resuming excavations with an international team.
2:02 The seventh sediment layer yields a staggering treasure. The remains of five distinct individuals; thermoluminescence dating, more reliable than carbon-14 — even more reliable, if you prefer — pushes their origin back to 300,000 years, from 40,000 to 300,000 years, in total contradiction with the generally accepted theory, which placed the emergence of our species in East Africa — Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa — 200,000 years ago.
2:40 These remains, 100,000 years older, were discovered more than 6,000 kilometers from the region supposed to be the cradle of Homo sapiens. This astonishing documentary tells of a revolution in our vision of our origins and our evolutionary process. A paradigm shift that forces the scientific world to revise its foundations just as much as it forces school textbooks to revise their chapters.
Descartes's hesitation, from infinitesimal calculus to the wax 3:22 Good evening everyone. I preferred to read the voice-over text first like this before greeting you, and above all, before apologizing once again for having given you so little notice that this live broadcast would take place tonight. For my part, at least — how could I not be delighted, I'm speaking for myself, but I'm sure most of you would agree — how could I not be delighted that Pierre-Alain is back from this long mission in the Far East, where he was dealing with things that are none of your business, but that you'll be able to see in public at Beaubourg, I won't say more, during the month of May.
4:11 I'll stop there. But still, I won't hide it from you — I'll say it in front of him because he's kind enough to come and assist me during this live session — I won't hide the fact that I felt almost like an orphan when he wasn't here, and not only on the technical level, but on the human level too. So I'm glad he's here, and I jumped at the chance, especially since he was kind enough to suggest I fill this time that remains empty between us, with no contact between us, neither in person nor remotely.
4:53 Because the Goscinny center is being requisitioned until early December — anyway, we'll come back to that — but you shouldn't count on any upcoming sessions in the beautiful hall of this beautiful center before the first half of December. So, we are still in our problematization of the notion of hesitation.
5:27 So far, I've illustrated it mainly through philosophical examples, of course. Last time we saw Descartes' incredible hesitation, the exact opposite of everything the ignorant call "cartesian," isn't that right? That is, your square, straight — not at all, it's not... Until the moment he says, "I am almost stopped by the terms of ordinary language, how can one not, in a clearer and more univocal way, admit that the key to the problem lies at the level of the language in which one speaks."
6:08 Ah, when he's dealing with equations, Descartes is at ease, mind you! Well, he missed out on infinitesimal calculus, because the infinite is not a clear and distinct idea — but I'll refer those of you who are interested to dig a bit further on that side. I mention it because I have the pleasure of telling you an interesting fact for us: there are more and more scientists, scientists versed in the "hard" sciences,
6:43 who are following our sessions. So I'm saying this especially for them, but of course everyone is invited to do it, insofar as they have time to consult a book titled Au plus faux — Notre ancienne puce mathématique et métaphysique chez Descartes. Remarkable. Where Vuillemin, its author, shows perfectly that Descartes had all the mathematical means to reach the great discovery almost simultaneously made by Newton and Leibniz a few years later.
7:26 Descartes, calculus, the derivative that would later inaugurate infinitesimal calculus as a whole — but for ideological reasons, Descartes, precisely because for him the infinite is not a clear and distinct idea, isn't that right, dismissed the matter. But Vuillemin has the merit of showing that in his correspondence with the greatest mathematicians of his time — Fermat and others — he showed, regarding the resolution of equations, and in particular equations relating to a curve mathematicians know called the cycloid, the curve traced by a wheel moving without slipping on a plane,
8:17 he showed that he fully possessed the algebraic means to solve the problems posed by the equation of this curve. So it really was ideological. But on the other hand, where he is immense is in the passage about the piece of wax, when he generalizes the discovery that this simple piece of wax led him to make — namely that when we see it, when we feel that we have touched it, we think it's the senses, whereas in fact what we believe to be a sensation, in this case a visual one, is only a judgment.
8:57 I judge that it's the same wax that was white and is now yellow, that had the pleasant smell of honey, and even the sweetness of honey that still held something of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered, to quote his admirable text — and suddenly, the smell of burning wax, you see — and so everything by which we had defined it, as good empiricists that we all are at the start, spontaneously, before digging a little into philosophy — you must always start there, you have to be honest — at the start, you ask yourself what reality is, and everyone tells you, well look, it's what we touch, what we see, and we notice that if that's it, well, all that has changed, and yet we say the wax was white, it is now yellow, it was — so we maintain a hypothesis of continuity. There, let me pick up the thread again, one might say, but what does this have to do with this introduction, this film, anthropology, Neanderthal, Homo sapiens? Well, here we are, right in the middle of it, it's first of all,
Animal or man: the continuous and the discontinuous 10:08 our central theme, that of hesitation. When this skull is found, are we still in zoology, or finally in anthropology? Are we among animals, or among men? You see the same problem arises — from what point on, and this is precisely why I chose, I watch quite a few scientific videos, why I tried to select this one, because the French project leader, who worked with his Moroccan colleagues, and to whose team we owe this admirable work — the leader, whom I'll quote in a moment, I'll quote the passage, but let me first put it in context, let me say how it relates to our problem — what he says very well is that we always tend to want there to be a point — we, one thinks it's the scientific community, you'll see, not only them — that there is a point below which we are in the pre-human, and beyond which we are human,
11:18 it's this kind of point that I somewhat mock, saying that surely it's not like some December 31st at midnight that we passed from animal to man — yes, and that's why I titled this evening's session, or rather I put it under the heading of an antinomy going back to the very first stammerings of philosophy and science — I'm thinking of the pre-Socratic period, even the Socratics, the Greeks — the problem of the antinomy between the continuous and the discontinuous, because this is precisely an opposition that runs not only through philosophical thought, as we're doing right now — from what point can we call, stop calling this an animal, and start calling it a man — no, but also through the scientific world.
12:09 The points on a line, in geometry, we are in the continuous — each point is contiguous to the next — whereas with the natural numbers, we go from 1 to 2, we skip an infinity of decimals — you'd agree, one might say, but no, from 1 to 2 there isn't an infinity of decimals — oh really? Well, let's just say, before that, 1.999, so there's still a small interval left, and I can divide it as much as I like, that's the continuous, you see, it's a bit like Achilles and the tortoise — we never reach 2 if we look closely at every stage, isn't that so. Well, the natural numbers, boldly, establish the discontinuous: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on to infinity — to the point that, I forget now whether it was Cantor, one of the great mathematicians, one of the great upheavals in mathematics between the 19th and 20th centuries, a very fertile period — it was Cantor or Russell who supposedly made this quip, which is magnificent: God created the natural numbers,
13:21 and man made all the rest. There you go. So you see, the continuous runs through, even scientific discourse — are we here in the natural sciences, or in the human sciences, I hesitate, let's hesitate, since we are precisely in the middle of excavations to find out whether we are dealing with something still immersed in the animal kingdom, or with a man. And we will see, let me tell you the program, we will see that this way of framing things is vicious in itself, insofar as it is bluntly antinomic — this is the animal, this is the man — that is, as anti-dialectical as can be. Being dialectical means taking these two extremes, these two opposites, and conjugating them, but at the cost of shifting, at the cost of movement, isn't that so — and so man is not before, at such a stage, then after,
14:31 no, it is the movement by which the animal humanizes itself — this movement is called history, even if, of course, it has a proto-history, a prehistory. I've told you the bulk of the program, but what's fascinating is to see that this is not speculation from the philosopher Pagani that I'm developing here — we're going to see, among one of the most remarkable specialists, all the more modest as the greatest ones are, self-effacing, speaking simply, calmly, clearly, when he's no longer dealing with his equations or his extremely fine measurements, from carbon-14 to thermoluminescence — which, the way, we'll leave you the link to watch the whole video, it's worth its weight in gold, isn't it, this astonishing find in Morocco, which pushed back by 100,000 years the appearance of Homo sapiens in this region, the region closest to our own, to Europe — so it's not exactly a trivial matter, and let me add one small point concerning the initial image,
From Morocco to the Green Sahara 15:43 the caption, isn't it, you'll notice, it's a map that goes from the region where Homo sapiens' appearance was traditionally placed, East Africa — we see, a little earlier, that it shifts into the part of the map we don't have, that is, into South Africa, but essentially, and there, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lucy, you know, we see the region where the appearance of Homo sapiens was usually placed, and the oldest datings fixed its appearance at a hundred thousand years — and now, elsewhere, in a place where it was supposed to have appeared much later than in this East Africa, you see, on the map, not in the south-southeast, in the east-southeast of Africa, but on the contrary, in the northwest, Morocco — I remind you in passing that Maghreb means "west," "occident," in Arabic, by the way.
16:50 So, coming back to it, 100,000 years — an advance of 100,000 years compared to the date at which it was believed to have appeared, which was around 40,000 — but for that, it had to be the case, since everyone agrees the first hominids appeared there, of course, in East-Central Africa, in other words in the forest, the green region, the region of Central Africa, isn't it, the great Congolese forest — Congolese in the geographical sense, which covers several countries other than Congo, which is a bit like Africa's Amazon, if you will, in any case the largest equivalent in tropical zones.
17:37 And you see, but no, it's not possible, you tell me, they couldn't have — I know they were clever, they knew how to work stones, but still, they couldn't have crossed the Sahara, surely you need equipment, I say, maybe not a 4x4, but still, you need camels, which didn't exist yet, which would come along millennia later — but here's the thing: it wasn't a desert. No, and yes, this surprises those who believe the Earth only started warming up recently, but no — because you and I are wallowing in consumption, but no, the Earth has been warming for more than 10,000 years, since the retreat of the most recent of the great ice ages — I can't be more precise, which means there were other ice ages before that, going back, going back to a time before the dinosaurs, to a time when man already existed. Neanderthal is an excellent hunter in the blizzard, in the blizzard, and in Siberian cold,
18:49 hunting mammoth — and so, when the Earth began to warm up, and at that time there wasn't even the shadow, the embryo of what we call industry, not even metallurgy yet, it was still stone that people were dealing with, either chipped or polished — but there you go, the Earth begins to warm up, and what do you do then?
19:21 If you're in... Careful, I don't mean to say the Sahara was as lush as the Amazon or today's Congo, but it was, according to all the studies, likely a marshland, in any case much greener, with fauna and flora, an ideal place to shelter, isn't it, all sorts of animal and plant species which of course now lie far beneath the dunes. And of course, the proof is attested by the extraordinary petroglyphs — the drawings on stone, petroglyphs, isn't it, not hieroglyphs but sacred writing, but writing on stone — that you find over square kilometers, I saw them up close in Niger, you can't believe your eyes, you're stunned — this region, the most uninhabited, the most desert-like there is, you get the impression there was a crowd at work, hammering away, I don't know, at the rocks, to produce these admirable reproductions of animals — and what animals?
20:29 Nowadays mostly cattle, but very often hippopotamuses, elephants, animals that eat tons — at any rate several hundred kilos a day, sometimes of tall grasses, not the sparse shoots that grow between two stones in the Mediterranean or in dry regions, with sheep and goats — no, no, big animals, large ungulates, pachyderms. So there you go — I'll take the opportunity to remind you that we, in this continuous movement, have not yet quite emerged from the ice age: the great European lakes, in France, Le Bourget, Annecy, then, moving into Switzerland, Lake Geneva and Lake Constance, the Bodensee, as they say in Germany — all of these only hem, if you look closely, the chains of the Alps, so they're remnants left by the glaciers of that time, in basins, no doubt clayey, that retained the water, you see. And as for northern Europe,
21:39 there are still, in the process of emerging from the ice age, the thousands of lakes that make up the charm of Finland — once you've seen what you need to fend off the mosquitoes — or of Canada, are of course remnants of the ice age. There you go. Well, let's get back to our Djebel — which means "mountain" — the Irhoud mountains, Djebel Irhoud, in Morocco, this astonishing discovery.
Naming man and the ape 22:13 I told you it fit perfectly into our problem of hesitation — what are we dealing with? We'd like to settle it, but here it's no longer philosophers hesitating — you couldn't accuse the philosopher of wanting to split hairs, could you? No, not at all, these are the most competent people in the field — which brings me back to Mr. Hublin, Professor Hublin, whom I refer you to other lectures he's given, admirable ones, all found on YouTube, I recommend them, some concerning only the hominids who preceded man — he knows this early history very well, the figures we passed through, I'm thinking in particular, personally, of Australopithecus — look at the word, "pithecus," that's everything ape-related, whereas "homo" or "anthrop-" means it's a man, isn't it?
23:04 Australopithecus, that is, the southern ape — it was not a man — ah, there you go — it resembled us even more than chimpanzees do, we have to be clear, it was already frequently bipedal, isn't it — but still, the shape of the skull, the brain capacity, and lots of other elements mean we're still far from what we call men. We'll come back to this problem of language, but I'm sure the best among you, the most diligent, the most consistent with what's already been heard, are starting to see, all of a sudden, that all this forms a system — and in a non-closed way, a fruitful, open way — you're beginning to realize that it depends on us to determine what is man and what is ape.
23:57 A star has never asked to be called a star rather than a planet, never. It's up to the astronomer to decide. We bear this enormous responsibility. When — and I often quote this — the Scriptures, especially in Genesis, say that God gave Adam the power to name the creatures, it's idle to ask whether God exists or not, because that doesn't diminish the importance of this formula in the least.
24:29 That means that, even granting that we are, for the most part, in a materialist milieu — which is largely what I identify with, as you well know — we'll have to conclude that language must really be something devilishly important, something to which we don't pay enough attention, for our ancestors to have placed its appearance squarely within the framework of a divine decree.
The rock that becomes a table 25:00 What a tribute to the logos! So there you go. Before returning to Professor Hublin's remarks, which we haven't yet heard live — we've only seen his discovery mentioned — let me also remind you of other videos, or in other contexts, for other problems, that revolved around language — not about hesitation, as today, but about language.
25:32 I had said, remember, I had taken the example — I said, let's imagine we're having a picnic, and since I need to cut the sausage, or lay out the couscous, because nowadays you have to be careful about everyone — it's a Sandrine. It's a Sandrine. Well, anyway. As if we'd been waiting for her to pass the couscous.
26:04 If it became popular, it's also because there's good value for money, you know, people aren't stupid. A complete dish like that is like bo bun. I've noticed, being born in Vietnam myself, that it's becoming almost a second couscous, because now it's known even by those who almost never go to a Vietnamese restaurant. There, let me close this parenthesis. We're on a picnic. There's something to set up. Where's the table? We're among the trees, the rocks, the ponds. I say this because we weren't far from Ermenonville.
26:35 I'm taken for a stroll one time. And what do I see? A rock a bit flatter than the others. And I say, that's it, I'm like God. This will be our table. I decree it. It's too much, according to Marianne Bambé. You can call it a rock. I don't mind at all. You see, you can say it's a piece of sandstone lost in the sands of Mortefontaine. I decree that it will be our table. Because the word designates a function, a desire, a need, a utility, something that has nothing to do with what is, but with what ought to be.
27:14 And that requires a subject. You see everything we've just revisited all of a sudden. Back to the logic of the subject. Ordinary language words, generally speaking, express the subjects that we are and who speak. Well yes, it seems obvious now, but what do you expect? There's such resistance. People always want to look for something physical, chemical, to explain things. That explains a great many things. Thankfully, I wouldn't be alive, nor would you, without the fabulous progress that physics, chemistry, and biology have brought to medicine.
27:47 I've already told you I would never say a word against the hard sciences. We'll come back to this. Along with others, people I respect but who are unhappy. And who, as unhappy people often do — in apposition, comma, a quote from Spinoza, which opens one of his most beautiful texts — "Men are, for the most part, wicked and unhappy." The genius of Spinoza, saying with a formula so simple everyone understands, suddenly, the essential thing: they are wicked because they are unhappy.
28:17 Because it is wicked. It is wrong, if you prefer. Let me be more precise. To criticize what is positive in progress. And that's why I quoted, the last time we spoke together, the admirable line that Goethe puts in God's mouth in his Faust: "If you despise science and reason, humanity's highest gifts, you give yourself to the devil and are lost."
28:56 That one, he had anticipated his Germany, I told you, before it sank into irrationalism. Anyway, enough. You see, this point is important, you see what's at stake. So when I speak of the progress that we owe to the so-called hard sciences, without which — I repeat, no need to invoke Goethe to know their benefits, their value — without which we wouldn't be here.
29:27 Your children, let's not even talk about it. They would have been carried off by dreadful things that exist and of which I've seen a few samples in countries where technology hasn't yet spread widely. It's quite frightening. But that's not the object of philosophy. And besides, philosophy is precisely about stepping back from the words we use every day. True philosophy does not criticize science — it criticizes you, me, everyone, for the way we speak.
30:02 When we say yes, it's the same wax. But no, it's not a table, it's a rock. It will be our table. If you look closely, try the experiment at a picnic — no one will tell you no, that won't do, that's not a table, a table is made of wood. Some of you may remember that I once did this experiment with our African students. It was right at the very beginning of the philosophy course, wasn't it? And I had told them, I know you're expecting all sorts of things — metaphysics, philosophy, depth, that we'll go beyond the French class, but in more depth, it's roughly the same thing, a literary discipline, but this time we go all the way, without stopping halfway as in literature.
30:47 I know you're thinking all that, and even claiming to explain the mysteries of the present, of here, and everywhere, and always. Well, I'm going to disappoint you, I'm going to ask you what a table is. And of course, almost the whole class tells me, well, we know that, it's a table, it's something rectangular, square, that has four wooden legs, that has four legs. You know, I've seen tables with just one leg in cafés. It's true. Oh no, it's not about the number of legs.
31:17 They're wooden tables. Well, haven't you ever seen tables made of metal, plastic, gold? Among rulers. Among the princes of this world. It exists. You see it there. Yes, but well, let's say, it's something, whatever the material and the number of legs, but that is square, that juts out. I've even seen round tables. Walk around the neighborhoods of Avignon, there are plenty of cafés with round tables.
31:51 So there, panic breaks out at the back of the class because the table was there and then it's not anymore, it no longer has its material, which has disappeared. I don't know, neither wood, nor iron, nor ivory, nor its shape. All that's left is the word. The thing is gone. Only the word remains. That's the best thing in Foucault. It's his title, The Order of Things — Les mots et les choses, words and things. I've done Deleuze justice, so I'd better do Foucault justice too. I never said he was an idiot.
32:23 That's what I don't forgive him for: having fulfilled his function at the very moment when it was necessary to swing over toward the counter-revolution. After the period when we scared ourselves believing Marxism was invading the intelligentsia. I can guarantee you, I'll finish with this parenthesis, that at the time you could pass the agrégation in philosophy without having read a single line of Marx. Ask any of the contemporaries, check, don't take my word for it, check the documents, everything is in the Journal Officiel, everything is countersigned. But even the little there was, was already too much.
"What do you call...?": the word as mediation 32:56 Let's leave that. I'll come back to our story. I went through the example of the table to tell you, to convince you, that it is you, you and I, but you in particular, because some of you aren't convinced, who are sovereign in knowing what is human, animal. Hence Socrates' fundamental question. People often ask me, but why, Pagani, do you attach so much importance to the difference between what is it and what do you call it? Fine, all right, it's not the same thing. I'll grant you that, but still, broadly speaking, it's the same.
33:29 Ah no, that's precisely the point. All the difference lies there. We've left being behind by saying "what do you call it." We're no longer dealing with immediate being there. No. Like the eyes that saw the white color of the wax. No. Or that breathed its honey smell, the color of the flowers it was gathered from. No. We're dealing with a word.
34:02 That is to say, not with the immediate, but with mediation. The word is what serves us as an intermediary to reach things. If I want the real salt, the salt, truly the salt, to be on my table, right there, immediately within reach of my hand, I have to say to my neighbor, "pass me the salt," and we have to understand each other, so that he doesn't pass the sugar. You see, you see, you're not so bad after all, good grief.
34:34 It's up to you to decree what corresponds to the words we use. But not to you individually — it's not a matter of whim, like at the corner café where everyone comes and offers their opinion. Because words serve for us to communicate. So, each time, we need an agreement, a shared understanding of expression. That makes us revise quite a few things. So then, what I'd like to show you now is an excerpt from this video that I have — just the beginning, to show at least the stakes, the importance of this discovery, isn't that so?
35:17 Where the team leader, this Professor Hublin, who isn't trained as a philosopher at all, but who has skills I envy so much in his field, isn't that right? And above all, he works within an international team, the Germans, from the Max Planck Institute, which has students, whatever you like. And we're really at the summit here of what's being done in paleoanthropology, if you prefer, in terms of scientific rigor.
35:51 I'd like you to hear him at the moment when he's doing philosophy without even realizing it. It's not his field, but he has the merit of raising the problem. And I asked Pierre-Alain to start the segment where he says — let me specify this before restarting the video — that a link, which I'll leave for you, once again, gives you access to it in full.
Hublin: the boundary does not exist 36:23 I should specify that he's talking precisely about this threshold that would allow us to decide definitively that we're no longer dealing with the animal but with the human. It's not something one decrees. He's addressing all those who look for these differences in things that are, in quotation marks, with a thousand quotation marks, objective, external to me as subject. It's not in his biology, in his... and God knows if I know anything about that. Well, here's what he says. Listen carefully.
36:53 300,000 years after his death, the Irhoud man opens up a vast field for research. And the evolutionary history he reveals to us confronts us with a troubling observation. This brain — I find it striking to see that it kept evolving the whole time. There was never a moment when it stopped, when it was like, "that's it, we've got the right brain now, it's done."
37:23 It never stopped. We, modern Homo sapiens, are only one moment in a long evolutionary process that is still ongoing. And this simple fact urges us to question the limits we set for our species. In the evolution of man, there has been a constant search to identify a point that would allow us to say, well, after this, these are humans, and before, it's something else. There is this secret desire to find a boundary that would let us draw the line between the human and the non-human, the infra-human or something like that.
38:03 I think this boundary doesn't exist. [Pause.] He said the key word. He's a far better philosopher than many who are actually philosophers, this scholar, with his humility and his self-effacement. It's when he says, "We can't help but have the desire that there be a moment when there's a separation of desires." He admits that doing this is not a scientific problem.
38:39 What made the sciences advance was not reflecting on the desires of stars or planets, but on the contrary, driving out desires. That's all there was in Antiquity, or in the pre-scientific period. Stones fell because they wanted to fall, to go rejoin their natural place, to stick with Aristotle. Aristotle's physics isn't limited to that, but still — isn't that right? And if they accelerate as they fall, I'm still quoting Aristotle, it's because they act like horses which, since they're getting close to reaching their natural place, which is down below — I'm quoting the physics of that era, where there really was a substantial "below" and "above," isn't that right?
39:18 In itself, in itself, a below and an above without a subject. Just as the body draws closer to the ground when it falls, it acts like horses when they sense it's time for the stable, that is, the hour of coming home — they speed up because they sense the manger. You see, we thought we were talking about things, and we were talking about ourselves. We were doing what's called anthropomorphism — giving the form, morphè, of man, not only to the animal, but to the falling stone.
39:55 There you go. I won't even mention the gods, will I? Gods like Jupiter — if you look closely, Zeus, if you prefer, Wotan among the Germanic peoples, because they have exactly the same behavior, I'd say, using the Anglo-Saxon word, the same conduct. They cheat on their wives, they sign treaties, they violate them — it's not the omniscient, omnipresent, infinitely good, infinitely just god, who alone possesses wisdom, power, and glory. No, no, it's a man who simply never dies.
40:27 You see, the immortals, that's what it is. So, there. I want to... I'm very glad that Professor Hublin, whom — I apologize for repeating this, some of you get exasperated by my repetitions, but I refer you to these other videos — when you have this kind of range, being both one of the very best specialists — I'm not here to rank people, I'm not qualified for that, but according to his peers, on this question — and on top of that, having such plain, clear philosophical insight, and clear language, that's pure gold.
Chrétien de Troyes and the enigma of the word Grail 41:16 I refer you to that. Now, I told you last time that next time, which was supposed to be today, but this session wasn't planned — meaning, next time at the Goscinny Center, in the presence of part of our audience. God knows how happy we were, I believe, our audience too, to renew this shared presence.
41:48 I had told you that next time we would illustrate the problem of hesitation through a myth, a tale. Generally it's classified among tales. I'm thinking of the tale of the Grail, I'll come back to it. In fact, the word Grail appears for the first time — research by medievalist specialists has been done to find out where Chrétien de Troyes, since he's the first to use it, in his last, unfinished work, Perceval or the Story of the Grail.
42:27 It's not even the quest yet. Later on he speaks of the quest, but in the title, Perceval, the Welshman, or the Story of the Grail. And I no longer remember if it's from the first or second page of his manuscript, but by the second page at the latest, we see the court poet speaking, no doubt at the court of Champagne, since that's where he's from — look, Chrétien de Troyes — he is in the process of inaugurating what, in the history of our poetry and our literature, is called the Matter of Britain.
43:06 Yes, it's no longer the Song of Roland, it's no longer the imitation of ancient heroes, and even less Germanic mythology. No, these are heroes who unfold within a space that contains both our Brittany and, of course, Great Britain, given that at the time the two were barely separated, humanly and even less so culturally and linguistically.
43:36 So, he inaugurates this Matter of Britain even though he's from Champagne. And on the second page, I left it hanging — what does he say? Because he's at court, I come back to it, I'm lingering a bit to bring out the importance of this line. When he introduces his tale, he hasn't started yet, it hasn't begun, he's presenting it to his audience, and he knows there are pretty women at court. Courtly love is the love that began in courts.
44:07 You want to court, since the war is over — love. He knows there are young women listening, and he knows how to speak to them, like any great trouvère, troubadour. And above all a poet of "fine love," as it was called at the time, of courtly love. Chrétien de Troyes says, "I am going to tell you the finest tale ever told at a royal court, this is the tale of the Grail."
44:38 And there, he really lays it on. It's solemn, all the same. Now, research has been done: where does this word come from? Even now, nobody knows. The word didn't exist. It's been searched everywhere, including in the Crusades — one theory says it's a word of Arabic origin, since there's "Krak," the fortress, you know it well, those who've traveled through the Middle East and Syria before — well, let's move on. We no longer know the pleasure of walking there. One of the most beautiful fortresses in the world from the medieval period was built by the Frankish knights there, during the Crusades, a few kilometers from Damascus.
45:16 And it's called the Krak des Chevaliers. So, there are plenty of hypotheses. Of course, it's linked to food, that much we know. It contains something which, if you don't eat it, makes you invulnerable in combat. Well, anyway, I won't dwell on it, otherwise we won't have fifteen sessions. No, no, but why do I bring in Perceval, the Welshman, or the Story of the Grail? Because the character of Perceval and his quest take place entirely within a polarity made up of hesitation and decision.
Perceval's childhood and the Fisher King 45:56 Decision is the opposite. I told you how Alexander cut the Gordian knot when he took Asia as a land of conquest. That was, I think, his first act — something that thousands of individuals over the centuries had tried to untie without succeeding. You see, we find the equivalent of that in medieval tales, particularly the Matter of Britain, with the sword driven up to the hilt sometimes into a tree, sometimes into a rock, and the knight is challenged, tested, to try to pull it out, and no one could.
46:35 Except Siegmund in Wagner's Die Walküre — not "except" — Siegmund, the future father of Siegfried. So, leaving aside these more or less phallic symbols, let's come back to the Grail. We don't know, we don't know where it comes from. But what we do know is that the hero himself is raised by his mother in a way completely opposed to what his life is going to be.
47:06 His life will be that of a knight. Now, his mother did everything so that he would never have any contact with the world of chivalry. She raised him like a savage in the forest, because her husband, the love of her life, was killed in the Crusades. So she has no desire for her son to expose himself to the same danger. I'll go quickly. And so she raises this little savage apart, this Mowgli, who would have, not a she-wolf for a mother, but a real human mother-woman.
47:36 And who spends her time projecting onto him the love she had for her husband. And doing everything so that he never comes into contact with it. You know what the forbidden fruit is? I told you last time, briefly — the first time he hears clanking noises in the distance and sees knights passing on the road, he can't help himself. He runs to follow them. He's amazed by their helmets gleaming in the sun and by their armor, their weapons, because he only has a bow, he shoots down anything that flies, as he'll later say, like an exterminator.
48:09 But for him, a bow is a lowly weapon at the time, a weapon fit for children. They have swords, lances. He follows them. He hears a noise behind him — he runs off from his mother's castle. He sees his mother swooning, falling into a faint. She faints from the pain of watching him leave. He turns around, and passes on regardless. I told you that the fact that he passed by like this — what's the equivalent called, of a hermit?
48:48 A "prud'homme," as they said in the Matter of Britain. Years later, when he'll be a seasoned knight, when he'll already have defeated several enemies — because everyone he encounters has already learned to fear his strength and courage — because this true "prud'homme," one day, in the forest, will reveal part of his truth to him. Because, in the meantime, he had passed through the castle that houses the Grail, the Fisher King.
49:21 We'll come back to this in detail, I'll go fairly fast. This Fisher King — take it however you like, because in the tale, he has committed a great sin. He's a "sinner" with a circumflex accent, that is, both at once. But he's also often out fishing on a boat, because he has trouble standing up, because he has a wound. So yes, I know you've already understood there's a connection with castration — well, the wound is supposed to be between the hip and the thigh, yes, typical medieval imagery.
49:55 But this wound, which nothing manages to heal, isn't that so? And ever since he received this wound, his land has gone to ruin, and the world has fallen into desolation, into abandonment. Now, Perceval arrives at the castle, amazed by the beauty of the maidens, the young girls — that's what the word meant at the time, those who aren't married — simply, who carry the Grail and bring it into a mysterious room so that the king may feed on it.
50:31 It's true, he's so stunned that he says nothing — hesitation, you see, the mouth doesn't speak, doesn't decide. And the hermit will tell him — I come back to this, he'll tell him later — your throat stayed knotted because you passed by, indifferent, your mother's pain. You see, there's a lot to see in this tale. And of course, I'll linger on the version.
51:01 The version — because, as I told you, it's unfinished. And as with all unfinished versions, we have had them since that very era. That's also the case with the story of Tristan and Iseult, which was such a success at the time. You wouldn't believe the number of what are called continuations, variants. I'll remind you that with the Homeric tales and epics, it's the same thing, isn't it? It's not in every version of the Iliad or the Odyssey that Ulysses goes down to visit the dead in Hades.
51:40 and not, like Theseus, to go dishonor the bed of the god of the dead, and to be struck by the sadness and pallor of that underworld. There you go, there are plenty of variants because the bards, at the time, also had a bit of a marketing side to them. They knew that to keep their audience engaged, they had to offer something a little new. People had already heard the story a thousand times — I don't know, the story of the Trojan Horse, say — well, there. So it lent itself to variants. There were plenty for Tristan.
52:10 There are even more for the tale of the Grail. And among these, of course, throughout Europe, there's a Swedish version of Tristan. But here, let me show you this version. You see? Perceval has become Parzival, because the V is an F. And our V, our own V, is a W. I say this because there are plenty of people who ask, I don't know, should we say "Volkswagen" — well, there you go.
52:44 No, no. V is F. In English, "folk" — the people, by the way. "Volkswagen," the people's car. Yes, by a great Minnesänger, as they say for troubadours, Minnesänger, from the thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was the mediator between Chrétien de Troyes and Wagner. Of course, Wagner knew Chrétien de Troyes's whole text by heart, but he was fascinated by the supernatural dimension that appears here in Wolfram's version.
53:19 So, I will develop especially the character of Perceval through his incarnation as Parsifal, referring to this text which gave us Wagner's ultimate work, his testament, to which I have done more than merely allude when, in... well, several times, but above all, I lingered over it in our music podcasts, which I owe to Aliosha's team, of which Pierre-Henri was also a part, by the way.
53:51 And among those, there's a chapter on Nietzsche, isn't there? And I recall that Nietzsche had been disgusted by reading the text of Parsifal that's going to occupy us, and his knees trembled, he was so stunned by the beauty of the music when he discovered the music inspired by this text. There you go. So, last time, we're going to come back to hesitation.
The constricted throat in Baudelaire and Kafka 54:29 For now, I've only given one... of Perceval now, I've only given one avatar of it, which is his muteness, the choked throat. I'm always afraid of annoying you with detours, and I notice that as a result it makes me speed up, and it's more confused when I speed up. No, I'm digging deeper. I've now understood that on the contrary one must dwell at the center of the spiral. There, you see.
55:01 Because you know quite a few things by now since we've been talking together. Now, I've already spoken of a choked throat. I've spoken of it at least twice, I mean with quite precise references to readings. I'm sure some of you already remember the discussion we had together about Baudelaire's cracked bell. Let me recall the text, it's so short, it's a sonnet that begins so well and ends in nightmare. How can one make that transition in so little time?
55:34 Well, it fits perfectly with our current season, so let's say it right away. "It is bitter and sweet, on winter nights, / To listen, near the flickering, smoking fire, / To memories slowly rising / To the sound of chiming bells singing in the mist." Isn't that nice? Isn't life beautiful? There's bitterness, but it's romantic melancholy, which is a source of voluptuous pleasure. You know, Rousseau's, when he wrote to Malesherbes: "So that I was pervaded by a certain sadness which I would not have wished not to know."
56:11 thus inaugurating modernity. Listen, somewhere right at the very beginning of modernity. Second stanza, still in the happiness of the beginning. "Happy"—I'm not paraphrasing, I'm not interpreting. "Happy the bell with the vigorous throat"—the bell is in good health—"which faithfully utters its religious cry, like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent."
56:58 I had even told you: there are the two great crowds to which Freud devoted a study, "Groups Without Women"—the Church and the army. The Church, the bell, the bell and the Church. The bell that gathers the faithful. "Like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent." The sword and the holy water sprinkler, as we say elsewhere. "Like a soldier keeping watch under his tent."
57:28 No punctuation on the way there. Careful, it takes a turn for the worse now. Here are the tercets. "As for me, my soul is cracked." Remember I'm trying to illustrate the throat that is choked and can no longer let its voice out. "As for me, my soul is cracked." The cracked bell is no longer good for anything, it can be thrown away. "And when, in its troubles, it wants to fill the cold night air with its songs,"
58:01 We're far from the flickering, smoking fire. "It often happens that its weakened voice / Seems the thick death-rattle of a wounded man forgotten / By the edge of a lake of blood, under a great heap of the dead, / Who dies without moving, in immense efforts." There it is. It's over, in a few very short lines. We've moved from the quietude, the voluptuous pleasure of romantic melancholy on a winter evening, when one delights in the comfort one enjoys in the bad season while outside—autumn, winter, spring soaked in mud, drowsy seasons, I love you and I praise you for wrapping my heart and my brain in a vaporous shroud, vague as a tomb—you see how this could chain together, these are themes.
58:54 It ended in nightmare, the nightmare of the voice that no longer manages to carry, that no longer manages to make itself heard—and the other reference, remember, was in Kafka, it was K, the central character of Kafka's last novel, his most sober, most stripped-down masterpiece, The Castle, where almost all pathetic effects are banished to keep only the essential—that is, the pitch: one winter evening a stranger arrives in a small town of the Holy Roman Empire, he heads straight for the only light that's still on, because people go to bed early in those parts, especially in winter, because it's a winter night, at the peasants' inn—there are only two inns in the village, below the peasants' inn, and up above, because there's a slope leading up to the castle, we'll get to that, the gentlemen's inn, the gentlemen who all work at the castle, quite different from the other inn. He arrives from the peasants' side and there he asks for a room, there isn't one, they let him sleep in the common room on a straw mattress—typical Kafka touch—and he says he's come
1:00:09 to take up his post: he's been recruited by the castle as a land surveyor—Mr. Surveyor, we'll call him that throughout the novel, K., Mr. Surveyor, the surveyor. I told you I'd dig deeper only at the center of the spiral—here too the story needs digging, I'm holding onto it, don't worry, I'll come back to it—but the surveyor, the one who takes steps to measure—oh, that must be about 15 meters—the very origin of geometry, which doesn't mean study of the earth, that's geology, but measurement of the earth, which began with surveying, with our legs—look closely at the spread of the legs, one meter—the surveyor brought the rigor of measurement, of order, of rationality into chaos, into the infinite. Mr. Surveyor: still, no one believes him, and anyway, the castle—the castle is nobody's business, no one ever thinks of going to the castle, everyone stays down in the village, and he wants to go to the castle.
1:01:19 He never gets there throughout the whole novel—that's it, I've summed up the novel for you: it's these incessant, tireless efforts—and also fatiguing, because he's worn out—to gain access to the castle, to see who employed him, and so on, what his instructions are. And once he's very close—remember, I'm going to quote this passage—to arriving, first he's very disappointed by the building, he finds that his village church had more style, with its roof, compared to this castle which is a bit like a heap of shacks gathered together, with a keep all the same—and there he is, brought there by a sleigh with a consumptive old man who does nothing but cough, a pitiful rig, and so they turn back because night is falling, they're exhausted, as soon as you try to walk you sink into the inches of snow, it's even more tiring to pull your legs out of the snow, so they turn back, and just as he turns his back, they hear it—here it comes—a ringing of the bell, there's a bell coming from the castle.
1:02:29 and so he says that with the voice—the voice is—it threatens to fulfill all the desires he had never dared express—an extraordinary passage for an author of whom it's said, Kafka, that music was indifferent to him, you see, he must have had to protect himself from it for it to hold such importance in his work—well, in The Castle, I keep coming back to it, but at the beginning, right at the beginning, when he's in that room, he says, you don't believe me? Well, just telephone. "Wake, wake up the castle at this hour? You can't be serious." "I'll do it myself," he heads off in front of the bewildered peasants, isn't that right, he heads off, and at last they hear the voice of the castle, and Kafka says it was a crackling, you'd have said thousands of childlike voices, but very distant, very distant, yet uniting and gaining in pitch and volume, as if they wanted to pierce something more than a poor ear.
The three drops of blood on the snow 1:03:39 You see, all of this is variations on the theme of the voice that fails to make itself heard—or else it's a moment of grace, you see. Well, Perceval, then, on several occasions, has not opened his mouth at the moment when he should have—he's someone rather withdrawn, he's a little wild thing, he's a bit intimidated at King Arthur's court, with which he's going to come into contact. So, we're getting there now, because at some point it's not King Arthur's court, but, carried along by his adventures, he finds himself in a winter landscape hunting, and there he's just wounded, without knowing that King Arthur's court is roaming about nearby—courts were often on the move, you know, with tents, of which you've seen very beautiful reproductions in period paintings—the great meeting of Francis I and the King of England at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, isn't that right? Well, that's King Arthur's court there, but he doesn't know it, he's out hunting, and he's wounded a bird, a white bird.
1:04:51 On this whiteness—Wagner will take up the theme where Parsifal comes on stage, his first appearance, when he's just shot an arrow and killed the sacred swan, the one that lives in the domain of the Grail, a domain where one isn't even allowed to touch the slightest blade of grass, let alone pick it, and even less to kill an animal. Well, he's just wounded a bird, he comes to retrieve it, good hunter that he is—oh! the bird was only wounded, it flies off, and Parsifal, instead of following it with his eyes, remains fascinated by the ground, he looks at the spot where the bird had been standing, and there are three drops of blood on the snow, and there he's going to shut himself into his muteness, muteness triggered by the sight of three drops of blood, a red triangle on immaculate snow—you can speculate all you like, the colors of Japan, I know, of Poland, of Switzerland, the colors of Saint Catherine in painting.
1:06:01 Look closely at the martyrdom of Saint Catherine, look at the importance of red and white—painters knew all these saints' stories by heart. Well, the red and the white—doesn't it send... and I'll come back to white and red afterward, but let me continue what happens here—the court, the knights see a knight bent over toward something unknown, from a distance they don't see what, and who doesn't even come to greet King Arthur in person. It becomes more and more unbecoming, and the seneschal Kay, who's a hot-headed fellow, as we say in French, quick-tempered, we also say, decides: I'll teach him a lesson, this fellow is ill-mannered—little does he know how right he is, Perceval doesn't have all the court manners since he was raised in the forest by his mother. So anyway, he takes his horse, gallops so as not to—no, to give him a fright—Perceval doesn't move, absorbed in his silence, and when he hears the crash
1:07:13 of the horse's hooves a few meters from him, he just makes a small movement with his lance, the seneschal breaks his collarbone and returns to court miserable, gasping, and there are two or three more who try, meeting the same fate, until Gawain—Gauvain, Gawan in Parzival—Gawain, who was considered in the Matter of Britain to be the ideal knight par excellence, the one who most honors the rules of proper chivalry, says to the king: but Sire, surely this is someone who has taken a vow, and we know why, a vow of silence, we haven't used the right approach, I'll go speak to him—which is what Gawain does. Perceval relaxes, and in the last moments of his reflection, the narrator, Chrétien de Troyes, tells us that the three drops of blood reminded him of the roses on the cheeks of his fiancée, whose name is Blanchefleur—look how nothing is left to chance, Blanchefleur.
1:08:24 For at that time, you know, a woman could not be beautiful unless she was white/fair. Look at Villon's beautiful poem about where the snows of yesteryear have gone, when he comes to the stanza where he speaks of Blanche of Castile, he says, if I remember correctly, "the queen white as a lily, who sang with a siren's voice." So, Perceval, there you have it, the roses, you see, the blood—when there's an emotion in the young girl, one with some modesty, who has been raised not to express her desires, to be an object of desire and not, like the boy, a subject of desire, in traditional upbringing, from which some people wrongly believe themselves to be entirely liberated—the slightest emotion draws blood to the surface of the cheek. There's an attribution of red and white, and that's not all, we'll see later, I told you we'd come back to it, in any case that's how this magnificent episode ends
1:09:34 — this magnificent, poetic episode, isn't it—this knight there, on a winter landscape, on the moor, desolate like that, the moor covered in white, forgetting his hunt and staring for hours in silence—and so he was admitted to King Arthur's court, there's a feast, he discovers what that is, the feasting, the glasses being filled, the women laughing, the men telling bawdy jokes as always, or their exploits, and then in the middle of the feast a frightening figure arrives, of the kind found only in medieval imagination—if you look at the gargoyles—a monstrous figure, rather like—the one called in the romance the Grail messenger, she comes right into the feast like that, she confronts him in front of everyone, Perceval—let me give you a few elements of her description from Chrétien de Troyes, you'll recognize paintings by Bosch or Bruegel—teeth like egg yolk,
The Grail messenger: from hesitation to decision 1:10:46 eyes like a monkey's or a cat's, you see the kind of character straight out of a fantastic medieval bestiary. And what does she say to Perceval? "Oh, Perceval, you went to the castle, you saw the bleeding lance"—since the Grail is kept in a castle where two relics are guarded, the Grail which collected Christ's blood, and the—excuse me—the lance that pierced Christ's side, especially in the Christian reworking that took hold of a legend—we're now certain that the story of the Grail, etc., goes back even before the Christianization of Brittany in the broad sense, but Christianity immediately transposed it onto the two sexes, if you will, the lance and the vessel, the Grail, isn't that right? So she says to him: you saw that, you saw the bleeding lance, you saw the king and his wound, and you didn't ask the question that would have lifted the curse on his kingdom—yet if you had asked,
1:11:56 you would have—excuse me, but I'm following the original text, which isn't very comprehensible unless put into modern French—"had you asked, you would have healed the rich king, so frightened by his wound, the world would have known peace." You see where the hesitation of the best of men can lead. And it's from this outburst that we move from hesitation—well, we've been talking about it long enough, we can move on to its opposite, it feels good—to decision. He drops all this newfound glory, since he's become something of a prince of the feast, being new and all, he drops everything, including the maiden who laughed—that's the last detail I'll give you about this feast. He'd been asked his name, he'd stammered two or three things, he's a wild boy, he doesn't know how to express himself very well, and it made people laugh, his declaration made a maiden laugh. The seneschal Kay, always so gentle, gave the maiden a violent slap for having laughed, and Perceval—it's sworn—swore to avenge the laughing maiden. We'll see later whether he does it or not.
1:13:06 For now I'll suspend the quest for the Grail, which we'll take up again—we have time, in the coming sessions—and I'll go back to red and white. I insisted heavily on the fact—a synthetic pause, let's review several things—the anthropological and the zoological, instead of opposing them like the terms of an antinomy, rather we should see them as the poles of a dialectic. You see the difference? When I say poles, think of magnets, there's movement right away, it moves, there's a cursor that spends its time going from one to the other, like the hero of The Castle spends his time going from the village to the castle and from the castle to the village, whereas all the villagers never go beyond a certain threshold. As a result he's never really integrated into the village, and even less does he gain access to the castle—he is the movement. We are men—what did the scholar Hublin say earlier? He said this movement
The poles of a dialectic: Rousseau and Hegel 1:14:16 which some would like to see end at a precise point, below which we were still in the pithecine and beyond which we're finally in the anthropos or in Homo sapiens—this movement has never ceased and it continues, he says, in the present: yes, at the very moment I'm speaking to you, we continue to hominize ourselves. In other words, we always retain an animal part—that's what dialectic means, we've stopped opposing them, but they have an antinomic relation to each other—this time active, not on a sheet of paper where on the left of my table of opposition I put the animal, on the right I put man, on the left I put instinct, on the right I put institution, a bit like Rousseau apparently does in a text I often quote, chapter 8 of book 1 of The Social Contract—let's review, go on, I'll recall it—of civil society, this passage from the state of nature to civil society, I'll stop there for now, this passage, you see very well
1:15:26 that his point is this passage—it's not the state of nature or civil society, it's the passage, the movement itself, that "produces a very remarkable change in man"—I've said it often, so I'll go quickly—"by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they previously lacked. Although in this state he deprives himself of several advantages he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in return, his faculties are exercised and developed"—yes, sexuality becomes love—"his passions are ennobled, his whole soul is elevated to such a degree that"—and you know I always stop there, because you get the impression that Rousseau leaves the sentence entirely open just to mock all those who teach him by pretending he's really someone who does nothing but praise nature and demonize, like today's naturalists, the human world—we even find that we go too far, starting with others—"his whole soul is elevated to such a degree that"—it's there "if the abuses of this new condition," civil society, "did not often degrade him"
1:16:37 "below that from which he emerged"—I insist, below bestiality, rather below the animal begins bestiality, horror—"if the abuses of this new condition"—there's a theory of evil there such as had never been seen before, and which begins with the modern world, and which will soon inaugurate the century that will end with the greatest massacres humanity has known—"if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged, he ought," a conditional, isn't it, "constantly to bless the happy moment that tore him from it forever"—because there's never a moment when this cursor stops, we've tried, we're no longer among the beasts, we're in man, but the movement doesn't stop. We'll see the philosophical resonances of what I'm saying about the movement itself, which doesn't stop, just as K in The Castle never stops going from the castle to the village and back again, isn't that right—he is that movement, he is neither the castle nor the village, he is not the stone,
1:17:49 he is not God—the two extremes—passing through the vegetal, the animal, he is the movement that goes from the stone all the way to God, God being perhaps the classless society, I'm not leaving materialism, it's rather the viewpoint of liberation theology: the existence of God takes shape as the domain of freedom on this earth increases. That's exactly what it was, isn't it, that religious people, priests, who had themselves tortured, cut to pieces in the guerrilla wars of Latin America, with the help of all the Pentagons and all the CIAs, especially in Argentina and Chile, and especially—it's countless, I think the record is El Salvador, I always cite El Salvador and Guatemala together for the record of the number of deaths, of people murdered per inhabitant—it's 400,000 for these tiny countries, I'm digressing, in December—anyway, workers, I insist on the point, we hadn't seen this before, so I'm dwelling on it a bit: it's the movement
1:18:59 that emerges here, whereas usually I say the middle term is only a means, I use it, it's not the essential thing—the essential thing is the goal I'm pursuing, the rest is what serves me to reach it, what matters is what I want to reach, that's the goal, the means is nothing—there are Eastern wisdoms, similarly, that say the truth of the path is the path itself, yes, that's very close to what I'm saying, isn't it, but one must accept the consequences. So, since we're here, you see, we're right in the middle of philosophy, I'd like to take the opportunity—I've already said I was thinking of those taking exams and competitive exams—and there's a magnificent seminar on Hegel going on right now at the École Normale Supérieure, I'm thinking of it, and I recall, to stay with the theme of the passage of time, of becoming rather than being, of what is already there, that Hegel defines man—I'm not trying to explain the definition,
1:20:10 as for me, that's Hegel for you, it would take hours—anyway, here are the terms, here's the definition: man is the concept itself existing—Dasein, for once let me give the German word, Dasein, being-there, Da is there, Sein is being—and man is the concept itself existing, not the concept that's in my head when I think of the concept of dog among mammals, canids existing. Man—I'll leave that, that's not my subject. Then he defines time—we're not talking about man, we're talking about time. You know what he says?
1:20:57 exactly the same thing: time is the concept itself existing. It's perhaps a privilege of man to gain access to time—it's interesting to see how the hard sciences try, on the contrary, to eliminate time. I'm going to ask what time it is now, because when we're on subjects like this, we don't even see time passing, and we'll end up saying, like Ronsard, "Time goes, time goes, my lady"—no, not "time," but "we go away"—yes, that would be—so, yes, Pierre-Alain's wisdom—I'll move on now to your questions, and I'm putting off till next time the return I promised on red and white, taken each separately. Now let me tell you the program right away, before hearing your questions—listen, we'll read them—we'll see a text by Mallarmé where everything is white, and of course another where everything is red, and a synthesis, another that begins with white and ends with pink.
Question from the audience: an unlimited evolution? 1:22:08 make a synthesis of red and white, you'll see the pink—quite a program, isn't it. Yes, I'm not joking, you'll see, it's serious, these are great texts—but I take your questions even more seriously, which are also texts. So let me look here—ah, well yes, let me try this too, there we go, thank you very much. So, Daniel, good evening Daniel, always happy to find Daniel Arias again, who always helps us move forward with his questions: hominization, ape, man, cyborg, humanoid, unlimited evolution. There's a good question. You can imagine that the essential word is the last one, it's the tendency, at least in man, to initiate an evolution without limits—that's not the case for all living species. The polar bear
1:23:20 is limited to a biotope which is whiteness, I mean it's his camouflage—if he leaves the ice floe, he's in trouble, imagine him a bit in the African savanna, he wouldn't last long. The badger is equipped to be limited by equipment he has from birth—that's the difference with man, there's no need for a great deal of learning, well, a little for the young, but that doesn't last long—we'll need to come back to this theme of the importance that schooling, the education of children, takes on in the human animal. Professor Hublin, whom I mentioned to you, comes back to this in many lectures, he says it's striking to see, as far back as prehistory, how much the relationship of parents to children in the human species differs immensely from other species—it's not a matter of more or less tenderness, it's the time it takes. I'll wait for that to finish. Since we're talking about limitlessness, let me come back—yes, the badger is a species,
1:24:31 that means he's specifically made for terrain where burrows can be dug, that's why we almost never see him, the burrowing animal, he has claws for that, he's a real excavator, those claws are real excavators, shovels—man produces shovels when he needs them. And man can live on the ice, in Antarctic stations or at the pole—the largest American station in those areas is Thule, you see, packed with technology, crammed with technology—just as he can live in the equatorial forest, on the ice floe, he even ventures onto the sea—a fine phrase from Plato: there are three kinds of men, those who go to war, those who cultivate the land, and those who go to sea—you feel the Greek there, from archipelago to archipelago, you feel Ulysses. So what's proper to man, as I've just said, the whole development beforehand,
1:25:41 unlimited evolution, yes, but that's what's proper to man, that man, unlike the badger, is not condemned to adapt to a certain environment—he adapts the environment. To what? To a desire without limits, but within a limited time as far as individuals are concerned, isn't that right? If I'm speaking of man as a species, yes, then I would say, yes, unlimited evolution, I'd answer Daniel positively, without hesitation. But still, there we're in essence, not in existence—what exists are men like you and me who are born and die, and there I can't help quoting this passage from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit where he speaks of the phenomenon—I told you earlier about his definition of man, the concept itself existing, then of time, the concept itself existing, and now you see what he says of the phenomenon, a term inherited from Kant—in short, everything around us, at least when posed as appearance, that's what he distinguishes from mere appearance.
1:26:51 He says: manifestation—it's the same word as phenomenon—what manifests itself is the movement of being born and perishing, comma, a movement which itself is never born and never perishes. I'm answering, opening up avenues, to Daniel's question—yes, since this isn't a Q&A session, I'll thank Daniel infinitely for the relevance of his question, you see it was right there, but I'm sure it's no accident that he asked it, it's because he's been attentive to what I've been able to say, to recall or to convey. And I'm going to end, for once, not with something philosophical or scientific but with a sound, a musical illustration of this hesitation—this time between the continuous and the discontinuous—a piece of music,
A chorale by Jehan Alain: from the continuous to the discontinuous 1:28:01 a marvel by a composer little known to the general public, Jehan—like the medieval first name, J-E-H-A-N—Jehan Alain. The Alains are a great family of tremendous organists—we're more familiar with Marie-Claire Alain, Olivier Alain, among others—and Jehan, perhaps the best of them all, well, one could speculate, but he died so young, he was one of the earliest members of the Resistance during the war, and we lost him in the first hours of the war. Jehan Alain had previously composed a chorale, as organists often do—now, the chorale is the form of the discontinuous par excellence in music, it's square, it's not—it's no accident that it's especially in Protestant music, in countries of the Protestant religion, in Bach and Handel—it's not just that the chorale is important because Luther himself had composed that famous chorale titled—and I think this summed up a certain paranoia common in Germany—Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, "Our God is a mighty fortress," we're on the defensive.
1:29:12 we're on our way—and he wrote a chorale, but not at all in that taste, rather we have the impression of plunging into the mists of time when we hear it—I have the impression of seeing all the bell towers of our cathedrals, from the old Romanesque chapels to the immense cathedrals of the Île-de-France and of Reims, of Normandy, I see them all suddenly, all these bell towers echoing one another with this chorale that's coming—you'll see the contrast between the beginning, which is cottony, continuous, blurred, these sorts of whirlwinds of light, of dust of light, it was very strange, a time between dog and wolf, a squall-like time, if you will—and suddenly this apparent disorder, very difficult to play, this continuous flow, isn't it, these gusts of notes on the organ, and suddenly the majestic chorale
1:30:22 settles in, and we can say, that's it, we're no longer in zoology, we're in anthropology—but it's only in the world of aesthetics that we can contemplate this passage like that, in a few seconds. It's performed on the organ by a young organist—I try to stay in touch with new talents, and I was struck by the skill with which she performed this difficult work. I'm telling you this because the people who made this video were kind enough to insert, in a little window inside the screen, her feet—because you know that then one can play with one's feet, there's a third keyboard when there are two manuals, a fourth if there are three manuals, played with the feet, heels and toes—the difficulty that presupposes, isn't that right? Bach could, hands on his head like that, play you a fugue with his feet, a fugue in two voices, but why not three, as I know it—so be attentive, the chorale begins around 5:03 or thereabouts, isn't that right, and there you go.
1:31:32 So I—but in any case I don't need to point it out to you, the contrast is so striking between the turbulent, whirling continuity of the beginning and the establishment of the chorale that no one will be mistaken. Well, listen, I'll see you again for the next adventures of Perceval the Welshman in his quest for the Grail, and I'm very glad to have found you again this evening, even though I warned you once again, and I apologize, a bit late. Thank you a thousand times for your presence, thank you to Pierre-Alain for his unexpected presence, which allowed me to hold this session, and see you very soon, thank you.
