English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Rousseau the musician: copying music, refusing glory 1:30 The last letter before we leave Rousseau and the cenotaph is M, but here I simply want to say the word music. Oh, but these are words that do not leave Rousseau today. We are prey to the signifier before his tomb, his tomb so little funereal, because it concerns a musician, and it's even the fact that he copied music his whole life — a rather thankless activity, absolutely like Spinoza polishing lenses to make himself independent of the powers of this world. Rousseau, in order to depend on no one, earned money by copying music. There were no photocopiers, there was no internet, there was no piracy — you had to copy them by hand, it was work. Besides that, he was a composer, and as we know, he could have had a superb career in the showbiz of the time by accepting the hundred louis that Madame de Pompadour wanted to reward him with after the popular success — I would even say the "celebrity" success, the notions don't quite overlap, we see — of Le Devin du village.
2:39 The opera which had great success. And Rousseau refused. Rousseau refused to become a celebrity of the people. He could have lived in pleasure, far from austerity and happiness. But there is something deeper in the link between Rousseau and music, and that's why it interests us, with the letter M, beyond Rousseau, for music in general. When you look at his great poetic texts, even if they are in prose — I'm thinking of the Reveries of course essentially, but also in the Confessions and in the correspondence, the letters to Malesherbes too — it has been noted by critics, even in a schoolroom way, that there are very few colors in Rousseau, very little detail about the setting, but a great many sounds.
Sounds rather than colors: a reading of the fifth walk 3:23 Whereas Chateaubriand, the enchanter, shows us parrots of every color in the forests of the Orinoco, and waterfalls to the left, in Rousseau there is almost an extinction of everything visual. I take the most significant example from it, in the Fifth Walk, when he is by the water and begins to sink into a half-sleep, reverie, neither sleep nor waking, it's between the two. "The flux and reflux of this water, its ceaseless yet at intervals swelling sound, striking my ear and eyes without relief, supplied the internal movements which reverie was extinguishing within me, and sufficed to make me feel my existence with pleasure, without taking the trouble to think."
4:23 So there, almost, sometimes, a few short and faint reflections would arise, so one starts thinking again about the instability of the things of this world, whose image the surface of the waters offered me. But soon — this is where we'll see there is nothing visual left — soon these slight impressions themselves faded away in the uniformity of the continuous movement that rocked me, and which, without any active participation of my soul, did not fail to attach me, to the point that when the agreed hour called — someone had to call him for the meal — I could not tear myself away from there without effort. We find once again the effort, not of doing nothing, but of being attentive to another world, to that call, to that music, to that lullaby — I find again the bond to the mother.
The bond with the mother and a music that enters time in order to leave it 5:07 The first bond to the mother is, after all, the songs the mother sings, like that — gratifying words, not yet prescriptive words, not yet. There is still that first bond. So there is a fidelity. I had a student who did remarkable work on a parallel between the narrator's journey in Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Parsifal's journey in Wagner's Parsifal.
5:38 She said the matrix scene of that theme is Rousseau's Fifth Walk. There is a fidelity to — not to my mother, to me, in the singular, to the anecdote on the couch — but to the mother in general. The fact of having been carried, of having been fed, and so on. There is a fidelity, and of being in absolute security. And above all, I come back to desire, and this is profound for understanding music: in the intrauterine state, there is no time.
6:08 That is to say, time arises when there is a gap between desire and satisfaction — you only have to see how long time seems to us when we're hungry and the meal is late. So there, as soon as there is a need, it is immediately, chemically satisfied by the liquid surrounding the child, in the liquid — so it's the fact that there is no time, and music will be the link that takes into account the world into which one is born while remaining in that fidelity. And Lévi-Strauss saw this very well — I'm using a non-Marxist author, sometimes used against Marx, to show that I'm not sectarian.
6:44 Rousseau says, "everything happens as if music entered into time in order to leave it." By producing a time whose vicissitudes can be foreseen, precisely. A time that is not that of wrenching away, but which somewhere has a beginning and an end, like rhymes. Is that Bergson's time? That is to say, Bergson is one of those who reflected most deeply on musical duration, absolutely. And I have never understood why this philosophy was opposed — Bergson being the first, moreover — no doubt because of the wartime context of the period, to Kant.
7:21 I even have this stupid line from I don't know who, commenting on Bergson, who said, "French light artillery answered the heavy Prussian cannons." Well, it's foolish to oppose the two philosophical cultures like that, it really doesn't fly very high. Now it's Russia that takes the place of the heavy Prussian cannons, and we always find someone more backward than ourselves, and the Russian is the Black of whiteness, as I like to repeat, having lived in Africa — what the Pole is for the German, that's what the Russian is for the Pole, and so on. I mean, always further east, more serf-like, more snow, bastard poor people. And so, somewhere in music, within Hegel's architecture — it's no accident — music comes to crown the edifice of the arts, from the art most engaged in exteriority, the plastic arts.
8:10 Architecture, sculpture — there are the three dimensions. Painting, all painting is abstract, says Hegel. Even Raphael, I mean, or Turner, by the fact that one of the dimensions, depth, is abstracted there, is done away with, and is restored through perspective. So there is already a form of interiorization compared to sculpture, to architecture, to painting. And then there, the dispersal of all spatial dimensions in music, which is nothing but pure temporality — before Bergson — which is nothing but pure duration, as we would say today. Music which says "as time is no longer there as soon as it is there."
Complicity of language and music against Bergson 8:42 That makes me think of Rimbaud, who says "to understand my word, it must flee and fly." Music which is no longer there as soon as it is there. So there is this relation to time which brings it so close, at the same time, to language, which is also a function of time. Both unfold — discourse, which is the order of speech, unfolds in the temporal, we mustn't forget that. And so the relations — I'm answering your question about Bergson — there is a relation of hostility to language in Bergson, which comes to break the continuity of the real through the crudeness of the cuts made by concepts, and so on.
9:15 And so, I prefer a dialectic that shows there is a complicity between language and music. A complicity that child psychologists, or all those concerned with children — well, I know this well — that corresponds to the stage called infant babbling. The stage where the child begins to articulate, to make different sounds, and not just cries, so modulated sounds, but doesn't yet have the code. That's music. And to the point that — I'll end with this allusion, because the symbolic order lets us sum up quite a few things and save time.
9:48 When, in the Ring cycle, in Twilight of the Gods, Siegfried is about to see, a few seconds before his death — he has been trapped during the hunt — and Hagen talks with him and wants, before killing him, to convince him to perjure himself before the others, before the Germanic warriors, and so on. It's serious to violate oaths. And he says to him, to make him turn around, "they say you understand the language of the birds, Siegfried." You see how we arrive at music? Siegfried says, "yes, once, but since I've been listening to women, I've forgotten the language of birds."
10:20 Now, in Freud, it is said that young girls are the exact symbolic equivalent — after a thousand dreams analyzed, birds symbolize young girls. Mocking birds — a girl who taunts, who mocks, moreover — we often use all sorts of ornithological metaphors for women. A crane, a silly goose, a goose, a hen, whatever comes along — a birdbrain, and there you have it, a lot of male fantasies in that, I'm the first to agree, but that's how woman has been designated for centuries, within the relation, the status assigned to her, that was assigned to her. So music has something of the order of discourse, which articulates — and with what precision! — music which can articulate the slightest nuance of mood, but at the same time not through concepts.
11:13 There is no concept. There are two opposite renunciations of the concept, mathematics and music. I don't want to wander off there, it would take us too far, in opposite ways. Mathematics drops concepts, words — since you're asking me about words, the letter M — because in words there is always a metaphor. When I say "you're piercing my ear with your screams," of course it's a metaphor, I'm not actually drilling a hole in your eardrum with an awl. But at the same time, "pierce" is a metaphor that comes from some trade, from leather-work, etc. There is never a literal meaning.
11:45 And people make metaphors every day like Monsieur Jourdain, but in reverse. They make prose without knowing it. When they say every day, "look, the day is rising." It didn't go to bed, there are no sheets, it's a metaphor. We know very well it didn't rise, it didn't go to bed — well, it didn't rise. But we keep speaking that way, because it is the very essence of human language to speak through metaphor. Mathematics, being very coherent, dropped this language, too polysemous, in order to take — well, I call it a circle, the locus of points, by defining precisely — there are no more concepts, they are mathemes. Y, X, equals, are not concepts.
Opera, Rousseau and the modern fusion of genres 12:19 A great effort of conception thanks to these terms, but they themselves are not concepts. They are not words. Or else there is the opposite — there are words that exist in their abstraction. And so, with this complicity — not hostility, language and music — as Bergson would have it, but by unifying the two — I smile, because that is the whole program of the history of opera, indeed, trying to achieve the fusion of the two, and God knows this raises problems: prima la parola, dopo la musica, or the reverse — it was a great debate among musicologists, whether what matters is the text and then music is needed to embellish it, or the opposite, whether it's the music and the text must serve it — a problem opera directors face today. As for me, I would give Rousseau's answer. What did Rousseau do?
13:03 He unified poetry and prose, the first to do so, in his last works — inseparable, the musicality of his sentence and the message he wants to deliver to us, a message clear conceptually, that's the right answer. And I believe that all aesthetic modernity — I'm speaking now of the modernity of writing — has been seeking, since the end of the 18th century, this fusion of genres, which is characteristic of our modern human condition, of which I have made neither the praise nor the indictment.
13:34 But as moderns, we no longer have, as the ancients did, particularly the classical writers, the leisure to keep things apart. There is comedy, there is tragedy, there is tragicomedy. These genres have merged. That is what is proper to modernity. No doubt, just as social classes collided with one another at the end of the 18th century, one could no longer have the noble on one side and the base on the other. But all these middle classes we come from, which are constantly a compromise between the two — so the fusion of all genres into one, and in particular of the sentence, which recovers the maximum of poetry.
14:08 There is far more poetry in page after page of prose by Proust, or Chateaubriand, or Nabokov, it doesn't matter which, than in many recitations that make verses and aren't very inspired, and which are often thought put into verse — which is the very opposite of poetry.
