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 crisis shakes liberal-libertarian certainties 0:00 [transcription noise: repeated garbled fragment] ...unfolds outside this very thought. And today, thanks to the crisis, many elements that seemed to be self-evident for so many years that they seemed almost eternal. Imagine today's youth, for decades they've been hearing, "our system is not the best, nothing is perfect, but still all the others are worse." Nice as a prospect. We're heading for the wall, but there's no other solution. That's a terrible prospect. Well, thanks to the crisis — the crisis is terrible for those who suffer it, but at least there is this positive thing, that these certainties of the last 40 years, these certainties
1:10 locked up in what the same Clouscard, whom I was quoting earlier, called the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution inaugurated in the 1970s — so 1968 in France is only one episode of it. I do mean the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution, which can be summed up in a slogan that readers of Clouscard know well: "Everything is permitted." That's the consumerist side, it's nice, I'm all for it, you know. "Everything is permitted" — but you mustn't forget what follows: nothing is possible. "Everything is permitted," but at the unemployment office, if you prefer — that's what's been happening for 40 years. Clever system, isn't it. So, a system, to sum it up again this way, that is permissive on the level of morals and repressive on the social level. Permissive for the consumer, repressive for the producer. And since we are both, you hear on television, you hear them say "the users, the clients, the consumers." The consumer satisfaction level, statistics — but what is that? You are consumers, yes, but you're also producers, you work, you earn your living. By what right do they call you consumers, as if you were babies with a bottle, who produce nothing and only consume the milk, the milk
2:21 maternal and paternal, straightaway, in the pram, in the house. We don't produce anything. Well, there it is. For the baby, that's legitimate, he has every right to consume without producing. For the well-off young man, it's different. There you go. So, the well-off young man who accuses the worker of having become bourgeois — you saw a lot of that in '68. For years too we'd been told, well, we're now heading toward something stable. It's a system that may not be ideal, but you see, modern liberal capitalism is roughly the final, ideal form that a society at the end of its journey should take, and now humanity has this system to eke out an existence in for all eternity.
A crisis deferred by war and the "old mole" 3:04 And then, crash! And people used to mock Marx, saying he predicted a general crisis of capitalism, what a bad call, since capitalism has never been in better shape. That's not so old, that kind of talk. It's not that old, and nobody holds it anymore. Nobody holds it anymore. In fact, we'll have the chance to come back to this, but the crisis we are suffering is not just one more crisis of capitalism among others. It is exactly the same one, if you reread things very precisely, that Marx announced, but which was deferred by 50 million deaths, I mean by the Second World War. Don't forget that just before the Second World War, and as a cause — not the only one, but an essential and decisive one — of the war, there is the greatest economic crisis of the modern world, the crisis of the 1930s, of 1929, call it what you like, which, incidentally, like today, had started in the United States. That doesn't stop the radio, the press, and the liberal media from denouncing, every single day, as the origin of all our troubles, the French model — I mean the French model, not today's, the French model from way back, the one that came into existence thanks to the Liberation, with a significant role for the public sector in the economy, etc., and which is pointed at by our liberals
4:17 as being the cause of our ills — so each time, the crisis comes from what is most opposed to our economic model. So there was already this monstrous crisis, and capitalism got out of it, at the cost of 50 million deaths, and look, in 1914, another crisis, not an economic one apparently, mainly a military crisis, there you go. And regimes capable, you know, of waging the war of 1914 are capable of anything, because now the horrors of the 1939-1945 war, the camps, somewhat overshadow the horror of the 1914 war — when you'd walk around, you know, these cemeteries, you see, 50,000 dead, just like that, kids between 18 and 22, off you go, front line, bang, off you go, second line wiped out. When a world capable of doing that, you see, in the midst of civilization, well, industrial development, that's a world capable of anything.
5:04 Now, on the eve of the war of 1914, to get back to my thread, in 1913, the traffic of the port of Hamburg overtakes that of the port of London. You see, the economic tensions were already there, the competition among the great powers. And at a moment when suddenly everyone seems to be taking back their marbles a bit, you saw that Japan, for a few months now, has regained its financial autonomy and decided to do what's called quantitative easing, releasing lots of money onto the capital markets to get out of the situation. Just a small parenthesis, it makes me smile, because when I was 20, Japan was cited as the model.
5:37 Ah, there you go, the people, well, they take vacations, so little it's barely worth mentioning, they work like crazy, they're loyal to their company, they do their gymnastics and theater, all within the framework of their company. There you go — for 20 years now Japan has been desperately trying to get out of an unprecedented deflation, a dead growth rate, and yet they've got both feet on the accelerator, I don't want to get technical, the lowest interest rates, they were the first to have negative interest rates, because you see, it's interesting to factor in inflation, it amounts to even negative returns. Anyway, well. So, all these factors to show you that the crisis is old, only it keeps coming back, it comes back like that, like something you try to wave away like a fly bothering you, and which never stops coming back to bother us.
6:20 That's what made Marx say, quoting Shakespeare, "Well grubbed, old mole." It became a famous formula — it's from Hamlet, at the end of Hamlet, Hamlet visits the graveyard where there's the skull of his old excellent friend, Yorick, he looks at the skull like that, "Alas, poor Yorick." My God, my poor Yorick. And then, when the ghost of his father goes back underground, he says to him, "Well grubbed, old mole." The mole is what we think we've gotten rid of — workers don't exist anymore, the proletariat doesn't exist anymore, there are no more social problems, we only have societal problems now.
6:54 There's the relationship between men and women, Corsicans versus French people, regional versus national, everything, everything — I may seem to be caricaturing, you know. Capital sits back twiddling its thumbs and yawns with happiness when it sees men and women killing each other, executives — apparently it's the executives who occupy the positions that young people would like, you see, people are set against one another, you've already heard that too, when they pit the young against the old, ageism, men against women, as I said, Corsicans — I'm Corsican — against the French, when in fact there are millions of men and women who are exploited by other men and women, it's not one against the other, even if, within exploitation, believe someone who spent a long time south of the Sahara, it is indeed the female sex that is more materially exploited.
7:38 So, we thought we had, there you go, sent the societal underground, the social underground, thank you — the world of production, it's true it's no longer here, but it isn't underground, it's on the surface, just in Slovakia, the Renault factories in Romania, there has never been so much of it. If you measure it in number of hours of working-class labor that we all consume every day, without asking ourselves where it was produced, there have never been so many hours of working-class labor embedded in the goods we consume.
The unconscious of the unconscious: Clouscard and Proust 8:10 So there it is, this old mole, as Marx says, that we thought we had buried, well, it comes back to poke its snout up to the surface through the breaches opened by the crisis. And that's one of the reasons why we're here to talk about it. Now, you'll have noticed that on the poster announcing our discussions — I'll start from there — it seems a bit enigmatic as a formula, it seems a bit like marketing too, on a poster you condense things, you put a catchy formula, but it's not something made up to be catchy, it's a formula from...
8:50 the same thinker I quoted earlier, Michel Clouscard — I cannot recommend his works highly enough, since he saved the honor of dialectical thought over the last forty years, while so many others fell in line with the consensus we're now beginning to emerge from. And Michel Clouscard had... It was in the context of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marx, I won't go into detail now. He said, Freud's unconscious, fine, it's an advance, etc. But still, Freud's unconscious itself has, as its own unconscious, its limit — production, what Marx called praxis, the whole history of praxis that has made us what we are, that means we don't have quite the same ways of being in love as under Neanderthal man, as in The Princess of Cleves at Versailles under Madame de Lafayette, or in a peasant household in 14th-century Corsica.
9:43 And there you go, it's not quite the same relationships. So you'll say to me, class struggle now gets mixed up with love, on top of everything else. That's very Marxist, mechanistic, deterministic, to be able to mix up dirty things like that. Production is always a bit like that. It would be ideal to consume one's labor without ever seeing it. That's roughly what people have tried to do over the last 40 years. If you find that mechanistic, I'll switch reference entirely, I'll go to the exact opposite of Marx, I'll take a decadent literary author — not pejoratively, a masterpiece produced in a period of decline.
10:19 The aesthetic field is not the same as the political field. And... it links up in a complex way. So I'll take Proust — we're very, very far, we can't be less of a Marxist reference, a rentier's son, who lived off private income all his life, who never had to work for a living. Luckily for us, because he wrote masterpieces. And... and who — you all know In Search of Lost Time — put in, directly or indirectly, I hope it was directly. And at one point, the narrator, as he's called, who never quite gives his age, but you sense he's 15-16, a bit pre-adolescent, is with his grandmother by the seaside at Balbec, in Normandy — it was the grandmother's family — seeing for the first time the famous group of young girls on the pier.
11:03 This group of young girls among whom is the future Albertine, who will become one of the great passions of his life, but we don't know that yet. And so, he discourses on a certain beauty that runs through the midst of these girls, common to them all even though they are all individually different, and the narrator, you see, wonders what that common point could be called. And suddenly he says, it's perhaps, independently of their friendship and their being girlfriends, the new habits of sport and comfort that these new classes could practice, which can produce in quantity fine legs, fine gazes, fine blouses.
12:11 If it had been Marx and Christian, they'd have been accused of mechanistic determinism. But there, it's Proust, saying it himself, you see. So I ask you to be at least as social as Proust, if not as Marx — that would already be something. There you go. So, if we spoke of the unconscious of the unconscious, it's because the social determinations we'll have — we'll have plenty of time to see what Marx means by that — constitute the decisive approach for Marx to the knowledge of human things, as opposed to the things of nature. There are the sciences of nature, there are the so-called...
12:47 They're called the hard sciences, the sciences of nature, sometimes called soft sciences for the human sciences, sometimes the human sciences are changed into social sciences — well, that's a dispute we can't dwell on for now, I use these terms interchangeably, let's say, but history, sociology, demography, everything that is — don't have quite the same object as biology, physics, chemistry, etc. So, within these determinations which, for Marx, are essential, which broadly come from the history of production and the political conditions of production — I'll explain the rest in a moment — one must not forget that for Marx this is completely unconscious as far as the individual is concerned.
Reading the 1859 preface 13:32 For that, I'll quote you the first text, well, the first extract of a text I really recommend to you as a priority, because, just as his mentor in philosophy Hegel said that it's useless to say "here is a fundamental, essential text, here is the first principle" — what matters is how that principle develops if one wants to know reality, it's not a general sentence one must state, it's all the mediations that make this general something account for what happens in a given here and now.
14:06 So it's very rare for Marx to say, here, I want to state something that sums up the essence of my thought — a thought that is multiple, teeming, ever-changing, and always ready to criticize itself, as we see throughout the evolution of Marx's work. Well, here there's an exception, there's this text where Marx himself signals it — it's just a bit before Capital, written in 1859, it's the famous introduction to the Critique, sorry, to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy — and look closely at the title, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
14:38 Marxism is not just one more political economy, a revolutionary one compared to bourgeois political economies. It is a critique of political economy's claim to constitute itself as an autonomous science. Marxism is not a science of history. That was supposed to be the title of Capital. That was supposed to be the title of Capital, you know — the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Well, in the introduction to this decisive work, which is the first prefiguration, later, in 1859, you have this passage where, quite solemnly, Marx marks the occasion — which is very rare. He gives something of a summary of his enormous work.
15:12 I've told you before, I'm working on money — I think, because he was in dire poverty at that time, he had a child who had gone... he said, I think nobody has ever reflected on money while having so little of it. Might as well reflect on money while having so little. So here is the passage in question. The general result — you see, the general result, we're looking through the little Marxist microscope here, that I arrived at, and which, once obtained, served as a guiding thread for my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows.
15:48 Of what? And here begins the page that contains the most Marx per minimal number of lines — in fact, I recommend it to you, because not everyone has time to plow through the complete works and the difficulties they entail. The difficulties are almost all softened, they're all contained in what we're about to say. And here is the program. In the social production of their existence — I'll say it first without comment. In the social production of their existence, men enter into determined, necessary relations, independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a certain determinate degree of development of their material productive forces.
16:25 The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society. The concrete basis on which rises a legal, political superstructure, and to which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being; it is, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
17:02 At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or, what is but the legal expression of the same thing, with the property relations within which they had been operating until then. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The change in the economic foundation more or less rapidly transforms the whole immense superstructure.
17:35 When considering such upheavals, one must always distinguish between the material upheaval, which can be established with the precision of natural science, in the economic conditions of production, and, on the other hand, the legal, political, religious, artistic, philosophical, in short — one waits for a word that sums it all up, perhaps a very important word, which contains at once the legal, the political, the religious, the artistic, the philosophical — in short, the ideological forms.
18:09 The only definition of ideology that Marx gives in his entire body of work. If you don't want to misread the term ideology in Marx, think of this passage. That's what ideology is in Marx, right? It's really the world of appearance, apparently — we'll see that's what he says right after. But what's very important is that we constantly hear talk of the end of ideologies. You know, we've heard that a lot for the past 40 years. There has never been such an unleashing of ideology as right now. And yet people talk of its end.
18:40 In fact, they only meant the end of Marxist ideology. There has never been a Marxist ideology. Maybe Marx got it wrong. I'm not being diplomatic about it, anybody could. But he never presented himself as an ideologist, he always presented himself as a critic of ideology. So, I told you I wouldn't comment. So I'll say it all the way through and then we'll come back to the details, because it's an extremely dense text. When we consider... No, I mean, just as we don't judge an individual by the idea he has of himself, we cannot judge such an era of upheaval by its self-consciousness.
19:12 On the contrary, this consciousness must be explained by the contradictions of material life, by the conflict existing between the social productive forces and the relations of production. A social formation never disappears — this is for the impatient — before all the productive forces it is broad enough to contain have been developed; new and higher relations of production never replace it before the material conditions of existence of these relations have hatched within the very womb of the old society. That is why mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve.
Social production and relations independent of the will 19:46 I read this long extract in order to reread it. To reread it — it's a bit of a way of learning to read this kind of text. The text. So, if I go back over the text, you see, we're going to read it, otherwise we slip. I'm going to give you an example of how one can slip. You see, the text begins like this. In the social production of their existence, men enter, etc. In the social production of their existence.
20:17 Already, Marx does not say that it's production that makes us. It's social production. You have to read it properly. What am I saying here — that not all labor corresponds to what Marx is talking about. I could amuse myself drawing on a wall the face of my beloved or my son. That's labor. I could carve into a tree, you know, so-and-so plus so-and-so, with a heart, anything you like. I could spend the whole day at it, even doing it artistically and decorating it. That has no market value because it only has value for me. You all know that an object only has market value when it can be exchanged.
20:50 If it only has value for me, by definition, it's not exchangeable. So Marx is indeed saying he's only talking about social production. It's the production of objects that can be of interest to someone other than me. That's very important.
21:26 Very important already, this nuance. In the social production of their existence, men enter into determined, necessary relations, independent of their will. So — independent of their will. You see, we're back to my little introduction. There's the unconscious. Production, for Marx, the whole of the material economic production that surrounds us, plays an underground role exactly like the unconscious.
21:59 By analogy with Freud's unconscious. Just as Freud's unconscious is what's furthest removed from the consciousness that this unconscious determines. Likewise, I mean, what's in our heads is generally the opposite, even the reverse, of it. Stand in front of a mirror, you'll see that nothing resembles the reverse more than what it reverses. And that's why, incidentally, it's much harder to rid oneself of an illusion than to correct an error. That's part of what's rather delayed.
22:29 Not to lose the thread, the most important thing is to show the unconscious side, Marx-wise, independent of their will. So, let's keep it simple, I go out onto the sidewalk. I didn't want to run into Abdallah. Who's Abdallah? He's one of those doing the sidewalk with a jackhammer. Basically I call him Abdallah — could just as well be Ivan, given the times we live in. And so, I did not want to enter into a relationship with him. Marx says that men enter into determined, necessary relations, independent of their will.
22:59 I didn't want it, but insofar as I consume this sidewalk by walking on it and not walking in the mud, as used to be the case in Paris not so long ago — you'd get muddy the moment you arrived at an appointment, there were boot-scrapers at every gate, you can imagine — this use-value that corresponds to the sidewalk, I mean, it was produced by others than me. I'm in a relation with those people the moment I consume the commodity. I wouldn't be in a relation with them if I stayed in my own bubble on a desert island like Robinson.
23:31 Since we're talking about Robinson, at this moment of ecological upheaval that we've been living through for about forty years, let's take the opportunity to recall one of Marx's most famous formulas, mocking the "Robinsonades" of quite a few economists of his time. What does he mean by Robinsonades? It's a discourse you're all familiar with. It's a completely fantasized anthropology. Anthropology being the science of man. At the origin, this discourse says...
24:02 They don't say all these Robinsonades in so many words, but you'll recognize discourses that are familiar to you. At the origin, men saw that it was better to group together, to live in society, because to hunt the mammoth, being organized in a group is still better than being alone, etc. None of that is absurd. No, that's not the point. As Marx says, these are Robinsonades — what does that mean? It means we're projecting onto a founding past what is in fact the state of the present. In the present, yes, there is free enterprise where everyone minds their own business, but couldn't care less about another's interests as long as they manage to sell their goods.
24:34 Right? And we project this thing of each on his own island, Robinson-style, free enterprise, let me do as I please, I don't want taxes, I don't want laws, I don't want regulation — you hear that all the time, in the immediate illusion. And that's what Marx calls the Robinsonades, it's the illusion — you see, I said we'd come back to it — the illusion of the mirror and the inversion. It's the illusion of believing one is speaking of the past, that one is doing the genesis of humanity, when in fact one is speaking of the present without realizing it, which is reflected symbolically in that past. Which gives us a masterpiece called Robinson Crusoe, which appeared when?
25:04 End of the 18th century, at the moment the Industrial Revolution appeared — where, in England, right where this industrial revolution is taking place. It's at that very moment that natural man returns as nostalgia, as if by chance.
The occultation of labor and the unconscious according to Althusser 26:01 There you go. So, if we spoke of the unconscious, of the unconscious, it's to insist on the fact that the economic determinations we're going to talk about must be studied, analyzed, and attended to all the more closely because they do not arise spontaneously. We don't easily become conscious of them — quite the opposite. According to Marx, the dominant ideology does everything it can to prevent us from becoming conscious of them. Notice how everything that resembles labor has an obscene side to it that is hidden. Besides, we're raised a bit like that.
26:33 For a positive part. If I look at the whole alimentary part of the body, we all learned very young that you have to put your hand in front of your mouth when you yawn, and that you have to close your mouth when you eat at the table. Because you must not show organicity, you must not show that you are determined by needs. That's fine, I do it like everyone else, I don't know. But there is, like that, a human unconscious, an old fear of showing the state of determination, of dependency.
27:03 I remember an uncle who used to tell us at the restaurant — children always want to mop up the sauce with bread. It's good, but you mustn't do it, it looks poor, we'd say today it looks cheap. There it is, you must not show that you are determined, that you're going to be determined. Well, all that is unconscious, I insist on this. Now, why do I start with this business of the unconscious, why do I linger on it? Because Marxism, you'll tell me, hasn't disappeared, it has always been present in intellectual debates.
27:39 Well, let's say that certain forms of Marxism — which is perhaps a good thing, moreover — have perhaps receded a bit. There are well-known authors, Althusser first of all, you see, in the 1960s, who proposed a renewal of Marxism. And precisely, let's talk about Althusser and the unconscious, that's why — if Althusser isn't exactly clear on the unconscious. Althusser, in the most fashionable Marxist currents since the late 1960s, roughly speaking, in his — twice, in Reading Capital, which is his masterwork, in the first volume, I'll give the reference for those who want to check, and in a small booklet which is among the best things he wrote.
28:18 As I often criticize him, I also acknowledge his advances. A small work called Lenin and Philosophy, a lecture actually, I believe it's a French problem, in which he gives a general picture of the history of the sciences in order of their entry onto the scene — I'll go quickly, it's not our subject. The appearance of mathematics around the fourth century BC with Euclid's Elements, the appearance of physics fifteen centuries later with Galileo, the appearance of chemistry with Lavoisier in the 18th century, of biology with Claude Bernard in the 19th — the gaps narrow, fifteen centuries between the appearance of mathematics and that of physics, then one generation between physics and chemistry, accelerating — and he says, that's it for the natural sciences, math, physics, chemistry; the human sciences, indeed sociology, appear in the 19th century.
29:09 And Althusser adds in a note, a small note, that we should perhaps also add the unconscious continent. The mathematical continent, the physical continent opened in the 20th century, the unconscious continent opened by Freud, he says. You can already see the distance between what I'm saying and what Althusser says, for what it's worth. For Althusser, the unconscious would only exist since Freud spoke of it. That's why we noted on the sheet that when it comes to Marx, we're going to talk about what is unconscious, even for the analyst himself.
29:41 Freud was not at all conscious of class determinations. I think that's serious — one has one's talents and one's advances, one has one's limits, that defines a limit. And so I wanted to begin with these three texts, you see, in order to be entirely objective. First, from Marx, where he says that economic determinations are independent of our consciousness and our will, etc. Involuntary or unconscious are here equivalent, equipotent, as mathematicians say.
30:11 First text. Second text, Clouscard's formula: class struggle is the core of the unconscious of the unconscious. That is to say, when I look — not when I look and see class struggles going on around me in current events, why not? Though these days it's more fashionable to talk about religious struggles. You know, as in Iraq, there are no struggles between rich and poor, there are struggles between Shiites and Sunnis. Isn't that so? And elsewhere it will be identity struggles.
30:43 Kurds and Arabs, I don't know. As if it were nothing, these stories pile up mountains of dead. And... but there I'm not talking about the outside world where the notion of class might, at a stretch, be relevant. I'm looking inside myself, my intimacy — that's a reason I might go see a shrink. My romantic failures, my successes, my illusions... we're all there. And what does Clouscard tell me there? That the determining element of what happens to me at the most intimate level would be these stories of proletarians against bourgeois, of peasants against lords.
Activity and labor; naming a thing 31:17 That's possible, there. A certain narcissism still takes a hit. And my intimacy in all that. That's why we wanted to begin with this notion of the unconscious. Is there a difference for Marx between activity and... So it's a matter of words. I'm not saying that to reduce your question, quite the contrary. It's a matter of words that is fundamental in theoretical terms. Lenin said: without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice.
31:47 That's for the spontaneists, for those against spontaneism. That's what distinguishes a revolutionary from a rebel. A rebel doesn't go through the mediation of a theory, of a reflection. The French Revolution went through a century of reflection called the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Before that, there were revolts — we didn't wait for the French Revolution to express popular discontent. But those were revolts, called jacqueries when they involved peasants. They were drowned, put down quickly and thoroughly. So fortunately there was an evolution among the discontented who understood that the detour through theory was more useful for freeing themselves from the feudal yoke than suicidal spontaneism.
32:23 It's the fact of going, as we say in colloquial French, straight into the meat grinder. So, to answer your question, extensionally, as they say in logic, every kind of work is an activity, I would answer you. It is not certain that every activity is work. In any case, not work in the sense Marx uses it, that is, work that creates value. As I indicated earlier, the work I might do on a tree, for personal reasons, etc., is not work, it is an activity, but it is not work in the economic sense, capable of producing added value.
33:04 as they say, there. But your question is all the more interesting since the word activity, and not work, is precisely the one Marx brings up in the famous Theses on Feuerbach. A little chronology, that will let me please those who already know this, and even more those who are catching up along the way. A little chronology. Marx's biography — you'll look at the details, nowadays there's Wikipedia and all that, I don't want to tell you about his great-aunt who was related to the Philips family.
33:37 Yes, Philips, Philips, the largest Dutch company. That's Marx's family, I don't know if you know that, but... well, the family of his parents, originally. On his mother's side. Look all that up. What we retain from it: it unfolds over the 19th century, he was born in 1818, he dies in '83, one month after Wagner's death, the musician, by the way. And in fact he was born in 1818, one month after Wagner's death — one month after Wagner's death. And so he is, of course, a contemporary of this century which has no name.
34:10 I mean no nickname, as the English say. Look carefully at a literary handbook. Every era, every period has a nickname. Nothing comes from nothing. The 16th century isn't a number, it's the Renaissance, or the century of humanism. The 17th, thankfully isn't a number either, because numbers don't say much, they're abstract. It's the Great Century, or the century of classicism, or the century of the Sun King. The 18th — that's the Enlightenment.
34:40 Bravo, the Age of Enlightenment. One has to stay alert, there are people here who know everything. And the 19th? Can you name it? There isn't one. No, there really isn't one. There isn't one. In the textbook, it's not stated. As for me, I would... Why not, eh? You'll see my answer isn't far off. But there's no nickname. Why? Because it's still too close. It sticks to us, we have no distance on it. You know, when you name a thing, you master it. And Hegel did that very well. 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.' And God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures. That's in Genesis. To name a thing is to become its master. 'Kitty, come here.' Psychoanalysis analyzes the importance of the name of the Father — even if, as Lacan jokingly says, the names of the Father.
35:10 Well, not wanting to be the first with dream puns — the names of the Father. Let's leave these jokes aside and get back to serious matters. So, to name a thing is to make oneself its master — so naming a thing, securing power over it, is already an activity, to answer your question, madam.
Feuerbach and religious alienation 35:46 And in the Theses on Feuerbach, I quote them because it's a text where Marx begins to take on his own distinct profile. Before that, he was like all of us — young, subject to influences. And to get to the essential point, throughout his youth, in the first part of his reflections and even of his publications, he was under the influence, like his whole generation, of Feuerbach. 'The stream of fire' — it's a German pun, because Feuer is fire and Bach is stream. And it's been said that Hegelian dialectics had to pass through Feuerbach's stream of fire in order to become operative.
36:19 It's time for Feuerbach. Who is Feuerbach? Let's go quickly. A disciple of Hegel, so someone who serves as a mediation, chronologically at least, right? And philosophically too, between Hegel and Marx. Hegel dies of cholera in 1830 in Berlin. And Marx's very first reflections and articles date from 1836 — you see how it all links together fairly closely. And Feuerbach had been a student of Hegel. We even have a letter from Feuerbach to Hegel. Unfortunately we've lost the reply. The bombing of Berlin — we still have quite a lot of documents though.
36:51 And Feuerbach — that was the moment of the critique of the religious. That was very important. We don't suspect the weight of religion in the political regimes of the time. You might guess it, but abstractly. You really need, concretely, in daily life, to measure what that means. Hegel, for example, was a professor in Berlin, paid by his university, but his employer wasn't called the Ministry of Education. It was called the Ministry of Religious Affairs. So they kept a close watch on what he said.
37:22 And I was saying, earlier, to Dominique Mazoui, the other day, that one of the reasons for Hegel's difficulty — everyone complains about the difficulty of Hegel's philosophy, it's all very theoretical, it demands an effort at least equal to elucidate it. But with Hegel, it's really tough going. And there are some who even put forward the hypothesis — this is the case of Jacques D'Hondt, to whom we devoted a session, by the way — that a certain part of Hegel's difficulty was made deliberately obscure by him in order to fool the censors.
37:55 Because I feel sorry for the censor sent by the Prussian ministry, because their question about this Mr. Hegel was: is he an atheist, does he believe in God? That was the fundamental question, because our children are in his hands. No joke. It's not... good luck to whoever could find the answer in Hegel's sentences about the in-itself, the for-itself, substance, predicate, being. They were rather lost. No, the religious was still the decisive authority. And let's not forget that most countries — France was ahead in this respect — had not achieved separation of Church and State, and that the only region in France still today without separation of Church and State is precisely the most Germanic one, Alsace.
38:33 I love Alsace, don't worry, it's not at all a... I'm a Corsican who loves northern countries. And what about it? Lorraine too. So I love Lorraine. No, the Concordat applies only to Alsace. The Concordat is Alsace. There's Lorraine too. There's part of Lorraine. There was even the Saar at one time. That's half of Moselle. There, there, there. Active participation of the Saar. Well, that's very good. As long as they can correct, knowing well the structure of these generalities, which I could bring up like everyone else.
39:05 So Feuerbach had the merit, I'll say, of freeing philosophical thought from complexes about this religious taboo. And broadly speaking his thesis, I'll sum it up because it's very important, comes down to one key concept that Marx takes up. And just as Feuerbach takes it from Hegel, it's the concept of alienation. Alius, I remind you, means 'other' in Latin. To alienate one's house, to sell it, is to pass it on to another — to another owner. And the madman, in French, is the 'aliéné.'
39:35 That is, the one who is perceived by us as an other, as another essence. I belong to normality, he to pathology. I note this in passing. I'm careful with these words. Where does the limit lie for what constitutes a human being, I sometimes ask. An animal moved by its reflexes — I'm talking about the traditional beliefs of positivism over the last centuries — an animal moved by its reflexes, whereas we are moved by intelligence and reason. And so if we manage to prove that my patient's madness comes from the third lobe of Broca's area — well, a bit of the delusions of the time — then we animalize him a little, don't we?
40:07 And if you look closely, this is a bit of the success of Freud and psychoanalysis: before him, psychiatrists didn't listen to a madman — you don't listen to a discourse that is by definition senseless. In German they also say the insane, 'Wahnsinn' — those who cannot find any sense, notably in delusion. And so we didn't listen, we examined. Already when you look at a thing — I told you, to name is to become master, to look at a thing is also — it's a way, you know, of the predator looking at the prey who doesn't see it.
40:38 The one who watches is master compared to the one who is watched and doesn't know he is being seen. Lacan developed this very well in 'The Purloined Letter,' didn't he? The imaginary dream of being the one who sees without being seen, the one who spies from his hiding place. There, like Freud. So Feuerbach had the merit, with this concept of alienation, of putting an end to that old critique of religion which existed in the 18th century, of which Voltaire is the perfect representative, who mocked it. People, that's just the stupidity of idiots.
41:08 Well, I'm caricaturing Voltaire a little, it's more complicated than that. But still, it comes down to that — it's an error. We who are intelligent, living in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment, are no longer going to believe such nonsense. No, one must note — and this is the last point in the lesson — Hegel worked enormously in this direction — it isn't an error. It's a displacement of truth. That doesn't exist. And Spinoza was the first to see this. I say this for those interested in philosophy. Yes, yes. Bravo, madam. Exactly. Spinoza had shown very well that if error consisted in making things exist that don't exist, we should rather admire it as a faculty of power in man.
41:48 He desires, he... what am I saying. Our mind does not have the power to make exist things that do not exist. So if we are mistaken, it's not that there's a new existence we're constructing in our imagination, it's that there is a real reality we're unaware of, which was conscious a moment ago, and which comes to take its place. Sorry — which is not in its place and which is displaced, moreover. We speak of displacement as one of the essential mechanisms of the dream. Thus, for example, I'll take a very simple example.
42:18 I wanted, in any case, to talk about the mythological battle between the Titans and the Gods. You know, it's a classic episode of mythology. There was a great gigantomachy, as it's called in Greek mythology. A great battle among the gods of Olympus. They're not below, they're above. Olympus doesn't put us down here — that's the content now. We find class divisions again there. That is, to hold the high ground. If you're on top, dragging someone through the mud, that's down below. Or in the muck.
42:49 There is a distribution in the unconscious of high and low. 'Highness' — 'altesse' — is made with ALT, which means alto, altitude, high, yes. All that matters. And so, the gods are in conflict with whom? Well, with those who work for them. This resembles a bit of a literal medium in this story. And indeed, the giants — look at Vulcan. He spends his time forging things, this blacksmith god. It's not that the gods themselves work — they're always at the banquet of the gods, with the girls who come to serve them the nectar.
43:22 No, no. It's the girls, or the pretty ones. The pretty cupbearers — I'm thinking of Ganymede, who was so beautiful that a god carried him off in the form of an eagle, so that he could serve him watered wine. And no, the gods are in conflict with those who work for them. Not far from Marx here, in the midst of Greek mythology. An ambivalent relationship. They serve us, but from time to time they get tired of serving us, they rebel. So Zeus sent them, as you know, the thunderbolt. He had a knack for resolving the general strike.
Nature, a new alienation: activity and praxis 43:53 He already had lasers, so to speak. But we always find, in something, the imaginary. I know... '15, '20 — '68, 'imagination in power.' Imagination has held power. Precisely, could you say that Marx had a dream in the same sense that Martin Luther King spoke of one, for example? We all start with dreams. Hegel said nothing great was ever accomplished without passion. If I may, we're very, very far from the question between activity and work. We've strongly... No, we're circling, circling, it's spiral-shaped. It's good that we come back to it. In a spiral, yes.
44:23 No, but it's important. Because we start with the dream. The whole point is to move, as Freud would say, from the manifest content to the latent content — that's the meaning of the dream. He interpreted through a few dreams. Once that's settled, afterward. So, I insist on the Theses on Feuerbach. Marx takes on his own outline, becomes Marx, breaks with Feuerbach, who had the merit of freeing us from religious alienation, but at the price of a new alienation — and this one is current, I insist — nature has replaced God.
44:56 There is a religion of nature in Feuerbach. Feuerbach said, everything that worked to our advantage — human greatness, mankind's mastery of the surrounding world, etc. — we attributed it, and this is the alienation, to an all-powerful being, a great power, which is in fact made in our image. It's classic, we know it well enough now — fortunately it's fairly easy to understand nowadays. We say God is man inverted. So everything positive in man, everything that constitutes his exceptional nature, instead of man attributing it to himself, he attributes it, out of submission, to a sovereign of sovereigns, and thereby strips himself of it.
45:31 We must therefore, says Feuerbach, in some sense recover this wealth that we placed in heaven, this investment we placed in heaven, we must recover the benefit of it now here on Earth. But, it's understood, the truth is nature. And Marx understands — leaving aside Feuerbach, because he was beginning to work intensively on the Anglo-Saxon economists and on working conditions — that this was a new alienation. That nature — well, this is a formula of my own, I don't think it captures Marx's thought perfectly, but it's along the lines of Marx's formula that religion is the opium of the people.
46:05 Well, the extremely famous phrase, which has even been mocked, because it was found too reductive with respect to religion — I'll come back to that. What I want to specify is: nature is the opium of the people. You see, taking up Marx's formula with a slight variation — today nature plays roughly the same role in political discourse. It's not that religion is as it was for Marx and Feuerbach. I have nothing against nature, I'm speaking against the ideological use of the notion of nature, that's what I mean.
46:35 And I'm eagerly awaiting autumn to gather mushrooms. And I'm waiting for the Germans to leave Corsica so I can go there myself. I love the Germans too, I have nothing against them. In general I go to Germany in summer. There, so to finish answering your question, I'll take a quotation from Marx, madam. I remember it well because it's fundamental. Marx, at the moment he breaks with the Feuerbachians, says exactly, precisely why. There's a theoretical point, he says: it's that they neglected the 'Tätigkeit' in German, that is, the term perfectly translated as 'activity.'
47:10 Not, of course, the fact of doing, in German, deeds. 'Tätigkeit' means that they neglected — they believed there was a human nature, that it was enough to be born human in order to be human.
47:51 I remind you that 'nature' and 'to be born' [naître] share the same root. What is natural in me is what I have by birth, before culture, history, everything that man has added on top over millennia, comes to add itself to my determination. We are all born crying, weak and vulnerable, but not all animals have the support of a stroller, a room, central heating and running water nearby, do they, to welcome the baby. There is the natural and what is not natural.
48:22 And the artificial — call it what you like, the cultural, the historical. Marx has a term for this, and I won't even ask you to remember it, it's everything that flows from what he calls praxis. It's the equivalent of — you see, it's a word that synthesizes, madam, both work and activity — praxis. Can we clarify this a bit further? There is a very clear answer from Marx on this. Work, then, is that type of activity, within the framework of social production of our existence, which is useful to others and shared in exchange.
48:55 Shareable in any case. Shareable, in exchange. This is very explicitly mentioned in Capital. There's a whole passage where it's described perfectly clearly. Certain types of activity that have extremely concrete determinations, tied precisely to the social relations of production. Now, don't make me say that because labor and activity have this importance in Marx's thought, don't make me say he's an apologist for labor. On the contrary, Marx's whole fight is to reduce working time, isn't it? And to judge it scandalous that we still have...
49:29 Don't forget that in his time there was a working day of 14... I think in 1842, the working day, we should say, was 14 hours a day. Including for children of 5 years old, sorry. And there had been a strike to get the day reduced from 14 to 13 hours. You see, they fought foot by foot for minutes, half-hours, hours of work. And it's Marx who cites this in Wage, Labour and Capital. He quotes an English labor inspector who quotes an employer he went to interview, as we'd say today. What were the arguments of the employers of the time for saying it was impossible to go from 14 to 13 hours a day?
50:03 I'll give you a thousand guesses, and you'll see that nothing has changed. It's in the 14th hour that we make all the profit. We've gone down to 8 hours a day, and there's much more profit than in the era I'm talking about. The difference between the two is called the increase in productivity. There. So I'm not closing off these questions, but thank you for having asked them, since they allow us to clarify notions that are generally confused. Given the timing, we haven't quite managed to take a little break, because for a 2-hour session... That's an hour, we can take a 5-minute break.
Productive forces and relations of production 50:35 That makes for a little break. 5 minutes' break for the smokers. For the smokers, there we go. So, I'll continue the commented reading. I already said, in the social production of their existence, you saw that the epithet 'social' was important. Thank you, madam. Not all activities produce value. Men enter into a necessary relation, determined independently of their will. Unconscious of the unconscious, and now I continue.
51:05 These relations, what are they? And here, they're called relations of production. I've left this in the shadows until now. This is where we're going to make explicit the fundamental concepts of Marxism. We're going to develop them because that will take up basically all of August. But at least let's bring them out in our discussions. What are the relations of production? Well, according to Marx, the relations of production correspond to a certain degree of development of the productive forces. So already, first thing: distinguish, within what is called the material base of society that determines everything, apparently, in Marx, within what's also called the infrastructure — the infrastructure is what's underneath, keep the same metaphors, it's what's below, just as the belly is below relative to the head, you see.
51:49 You need to distinguish within it — it's not a homogeneous place — two very different instances: the productive forces, which, as the term indicates, at one time meant the plow, at another the chipped flint stone, right? The productive forces, at issue, and to begin with, even before anything else, the body itself, right? Don't forget, at one time it was men who turned the millstones — since they weren't donkeys or cows, it was slaves who turned them, right? The body itself as a productive force — Marx, God knows how much use has been made of that phrase — the body and the mental faculties, man's intelligence, that too is a productive force.
52:29 So, the fact of productive force, again, we understand. It's Marx's most properly economic, material concept. But it's different with what, for him, determines us — it's not only economic and material forces, it's the relations of production that they generate. What are the relations of production? Here we leave the purely economic domain to enter the political domain. And this, Marx was the first to have understood that the two are inseparable.
53:01 In every era, there is no such thing as a purely liberal economy here or a purely command economy there. Every economic regime is inscribed within a political deal, if you will. Why political? Because what Marx calls the relations of production is — and I come back to productive forces — it's a game of Lego, if you like. You take the basic elements of the productive forces and look at what you build. With the productive forces, I construct the concept of relation of production. The relations of production are: who owns the productive forces.
53:31 You have to start from the productive forces and then pose the problem of their ownership in order to arrive at the concept of relation of production. And to take a very simple example, because I understand people get confused at first — being precise in French, but being precise means committing oneself, as Bachelard used to say. And then you, girls, who stay vague with general abstract words. Take a population of 100 people deep in the Amazon, to simplify, it seems, not too long, right. And imagine, rather, two populations of 100 people 10 km apart from each other, no matter.
54:03 From different villages. And in the first as in the second, there is the same productive force. Let's say a kind of hoe, like the one we're holding here, used to till, with a kind of spade, for planting cassava, as they say. Originally made of stone — even now stone is still used — and there's a result made of metal. So both groups have the same productive forces. But in the first group, the tool belongs to everyone, a kind of cooperative, if you like, collective.
54:34 And in the second group, it's the chief who owns the tool in question and rents it out for a number of sheep, cows, pigs, feathers. The Indians — the Brazilian tribes are very fond of them — macaw feathers, Lévi-Strauss said, decorative and ritual type. So, and there you see the difference. There are the same productive forces, but that doesn't give the same relations of production, depending on whether property is private, in one case for a single person, or collective. It doesn't give the same societies and the same relations of production at all.
55:04 This is very important. So, as Marx says — and here there's an almost mathematical precision in his way of formulating things, which we miss when we slip, if you will, into too cursory a reading. I'm referring to this precise passage. Men enter into determined, necessary relations independent of their will. And that's where he adds a relation of what? Of production. That is, how do we position ourselves relative to production?
55:34 A relation of production that corresponds to a determinate degree of development of their material productive forces. Here, I ask all those who did math even just in middle school to recall what Y equals F of X means, to be clear. That is, what? Y, here, is the relations of production. The relations of production are a function of the state, X, of the productive forces. That's what 'correspond to' means, 'be a function of', 'be determined by' — all this is equivalent.
56:05 Here, for now. Let this be clear. So there is no such thing as a pure economic regime, tried out as a laboratory here or there. A regime is always at the same time characterized by its economic infrastructure and by the arrangement, the political deal, if you like, within which economic forces operate. The set of these relations of production constitutes, to recall, the economic structure of society — the set of these relations of production.
56:39 That is, careful, the purely economic and material element of the productive forces plus the political and legal element of property relations. That's what the relations of production are. Forgive me for repeating myself, but the inhabitants of 50 capitals are so unaware of this in Marx that I allow myself to hammer the point home even more. The set of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the concrete base on which a legal and political superstructure rises, you see, and to which correspond determinate forms of social consciousness.
The unconscious externalizes itself: slips of the tongue and symbolic expression 57:12 That is to say, form means that in my head I do have the form of all this, but not the content. The content is completely unconscious. But I have the form of it. Ah, this reassures us with respect to what we said at the beginning. Don't worry, it's unconscious, but that doesn't mean it's unknowable. Because the peculiar property of the unconscious, the peculiar property of everything that is interior, even the peculiar property of God, is to exteriorize itself. To exteriorize itself, to express itself. Freud spends his time saying this. What we want to hide, we spend our time expressing.
57:43 So that others need only bend down to pick it up. This is even the theme of 'The Purloined Letter,' if you look closely. I believe he manages to hide the stolen letter from the police that way, even though it's blindingly obvious. You know, I'm preparing to conduct a business negotiation, etc. And all of a sudden I let slip a mistake that escaped me, revealing my whole strategy. I'm thinking of that little banquet in honor of one of Freud's professors at the Vienna medical faculty.
58:13 It's Freud who thought of using this as an example of a slip. And one of his colleagues said, 'Now let us all drink a toast to our director.' In German, to toast is 'anstoßen.' And there he says, 'aufstoßen,' which means to belch. 'We shall all belch' — he doesn't want to carry the director in his heart, he wants to belch at our director. Second example: you have a rather vain professor, a great professor somewhat full of himself, full of his own prestige, a professor of physiology, and a specialist in the nasal cavity. And so he approaches the subject of the nasal cavity in front of his students and says, 'Now be careful, the nasal cavity is complicated, and I warn you, those who really know the nasal cavity in Vienna can be counted on the fingers of one hand.'
58:57 Clearly he thought there was only one nasal cavity in Vienna. What we think we're hiding deep down — I'm going to hide my vanity, and so on — it all explodes; the more I want to hide it, the more I show it. Wouldn't you know, tell a girl, 'Sorry, I'm terribly sorry, I think I'm late for our appointment,' but by the tenth time she'll understand that, well, these things happen, it's fine that there's an unconscious, that there's a slip, it's true, it's just like that. So, that's what we're saying is important. What characterizes the interior is that it exteriorizes itself, yes.
59:28 First sample of a word we've rediscovered, and which was cursed during the shameful decades and needs rehabilitating: dialectic. I'm playing here with opposites. The unconscious, the interior — same prefix, 'in,' what's inside — expresses itself, exteriorizes itself, unfolds. But again, you have to know how to hear it. Here I'll allow myself to introduce a second distinction which will be crucial. When I said that the unconscious expresses itself, it doesn't express itself the way an engine grinds when it's low on oil.
1:00:08 Because that too is an expression of a lack of oil. A good mechanic, you know, doesn't just use his eyes, he also uses his ears. I tell myself he's a mechanic, there. So he sees right away what's going on, extraordinary, just like an emptiness. He arrives with a stethoscope in each ear. This is a genuine causal expression. It's not, 'the engine grinds because there's no oil.' Whereas the expression of the unconscious wouldn't work in a mechanical way. So, to reassure you, don't worry too much. It's a symbolic expression. I took earlier the example of the battle of the giants against the gods.
1:00:40 It's obvious that if I questioned the Greeks of that time, they wouldn't have said, 'We wanted to illustrate the class struggles through the story of the giants and the gods.' It wasn't conscious at all, of course. But the fact of repressing, for the Greek citizen, the one who does philosophy, who does mathematics, etc. — that gives an intellectual harvest all the same. But we mustn't forget that three-fifths of the population of Athens were slaves. Nor should we idealize Greek democracy too much. It's very good, it's progress compared to the pharaohs. It's good that there's at least a milieu in which people are equal and vote. But that only concerned free citizens.
1:01:14 The vast majority of society were slaves. And so it was a way, if you will, of reflecting this world of the free man and the slave: the world of the gods of Olympus, who never do anything, who have banquets — very nice, very nice, banquets of drones — and then the world of those who toil. The world that toils to produce the universe in which the gods take their delight. There, I mean, I'm insisting on the symbolic function. You see there's a link between Marxism and Lacanianism. Just as Freud says, the repressed returns, it exteriorizes itself, it expresses itself.
1:01:46 It's not a hidden force — you're doing bad psychoanalysis when you always look for some obscure hidden meaning between the lines. The meaning is in the lines, not between the lines. But it expresses itself in a symbolic way — again, you have to have the symbolic ear for it. Now, what prevents us from seeing this is that we have a model of scientificity taken from the natural sciences. And we've just seen that it's exactly the opposite. In the natural sciences, it's Y that depends on X. What matters is the relation of cause to effect. Why does this metal rod expand? Because it's in the sun and heat expands bodies.
Meaning and signs: the superfluous and the bond to the other 1:02:16 That's clear, there's an infinite chain of causes and effects. In the human, historical, cultural domain, do it however you like. In the human domain, the cause-effect couple matters less than the meaning-sign couple. That's very important. I mean that when, say, at a little Sunday meal among proletarians — I mean a little Sunday meal among proletarians, for instance — and people take a bit of trouble for their friends to do better than usual. And the friends too bring a little bottle that's a bit better than usual.
1:02:48 I'm talking about utterly ordinary things. So we arrange things, the slices of sausage in a circle around the radishes, or the other way round. In other words, all this is us being within the symbolic universe, which is practiced every day. None of this adds anything to the biological program of hunger. Whether I arrange the sausage slices in a circle, a square, a cube, or in waves. What counts is the quantity of lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins I can consume through them, needed for my survival. So this means that in human interrelations, in the signs I give you by doing this, there is a symbolic function that is permanent in man and is not...
1:03:24 Don't think I'm talking about the superfluous and that it's somewhat secondary, because after all the necessary thing is to feed oneself. Don't believe that! Because this superfluous begins with cave man. Believe me, the cave paintings — that's not biologically necessary. That's the whole greatness of man. If he lived only on lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins, man, that's soon dealt with, he'd have been satisfied long ago. He wouldn't have this magnificent restlessness that has pushed us forward for thousands of years.
1:03:54 There would be no history. There would be no history. Thank you. And, one more small example to illustrate this important side of the symbolic function in man — not in the general sense, or in the sense developed in psychoanalytic circles, but in the Marxist sense, that is, this symbolic function is crucial for recognizing fundamental interhuman bonds. I'll take the example of the proletarian of Zola's era. I do this on purpose, because taking somewhat extreme situations lets us see things better, since they're clearer than in in-between cases.
1:04:25 I'm talking about this proletarian who receives his pay. Imagine, he's not a wage earner in the 1880s — you can imagine what pay could be like then. So, just barely enough to survive. If, to explain his behavior, we only had the hard sciences, the natural sciences — physics, chemistry, biology — that's real, that's current, we explain everything through that. Our kids watch nature documentaries, and all behavior is explained by dominant males, marked territories, females, and so on. You see what I mean, it's very worrying. It plays into the hands of the Anglo-Saxons.
1:04:56 If he were an animal — I'm not denying it — but if we were nothing but an animal, without that other determination that history brings, he would run immediately to the local shop to buy the basic biological substances he needs in order to go back to the grind the next day. He's not stupid. What does he do? He gets drunker than everyone else. It's got to teach us a lesson in humanity. This means that if you want to trap me — because none of us here has this problem, we have both the necessary and the superfluous, so we don't see the problem well. But if a human being is cornered and has to choose, excuse me, I'm being a bit loose here, between the necessary and the superfluous, what's extraordinary is that man will precisely choose the superfluous at the expense of the necessary.
1:05:39 Because the bond to the other is sometimes more important to him than the bond to the thing. You know very well that a house can be burning and you'll go in anyway to save your son or your niece, or throw yourself in the water to save someone drowning anyway. I mean, the relation to the other is so fundamental for this zoon politikon that is man, for reasons I won't go into now — we'd have to do anthropology, that's not today's subject, but we'll discuss it briefly — Lacan showed this in part. We come into the world in a kind of distress, more than the rest of the animal world, especially man, because it has been proven by physiological studies that pregnancy, that human parturition, is especially laborious and hard — the Bible knows it, 'thou shalt bring forth children in sorrow' — you have to have seen the wildebeest in the African savanna, I don't know why I'm being so naked today.
1:06:23 I mean, bang, you see the little one fall from its mother's belly, and then it's up on its hooves 20 minutes later, and it can run for 2 or 3 hours, or the next day it can flee with the herd if there's danger. We take 3 years just to start. Man is born premature, that's known physiologically. We have a generic prematurity — to put it precisely, for reasons connected to the transition to bipedalism, long ago, the narrowing of the woman's pelvic bones, etc. In short, a complicated birth.
1:06:53 Which means that the small child — the fontanelle shows this very well — is born unfinished, compared to most of the animal world. And so, if it had only its natural endowment, it wouldn't be viable. That's why the social relation is not an attribute in man that gets added on to something that is otherwise his core. No, it is the core, of what makes us human. It's this imperious necessity of having a relation to the other, without which one isn't viable. When we speak of the unconscious, we mustn't forget that the unconscious, which we think is located in the psychic field, the psychological field, is also a sociological field.
1:07:32 And even from the start, you know. If there weren't the other, because of our generic prematurity and our wailing birth — moreover all the great founding heroes, look, are supposed to be found wailing somewhere and abandoned. That's Oedipus, found on the mountain with pierced feet, which is exactly what it means in Greek — 'Oedipus' means 'pierced feet' — but he's tied up. Moses, in the bulrushes, Moses, Siegfried among the Germans, the hero, the German Achilles, right? Found in the forest, etc.
1:08:03 This is important because in order to be a founder, one must not be founded oneself. The founder is as if there were no parents, he's the foundling, with no name of his own. There. So the symbolic function is important because that's where we find our most fundamental social relations. Freud said we dream of siblings, brothers and sisters, in the form of vermin. The symbolism of dreams — we're not kind to brothers and sisters in the unconscious. It's not because my unconscious is nasty that I am nasty.
1:08:33 It's not because I want the book that's in the shop window that I'm going to smash the window to take it. I mean, wanting it isn't a problem in itself. There. We've grown used to the father figure we've shown. These are things that get aired out, you don't realize it. The symbolic function. When Marx says that relations of production are independent of will, that doesn't mean it's some kind of mysterious thing you try to track down through abstractions. No.
High and low; Wagner's The Rhinegold 1:09:03 They're there for the taking. I quoted Proust earlier. But if you look closely, if you're attentive, in human expression in general you find class relations fundamentally at work. I showed a small connection with my own vocabulary earlier, with the various forms of 'high' and 'low.' Well, if you want to have fun with it, do so. You can find other applications than the ones I made. There are a great many. And each time you'll see a distribution of apparently external and material things.
1:09:35 A distribution whose causality is purely symbolic. It's not a real high and low. We've known since the Earth is round that high and low are wherever you want them to be. What we call 'up' is 'down' for New Zealand. So it's not about physical realities and all that. But on the other hand, in the symbolic universe, it's fundamental to have the impression of rising or falling. Believe me. Just compare dreams of flying and dreams of falling. Dreams of flying are euphoric. Dreams of falling are distressing. You see, there really is a symbolic function at work, and a full one.
1:10:05 And I was talking about Greek mythology earlier, but for those who know a bit of Germanic mythology, you find the same thing. It's not the gods of Valhalla, it's the German Olympus. This band of warriors, there, drinking mead — it's not nectar, but the New Zealand equivalent. They're in conflict with a world, the legion of the Titans. We come back to exactly the same thing, with this detail: who are the Titans? Those whom the gods commanded to build the palace of the gods. So, I can't help but give a little detail, because if you really don't see the symbolic function at work, or how class lines insist on making themselves heard where you'd least expect it, I'm talking about Wagner's opera called 'The Rhinegold.'
1:10:45 Isn't that so? And which is, in the text, the poem as they say for Wagner — the libretto was made after consulting all the Germanic and Scandinavian mythologies, right down to fine detail. So, on very serious anthropological grounds. I open a parenthesis, but Lévi-Strauss says Wagner is the unquestionable founder of the structural analysis of myths. You see I'm being serious after all. I try to have serious references. Well, in the Rhinegold, the deal is this: Wotan, the chief of the gods — they say Wotan, Germanic — tells him, because it's Scandinavian, etymologically linked, tells the two Titans, the two brothers, 'build the palace.'
1:11:22 Neither of the two works, huh. You don't have it, you have strong ones. The network of places. I promise you it helps. I'm going to give myself in exchange. So, what do you give? Come on, what can I give the Titans, in exchange, for building Valhalla, Versailles, that sort of thing. Or the Peltangoni, whatever you want to call it, where we'll be able to stop. Guess. Ah, that's interesting. Maybe not everyone knows this.
1:11:53 I know, but no, I won't say it. Pardon? No, you're not getting it. Well, Wotan says, I'll give you Freia in exchange. Ah, who is Freia, the goddess of beauty, the Germanic Venus. Ah, gifts. The big roughnecks. The 70 virgins. There you go. Who have calloused hands. And who are going to dismantle the very quintessence of beauty. Freia means the free one. Freia. Freia die Schöne, Schöne, Freia says Freia.
1:12:24 I won't say it. Right, so... And of course, since the panel is finished, they come to get me. No question of... No, no, no, I said that as a joke. It's wage negotiations. Right? Because it turns out that Freia is the sister of the wife of the king of the gods. She must bring my sister. What's this business between men? There's already... I think all this is quite topical. It's very timely. So... And... And so the tension rises. Because there, the giants aren't building anymore, he's there. Well, they say, you won't get back in until you give what you promised.
1:12:54 What's... You're waiting for me because everything is already there. And Wagner died in '83, the same year as Marx, you see. We need to find an equivalent. Since Wotan won't let go of his sister-in-law, the goddess of beauty, and the giants don't want to have worked for nothing, he calls his advisor. Ah! The consultants, the experts, here they are! His advisor is Loge, the god of fire, the Hermes, the Mercury. He's the one for the whole world who knows lots of things and advises him.
1:13:25 There isn't everything. Subsidies! No, no! No, no, because he parades by, huh! Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand... Interesting! Subsidies! Oulain! Subsidies, don't move! That's the oath for... There aren't the sailors. So, Loge, the god of fire, who is a bit ambiguous. He's fire! That is to say he serves down below, in the world below, at the forge.
1:13:57 And then, at the same time, he's part of the gods. He's a bit ambiguous, he's a bit in both worlds. In fact, he's the only one who'll get out of it at the moment of the Twilight of the Gods. Well, Loge says, it's simple, we'll give them the gold, that way they'll stay quiet. See! We started from a palace to be paid for, which was to be paid for in erotic pleasure, let's say, to understand love, sexuality, libido, if you will. The goddess of beauty, that is to say, what that means. And for which we substitute, as an equivalent, gold. Not just any gold, the gold of the Rhine, the one that gives power over the world, money, in short, plain and simple.
1:14:30 Seriously, seriously. And we even have an example of assembly-line work, if you look at a production, the one Chéreau did of the Rhinegold, it's available somewhere on YouTube, isn't it? A Chéreau production with Boulez conducting, no less. A production that caused a scandal, French, for the centenary, Bayreuth. If you look closely at the staging, you see it's Wagner's action, the anvils, the guys hammering away in the underground world. The gold must be forged. There you go.
1:15:00 And you think I'm exaggerating, on the contrary, I'm going through it very fast. And meanwhile, the gods say to themselves, this is good, we'll be able to have jewels, there, that, there. Everything, everything, it's the good of the city, everything, everything. Anyway. I have the gold jewelry. Uh, there you go. I buy them with fire, but... So, the symbolic function. It's not... We haven't understood Marx when we say, there's the economic. The truth is the economic, and that's what's propagated eternally. No. Because the economic is never lived in consciousness as economic.
The economic is always lived displaced: the example of Racine 1:15:32 That's what needs to be remembered today. The economy is always lived, like Freud's unconscious, displaced in religious form, in identity form, in ethnic form. In the form of Britishness, Corsican-ness, Basque-ness, no it's nothing. It's never conceived on a purely economic level, it's always displaced. That's precisely why I insist on this symbolic function. Because it serves less to know the economic infrastructures that Marx talks about than to recognize them.
1:16:07 That's especially what's important. And I say this because it's the most neglected part of Marxist studies. And at the same time, it also explains, to a large extent, a certain disaffection of quite a few intellectual and especially artistic circles with regard to the Marxist field. Because we get the impression that all that, the economy, that it's very important, it's serious and all. But still, I mean, it's not fun. And what does it have to do with what matters to me, lyricism, feeling, impression, artistic creation?
1:16:39 Well, we're seeing it right now. The unconscious is an artist, because it spends its time expressing itself in a symbolic way. Another example. The great Racine, the greatest poet of the 17th century, he can be quite natural after all. Racine writes the preface to... And in it, he justifies having slightly modified, this creates a bit of a break with the ancient tradition, at the time, it was the Athenian model, the unsurpassable, rigorous Athenian model.
1:17:13 And why had he changed things? There had already been tragedians, notably Seneca. It's Phaedra who slanders her stepson, telling Theseus, he tried to violate me. Me, your wife, the queen. Your son. And Racine, you know, it's not she who does the slandering, it's her servant. She tells her, we only need to say that it was he who took the initiative, etc. That way, he says, everyone will believe you. Racine justified himself by saying this.
1:17:43 I thought that slander was too great a villainy to be put in the mouth of a princess and that it was better placed in that of a servant. Which is to say that at the time, villainy wasn't for people of noble birth, and someone of noble birth is likewise exempt from villainy. You see how, chase out the economic and the social, class, and they come galloping right back. It expresses itself. I can hear people speaking ill of Racine. He expresses the aristocratic relations of the order of his time. No more, no less than any other. But we're going to look at masterpieces even better than that.
1:18:17 Masterpieces that contradict his own opinions because they express everything I'm in the process of saying. Symbolic. There you go. So, let's not neglect this symbolic function. And if we've written about the unconscious slipping away into religion, it's precisely on this. And to come back to it, to come back to the essential text and the passage that you skipped a little, in my opinion, it's going to hit us with a voice of thunder. It's the end, then. It's the famous definition of ideology.
Definition of ideology and the gap between temporalities 1:18:48 Dominique skipped a bit of the end of the sentence, which is essential to get back precisely to everything he just said about the symbolic, about the consciousness we have through the symbolic, etc., and about class struggle. So, when we consider such upheavals, the ones we're experiencing, the crisis, we started from the crisis, remember, that's what was already at issue 150 years ago. And in almost exactly the same conditions. A crisis of overproduction, quite analogous. When we consider such upheavals, we must always distinguish between the material upheaval, which can be established in a scientifically rigorous way, the economic conditions of production, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophical forms, in short, the ideological forms, under which men become conscious, notably through the symbolic path just developed here.
1:19:42 Men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. And now we may have to cut things short because it's 8pm, so I'll let you give the conclusion, of course. I wanted to tackle the passage, I can tell you now, that I left unspoken, that is, the whole passage I read to you twice, once quickly, once stopping along the way, but I forgot. It's a passage that's false. Well yes, I can tell you now. Why? Because I didn't read the continuation that Dominique just started.
1:20:12 Here's the abstract diagram, at the bottom. You see, it's spatial, huh. The economy of the infrastructure, the belly at the top, the head, the superstructure. That's not how it happens. Marx says right away that there's never a perfect correspondence between infrastructure and superstructure. Because there's a difference in temporality between the becoming of the productive forces, the development of technical inventions, innovation, call it whatever you want, from the flaked flint to the particle accelerator, right? There's a time of development of productive forces that's much faster than the time of mentalities, which is a sedimentary time and much longer.
1:20:46 Think of Roman law, which is still ambiguous in some of our jurisprudence, for example, 2000 years later. What Marx says is that it's this gap that's essential for understanding our history, human history in general, history and even anthropology, the human sciences in general. It's that in fact, at a certain degree of increase in productive forces, the new productive forces, as is the case today. There are means of transforming the world that didn't exist before, and which would be in all our interest, I don't know, to benefit from their power, but which cannot flourish because we're stuck in the old relations.
1:21:25 The bourgeois relations of production that appeared a century and a half ago and that are now holding back the development of the productive forces. That's what Marx called a revolutionary situation. It was typical of France at the end of the 18th century. The old relations of production, in this case aristocratic and feudal, became a brake on the emergence of industrial bourgeoisie, etc. All of a sudden, the increase in trade means that if you have to pay a tax to go from Romans in the Isère to Bourg-de-Péage on the other side of the bridge, I don't know if it's called Bourg-de-Péage, the merchandise becomes too expensive on arrival.
An anti-productivist and financial capitalism 1:21:57 There you go. So I mean, there's a stage where the relations of production, that is, roughly, as Dominique was saying earlier, the political-legal system within which the economy unfolds, becomes a brake on the development of the overall economy. Of which property relations are the expression. There you go. And today, we were talking about expression. I think that the greatest critique of capitalism is not going to consist in saying what productivist madness capitalism is, it's the opposite. Capitalism has become anti-productivist for the last 40 years, it's on strike.
1:22:27 Moreover, we've rarely been. It does finance. It no longer does production. It understood long ago that this wasn't advantageous, because industry requires a lot of workers, that means unions, that's not good. All that, the communists, here we go again. And then, no, no, no, no, no, we had a nightmare, we don't want it twice. Right? We'll get rid of all that, or else the workers, I tell you, they'll be Romanian, whatever. Find yourself, you're alive. But us, we're going to do deals, rates, bonuses. Yes, yes, speculation and financial products.
1:22:57 What Marx analyzes very well, don't think that Marx couldn't have known all this because it's new. Read the end of Capital, book 1, a chapter titled precisely industrial capitalism. And it's astonishing how much we find, in detail, what's happening today. Financial speculation, debt, Marx even goes so far as to say that the only thing that proletarians throughout the world truly own as their own property is the public debt. It's their debt.
1:23:27 You see, how he had already understood that capitalism begins with debt. It begins with debt in order to hold the indebted. There you go, huh, by the way. We'll discuss it if you like, but your question comes right on cue. And there, we'll have to wrap up, it's 8pm, unless there's something essential you want to add. Yes, a second thank you to everyone who came despite the heat. Maybe I'm... very old... about taking the heat. Thank you all.
