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Marx's aesthetics and the enigma of Greek art 0:00 Hello everyone, we are with Dominique Pagani for this seventh session, it's wonderful and I hope there will be many more. Just before recording, I was telling you about that quotation from Marx which, in my opinion, is essential when talking about aesthetics. I'll interrupt you to hand the floor straight back to you, and to turn the screen of my big computer around, I'll need some quotations that are on it.
0:32 And there, since he has his back to me, but I can hear you, you can carry on for our friends. All right, yes, if we're being serious about Marxist aesthetics, even if one can't make an ad hoc aesthetics, the idea was to start out on a history of music which, moreover, isn't really one, since we spend our time subverting chronology. So, in the end, the term musicosophy isn't bad. For now, I think we can keep it provisionally, at least, as the title for what this represents. I agree.
1:02 There we go, yes, I agree. But indeed, I believe that, since Marxism is an unsurpassable horizon of our time, at least for you as for me, the specialists in Marxist aesthetics—if there's one thing they constantly reflect on when talking about this, it's that famous quotation, not just a quotation but a development, by Marx in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy on Greek art.
1:35 What we really must call Marx's aesthetics, in a way. Marx's aesthetics, there we go. At least fragmentary, but… There, he was suggesting to us, that means it's a work in becoming. There are also famous letters by Engels on Balzac, for example, which are part of… Or their correspondence together, when Engels says to him, "Have you seen the Aesthetics? What a marvel!"—Hegel's, I mean, the old man still sniffing out all sorts of things. That is to say, in fact, we reconstruct a Marxist aesthetics in the sense of the authors Marx and Engels, moreover with their differences, but we reconstruct it from, let's say, fragments, since there isn't one aesthetics that they left behind.
2:13 Then afterward, there is the aesthetics that Marxists worked on, obviously the most important being Lukács, but he's not the only one, of course. We were also talking about Adorno, of course, in his own way. Indeed, what is absolutely essential is what Marx said about Greek art. I would allow myself not to forget Clouscard. Yes, of course, absolutely. The further he goes in his work, the more the importance of the Hölderlinian conception of the "national" grows, which is unexpected in someone accused of mechanistic Stalinism, isn't that right?
2:49 And the more his reflections on rhythm as a fundamental element, not only of music but of aesthetics in general, deserve to be taken into account. There, very quickly. Exactly. Besides, it's true we should also do justice to the fact that you played a decisive role in his aesthetic conceptions too. I think you'll deny it for various reasons. You're not doing yourself justice, my dear friend, it was you who decided to publish, with Éditions Delga, my Aesthetics and Politics in Hegel.
3:19 There's my modest contribution of 120 pages by a lazy Mediterranean. That's why we found everything. Fortunately, you're caught up again by the same points about productive forces, and we're in the process of making a book out of that connection. I'll go back to my Greek art and Marx. Absolutely. It's essential because precisely, it's what excludes any mechanism—mechanism being the opposite of Marxism, with which Marxism has been confused. So I quote: the difficulty is not in understanding that Greek art and epic are tied to certain forms of social development.
3:53 The difficulty lies in the fact that they still give us aesthetic enjoyment and that they still have, for us, in certain respects, the value of norms and unattainable models. So the difficulty is not in linking Greek art and epic to certain forms of social development. Even if that's possible, he didn't exclude that. That doesn't rule out explaining things through their historical development. But the difficulty, that is to say, the difficulty is explaining why this gives us aesthetic enjoyment.
4:27 And I was about to say, I wanted to put that to you because in music, we're always faced with this phenomenon. I was about to say, in a sense, even listening… And you added this crucial point. It's that in music, we are almost always immersed in a past. Exactly, that's it. It's even truer in music, precisely. And that's why I wanted to put that to you and see how you might explain this phenomenon. Listen, that's a very rewarding question for me.
Philosophy as a discipline; Marx the researcher, Engels the pedagogue 4:59 I mean, I hope especially for those kind enough to follow us. Because of the potential richness it unfolds. And you'll see this isn't gratuitous flattery. First, it's so important that I'm stepping back. And I'll begin with things that seem circumstantial, calmly. You started by saying, this is our seventh session. And you said to yourself, bravo.
5:29 You're quite right. Because I'll read you right away a message I received this morning. So, you'll tell me—I don't want to leave your question aside. On the contrary, we're right in the thick of it, because it comes from a musician, which is rather rare. Second, from an excellent jazz musician, a saxophonist. Third, who is a member of the PRCF. And whom you may know, it's our comrade Oscar Binault. Ah right, yes, I see him. Good.
5:59 Familiar. A young one, yes. There, there. Yes, very young. But an excellent saxophonist. And with whom I haven't been in touch for a long time because I manage my relational time badly. More and more badly as I get older. And there again, a relation to time. And here comes Oscar, from whom I haven't had news for a long time, and since well before we started this musicosophy—we owe you the phrase.
6:35 And as for me, I don't regret at all that we're not doing a chronological history of music, nor that we go off in every direction either. But we're doing musicosophy. Right, it wasn't about being careful. No, no, but we're doing musicosophy. There was more musicosophy in that. That means it's not just random either. It's not that either. There are demands proper to philosophy in it. About which I recently said, in response to another question from another sympathizer, from a young Marxist science student whom you might know, Léo Bernus, who will soon be presenting his thesis on the stability of the solar system through relativistic mechanics.
7:15 I mean, I'm quite happy to be surrounded by people I can rely on so as not to say too much nonsense in fields that aren't mine. And who recently referred me back to this kind of problem. And I'll return to Oscar Binault's question so as not to stray, and to musicosophy. Yes, I mention Léo Bernus very quickly because he was telling me, "You're exaggerating, you say in your talks, you've often said it, that philosophy isn't really a science."
7:58 Whatever Engels said when he speaks of scientific socialism, it's a discipline. There, it's me, Pagani, who allows himself to introduce this notion. Do you see the connection with what we were saying? Which isn't just anything. Discipline means rules. But which also can't claim too much. And for me, it was a lesson in prudence, in epistemic humility, quite simply. To say that with everyday language, we enter a domain that lies between music and language.
8:36 An old problem, which we'll come back to, moreover, in the wake opened by your question, namely that everyday language, which is precisely not scientific discourse—let me try to be more precise about this, I'm getting increasingly precise. Philosophical language is natural language, to speak like a linguist, which we use. It is not a highly formalized language. It is not that of mathematicians.
9:07 So for me, mathematics is not a language. It is discursive, undeniably. Undeniably, Y equals F of X implies that, that's discursive. There's the essential division between the one and the other that defines discursivity, the Platonic dyad. But it's not a language. It's silent. There's no metaphor. There's no "day breaks." There's no poetry. So, in the sense of the Prague Circle, there's no poetic function. So it's not a language.
9:37 I'm recalling fundamental things that revolve around your question. Even though we haven't yet pointed to the relation to time that is essential in your question, and which I'll get to right away. So I maintain, against Léo Bernus, very amicably, he's a comrade, that we don't find the notion of scientific socialism—I seem to be straying a bit from our subject—under Marx's pen. I challenge anyone to find the number of occurrences where he speaks of it that way. And when we find it in Engels, I paid tribute yesterday to our comrade Gastaud, who gave a very fine talk, I learned of it, I think it was the day before yesterday, but he must have written it a bit before, where he rails against the wedge that people have always tried to drive, in the Marx-ographic tradition, between Engels and Marx.
10:29 There's Marx, the little genius, the intellectual, worthy of our café or university colloquia. And then there's the plodder, Engels, a bit stiff, a bit mechanistic, who's going to invent for us a dialectical materialism in which the subtlety of the paths and roads opened up by Marx will freeze, and which, of course, will help set up the socialism of barbarism.
11:02 There. I'm not caricaturing. And it's true there's a philological question here. There's a philological question. Yes, but it's true there's a philological question. The phrase "dialectical materialism" would have been contributed by Engels. It's true we see it in his book on Feuerbach, but it's true that it's the chapter title from the Éditions sociales publisher. It's not… Well, since it's not another subject, I don't want to dwell too much. But never mind, because in fact we need this phrase, of course. But of course, thank you for bringing that up.
11:32 But to connect it back to our subject, and I'll say right away, here's how, personally, I resolve the problem. It's pretentious to say that. So it's provisional. We're in philosophy, let me remind you. We're in a discipline, not a science. Namely, it's not at all that one is a little genius and the other a plodder, that one is subtle and the other mechanistic, etc. It's that there's a division of tasks and functions. It's that Marx never stopped being a researcher.
12:02 He dies researching. He dies writing. On the continuation of the drafting of Capital, to which he was tied down—social classes, the title of the chapter about to open—and he dies, he kicks the bucket. And that's always been Marx. Work in progress. Fabulous. A fabulous researcher, in a way. The rare completed works are, as it happens, produced with comrade Engels, whether it's The German Ideology or the Manifesto, of course, to take the most emblematic ones.
12:33 But in fact, the difference between the two is not at all a value judgment on the respective competences of each, it's that these are two different positions and two different functions with respect to the public. Marx keeps on researching, and Engels takes stock of the advances opened up by Marx, or opened up together, isn't that right? And he transmits—when one transmits, and your humble servant is well placed to know this—when one transmits, not only is one more systematic, more rigid, I'm deliberately choosing a word that might invite pejorative connotations, but one has to be.
13:14 I claim this in the name of transmission, in the name of pedagogical honesty—that with students one must not play the smart aleck, saying "I'm telling you this, but tomorrow I'll say the opposite." No, we're not in Nietzsche. Of course, one must grasp it. Yes, I understand. We're not in a fairground barker. So Engels, because he is an immense pedagogue, no doubt the greatest of the classic Marxist authors as a pedagogue, in the sense of the transmission of Greek paideia, of course, in an extensive sense, is necessarily more systematic, more rigid, and summarizes, let's say, in synchrony, what remains in Marx a diachrony in motion.
13:59 Yes, yes. That's how I sum it up. To reproach him for having stated the state of the sciences at instant T, and that this state in Dialectics of Nature has since been superseded—one cannot think further than the Colossus of Rhodes. In all simplicity, I'll allow myself to say that it's the heroism of transmission that excuses Engels here. When one transmits, one is condemned to be overtaken more quickly than when one continues researching. That's true. And nothing stops me from thinking that Engels kept researching for himself.
14:30 In any case, even the editing of Books 2 and 3 of Capital, it was he who did it, precisely because this division of roles, I was about to say, as you put it, is almost psychoanalytic. Fortunately for us that he did it. Yes, exactly. And for posterity. So I'll now come back, after this long digression, to what Oscar Binault says, to confirm what you're saying, that it's wonderful we're already at the seventh episode. Because as for me, I have doubts all the time. I always doubt in the afternoon what I thought in the morning.
15:00 That's how it is. And so, I say to myself, I move from one subject to another. There must be people who get lost, etc. And here, we have the opinion of a musician, and a very competent one in his discipline, in his art. Well, here's what he sends me. Hello Dominique. I hope you're well despite the lockdown-ness. I'm usually quite discreet, it's true. But I follow with great interest. I follow, from the verb "to follow," with great interest all the livestreams from Berlin this year. I gather our cameraman is in Berlin.
Why the Cretan myth still calls to us: Phaedra's speech 15:31 And more recently, the conversations on music with Emmerich, which are truly fascinating. Duly noted, dear comrades. So this seventh episode is welcome for him. Thank you very much to you and the team. For once, I'll have a question, I'll skip it because it's long. It concerns a talk I gave yesterday on Phèdre. A subject you know well because you told me it had struck you at a certain time. Still does, actually, yes. There.
16:01 Well, it's right at the heart of your question. Why are we still... There are even peplum films coming out, I don't know, about the labyrinth. About some proof of the myth. Why are we still sensitive to this mythology? Why does an André Gide, in the full twentieth century, write one of the few plays he wrote, called Thésée? So we never read it. But that's another story. Why does Picasso devote an implausible quantity of absolutely brilliant drawings to the painter and his model, whose essential graphic theme is the bull?
16:43 Isn't that so? As if the painter had to tame the minotaur, right? Like the Cretan bull-leapers, far more astonishing even than the greatest Spaniards, taking the bull by the horns—the French expression comes from that—to do a somersault over it, as the Minoan frescoes show us. Isn't that right? Well. So why? And I plunged back into it, you'll see I'm answering your question for now through the literary route, even though the question is about music.
17:15 Even though I think that Phèdre's tirade which will answer this question, the tirade that is the great scene of Act 2, Scene 5, where Phèdre reaches the summit, where Phèdre and Hippolyte meet for the first time since the curtain rose on the play, since the one speaks of the other, or she of him, and Phèdre has come for political reasons, let me remind you, pressed by her governess who tells her, "Good heavens, we've just learned that Theseus is dead."
17:46 "So, you are a man, put your guilt aside, you wanted to die, why not? I too am stunned by what you're telling me. Even so, it's just not done," as the kids in the projects say, "it's just not done to be in love with your husband's son. But he's dead, come on, it's over, let's erase it." Quite bluntly, I'm not inventing anything, I never interpret. It's even cruder than that in the text. So think of your son, good heavens, who must position himself for the inheritance. In short, as always in Racine, the confidant is Cornelian.
18:17 The confidant is Cornelian. We're in the classical world, one must balance out the excesses and the hubris of heroes headed for disaster. There. So, in Corneille, the confidant is Cornelian and says to the Cornelian heroes, "Oh, come on? Now and then, a little love affair like that, a little fling with a passerby." You mean the confidant is Racinian? It never hurts. In Corneille, sorry, yes, the confidant is Racinian, tries to humanize a bit. He's a superman who takes your breath away to dizzying heights more than the Cornelian hero, and conversely in Racine, of course.
18:49 The confidant tells her, "Fine feelings, that's enough, go see Hippolyte, negotiate with him, and tell him not to forget your son." Right? And forget him she will not, since—I don't know if I told you—but I'm doing, starting this fall, a series of talks on memory, on anamnesis and forgetting, philosophically speaking. And which I illustrated just yesterday evening with Phèdre, with this excerpt from Phèdre.
19:23 That's why I'm diving into your question through this route. Because she arrives making an effort, poor Phèdre—you know I'm moved by her, even though people say she's the most guilty character, I find her the most innocent in this play—but she arrives saying, "Come on, let's forget." "I shall die no less, I shall die more guilty." "But there, let's forget my hero, let's take care of my son." And of course, memory—here we are between Phèdre and Marx—memory is going to catch up with her, memory is going to be able to speak through what her unconscious offers up to her.
20:04 So, and what does she do? It's said, "A hasty departure removes you from us, my lord." This is that famous tirade which always begins with this allusion to departure, because since the start of the play we know Hippolyte spends his time saying "I'm leaving," but one doesn't break the unity of place with impunity either. That's already a hubris, a transgression of the classical order, and by dint of repeating it, we know full well he'll die before leaving. There. So, since I'm not commenting on the whole play, but precisely on this tirade and its relation to the past, to get back to Marx's text on the Greeks, what does she say?
20:43 She begins by saying, "My son no longer has a father, and the hour is not far when my death too must make him a witness." So she discharges her political task. Very well. Then she expresses her grief at the death of her husband, who is also the father of her interlocutor. "What am I saying? He is not dead, since he breathes in you." So there, the danger begins, the transference happens. "Still before my eyes, I think I see my husband, I see him, I speak to him, and I lose myself. My lord, my mad passion declares itself despite me."
The Minotaur and the end of the tribute: a collective primal scene 21:14 So, off we go. Up to that point, it's banal. Well, banal in psychoanalytic terms, which isn't our subject. But here her fantasy consists in bringing back to the surface the high point of a collective past. For if we're here talking… Afterward, it's the age of Theseus, yes, in fact. There, if we're here talking about the Cretan cycle, good heavens, about Phèdre, about Theseus, it's because of the high point of this story, which is, after all, the destruction of the minotaur.
21:44 Yes. That's his role. So, I maintain that at the time—now I come back to Marx, that is, to history—since, thanks to Marx, I don't know if it's a scientific socialism, but Marx opened the immense door which… Well, he opened the door that allows us to see unfolding a path that also leads to human sciences which no longer need quotation marks around the term science, and in particular the sciences of history.
22:16 And I'll illustrate it here because, at that time—all historians confirm this—the Sea Peoples, as archaeologists call them, the Cretans and the Phoenicians dominated the eastern Mediterranean well before anyone spoke of Athens, of the glory of Athens and Sparta and the Greek world. The Greek world had not yet fully entered history when the Cretans and the Phoenicians already dominated the region. So, for the Greeks to free themselves from that, the minotaur had to be killed.
22:47 The killing of the Minotaur expresses the cessation of the tribute — with a T, as in taxation — that the Greeks paid every year to the Cretans, and that's what's expressed by the seven young people, well, the seven boys and seven girls that had to be brought — we're in the realm of the sacred, twice seven — that had to be brought each year to the Minotaur to be devoured, so that Crete could keep maintaining its domination over Athens. That's what makes Theseus — we're still talking about him today — that's a political act; enough with these skirt-chasing stories now.
23:23 I say skirts, I don't want to be sexist, or stories about willies or phalluses — that's not it. If Theseus is seductive and if, as she admirably says in her tirade, "when he crossed the waves from our Crete, worthy object of the vows of the daughters of Minos" — that means, good grief, who are the daughters of Minos? Now I'm in mathematics. Yes, the human sciences can be scientific. There are two of them. We're in arithmetic, the hardest discipline in mathematics.
23:54 There's Phaedra and Ariadne. That's the daughters of Minos. Well, because there's the... there's the monster, the half-brother, the one from the bull. But yes — "into what wanderings, O hatred of Venus, O fatal wrath, into what wanderings did love cast my mother." Everyone understood the allusion perfectly at the time. But there are the two daughters. There's one, Ariadne, who is going to be captivated of course by this hero she's never seen, but she's already in love, like her little sister, because the whole Mediterranean is buzzing with his exploits.
24:29 In other words, Racine is a contemporary of La Rochefoucauld, who at the time says — I know some — that no one would ever fall in love if they'd never heard love spoken of. So we don't fall in love for just anything. Women aren't stupid. They fall in love with the one who guarantees security. Here it's not even just that — it's really about finding a livable space. Collective security, not just for their children — for the hero. That, yes, is the myth. That's why she helps him.
24:59 She commits a betrayal, she betrays Minos, she betrays her family, she betrays her nation. She gives him the thread. She hands him the thread. And poor Phaedra, in this tirade, says: "A thread alone would not have reassured me enough, your lover, companion in the peril you had to seek. I myself would have wished to walk before you." Yes, because she identifies with her own sister. She is sublime because she returns to the primal scene. And here I break away from psychoanalysis. The primal scene isn't parental copulation. The primal scene, here, is the heroic and collective act — it's political and historical.
25:31 Yes, exactly. That's what marked memory. And that's why we come back to it. That's why what Clouscard said about the unconscious of the unconscious is precisely a subversion of psychoanalysis, but one that involves a genuine intellectual sublation. There it is — it keeps the syntax of psychoanalysis, the mechanisms of the unconscious, displacement, condensation. Yes, exactly. The dream, fine, but not at all with the same content. Yes. That's why I say, let's leave the skirts and phalluses aside now. "What altogether different care troubles and devours me," to paraphrase the poet.
Lévi-Strauss, myth, and oral epic 26:05 So, there's my first answer. Second answer, after congratulating myself on Oscar Binault's message. Second answer, I go back to the very beginning of our conversations, to Lévi-Strauss. But then, who introduces an incident that is at the heart of the answer to your question? It's not at all the Lévi-Strauss of synchrony, of the neo-Kantian and sometimes even reactionary aspects of Strakauer. No, it's the one who says, who justifies — in the opening of The Raw and the Cooked, which I'd like to keep coming back to given the tenor of our conversations — who keeps justifying, who says why, starting from the raw and the cooked, in launching the Mythologiques series, why it was no longer linguistics that served as the model around which anthropology should be organized, for him — why it shifted to music.
27:05 And in this justification, he talks about the relationship to time. And there he says this: there is another connection, he says, another complicity between music and myths — in short, between the unfolding of the musical phrase and the unfolding of mythical discourse. Namely, that everything happens as though music, like myth — and here I come back to Marx, myth is the discourse of the past — like myth, only entered into time in order to leave it.
27:37 So we suddenly understand the enigma — Marx is quite right to raise the question, there's an immense problem underneath this. We see it clearly. Yes, I'm a dialectical opportunist, that's my doctrine, all right? Yes, I bring Marx close to Lévi-Strauss, I'm an opportunist. It exasperates the Lévi-Straussians that I refer to Marx, doesn't it?
28:07 He wanted to talk about it, history along with it. And the Marxists, in a way — well, the Marxists, even my comrade and late friend Clouscard, would say "Forget Lévi-Strauss, he's a reactionary," you see? But I take from him, opportunistically, what he's unconsciously forced to formulate, which is that myth is, after all — and here I speak in Lévi-Strauss's place — it's the poem of the people, we must never forget that.
28:40 We must never... Besides, it's very funny because we started from Marx's situation — he does speak of the epic. He mentions Greek art and the epic. It's a pleasure to talk with someone who has reflexes — I say it often about you — it's still worth saying: "Make the most of it, young people who were listening to us or watching us, do your humanities, as they used to say. Greek and Latin aren't useless." Yes, exactly, namely that...
29:12 There's an extraordinary paradox: the literary genre par excellence, poetry, in which there would supposedly be no literature, no specificity of literature. Poetry — especially if I broaden it, as I mentioned a moment ago, to the poetic function in the Prague Circle, with that extension — poetry, such that, unlike Monsieur Jourdain even, we constantly speak the natural language of poetry without knowing it.
29:44 Just as Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose without knowing it, we constantly make poetry when we say, for instance, "the day is already breaking," all right? As though the day had gone down, when it's really us who are moving, not the sun — we're not in science, not in astronomy, we're in metaphor, in everyday language. Where am I going with this? The literary genre par excellence, poetry — and I come back to the epic you were alluding to — was oral for millennia before bards, minstrels, or griots — writing is more recent — put it down in writing.
30:26 If Homer is a name that is immortal for us, it's simply because he was the first to write down things that had been told for a long time in the households of the eastern Mediterranean, good grief, but orally, no doubt in something like a slam, certainly. I give a nod from afar to our friend Oscar Bino. We're not far from rap — ready-made formulas, Homeric formulas. There you have it, with a kind of delivery. There's a theme-and-variation aspect to it. We find the musical side again there. Yes, and moreover, in terms of the relation to rhythmic time, with a delivery that is both sung and spoken, what Schoenberg would revive in the middle of the twentieth century with Pierrot Lunaire, for example, what's called Sprechgesang.
31:10 That's exactly what it means: speaking-singing. Exactly. And I think it's around the same time that we come to the bards of Bosnia, who had the same formulas as the ancient bards, in fact. Exactly. But when I say bard, I always think of Yugoslavia, as it happens, because I read studies where they start from the relation to time, precisely to historical time, where they ask the bard: this story, this myth of the raped girl, when do you place it? He says, oh, it's lost in the mists of time, the bards answer. When you actually investigate, it goes back two and a half generations.
31:42 Because oral memory can't reach that far back. Whereas we know that 3,500 years ago the pharaoh gave the Hittites a thrashing — well, that's what it says on the stele. But there's writing, so we can go very far back into the past. There's a trace, an engram. That's not the case in orality. It's interesting, what we're saying here. I'm going from Homer to slam, to what's most current in what the Ministry of Culture calls contemporary music, which is looking, somehow, for a way out of musical impasses.
The child's babbling and the voice of the other 32:15 Music is never as rich as when it's in an impasse. And like an insect on a windowpane, it tries to get out. The insect traces strange trajectories, and so does music at that point. Now, in a way, spoken-song tries to overcome this music-language dichotomy which is fundamental to the sonic thing. Music wouldn't have this importance if, as newborns, wailing — as we all were in our own primal scene, each and every one of us — the other hadn't first had a voice, with cuddling, with melodious voices, such that the baby fairly quickly moves on from moaning, from groans, from borborygmi and the animal-like expressions we all start out with, to what child psychologists call infant babbling.
33:10 And that stage where the child finally masters the channel, not yet the code. We don't understand what he's saying, but we suddenly see him striving to act as though he were speaking. You're a family man, you see what I mean. And every child goes through that stage. That is, good grief, the stage that Wagner assigns to the Rhine maidens right at the very beginning of the primal scene that opens the Rhinegold and the whole Ring, where there's nothing but alliteration and assonance.
33:40 "Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle," etc. That's infant babbling, not yet very comprehensible, but it babbles, as we say. It babbles. So this primitive link between language, which is the relation to the other — good grief — the relation to the world that I want to enter into, to escape my colic, my sufferings, my newborn distress, premature — the generic prematurity of the human kind.
34:10 I no longer say "species," because that defines a genre, within species, within our transgenders. Precisely, it's about being unfinished, and the whole greatness of man, like surplus value in Marx, is that everything comes from a minus — from unpaid labor in the case of surplus value, and here, from a being who has neither scales, nor claws, nor... It's a minus, it's the whole myth of Prometheus that... I come back to the myth, which expresses it admirably. It's not unpaid labor, it's even the Titans, that's the case. Well, there you go, exactly. Oh no, wait, that's precisely the example Marx uses in the rare moments where he alludes to Greek mythology, in his famous university thesis on Epicurus, on the difference between Epicurus and Democritus, where he says: the Titans, the relation of the Titans to the gods — that is, we're in conflict with them, but at the same time we forge weapons for them, it's a strange ambivalent relationship.
35:02 It expresses well, he says, the relation of slaves to free citizens in the city. So myth has to be taken seriously, I come back to this. It's the poem of the people. It predates its being written down by several millennia. Millennia even — maybe that's too short, maybe it's more. Yes, yes, yes. When you look at... you have the Lascaux cave dwellers, Cro-Magnon man? Well, when you look at...
35:33 There wouldn't have been epics at that time? I'd give a lot to know — some people are working a bit on this. What could the music have been that resounded in the caves of Lascaux? It's not even certain that it was limited to a rhythmic element, which must have been important, but it's not certain. There must have been melodies. Exactly, yes. And it should be noted that they lived in primitive communism. There you go, absolutely. So we understand that Marx opens a magnificent Pandora's box, but by inverting the values a little.
Speech and music; man as subject, not object 36:03 A box out of which come marvels, not catastrophes. Here I bring in a new element, again straddling language and music. Let me recall a jewel, a masterpiece, a pocket opera as they say, by Strauss — Richard Strauss, nothing to do with the Blue Danube — namely Capriccio, which is a bit like Verdi's Falstaff, an entertainment for connoisseurs.
36:39 I recommend the version conducted by Klemperer, because it has a cast of singers such as you no longer find these days. Well, it opens with theater within theater. The theater director appears on stage and says, so, the problem: prima la parola, dopo la musica, or on the contrary, prima la musica, dopo le parole? It's always been the problem, because the language we're speaking right now, at this very moment, has an intonation, has pitches in musical terms, has interjections, has rhythm.
37:12 In short, everything that linguistics calls the continuous variables, which linguistics quickly evacuated from its thinking. It's even the langue-parole distinction in Saussure, isn't it... Absolutely. And, since we're at it, in Freud and in Lacan — in what is perhaps the best of it — the fundamental difference Lacan introduces between the statement (énoncé), on the side of writing, and the enunciation (énonciation), on the side of speech. So thank you for this question, the question raised by Marx, because Marx has the merit — as you say very well — not only of not being mechanistic, but on the contrary, a bit like Plato's heroic gesture in the Parmenides, where Plato submits scholastic Platonism to a radical critique in the Parmenides.
38:01 "Wait, at the same time, he doesn't evacuate a mechanical dimension, there are mechanisms, the mechanism..." "No, no, no, no, he's not tipping over into idealism, on the contrary, he rises to a higher degree of materialism, by integrating the temporal and historical dimension into materialism — which naturalist materialism doesn't do, which positivist, naturalist materialism doesn't do, the kind that has been flooding us ever since Marxism was erased, provisionally of course, during the Cold War, because Marxism lost a battle there, but it's far from having lost the war — proof being that we're here."
38:40 That's what's at stake: the reintegration of a dimension — first, a temporal, historical, diachronic one, no offense to structuralism — against the invariants of the hard sciences, against an invariant law, a naturalistic determinism that does exist. I myself, until the end of my life, will have to eat in order to live, I will always be an animal — that's a given that applies to the human species in general.
39:14 Here I'm speaking of species, not of genre, because that's something we share with the animal. On the other hand, the fact that before eating I say, "Please, help yourself first, madam," that I can take a step back from the drive — I've never seen one dog say to another, "Go on, old chap, you first." They're barely not aggressive toward their own master when it comes to their food bowl — better not get too close. So an animal, all its efforts, and even its ruses, which sometimes surprise us and are all the more moving for coming from an animal, are aimed at shortening the time separating its need from its satisfaction, whereas we're perverse enough to always look for delays, as Pascal would say.
40:00 We wouldn't want the hare if it were simply given to us. Imagine a hunter setting out in the morning with his gaiters on. It's not the catch that matters in hunting, it's the hunt. There's the fresh little October wind, and I say to him, "No, you don't need to go, look, I'll take one out of the freezer, I have a spare hare from yesterday, I'll give it to you." A hunter isn't going to be satisfied with that. But you're not going to tell him not to go either — you see, that's the interesting part. And Pascal gives a second example: gambling.
40:31 You get real gamblers to play, and you tell them, "Listen, if it's for the money that you're playing, I'll give you some — here, I'll give you a pension every month, and you stop playing." That won't satisfy them. So you do the opposite: "Fine, play, but with matchsticks." That won't satisfy them either. So, as with hunting, you have to act as if it were for the money when really it's for the game itself. There you go. Interesting, what we've just done. What am I rehabilitating here? The relation of subject to subject. That's what the subject aims at.
41:01 That's what the subject desires. Man is a zoon politikon. Yes, he's a zoon, but a zoon politikon. So, thanks to Marx's text, we're recovering the historical, temporal dimension, and the fact that man is a subject, unlike the stars and the Big Bang, which are objects. So they're subject to natural determination, but subjected to it without being able to escape it. Whereas, as the one who freed us, in the theoretical field, from mechanistic and natural determination unforgettably put it — and that's why Kant calls him the Newton of morality — I'm thinking of course of Rousseau, who goes so far as to say in Émile that everything men have done, men can destroy, can undo.
41:47 There is no ineradicable character, so there is only implacable determinism in what nature imprints, and nature makes neither a rich man, nor a prince, nor a great lord. That's the division into classes — it's not in the genes. Yes, absolutely. Precisely, I think — to make myself clear — what Marx is talking about ultimately is that there exists a collective subject; I think it's also the irruption of the collective subject into the very methodology of the sciences, and that's precisely why, when he comes back to Greek art afterward, he extends the metaphor of the small child — that is, it's an art that seems to us, that is the childhood of humanity, it's childhood but at the same time with all the gifts, so it's what always charmed us.
The collective subject: Hegel, Nerval beyond Proust 42:32 I could move on to Verlaine, "unhappy, all the gifts, the glory of baptism." As you say, there's the relation to one's own subject, one's own sensibility, but also to that collective subject that humanity represents, an essential given of individuals. I'm very pleased with your notion of collective subject, because it captures the whole problem. There's both "collective" and "subject." Neither should be neglected. There you go, yes, exactly. Because wolves are collective too, and bees are too. But they're not subjects.
43:02 There are no conservatories where bees learn to perform the dance that shows where the food is. There, it's in the genes. They're equipped from birth to do it. Whereas if you don't learn French, if you're raised by Chinese parents, you won't speak French. I challenge anyone to find, in any biology or genetics lab, the gene for French or for Turkish. Good grief. Now, it's language that establishes our relation to the other.
43:33 I won't elaborate further on that, all right? There you go. And here I'll still recall Hegel's admirable aside in the second preface to the Science of Logic, where he says that in everything man does, in everything he thinks, language has insinuated itself, such that we think according to language and according to logic. That's one of the most modern passages, so to speak, in Hegel. Well. Now, back to Marx's text. Yes, a past, a reference to history, to myth, so a past — but to history, that is, a collective past.
44:08 Here we're no longer in the personal past of the narrator of In Search of Lost Time. It's not a personal past. And in that sense, I could almost say that I place Nerval above — even though I admire Proust — I place him even above Proust. Nerval, at his own risk and peril, a risk Proust never takes, goes so far as to realize that in anamnesis, if it's done honestly, one goes beyond the framework of one's personal life. And when he's in the Valois, he can't help noticing that there are plenty of dead beneath his feet.
44:44 For there were battles here, between the Protestants, between the Leaguers, between... He realizes that he hasn't come only to his mother's country, he's come to a land with an enormous temporal depth, upon which Rousseau's tomb is laid like a seal. Yes, he pretends to look for the tree, already, as an ex-centering of the subject. Yes, that's why I dwell so often on this novella, because it's perhaps the only text I know in modernity where the problem of being torn between the personal stakes we all have too — which the common man can sum up by saying "to each his own mother," after all, I mean — and which leads Proust to say, in a different way, but it amounts to the same thing, that each person is truly alone.
45:33 Terrible sentence: each person is truly alone. It's no accident that he says it when he sees his grandmother's gaze, seeing that the doctor is indifferent to the fact that she is dying. So there's the personal drama, which is nonetheless enclosed within a considerable temporal expansion, the collective drama. And the two cannot be separated with an axe. They must be distinguished, precisely, but they cannot be separated — to borrow an old distinction from Aristotle.
46:10 Precisely, we can see it clearly. Now, and that's why this novella — Nerval spends his time trying to return to what seems to be the maternal land, since, banally enough, that's the classic quest. And so this quest should end at Mortefontaine, the maternal village. Well, my goodness, arrive where? At the fountain, at the source, at the origin, only to learn that the fountain [La Fontaine] is dead — that doesn't interest me.
46:42 So I go to Rousseau's tomb, three kilometers away. I'm not going to the geographic pole, I'm going to the magnetic pole. No, I'm not going to the magnetic pole, I'm going to the geographic pole. A tomb without remains, after all. And there you have it. And here I pay homage to the one who freed us from our relation to the other — not from our relation to things. We will always be determined by things, we are materialists. It's not so serious that I'm hungry. What's serious is that my political and social system condemns me to die of hunger.
Greece, a creation of Germany; private and public 47:15 Good grief! Everything that men have made, men can destroy; there is no ineffaceable character except the ones that nature imprints, that nature imprints, and nature makes no rich man, no prince, no great lord. So Marx is right to say, good grief, what is he doing? Even me, I mean, the Greeks concern me too, and this image of the child. And here I introduce my third digression in relation to the reference to Marx from which we started.
47:45 It's a bit more, not ironic, that's not the word at all, but I find it delicious—there's the word I was looking for—that even Marx, even the Jew Marx, and you know how far removed he is from German and Romantic ravings and so on, even though he wrote poems in his youth, he fully belongs to the Romantic generation, but he very quickly distrusted the deadly fantasmatics at work in Romanticism. Well! There he shows all the same that he is truly German, because he recalls his fascination with the Greek world.
48:20 I would even go so far as to say that Greece is a creation of Germany. The Greece that appears in literature, in culture, in philosophy, in Nietzsche, in Heidegger, in Hölderlin, in Hegel—and one never finishes the list—that Greece is no accident. It is Germany, fragmented into 400 states, that spent its time acting as if a resurrection of Greece were imminent right there, between the Rhine and the Danube. Indeed, it was Schliemann who exhumed Mycenae III.
48:53 All the same. That's what they did in book form. That's rightly called creating. When there's a discovery, isn't it? We do say that Yves Coppens invented Lucy. Yes, exactly. So there's this dimension in Marx too. If this Greece fascinates him too, it's because he inherits all this literature, and the question, the problem you've been posing from the start—thanks to you we've been posing it since the beginning of this conversation—namely, how can something so determined in the past, in a slave-based mode of production?
49:30 It's really a bit more organic. How can it still call to us like nothing else does today? That's exactly what Hegel says about the tragedy of Antigone in his Aesthetics. Here's a work that calls to us in all the arts and at all times. And yet Hegel is the first to explain that every aesthetic figure is determined by a moment of the spirit. Yes, because that judgment doesn't cancel this out either.
50:01 And here is what he attributes, good grief, to Greek tragedy, where what he calls the supreme ethical opposition manifests itself. The one that lies—oh, surprise, because here we come back to today—between the private and the public. Yes. And I'll end on that note, because here too we must think dialectically. We live under the dictatorship of the private.
50:31 And Clouscard helped us see that what we believe to be the State—and here I distance myself a bit from the libertarian streak Marx never entirely abandoned, which he inherited from Feuerbach and his youth. I'd rather have an excess of libertarianism, if I may allow myself that barbarism, than an excess of dictatorship, of course. But still, I mean, there's a relation to the State in Marx's discourse that is always hostile, and he's quite right, given how, in his time, reason of state was used to justify all forms of repression and exploitation.
51:09 But Clouscard is perfectly right to say: fine, yes, the State must be destroyed, but it isn't the State that governs us, it's a state apparatus from which civil society has expelled the State. We can clearly see that the current regime's elimination of hospital beds is a way of putting the state apparatus at the service of destroying social advances that required the sacrifices of entire generations of social struggle. That's what this text helps us see.
51:41 And that's why I'd like to conclude on this point: that it still concerns us if we keep coming back to these mythical references—but not mythified ones this time. Because one can play on the roots—you're linguist enough to see the slippage from myth to mystery to mystification. Well, we don't need to teach a Marxist how to grimace at that in order to free us from mystifications.
The end of human prehistory; speech and music 52:16 Above all, we notice that the main mystification is rarely in the answers but rather in the way problems and questions are posed, by the way. So the fact of constantly returning to and wearing away at this past means there are problems that still today have not been resolved, that we haven't rediscovered—you were talking earlier about primitive communism, right, the problem of origin is there—and it's no accident that the text of the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that is, to Capital in embryo, well, it's Marx's latest word, so to speak, he won't evolve much on the fundamental concepts past that threshold—it's no accident that the passage ends: thus ends the prehistory of human society—there, there is an anthropological affirmation of vertiginous depth, and music—you were saying earlier that as soon as you listen to music, you're plunged into a temporal thickness, which tears
53:26 tears from the eyes of many—there are those who can't help it. How many Bretons get tears in their eyes listening to La Paimpolaise? And I especially love "La Paimpolaise who awaits me in the Breton land"—you melt into tears, especially when you're plunging into the abysses of the ocean, cod fishing off Newfoundland, and thinking that La Paimpolaise awaits you by the fireside corner, except music says it like nothing else can, and someone developed this—in the most beautiful text by Rousseau, the Essay on the Origin of Languages, which was originally a musical polemic, let's never forget, with Rameau.
54:07 It's true, you inspired a book built around your courses called Pagani in Detour, and indeed, I think we've been talking for an hour about everything but music, but that's exactly how we get there, even if it's through La Paimpolaise or Je veux revoir ma Normandie that we enter. You've tracked me down—to keep the semantic field of detours—you've tracked me down, because I've been prowling around the musical thing without ever quite getting to it, always staying on the ridge of its old complicity with speech.
54:45 In both cases, we're in the auditory realm. That's what needs recalling. Words, which mean collective, which mean... There you go, the intelligible auditory, the concept, speech, philosophy, theory, the Enlightenment. We must never neglect that. If you despise science and reason, says Goethe—who knew his Germans and who sensed those terrifying things coming in German history, Goethe—if you despise science and reason, you give the devil the highest gifts of humanity. You give yourself to the devil and you are lost.
55:18 Right? A thesis taken up again by Hegel in the preface to the Philosophy of Right as a warning to German history. There you go. So, I have nothing to say against this non-musical thing that is the concept, the world of daylight, language, discursivity, clear and plain. Right? But never forget what Rimbaud calls the ancient savagery that must be forgiven. That backdrop of darkness which means we first began to hear speech—that of the parents, that of the mother in general, it doesn't matter whether it's the nurse or the natural mother, who cares—who somehow, through caresses and so on, let us glimpse another world beyond mere animal determination.
55:59 There you go. Quite so. This determination—two things combine in the musical thing. So if I take a long detour without speaking of music, but while speaking... staying on this ridge between language and music, it's in order to announce, perhaps another time, next time, a very fine study by a great contemporary anthropologist on Wagner, where he speaks of the myth of the androgyne in Wagner, in which he assigns to the text the virile function, in the historical sense, of course.
56:29 Nattiez, I believe, yes. There you go, exactly. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, if you know him well, who is an anthropologist and musicologist, an ethnomusicologist, as they'd say elsewhere. Music being the feminine element and text being the masculine element. Masculine and feminine here designating millennia-old functions. I'm not saying we're condemned, of course. So there you go, it's no accident that when Siegfried wakes the Valkyrie, it's the first time he's in contact with a woman—he sees someone in armor and believes it's a man.
Solidarity against social Darwinism; the babbling of Mingus and Dolphy 57:05 There, I'll stop. He who is the son of twins. There you go. I'll stop there and thank Marx for allowing us to come back and prowl around the primal scene—not of my personal history, I come back to it and pay tribute again to Nerval, once more, but of our collective history. That's where Marx comes to prowl, in our collective primal scene. And so there's no misunderstanding, I think when you say "this ancient savagery"
57:37 that we forgive, quoting Rimbaud—what matters is that there's the word "savagery" and also the word "forgive." That is, if what we're ultimately talking about, in a word, is the dialectic between ontogenesis and phylogenesis—what we're talking about of certain... And of certainty, but we're right in the thick of it. But precisely, it's not for nothing... Savagery entering through ontogenesis, we agree on that. You're talking about our species, the human species—the specificity is that precisely, in response to savagery, to dereliction, humanity's answer was solidarity, the fact of the newborn's prematurity, which is a characteristic of our species that we don't share with other animals, created solidarity, developed intelligence.
58:17 That's why we can never be harsh enough on fascism or liberalism, which share this in common: being anthropological aberrations relative to our anthropology. Homo economicus, or else the self-fulfilling Nietzschean being, fulfilling itself through violence and chaos, that isn't... And cruelty? And cruelty, that isn't anthropological. It isn't anthropological. It doesn't correspond to reality. It's already a lie from the start. So we obviously cannot... It's the lie of a social class terrified by the rise of the popular classes.
58:51 That's why it happens. There, you give me the chance, as I conclude, to pay tribute to someone with whom I've often had disagreements—on ecological matters, say—but who had the merit, I'm thinking of Patrick Tort, of having fought hard to lock down the theses of social Darwinism. And to have said: no, it's quite the opposite. It's exactly what you just said. What Darwin highlights is the fact that without this solidarity, the human species would not have survived.
59:26 Would not have survived. That in the struggle for survival, not all blows are permitted. No, on the contrary. I mean, for the struggle for life—staying within evolutionary theory—to succeed, one must precisely wager on solidarity with the other and not only on conflict with the other. So, this is a good opportunity to pay tribute to him, but it won't be my final fall. I'd like, as a musical flourish,
59:58 Perhaps it's Oscar Bino—glad to be reminded of him—who inspires me to end with jazz. I mentioned the Rhinemaidens in Wagner. One could hardly be further from jazz than Wagnerian drama, after all. To illustrate what? Babble. We hear, we can see it's speaking, but we don't understand yet. Because, as I said, there's mastery of the channel but not yet of the code. There's exactly the same thing in the unforgettable encores that took place at the end of Mingus's concerts.
1:00:33 When, by the sixth encore, the musicians had had enough and stayed behind in the wings, Mingus and Dolphy—him on bass, Dolphy on flute—would come back on stage and converse, but you'd have thought it was two kids talking. And the flute answering. We witness a conversation. We don't understand a single word in linguistic terms. There you go. There's the jazz equivalent of the babbling song of the Rhinemaidens. I wanted to end on that flourish.
1:01:05 And then, those who were all eager to talk about music, I think, will also be satisfied, while at the same time understanding a little what's at stake, and forgiving you this detour which was really forced upon you. Thanks to Marx, and to the fact that he steered us toward his relation to myth, and so thanks also to Lévi-Strauss here, all the same, for the musical thing—because everything happens as if myth and music had in common the act of entering time in order to exit it.
1:01:35 So, past, present, it doesn't matter here. Perfect. I'll stop the recording, see you very soon. Thank you.
