English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Writing a music one has heard: a project almost always doomed to fail 0:00 Hello, so it's rolling. Hello Dominique. Today we're going to talk about music and literature. Perhaps scents, colors and sounds correspond to one another. I only know the theme you specified to me five minutes ago. And indeed, it's your way of treating it that's particularly interesting. Over to you, Dominique, hello. Hello everyone. Hello Aymeric. Yes, I'm sorry for having given you the theme a bit late.
0:33 But it's because, as I tell my friends, don't repeat this, I'm too much in demand. That sounds very much like narcissistic self-satisfaction. But actually, let me say right away that I grumble, but I'm not complaining. I prefer that, you know, to eating chips in front of my TV with nobody asking me to give a talk. Yes, I was on a Zoom call with Saint-Dizier very late last night.
1:05 And so, as a result, I didn't think to send you the theme as promised. And so, you just summed it up. So you were talking with people from Saint-Dizier. In a way, yes, with the... Hey, you know people from Saint-Dizier, absolutely. One last technical try, try turning off your cell phone. Maybe that's what's creating interference. But it's not... I'll turn it off completely. There, there. We have a little sound problem in the control room, let's say.
1:36 So, I'm going to check that the tablet... We understood we didn't have a control room, but... I'm going to check that the tablet is also off because... Neither control room nor master. No, no. Well, listen, yes. One second, huh. I'm going to completely turn off the tablet too. You never know. Maybe I think it's off when actually... Well, anyway. So... I'm sorry. Me too. Did you hear the robot? Ah, it's the robot that was sorry. I'm sorry.
2:09 They say they can provide us with every service, answer every question. As soon as you need it, I'm sorry, I can't. I'll answer. It's a computer problem. There, there. Is it better now, maybe? It's a little bit better. So... Anyway, I'll announce for the listeners who wouldn't be discouraged by this sound that the next one will be on another computer. So, on your end, there probably won't be a sound problem. So, well, the problem of... Well. Are you looking me in the eyes there?
2:40 Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. So, you can go ahead, dear friend. All right. Because I have to focus on the camera now. Yes. So, you summarized the theme quite well, sorry for these logistical mishaps. It's... By comparing various texts, we're no longer in music, we're in writing, in literature. I don't much like saying literature because you never know if it's in the pejorative sense in which Verlaine uses it when he praises poetry and says at the end, all the rest is literature. Yes, yes.
3:39 To obscure the class struggle, people try to wage the civil war of identities, don't they? Sexual, generic, ethnic. It splits infinitely, that's for sure. Everyone talks about that. Music has often been a victim of this, hasn't it? Sometimes it was good for the composer. I'm thinking of Berlioz, on his European tour, in Budapest. He played his Rákóczi March from The Damnation of Faust, because at one point, Faust and Mephistopheles walk through the Empire, so through Austria-Hungary.
4:12 And he plays the Rákóczi March, that's the thing, how does it go? It was encored, you see? Hungarian nationalism, which was in full awakening, at the time of the awakening of nationalities. There, that can be good sometimes, but it's rare. In general, it's more like brawling, the history of the musical piece. Well, yes, I'm in literature, with various authors, and it happens, and it's not so rare, that there are several pages, well long passages, sometimes several pages, that in the narrative strive to express something that is heard musically.
5:02 I don't know, it can be very short, Chateaubriand says he's in the heather in Brittany, near Combourg in autumn, and there's the famous passage, most famous, in the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, I was going to say the Confessions, the memoirs where he hears the famous thrush singing, it's been said this was a pre-Proustian passage, the thrush, which reminds him of the whole paternal estate, the thrush warbling, and then he hears in the distance the song of a peasant, and he says it immediately made him think that across the whole expanse of the earth, and he was a great traveler, our diplomat Chateaubriand, the song of man is sad.
5:40 Well, there you go, but those are fleeting allusions. No, I'm talking about texts where the author really tries to restore a piece of music, in its nuances or its progression, etc. And generally it's a failure, I mean, it stays literature, which isn't pejorative here, but I mean, if he were talking about a completely different piece of music, it would be more or less the same words, and there are a few exceptions where truly, through the magic of writing, through genuine work on the text, the author manages to restore what cannot—a sonic impression that can only happen when one is listening to pure, instrumental music, which is very rare.
French romanticism and German romanticism 6:26 So, there are several examples, but I'll take one, why not stupidly follow chronological order, the oldest one that comes to mind, because that too is a sign of the times, since—let's not forget the original premise of all our discussion—there was a project on the history of music, and we can rename it musicosophy all we want, it's still musics of history that we're all discussing. I don't see it elsewhere—there are indeed noises, but it's only from human history onward that noises become sounds. It's more a music of history than a history of music, actually.
6:56 Yes, music in the plural moreover, of course. There you go, so, however, it's not the music of histories, in the relativist Lévi-Straussian sense, I maintain that it's music in the plural of history in the singular—small distinctions, which are seeds for some future broadcasts, for our conversations. But yes, the text I'm taking, the first chronologically, I'm not going back to Antiquity.
7:28 You can search in vain, in Antiquity, for a text that restores an entire passage of musical improvisation, on the lute or the cithara. It doesn't exist. There isn't yet the importance granted to the musical thing, an importance that is only granted very late and that begins with the blossoming of romantic modernity. That's rather interesting. You only have to look at the place music occupies in Romanticism with a capital R, that is, not the French kind. I don't want to speak ill of Lamartine and Vigny. It's magnificent, Musset's Nights and La Maison du Berger and perhaps Vigny's masterpiece, isn't it?
8:06 I say this to those who are infatuated with bourgeois feminism, go read one of the most beautiful tributes ever paid to women, which comes from a rather stiff and reactionary aristocrat named Vigny. Really. But well, I'll say French Romanticism. I'll save time with Rimbaud who, with his lapidary, brilliant and precise style, says clearly in his famous letter to Paul Demeny, the letter of the seer: the Romantics saw well in some respects but they are strangled by the old form.
8:38 There you go. France is too marked by classicism. The apex of French literature is, as it happens, the Grand Siècle, plus the 18th century, that is, unless one accepts the novelistic tradition, in which case one must wait for the 19th century for the Balzacs and Stendhals to go touring around Europe. But otherwise, even with Flaubert, perhaps especially with Flaubert, one remains haunted by the success of classical language.
Jean-Paul and the birth of the dream as a literary genre 9:09 Which means that, when it comes to expressing what is utterly new in the romantic sensibility, the Nordics are better placed. The Byrons, that's one instance of what I'm saying, of course, the English, the Germans, the Coleridges, the Hölderlins. And here I'll take Jean Paul, who is surely the summit of prose. In the novel, he is by far the best referenced of the German Romantics. Let me recall, because here too the difference from our French Romanticism matters, and it's important musically, what we're saying, is that Jean Paul is a contemporary, not of Lamartine, well of the years 1830-1840, that is, of the apex of French Romanticism.
9:53 Jean Paul, the text we're going to read, is from 1801, and it's a late text for Jean Paul. Most of his works date from 1791-92. Robespierre is still in Paris, there are still wigs. It's interesting, I mean, he predates Romanticism by almost a generation and a half. I mention this in passing, but this is actually what's called in Germany the Frühromantik, the first flowering of Romanticism, which is by far the deepest, giving us Hölderlin in poetry, Jean Paul in prose, Novalis.
10:24 There you go, as a reminder. So here, to get straight to the text, it's about a dream. Let me mention, for the studies, sorry, from the publisher, of Te Concurrence Emmerich [phon.], at José Corti, but I'm sure you have an affection for a publisher that resembles Delga, courageously, that is, a small publisher who had the courage to publish people rejected by Gallimard, like Bataille, Proust, Gracq.
10:58 At Corti, you'll find a very fine study on Jean Paul, Le Rêve et Jean Paul, by Albert Béguin, B-E-G-U-I-N, who showed that this is well before Nerval, we're a generation earlier. Nerval is the first in French literature to integrate the dream as a poetic and literary genre in its own right. In Rousseau, we go as far as reverie, but not yet as far as the dream, the oneiric, with its pathological and hallucinatory side.
11:30 Whereas here, this is the case with Jean Paul, but here—Nerval isn't even born yet. There you go. So, in these novels, all of a sudden a character has a dream and, in rendering that dream, a new literary genre appears, onirism in literature. And from these dreams, I'm taking one that's in one of Jean Paul's last novels, called Flegeljahre, generally translated into French as L'âge ingrat (the awkward age). Flegel means something like scourge, roughly. Flegeljahre, the awkward age—I won't dwell on the context, but we find recurring themes typical of Jean Paul, in particular the theme of the double.
12:10 And I say this because the title of the passage is called Walt's Dream, Walt being the hero's first name, Walt, like Walt Disney—we see again that America is an enlarged Germany. America is a Germany that swings, or Germany is a Germany that doesn't swing, whichever you prefer, since we're talking about music. So, back to it, Walt's Dream, and Walt has a double named Vult, Walt and Vult—there's a lot of humor in Jean Paul, maybe that's why he's a German Romantic who died neither mad nor by suicide, who lived a long life.
12:42 Balanced—let's not forget that for Hegel, humor and irony are always the final stage of every aesthetic cycle. Thus dramatic poetry—dramatic, not tragic, which includes comedy—dramatic poetry in ancient Greece is, for Hegel, the crowning of every aesthetic form, poetry in general, dramatic poetry in particular, and within dramatic poetry, it's the laughter of Aristophanes that echoes over the ruins of the city once it had been shattered, first by Alexander's armies and then by Rome's.
The individual dream and the three positions of the self 13:18 There. Sorry, just a small objection—I feel we're talking about the Greeks—when you read Herodotus, you find dream accounts, dream accounts that play a key role in the narrative since, as with the Greeks, when you dream, it's a prediction of what you're going to experience the next day. But the use of dream in Romanticism, we should perhaps clarify, is a dream in which the character is entirely caught up in it without distinguishing it from reality—maybe that's the emergence of the dream. No, but above all, in Antiquity, these are emblematic dreams, that is, everyone understands the references.
13:54 An angel appeared to me—you could say the Apocalypse, the vision at Patmos, is a waking reverie, I mean, depending on one's view of the sacred, you could call it a hallucination or, on the contrary, a revelation, it doesn't matter, that's another subject—but these are references that everyone knows, we see armies of angels against demons, these are shared cultural references. What's new is the individual dream with Romanticism. Right, there you go, thank you. That's where it emerges with this other theme of modernity, which is the emergence of the individual.
14:26 After all, it's the cult of the self that somehow defines it, when the preface to Rousseau's Confessions begins by saying, 'I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent,' to depict an individual in all his states, 'and this man will be myself.' I know men, but the self—it's the century of the self that begins. Whereas Pascal, under classicism, says the self is hateful. There you go, that's an important point you're raising. Since you..., I'll recall here a small three-stage progression.
14:56 It's the relation to the self. I won't give a philosophy lecture, but rather, on the contrary, a literature one. Namely, there are three positions as we move from classicism to the modernity linked to the word symbolism. I don't much like that word because none of the great poets—Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé—ever called themselves symbolist. Actually, I might rather say impressionist, it fits better with the importance of sensation and physical impression in them, which takes over from the sentiment characteristic of the Romantics.
15:26 But let's leave that aside. Let's look at the position of the self in each of these three schools. The sequence classicism, Romanticism, symbolism or impressionism. With three quotations. I've already given one. In classicism, one does not speak of the self. The self is hateful. Right? And then you drive the point home. 'What a foolish project he had, to paint himself.' He's talking about Montaigne. That's not done, as they'd say in the housing projects. You don't talk about yourself.
15:56 There you go, the honnête homme—what does he talk about? About whatever was being discussed in the salon he just entered. You mustn't bother people with your personal states of mind. That's the honnête homme. One must express a character, not a particular individual with his here and his now. Because the model at that time was Antiquity. And from Antiquity, I challenge any man, however cultivated, to show me the passage where Homer says Achilles had a beauty mark on his left nostril and that he preferred split peas with bacon to grilled fish.
16:32 We'll never know. No, no, but we're joking. But in Balzac, you're told all that. In the first 50 pages of a Balzac novel, everything on the mantelpiece will be described. Bills, accounts, invoices, I mean. Accounts in the accounting sense, not in Hoffmann's sense. Invoices, a wig, crumpled love letters. You'll know everything about a watch, everything on the mantelpiece. That's how it is. Into this here, this now, we move to a particular individual and the weather it was at that moment.
17:05 That's new, it only appears with Romanticism. So, the self is hateful, I resume my progression. Antithesis, Hugo: 'When I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves.' So I speak of myself as much as I like. No, it's brilliant. The poet, avant-garde of humanity, that's very evolvable, it's magnificent. 'And when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves.' So it's exactly the opposite. It's the antithesis because it's a dialectical progression, as you might suspect, that I'm building here.
17:36 Thesis: the self is hateful. Antithesis: 'but when I speak to you of myself, I speak to you of yourselves.' So I speak just as much about myself, in a more discreet way, as Nerval would say, in Promenades et Souvenirs, at the end, a text he barely finished, one of the few finished texts found in his coat, at his death. And he says, 'not everyone has the opportunity'—sorry, he begins to speak of himself, it took him a long time to speak of himself, Nerval, much more reserved, unlike Hugo, etc.
18:06 And he says, 'Not everyone has the opportunity to tell their own story. And even if everyone did, it wouldn't be a bad thing—each person's experience is the treasure of all.' So it's somewhat the same idea as Hugo's, but in a more discreet way. There you go. There's the antithesis. Synthesis. It's remarkable that Rimbaud, with a wisdom that some, in 80 years, still haven't understood what he meant, says: I is another.
18:36 Yes, one must speak. Identitarianism, in any case, hasn't understood it even today. There you go. One must speak of the I, but not the I of Narcissus. The true self is another—which is what modernity, the unconscious, depth psychology, what Marx will call ideology, express: I believe myself to be a decent man, a philanthropist, while I'm causing 10,000 deaths on the other side of the planet, I mean, through my exploitation. The I is another. Interesting. There you go. Sorry, I derailed your train of thought.
19:07 No, I don't understand my own train of thought, but anyway, there you go. The dream expresses—the dream of an individual whose lived experience, whose irreducibly singular path, we assume we know—there, I was looking for. It's not like the dream of Achilles' visit to the underworld. Well. So, or in the Bible, the angel's appearance to Tobit—it's very different. And it's often toward the end of the novel that the dream appears, a bit like the myth at the end of a Platonic dialogue.
19:43 That's interesting. That's true. And so, like an aporia, moreover, because that's the same thing. Sorry? The myth, in Plato, resolves the aporia. That's what you see arriving to see. Between the sensible and the intelligible, between the temporal and the eternal, for they are almost always myths of the soul, in Plato, as has been noted. But you can't speak of the soul in phenomenal terms, except through myth. There you go. You need only look at the myth of the winged chariot in the Phaedrus, for example. These are myths of the soul.
Reading of Walt's dream: chaos, metamorphoses and the auditory factor 20:13 Well. Let's not dwell on it. But, I'm not going to read the whole dream, there are passages. I'll situate it first. I'll take it first from the beginning. 'I can scarcely still tell what was, and where, the beginning of my dream.' You see right away the true onirism. This isn't a thought-out dream. Supposedly, 'I dreamed this' and in fact the dream is so obvious—I think of that Bergman film, I believe it's Wild Strawberries, where a hero suddenly sees—he dreams that a coffin is picked up and when they open the coffin, it's himself.
20:44 That's too contrived. Dreams are much more complex. The dream symbolizes, disguises. There's not enough condensation and displacement, as Paul [Freud] would say. Nothing can be hidden from you. You're taking the words right out of my mouth, and I'll say the dream is much more allusive, elliptical in the processes you mention—condensation, displacement, substitution. There, it's not that blunt. Whereas here: 'I can scarcely still tell what was, and where, the beginning of my dream. Like chaos, the invisible world wanted to give birth to all things together.'
21:15 So it's so confused at the start that nothing can be said yet. But already, we're not far from music. I'm the one doing the mediation here. I admit that's rare for me—I don't like interpreting. I do interpret. But because I'm sure of what follows. It's intertextual interpretation, so it's not subjective. Namely, 'the invisible world wanted to give birth to all things together.' There's no image, but it's dynamic. We're already in music. In music, we close our eyes and hear it. But on the other hand, there's movement.
21:45 There. 'Figures were ceaselessly being born. Flowers became trees.' Now it starts to be figurative. 'Flowers became trees, then turned into columns of clouds, and at their summits grew flowers and faces.' So you see, it moves very fast. This metamorphism. Then, notice the discontinuity. 'Then I saw a vast, deserted sea in which only the world was swimming.' An extraordinary sentence—'in which only the world was swimming.' You see, it's contradictory. 'Only' is reductive. And there, nothing but the world.
22:15 'A deserted sea in which only the world was swimming'—colon—'a small grey and speckled egg that the waves tossed about. Of all things in this dream, I was told the name, but I don't know by whom.' And there, it begins. What is omnipresent in this dream is the auditory factor. That's why it's relevant to our conversations. We'll see that it's auditory occurrences in the dream that will determine all the articulations of the dream, these apparently unexpected shifts.
22:46 In fact, it's always a sonic event that articulates the different parts of the dream. Of all things in this dream, I was told the name — that reminds us here of the deep relationship between music and speech, which each time presupposes the world of hearing. I do mean speech, not discourse or language in general. Speech, which is language in act. So the language one hears and not merely reads. Of all things in this dream, I was told the name, but I don't know by whom.
23:20 Then, a river crossed to the sea, carrying the corpse of Venus. I won't linger, there are strange visions like that. Well, I'll skip ahead. There's a storm rising over the sea. And then a little disturbing phenomenon begins to appear. So I'll pick up the text from the last sentence of the paragraph I skipped. And on the whole horizon one saw, impassive, towers rising up crowned with gleaming lightning rods. The lightning rod was ultra new at the time.
23:52 Benjamin Franklin had just invented it. It was even Robespierre who had pleaded for the lightning rod. Absolutely. Exactly. There you go. Which shows, finally, I'm joking, but nevertheless, however modern he may be, Robespierre remains an old Gaul, he's afraid the sky will fall on his head. With all due respect. In any case, the other one who sees the corpse of Venus, he wasn't so Freudian in his time before Freud. No, no, but in Jean-Paul's dream, this was studied by Albert Béguin among others, streams of libido, of reference, but streams with that near-shamelessness which is unique among the German Romantics like that.
24:34 Well, let's move on. Actually, no, it will come back, so don't worry. So, I repeat, on the whole horizon one saw, impassive, towers rising up crowned with gleaming lightning rods, until the moment when there reappeared monstrous clouds having the shape of ferocious animals which began to devour the sky. There, there's a slightly disturbing side. And here, watch out, I then heard a sigh — again a sound, and here it's a sigh — I then heard a sigh, and everything had vanished. Here it's clear that it's a difference in the incidental music that orders all the other differences.
The evil enemy, the echo and the sound never heard 25:09 I then heard a sigh, everything had vanished. Here I'm doing analysis, not interpretation. I no longer saw anything but a sea — so again the marine element — polished, smooth, calm, from which there arose, without producing a single wave, like light through glass. Arose what? And this is underlined, well, in italics, the evil enemy, feminine. We don't know whom she's speaking of, it doesn't matter, in the dream. Something hostile.
25:39 That too is very dreamlike. The evil enemy. Since eternity, she says, the water has been flat as oil, which precisely is a presage of great storms. I must, it is said, tell you the oldest of all Märchen. And there the translator left the German word. The tale. Yes, we don't know when you speak the German of the street today. Sorry, you're not a German of the street. But my German ex-wife, when I said to her — because she has the best method — that we would take a philosophical term, from Hegel and so on, you ask a German off the street, what does this word mean?
26:14 All right? You ask what Erscheinung is, the word we translate as phenomenon in philosophy. They don't tell you about Kant. No, the man in the street says, I'm not a ghost, an apparition. It's not the appearance. He says the apparition. Well, so there I ask my wife Erscheinung, she tells me, it's a tale, you too. But then, that makes what follows inexplicable. Sorry? Damn, in fact, first there's an astral-origin sea, as one hears in Schumann.
26:45 Well, there you go. The tale, Märchen, is the little story, but it's not really long, so that's fine. Yes, it's a little tale, but even so, there's something more surprising. It's one thing, in any case, a tale is one thing, it's a cliché. Now here, I must, it is said, tell you the oldest of all Märchen. But have you already passed? Implied: are you dead? Are you entitled to the revelations that the dead can have? That's how he interprets it, I don't know what he says afterward. Her appearance was strange. She was clothed in green waves and white foam, small fins stirred on her back, her face was sea-grey.
27:19 And yet young, and entirely traversed by shifting colors that seemed to fight one another. Without waiting for my answer, the enemy continued. And how can you translate Märchen as 'tale'? Once upon a time, there was once an eternal Märchen, old, grey, deaf, blind. And often it was overcome with regret. Over there, in the far-off depths of the last corner of the universe, it still exists.
27:49 And sometimes God goes to it to see whether it still floats and whether it still feels regret. Have you passed? Then look at the animals on the shore. All along... The disturbing side returns as in a nightmare. All along the polished sea, the shore was covered with ferocious animals, lying down, asleep, but speaking in their sleep, telling one another of a cruel hunger and a bloodthirsty thirst from the most ancient times. One sees a very disturbing side.
28:21 Before I could answer, the enemy said to me, 'Listen to this ancient echo.' There, there's a reflection on sound. Its ancient echo. She speaks of the roaring of the monsters. Listen to this ancient echo. No being has yet heard the sound that it repeats. As if the sound were the thing in itself, and what we perceive is only the echo. No being has yet heard the sound it repeats. We hear the echo. But not the sound.
28:51 A very beautiful metaphor for the thing in itself. But which here, as in Schopenhauer, happens to be music, as it happens. Which makes Wagner say, somewhere, when he's still under Schopenhauer's influence, that art in general expresses the Idea. That's an idea found in Hegel too. It's a representation of the Idea, for Hegel. Except that music is not a representation, it is directly the Idea. So we're a bit in that outlook.
29:22 That's the theme. As for the importance of music in this current, German Romanticism. I'm returning to very precise things, to this incredible passage. Listen to this ancient echo. No being has yet heard the sound it repeats. But when one day the echo falls silent, time will have passed. Eternity will return and will bring the sound. As soon as everything is truly silent, I will hear the mute being.
29:54 I will hear the mute being. Every line is surprising in this text. One can hear the mute. As soon as everything is silent, I will hear the mute being. And even the first mute being who tells itself the oldest of Märchen. But it is what it says. It is what it says. There, I'll skip ahead to the middle. All of a sudden, I'll just point out the transition to show that it's still a sound that will...
30:30 There you go. 'But you have not passed, madman.' She realizes he is not dead and has not heard all her secrets. And before I could reply, those fins had turned into two great pointed wings which struck me with undeserved, furious blows. Everything vanished, so again a change in the visual. Everything vanished, watch out, and only the beautiful harmony still sang. There is always a sound that remains and that commands everything. It's really extraordinary. It's like the soundtrack today.
31:00 The soundtrack is what decides the dynamics throughout the whole dream, throughout the whole literary narrative. So, everything vanished, only the beautiful harmony still sang. It seemed to me that I was falling into the winged waves of a sea as deep as the clouds. With the speed of a shooting star, I cut through its desert immense as worlds, but I could not pass through its glass surface. I remained suspended in the dark water and looked through the wall, which extends the metaphor of the glass.
31:30 The wall. I then saw — there's a new passage that sets the stage that will last until the end. I then saw, on the other side, implying on the other side of the glass wall, on the other side, near or far, I don't know, stretching out. And there, again in italics, the true country. So, the opposite of the evil enemy, it's a positive factor. The true country. A kind of dreamlike Eldorado. Widely open, lit with twilight glimmers.
32:01 It's almost what Hölderlin recalls, Hesperia, twilight. The Occident, Hesperus, I don't know, it's that typical fantasy of the West which is decline, twilight. A century later, Wagner would write Twilight of the Gods. The sun seemed to play like a mayfly in its own rays. Indeed, since if the sun shone in a superior way, we wouldn't be in twilight.
32:31 For it to be twilight, its rays must be declining. The sun seemed to play like a mayfly in its own rays and the rays ceased to dart. Only, listen carefully, only the light sounds of the true country still floated in my ears. You see, I keep insisting each time on the continuity of this text. It's confused, it's a dream, it doesn't matter if we don't understand all the allusions he makes, the material is very rich, even abundant. What interests us here is the continuity of the sonic thing and its decisive role in what one might call, not the pitch, but the diegesis of the dream.
33:12 Its dramatic progression, so to speak. Only the light sounds of the true country still floated in my ears. Little clouds of golden green — one has the impression that every time the visual returns, it's almost like an illustration of the preceding sound. So what are these light sounds? How is that translated visually? Little clouds of golden green poured over the country a warm rain, and a fluid light dripped, like glass falling drop by drop.
French humor against German oneirism 33:43 It has a staggering libidinal charge. And a fluid light dripped, overflowing from the corollas of the roses and the lilies. It's the role played by the flower, by the scent in roses in general. Well. Now, we might note, as the English say that the antidote to fascism in England was humor, and I believe likewise that the antidote to German Romanticism in France was humor, because there, in French salons, I think it wouldn't have gone over.
34:15 Well, it did... It's the whole business of Wagner's Venusberg, the mountain of Venus, well, it made people laugh. It's terrible. But I see you're aware of it. We shouldn't repeat it too much, it's huge, really. At the Paris Opera, the one with the most resonance in the whole world, in the world of culture at the time, he wanted, instead of calling his opera Tannhäuser, Knight Tannhäuser, to call it 'The Mount of Venus.' They had to... The Mount of Venus means something very concrete too.
34:46 They said, Mr. Wagner, I beg you, you're in Paris, I beg you, there will be nothing but bursts of laughter, you see. Really? We're going to, we're going to. Yes, there might be more of an audience than expected, but still. I admit, I admit, but perhaps not with the reactions Wagner would have expected. Not quite that. It became schoolboy hilarity, I don't know. Yes, that's it, there you go. Well. No, but it's because the Germans were visibly preserved from all worldliness, to leave free rein to the imagination.
35:20 That's why it's interesting, obviously, to read this, and we don't read Jean-Paul enough — and I should clarify this isn't Jean-Paul Sartre but the writer Jean-Paul, there you go. Yes, in fact his real name was Friedrich Richter. What's interesting is that he took the pen name Jean-Paul as a tribute to Rousseau. Exactly, he didn't dare say Jean-Jacques, so he had himself called Jean-Paul as homage to Rousseau. Interesting, by the way. Yes, right away. Well.
35:50 So, I'm going back to this passage overflowing with sensuality. Yes, you were talking about humor, if I may pick up on what you just said, I'm bouncing off it. What you just said could serve as an introduction to a book whose appearance I would wish for, if anyone wants to take it on. I wonder whether your friend Francis Combes couldn't take it on, even if he has other concerns these days. Namely, a book that would revisit the pairing Nerval-Heine. Two end-of-cycle figures of Romanticism.
36:20 That is to say, where humor plays a crucial role. Heine, who is hated by the other Germans precisely because of his humor. And as it happens he's the Jew of the group, right, the mockery. But often his humor is true humor, not irony — that is, not laughter directed against the other, but self-mockery. Right? Or as in Nerval, who begins Sylvie, to take his best-known text, with this sentence: 'I appeared every evening in the front boxes of a theater in full suitor's attire.'
36:53 where we immediately see the self-mockery, and that Romanticism has gone out of fashion. It's funny — 'in full suitor's attire.' Well. So, there you have it, I'm proposing a study. Heine was Nerval's best friend in Paris, and vice versa. Right? Heine, the most French of German poets, Nerval, the most German of French poets — there's material for a book. I'll close my parenthesis, but it was inspired by your remark about the antidote we have in France against the deadly side of German dream-imagery, which is humor.
The two dawns: a crescendo contemporary with the Ninth 37:27 There you go. Now, precisely, when you say Jean-Paul in Germany, for those who know him, he is characterized by the fact that he's one of the rare German Romantics who plays with humor. Well before Heine — Heine is late, waning Romanticism, Jean-Paul, we're at the peak of Romanticism. There you go. So, I'll go back to the text. We're still at a warm rain and fluid light overflowing from the corollas, the roses and the lilies. A ray coming from a drop of dew pierced through to me.
37:57 Because up until then, he sees all this through the glass, as if he weren't part of it. A ray coming from a drop of dew pierced through to me across the dark sea and plunged its burning sting into my heart. I won't dwell on the erotic connotations, again, sting. Plunged its burning sting into my heart, which began to drink there. But the music refreshed it and kept it from withering.
38:31 So, so as not to be scorched, set ablaze by this ray of light, music comes to water it, as one says in German, 'laben,' and refresh it. Isn't that so? Incredible text. I cried out, it's raining, in the dream, it's raining burning tears of joy over there. I'll skip some passages. Everything sleeps in the true country, I said, but love dreams.
39:01 A morning star appeared, placed a kiss on a white rosebud, and bloomed with it. For now, there's no more sonic connotation. A zephyr laid its lips on the top of an oak tree. A sound. As soon as the landscape is expressed, I mean, we very quickly arrive at the auditory, which no longer shows but makes heard. A sound lighter than all sounds came and kissed a may-flower. How can a sound kiss a flower?
39:31 One understands why the Surrealists rehabilitated authors like this. A sound lighter than a may-flower came and kissed a may-flower in the little bell. Again a sonic connotation. Straightened up sharply. Suddenly, in the sky, a little star was seen springing forth, shooting sharp flashes of lightning. If we get lost, it doesn't matter. It's the dream. It jumps from one thing to another. It was called Dawn, and at that instant, the sea where I was opened as if with pleasure.
40:03 In place of the twilit plain, I saw before me a wide, motionless brightness. But it folded back up. The twilit country awoke and everything was transformed, for the flowers, the stars, the sounds, the doves were nothing other than sleeping children. So the characters, as humans, begin to appear. I'll skip that whole passage and get to the densest musical sequence, which ends the whole dream like a fabulous crescendo. Here I take up a musical notion. I announce it in advance. But facing the dawn — no one will guess what follows — but facing the dawn, in the east, facing the dawn, there rose a dawn.
40:47 I know of no other text where two dawns rise at the same time on two opposite cardinal points. But facing the dawn, there rose a dawn. Both produced a murmur growing more and more exalting from moment to moment. I ask here that we remember we're contemporaries of the Ninth Symphony. Good lord! Of the return of the chorus. But it's amazing how one hears it. We talked about this in another conversation together, where I had said there was a kind of... that the emergence of the voice from the depths of a nocturnal instrumental passage.
41:20 The instruments, I mean, it's pure music, it's pure sound. We see nothing, we hear, we close our eyes, we hear them. And then all of a sudden, the voice arises, as if someone had suddenly appeared in the middle of something. And here we witness the same process. So I'll take it up again and continue. But facing the dawn there rose a dawn. Both produced murmurs, growing more and more exalting from moment to moment, like two choirs — CH, of course — facing each other, with sounds instead of colors, as if mysterious beings beyond the earth had raised their song of joy.
41:59 Joy — the Ode to Joy, indeed, I mean, I'm inventing nothing. So when I seem to be interpreting, it's because I'm certain of what follows and of the intertextuality. It's really the analysis of the text. As if mysterious beings beyond the earth — I think, in the Ninth, when the choir says thunders — the crescendo is extraordinary, I don't know, and each chord lit up one more violent than the last.
42:37 Two suns were about to rise in the resounding morning. But now, at the very instant — you see, the progression, it's musical — but now, at the very instant when they were about to appear, the songs weakened, decrescendo. And then there was silence everywhere. Love rose in the east, Psyche in the west. We find again the couple Eros and Psyche. Love rose in the east, Psyche in the west, they met at the zenith.
43:07 The two suns. Thank you, there's a stain. Ah yes, the two suns rose. Sorry, but I had a flood, the paper is a bit crumpled sometimes. The two suns rose. These were nothing but, again, two sounds. We don't leave the versions behind. Psyche, Eros, all that, these are phenomenal representations. Of what? Of sounds. So, love rose in the east, I'll go back a bit and continue. Psyche in the west, they met at the zenith.
43:39 The two suns rose. These were nothing but two sounds against a background of silence, so, two very soft sounds, two sounds that died and were reborn together, you and I. Two syllables, sacred, but terrible, drawn perhaps from the deepest depth, from the heart, from the ageless heart this time, and from eternity. As if God had said the first word to himself and answered himself with the second. The mortal could not hear them without dying. So, you were right about Rimbaud earlier.
44:12 Ah no, it wasn't you. It was Pierre-Alain yesterday who had made a connection with — it wasn't this text — with the genius of Rimbaud when... It was somewhat like when you would die. So, the mortal could not hear them without dying. So somehow, when you're right, the thing in itself, one cannot know it except by dying. That's Plato, the soul, there. In short, the mortal could not hear them without dying. I fell asleep in a deeper sleep, and yet drunk with sleep and death.
44:42 It seemed to me that the perfume of a paradise crossing the air enveloped and poisoned me. Then, suddenly, I found myself again, so this is the end, I'll read it to the end, on the shore where my dream had begun. The evil enemy rose again from the waves. So, she always comes out of the sea, with her fins. From the waves, but she trembled like jelly and murmured with an anguished gesture and, sorry, and pointed with an anguished gesture at the sea of Airel, saying these words: "Eternity has passed, the storm is coming, the sea is stirring."
Romantic irony and the Hegelian idea that externalizes itself 45:12 I looked and I saw that the immensity was fermenting, forming countless hills, and a hurricane rose to the sky. Yet, over there, on the horizon, behind the battlements, a gentle dawn light was rising. But I awoke. Yes. There's also that famous romantic irony that Schlegel speaks of. Of course. There's also this form of underlying humor in the end. Ah yes, it's a bit less present.
45:43 But then, in his novels, it's downright sardonic sometimes. That's what he wanted, certainly. He was perfectly right to see the curative, downright therapeutic side of taking humorous distance. I believe that without humor, Kafka would have hanged himself or had a psychotic derailment. You see the Hegel texts on Solger.
46:15 Solger. There you go, there we're really… I think that… it's… Yes, because he has… he has a derision toward Solger. He contradicts him, but somewhere he says seriously, this is serious. There you go, yes, that's it, exactly. It's this eminently dialectical aspect of Solger. Absolutely. And since you're on this topic, a contemporary of Hegel, of Solger and the others, I'm thinking of Friedrich Schlegel. Or is it him or Tieck, I'm a bit hesitant, I'll check.
46:47 Aphorisms, like novels too, often are not made for long, sustained works, that's fairly rare. But Novalis, it's Pollen, in the plural. They're sentences, aphorisms, jottings. Water is a wet flame, full stop, then we move on to something else. But Tieck, in one of these jottings, says this — Tieck or Friedrich Schlegel, I'll check. An Idea, with a capital I, so a neo-Platonism, an idea is a concept pushed to the point of irony.
47:19 Ah yes, yes, that's it. Yes, it's starting from the concept of Socratic irony. We're right in Solger territory here. An Idea is arrived at by pushing to the point of irony. Irony, perfection, in the sense of completion — the Idea, its maximum of truth and reality. It's often the so-called materialist critics of Hegel who fail to understand that the Idea is a synthesis, actually a synthesis of matter. The materialism-idealism paradox explodes from this point of view. Since you're on this, I mean, I keep hammering it, don't forget that for Hegel, the very nature of the Idea is to externalize itself.
47:55 It's not staying an idea. It's not remaining interior. The very nature of the Idea is to express — his fascination with aesthetics, which is nonetheless his longest work. In some sense, spirit is not spirit if it doesn't become nature, history. One could say yes, yes, but the Idea, in itself, without which there would be nothing. It's true that without the acorn, there would be no oak. But good heavens, have you ever taken a nap in the shade of an acorn, if I may put it that way.
48:28 Really though. Come on, let's take a linden tree instead, to make it less sour. But I mean, the great lindens that cast their shade in the little squares of old German towns, I mean. Unter den Linden. There you go, that's it. Unter den Linden, the one in the second act of the Meistersinger, in that street where you get the impression nothing serious, or bad, or violent has ever happened, and in which a general saloon brawl breaks out where everyone punches everyone else in the face, like a metonymy of German history.
49:00 That oak, I mean, or that linden, it's not going to produce a linden seed. Well, in the same way, the Idea that is only the Idea, that has not externalized itself, is not the Idea. He goes so far as to say in the Philosophy of Right that the concept that is only the concept is not the concept. So there's good reason to insist on this point, because it's a way for him to dodge the censorship that was always lurking — whether this gentleman here, who talks a bit too often about French ideas, you know, about the Revolution and the Enlightenment, isn't pushing our young people toward atheism.
Censorship and the young Hegel's letter to Schelling 49:41 Censorship, that was really it, what it was watching for above all. The rest, it got a bit lost in — the subject, the predicate, those sorts of things, it was a bit drowned in that. And you know well, since it's one of your authors, that Jacques D'Hondt said that a part, maybe not all, but a large part of the proverbial obscurity of the Hegelian text would be due to the fact that he was sowing confusion for the censors. Yes, absolutely. Ah well, there he opposes Losurdo, because Losurdo wrote a book on self-censorship and compromise in Kant's thought. And on the contrary, he says that for Hegel, no, it's not the same phenomenon at all. He is particularly... well anyway, it's...
50:11 ...that Hegel bangs on the table. Yes, that's it. Compared to Kant, the structure is certainly... No, but there are texts that confirm both. I mean, because for example, in Hegel's correspondence — we're straying a bit from music — but with Schelling, when the three of them were twenty, Hegel is pre-Marxian, but you have to have — it's staggering — when he says religion and politics agreed like thieves at a fair. The one, religion, through religion, delivering the discourse that power demanded.
50:44 Colon: enslavement. It's simple, Paul. Yes, indeed. To find texts like that... For the Spirit of Christianity, certainly. It's exactly the Feuerbach of it. I'll give another one here because you have to read it to believe it. He speaks of the revolution that the Kantian philosophy will surely bring in ideas. You see how much it's like the famous phrase of Schelling, who wrote to him just before, that Kant is the Moses of our nation, leading us toward the Promised Land.
51:21 You see, he's a kind of titan for them. "The consequences," says Hegel in a letter to Schelling, 1792, "the consequences that will follow from this will plunge many people into astonishment." One will feel dizzy before this supreme height of all philosophy by which man is raised so high. We're exactly the opposite of today's dominant ideology, with transgenderism and nature being placed above man. Man is raised so high. But why has it taken so long to further elevate the dignity of man?
51:54 That's a real question. Why, for 10,000 years — not only at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, but why did we have to wait for the French Revolution for the dignity of man to finally be proclaimed alive? It's extraordinary. It's like an article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. So that it places man in the equal order of all spirits. That's even more impious. It means man is like the angels and the spirits. He is a sacred being.
52:25 I believe no sign of the times is better than this one: that humanity is represented as worthy of esteem in itself. It's proof that the halo which surrounded the heads of oppressors and the gods of the earth — here we get to it — this halo is disappearing. This aura is disappearing. The philosophers demonstrate this dignity. The peoples will learn to feel it, and they will not content themselves with demanding their rights, abased in the dust, but they will reclaim them. It's exactly the Feuerbachian recovery, where men must recover — they will reappropriate them.
53:06 "Religion and politics agreed like thieves at a fair, the first, religion, teaching what despotism wanted" — colon — "contempt for the human species." Those are texts... What an era! Show the book, we need to see the... I don't know if we can see it. Hegel, Correspondance, the Tel collection at Gallimard, in two volumes, there you go, it's the reissue of an old three-volume correspondence.
53:37 And I can say it, it's... Since if we want the reference, in case someone is skeptical and says, "it's not possible that Hegel said that," so I'm giving the reference. No, no, that's not it, it's so everyone can find it. Page 28-29, right, letter of April 16, 1795 — I said '92, I was off by three years, there you go. So Mozart was writing... Così fan tutte, I mean. It's funny, all the same. Well. We're... we're very much in the real world, actually.
From sentiment to sensation: Rimbaud as musician 54:08 Well yes, there you go. So, another text, I'm taking then... So, I'm moving on to Proust now. So me, that you still have... What we have to conclude, I think, is that what's most incredible in terms of symptoms is precisely the appearance of sound as an actor, in fact. In any case, that's what's totally new. It's... completely. What you call symbolism, in fact, as opposed to simple romanticism, is that sensation takes priority over feeling.
54:38 Well, in any case... bravo, bravo. It arrives in fact... And where impression comes in? There you go, that's it. Yes, or impression, there you go, that's it. It's the body that is present, and not only the heart. Feeling — sensation presupposes the body. I mean, when you read Rimbaud's "Aube," it's almost nothing but tactile, sensory impressions. "Each flower evaporates like a censer." There, I come back to Baudelaire, it's the smell of incense.
55:08 I mean, a smell is not a feeling. And it's not the Baudelairean beauty either, enthroned in the azure like an incomprehensible sphinx — it's also the musical body, that is, in its... There you go. ...dialectical, moving, there you go, hence music. So, since you're there, you're prompting me to make some convergent reminders, so to speak, that connect directly with the backbone of our conversations, namely music.
55:39 It's the importance this has in Rimbaud. We don't talk about it enough. In Rimbaud, we mainly think of images — "garish redskins had taken them as targets, having nailed them naked to colored posts." There's such visual richness that we forget several things. First, when he was in Ethiopia. In short, when he no longer speaks of any of this. For him, it's the past. And it's reported by a traveler who found himself stuck with him because of the rainy season, in Harar, and who kept wanting to bring up his past as a writer.
56:16 Rimbaud, in rather a bad mood, kept telling him all that was over, he'd given it up. And since he's stuck there, at one point Rimbaud sits down at the table very quickly and says, yes, in Paris I knew all those characters. I met painters, actors, poets, then he fell silent, looking into the distance, and said, but not a single musician. First of all — and in a text called "Barbare," in the Illuminations, which is a kind of prolonged ecstasy, an illumination given back — "the fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds" — here, for now, there's no sound — "the fires in the rain of the wind of diamonds thrown by the earth's heart eternally carbonized for us, O world."
57:05 And there, the tears, the sweats, the hair — so it's still fairly much, a bit like in Jean Paul's dream, scattered visual notations like that — and music: "the turning of chasms and the clash of icebergs against the stars." Music, colon: "the turning of chasms and the clash of icebergs against the stars." And third reference, in Rimbaud's "Mémoire": "I am an inventor far more deserving than all those who came before me — a musician, even."
57:38 There you go, this dimension, you're right to bring it up — even in Baudelaire it's not pushed to that extreme. It's an aesthetic in the proper sense, that is, simply — saying of the world, or a taste, it's a relationship to the world that has changed, in fact. Absolutely, and a relationship to the world we can develop, because right now we're rather far from our musical subject, but we're getting back into it. I don't know if you remember I once said — is it a paranoid effect of mine?
58:08 When you look for excess meaning, you're not far from paranoia, in a way. And I was wondering, I said to myself, was it a coincidence that literary modernity appeared, not in France, nor in Germany, but — you guess what's coming — at the border of the two, that is, in France and Germany, on the Île Saint-Pierre, in Switzerland. Ah, yes, yes, sorry, yes, yes, that's fine. Yes, absolutely. Hello. I'm coming. I'm the postman, sorry. Ah, okay, I'll pause.
58:40 Yes, I don't know, let's resume, because we had a visit from Hermes, messenger of the gods. Absolutely, yes, yes, with wings you never know whether they're on his feet or his backside. But anyway, it's a story. Hermes, whom I was speaking about the day before yesterday in my weekly talk for our association, in my Wednesday evening Zoom, because I was talking about the Rhinegold, and people absolutely demanded that I explain the whole Ring, because from time to time I make little allusions, and people say, we want the whole story.
59:12 You don't know what's in store for you. It's a bit heavy going. And I spoke about the character of Loge, who is exactly the German Hermes. Germanic — he was the messenger of the gods, and at the same time cunning. Of merchants, of thieves, yes, that's it. Of merchants, of thieves. Yes, yes. They're merchants. Every time you arrive somewhere touristy and it's raining, and you say, honestly, we're out of luck with our vacation, they always give you the same answer. Haven't you noticed?
59:42 "Ah, that's odd, yesterday it was still nice out." "You're the one who brought the rain." They're liars. Every time, it's always nice weather, except the day you arrive. Bad luck. Yes, it's serious. "And tomorrow it'll clear up." There you go, but remember, this truck always says the weather is nice. Or again. Anyway. So, now we move on to... What did I say? To Proust. That's it. So there, the context might be a bit more familiar to those who know his work.
Swann at the concert at the Duchesse de Guermantes's 1:00:13 It's an excerpt from Swann's Way — from "Swann in Love," that is, the only part of the Search where it's not the narrator speaking in the first person, but where the hero Swann is spoken of in the third person, as in a novel by Flaubert or Balzac, etc. And it's near the end. Toward the end of "Swann in Love," Swann has understood — even though he long resisted wanting to understand it — that he has lost Odette. I'll go quickly. He has lost Odette, she doesn't love him anymore, she tells him things, she lies to him.
1:00:47 There. And there, he finds himself stuck at an evening party at the Duchesse de Guermantes's, an evening that is almost unbearable, he says, because he can't leave the party since some musicians have started playing. A marvelous era — indeed marvelous eras — marvelous milieu, where there was no hi-fi system or speakers, but where there were flesh-and-blood musicians paid by your hosts to give you a concert during the evening. Isn't that right? And generally, they didn't hire the worst ones.
1:01:18 So there's a pianist and a violinist playing a sonata for piano and violin. We're in the instrumental genre, and in the typical salon genre — the sonata, small forces. And so, out of courtesy, he can't leave, slam doors, disturb people. And so he finds himself stuck there in the middle of these people, and that's what's unbearable to him — he can't talk about his love, because it would be taken for childishness, well, "at your age, my poor Swann, stop it, your Odette is a silly little thing."
1:01:51 We all know that, I mean, we're alone with everything we love, as Novalis says somewhere. "But the concert resumed and Swann understood that he could not leave before the end of this new number on the program. He suffered at remaining shut in among these people whose stupidity and absurdities struck him all the more painfully since, ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest in it, of doing anything but smile at it as a piece of childishness or deplore it as a piece of madness, they made it appear to him in the guise of a subjective state which existed for him alone, whose reality nothing external confirmed."
1:02:34 A little echo of the French humor I was talking about earlier. Listen to these deathly things, watch them for yourselves, if we're among Gauls, among the French, honestly — I'm exaggerating a bit, but there's something of that too. It's also a way of protecting oneself, a form of security. Well. "He suffered above all, and to such a degree that even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry out" — so we're far from gratifying music — "to prolong his exile in this place where Odette would never come, where no one, nothing, knew her, and from which she was entirely absent."
1:03:07 New paragraph. "But suddenly it was as though she had come in. And this apparition was so heart-rending a suffering to him that he had to put his hand to his heart." It's that the violin had risen to high notes, and here begins — not a discourse about music, but music itself speaking. And there are few authors who know how to make it speak over a long stretch. "It's that the violin had risen to high notes, where it remained as though waiting."
1:03:37 "A wait that prolonged itself without its ceasing to hold them, in the exaltation with which it already glimpsed the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to try to hold out until its arrival, to welcome it before expiring, to keep open a moment longer, with the last of its strength, the path through which it might pass, as one holds open a door that would otherwise fall shut. And before Swann had time to understand, and to say to himself, 'It is the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata — let us not listen!'"
1:04:12 "'It's the little phrase from Vinteuil's sonata — let us not listen!' — all his memories of the time when Odette was in love with him, and which he had until that day managed to keep invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden ray of the lost sunlight of love which he believed had returned, thanks to the music — which he believed had returned — awoke, and on the wing rose again to sing wildly to him, without pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness."
Vinteuil, an ideal type; pleasure against puritanism 1:04:49 This is only the beginning of the text, sorry, but it's a marvel. And so what's interesting is that — yes, yes, small clarification for the listener — the Vinteuil sonata, it's within the novel, is an imaginary musician, just as when he invents Bergotte, who is the writer. It's an ideal type, in fact, of Saint-Saëns — it's an ideal type, I say that to point out how everyone has tried to guess: is it Fauré, is it Franck, is it Debussy, is it Saint-Saëns? Well, people have looked everywhere, it's made up of all of that. I'd say why, at times, it's obviously Fauré, because of the sensuality of the music — Fauré, Debussy, it's the mystery of Fauré, it's the charm, all the same, for example. So there, these are idle questions, it could even be Brahms. I had a friend, whom you knew well, who wrote her master's thesis in literature on a parallel between the narrator's journey in the Search — in the whole Search.
1:05:59 An initiatory journey, so to speak, from origins to the fulfillment of attachment to the mother, little Marcel, up to the War of 1914, and she showed that it was a way of passing musically from the white sonata, Vinteuil's, to the red septet — that suddenly history bursts in at the end, and no longer just the landscape of Combray. There were already the vowels taking on — from Rimbaud, taking on colors — well now here they are, because the "I" is linked to blood and to crimson, "spat blood, laughter of beautiful lips" — during the vowels that turn into anger or penitent drunkenness. What a genius that kid was, all the same. So there, Vinteuil's sonata — I also think of Brahms, because there are languors in Brahms, those moanings that are so typical, and I think you were just speaking a moment ago about humor, which has spared us from the catastrophic side of the slaughter, between madness and suicide, or both — see Nerval.
1:07:09 ...of romanticism in Germany — in Nerval here at home, he'll be a representative of it — but there's another, very French way of protecting oneself against the deathly side, the most dangerous side of romanticism, and it shows romanticism's seriousness, incidentally — it's pleasure. It's that German romanticism is the romanticism of a Protestant country — we mustn't forget this, at a time when Protestant cultures dominate the planet and impose on us, you see, a reactionary version of ecology — because there can of course be a progressive version, a planned, democratic control of resources, etc., that's something else — but here it's not that at all, they say "you consume too much," that's why we go to — well there, resources are finite, they're under embargo, so naturally they ask themselves the question. I thought being modern was precisely, as Koyré says in a famous study on Galileo, going "from the closed world to the infinite universe," and now suddenly we're going back to a world, to a finite world.
1:08:19 Well, there you go, so I note that we are victims — we are constantly under the scourge, and I do mean scourge, because it's much more violent than one might think, this puritanical discourse that keeps coming to punish, every time — it's not the letting-go of pleasure. There you go — there's a loose connection, excuse me, there — maybe that explains the Larsen effect [feedback]. The Larsen effect is a connection issue — can you hear me? Yes, yes, we can't see you anymore, but there's a problem. There you go, so I'll continue, because this is only the introduction — instead of abstract expressions, here he digs into the analysis of why music produces this effect more than any other form of expression — I'll give the headings first — instead of abstract expressions, the ones that voluntary memory finds, which is not the case here — here he was taken by surprise, even instead of abstract expressions.
Involuntary memory: happiness relived in three notes 1:09:29 In the style, "time when I was happy, time when I was loved," which he had often uttered up to that point without suffering too much, because his mind had enclosed within it only supposed extracts of the past which retained nothing of it, he now rediscovered, understood beneath the sonata, everything that had fixed forever the specific and volatile essence of that lost happiness. He saw again the snowy, curled petal of the chrysanthemum that she had thrown to him in his carriage, which he had kept pressed against his lips; the address embossed on the gilded house on the letter where he had read "my hand trembles so as I write to you" — there we come back to personal memories, it's not collective memory the way dreams are — the way her brows had drawn together when she had said to him in a beseeching tone, "it won't be too long before you send me word"; he smelled the odour of the hair-tongs the barber used to raise his brush cut while Lorédan went to fetch the little working girl, the thunderstorm rains that fell so often that spring — isn't that beautiful — the thunderstorm rains that fell so often that spring — all of it comes back.
1:10:39 in three notes of piano and violin — the magic of the sonic universe — the icy return in his Victoria by moonlight; a Victoria is a small carriage, a hackney cab, by moonlight, all the meshes of mental habit, of impression used, seasonal sensation of impression, of cutaneous reaction — the body is really there — which had stretched over a series of weeks a uniform network in which his body found itself caught up again; at that time he was satisfying a voluptuous curiosity by getting to know the pleasures of people who live for love; he had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn its sorrows too, as now — the charm of Odette meant little to him beside this formidable terror. Well, I'll skip a bit of this passage and pick up here: and Swann saw, standing motionless before this relived happiness, an unfortunate man who moved him to pity because he recognized him — he did not recognize him
The violin, the invoked phrase, and the senses one closes one's eyes to savor 1:11:50 right away, so much so that he had to lower his eyes so that no one would see they were full of tears — it was himself. Once he understood this, his pity ceased, but he was jealous of that other self whom he had loved, he was jealous of that of which he had often said to himself — well, let's move on, the analysis of the music resumes. There is in the violin — if one does not see the instrument one cannot relate what one hears to its image — an analysis of such subtlety, which modifies the sonority of accents so common to the violin, shared with certain contralto voices, that one has the illusion a singer has been added to the concert; one raises one's eyes and sees only the precious cases, like Chinese boxes; but at times one is still deceived by the deceptive call of the siren; sometimes too one thinks one hears a captive genie struggling in the depths of the learned box, bewitched and quivering like a devil in a font of holy water; sometimes, finally, it is in the air like a pure supernatural being
1:13:00 passing by, unrolling its invisible message, as if the instrumentalists were far less playing the little phrase than performing the rites required of it in order for it to appear — so we continue to hear the musical phrase unfold and perform the incantations necessary to obtain and prolong for a few moments the miracle of its evocation. So he doesn't give us back the whole sonata, it's entirely centered around one small passage, what he calls the little phrase, the famous little phrase, but which appears like a jewel — that says a lot about the art of interpretation in that period. Yet we find Debussy again, that is, in fact with his annotations, not excessive but at any rate abundant — that is, there are Debussy's scores — the piece has a somewhat sacralized aspect and it must be brought forth, invoked rather than executed, and as I say, with the annotations one never finds before on scores, where it's written "cédez," from the verb céder, in the imperative — he doesn't say
1:14:10 decrescendo — so, to obtain for a few moments the miracle of its evocation, Swann, who could no more see the phrase than if it had belonged to an ultraviolet world — again confirming that we are indeed in the nocturnal world, but not in the sense of nocturnal nothingness, in the sense of an inner richness — here it's not external gaudiness — so Swann, who could no more see it than if it had belonged to an ultraviolet world, and who tasted, as it were, the refreshment of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness that struck him as he drew near it, Swann felt it present like a protective goddess and confidante of his love. All these passages on the blindness into which Vinteuil's little phrase plunges him make me think — I'll pay a small tribute here — after all, to my friend, our friend and comrade Caroline Champion, who wrote on her business card "explorer of flavours"; she's a specialist in taste, a consultant, and does excellent work in that field; we'd had interesting discussions
1:15:20 we had noticed that the common point between the sense of taste, that of smell, and that of sound, of hearing in music, is that all three are savoured all the better when one closes one's eyes. Go to a gastronomic restaurant — I know that happens to you and that you're as greedy as a goose, which just shows how right you are, you're truly French — well, go to a good restaurant, and when suddenly you come across something that really surpasses the average in excellence, spontaneously you close your eyes — oh my, you haven't tasted that! It doesn't diminish it, quite the contrary. Same with music, same with smell — the guy closes his eyes and searches somewhere inside himself, but where — I smelled that, damn it, it's not between the kitchen and my bed and the window that I'll find where I smelled that. Hence the great paradoxes in the history of opera. Well, that's why I make this digression, which will now be explained. So the phrase, to understand the pronouns — she felt him present
1:16:30 like a protective goddess and confidante of his love, and who, in order to be able to reach him amid the crowd and draw him aside to speak to him, had put on the disguise of that sonorous appearance, and as it passed — and always the little phrase, the subject pronoun here — and as it passed, light, soothing, and murmured like a perfume, telling him what it had to tell him and whose every word he scrutinized, like a perfume — again the senses, apparently among the most immaterial. Let me remind you that all of this is purely material — if there were no vibrations in the air I would hear nothing at all and you wouldn't hear me — same for perfumes: if one smells an odour, say of rose, it's because there really are molecules of the rose escaping on the breeze, etc.
1:17:24 and which come onto my nostrils, I mean onto my sensory cells — let's not forget that. So it's less material, less bulky in materiality than touch or sight, but it's not immaterial; still, there's a complicity, an isomorphism, between the apparent immateriality of perfumes, sounds, and tastes. And as it passed, light, soothing, murmured like a perfume, telling him what it had to tell him, whose every word he scrutinized, regretting to see them fly away so quickly, he made involuntarily with his lips the movement of kissing, as it passed, that harmonious and fleeting body — continuing in the phrase — he no longer felt exiled and alone, since it was addressing him, speaking to him in a low voice about Odette, for he no longer had, as before, the impression that Odette and he were unknown to the little phrase, since it had so often been witness to their joy — true, it had often also warned them of its fragility, and even then, in that time
1:18:34 he could guess suffering in its smile — let's think of Schubert here, sometimes even in apparently joyful Schubert music there's a kind of suffering in the smile, or in Mozart, I'm thinking of the Clarinet Concerto where he does pirouettes in the finale, like an excellent dancer performing one last dazzling number before disappearing from the audience in tears he doesn't want anyone to see — anti-romantic modesty if ever there was one, whereas at that time the finale had to be flamboyant. Well, so, one shouldn't — yes, well, there's a breach of contract here, well yes — and even then, in that time, he could guess — this makes me think of Chaplin, of Limelight, the clown who each time must play the clown and hide his suffering before the audience — of its sorrows, which it, the little phrase, always spoke to him of, of its sorrows of former times, and he saw them without being touched by them, carried along smiling in its sinuous and rapid course, of its sorrows which had now become his own, without his having any hope of ever being delivered from them; it, the little phrase, seemed to say to him
"All that is nothing": unbearable or saving wisdom 1:19:44 as it once did of its happiness: what is all that, all that is nothing — and Swann's thought turned for the first time, in a surge of pity and tenderness, toward that Vinteuil, the composer, toward that unknown and sublime brother who too must have suffered so much — what could his life have been? Out of what depth of pain had he drawn this godlike strength, this unlimited power to create? And here's a very interesting passage: when it was the little phrase — you remember at the start, he suffered from being among people who took his love as a childish thing, all that — well, when it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, what is all that, all that is nothing, Swann found sweetness in that very wisdom which, only a moment before, had seemed intolerable to him when he thought he read it on the faces of indifferent people who regarded his love as an unimportant aberration. Ah, that's interesting, that's the problem — the solution is, on the contrary, that the little phrase, whatever opinion it might have had about the brief duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something
1:20:54 not, as all those people did, as less serious than positive life, but on the contrary as so superior to it that it alone was worth expressing — so music here almost redemptive — expressed the charms of an intimate sadness; it was these it tried to imitate, to recreate down to their essence, which is nonetheless to be incommunicable and to seem frivolous — pardon me for being crude, but nowadays people often say "everyone in their own shit," as if — and that's capitalism's dream, that each of us be shut up in our own bubble with no communication between us. It's not the same as relativism, for example in ideology — yes, but that holds for us Westerners; but among the Bororo, they don't care whether their children are healthy, whether they come home from school bringing money — supposedly they don't care, go figure — well, I don't know — this idea is essential: that same wisdom, "all that is nothing," is unbearable
The divine captives: the musical phrase as acquisition 1:22:04 when it comes from indifferent people, and it is redemptive when it shows that they are superior, and not that it's not worth it — there are things more important in life than sorrows, that's important, yes, there are things more important, but it's music, not business affairs. So I'll skip a passage and get to the end — it's long, there are ten pages on one phrase, a little phrase that must last a few seconds on the score, in the sheet music — right, I'll finish on this: in that period Vinteuil had been one of his musicians in his little phrase, though it presented to reason an obscure surface, one felt a content so consistent, so explicit, to which it gave a force so new, so original, that those who had heard it kept it within themselves on an equal footing with the ideas of the intellect. Swann turned to it as to a conception
1:23:14 of love and happiness of which he immediately knew just as well what made it particular, comparable to no other — meaning he knew this the way he knew it for the Princesse de Clèves or for René — René by Chateaubriand, of course — whenever their names came to his memory, even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without equivalent, like the notions of light, of sound, of relief, of physical voluptuousness, which are the rich possessions with which our inner domain is diversified and adorned. So there is indeed a need — we said this about the Idea in Hegel, which externalizes itself — our inner world needs what?
1:23:55 nothing more external — let me repeat the list — notions without equivalent, like light, sound, relief, physical voluptuousness, with which the richness of our inner domain is adorned. And here there's this admirable fall which rises almost to metaphysics: perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will fade if we return to nothingness — Proust, like Kafka, was never quite clear, one can't quite tell whether he believed in the immortality of the soul — perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will fade if we return to nothingness, but as long as we live we can no more act as though we had not known them than we can for any real object, we cannot, for instance, doubt the light of the lamp one lights before the transformed objects of our room, from which has escaped even the memory of the darkness. In this way the phrase of Vinteuil, like a certain theme of Tristan for instance, which also represents to us a certain sentimental acquisition, married our mortal condition, its fate was bound to the future
1:25:06 to the reality of our soul, of which it was one of the most particular, the most finely differentiated ornaments. Perhaps — it comes back — perhaps nothingness is the true thing and all our dream is inexistent, but then — and here's the fall — but then we feel that these musical phrases will have to be nothing too, these notions which exist in relation to it; we shall perish, but we have as hostages — a superb metaphor — we have as hostages these divine captives, speaking of musical phrases, these divine captives, that's wonderful — we have, I don't know, Agamemnon has Briseis, Pyrrhus has Andromache, and he has a musical phrase — we're no longer in background music, it's more than that, it's part of — well, there — I like these themes of acquisition, because we also speak of "social gains," acquis sociaux, with all that resonance there is of acquisition, of validity — it's a homogeneous theme, we agree — we have as hostages these divine captives which will follow our fate — we even have, in the themes of Christophe, which are indeed tied to acquisition
1:26:16 tied even to the patrimonial acquisition — that's the word that catches — he waited for Tristan for that, which also represents to us a certain acquisition, because it is taken, and taken as the first publisher used to say when I complained that our books weren't being distributed — "listen, Pagé, at least they've been taken" — I'm speaking to a publisher, aren't I, that pleases him — I repeat, and this is the last sentence: we have as hostages these divine captives which will follow our fate, and death along with it, in the plural, something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable — there, how far it goes — death, where is thy victory — but following the hearing of a musical phrase in a drawing room, that's quite extraordinary, at the moment when he had felt like leaving the drawing room shouting, saying "to hell with all these fools" — that's funny.
1:27:26 it's the peak of subjectivism which joins up with a kind of human adventure — a fine dialectic, which reminds me that in one of the books you had the most courage to publish, I'm thinking of Le chemin de la praxis — listen, you're stealing my job, but you're absolutely playing devil's advocate for the— no, calm down — "here below, fallen from an obscure disaster" — one wonders where this comes from, torn away from illness, from death, from the solution in which the Parisian philosophical-ideological establishment etc. held him; well, inside it, he wants to rehabilitate subjectivity against subjectivism — a very fine dialectic too, and this is not far from the Hegelian project either — to have rights recognized. I'd like to end our conversation on that. When we say "game over" on a sign, that doesn't mean we deny the game — thank you — I'd like one day — I seem to be jumping from one thing to another, not at all, I'm extending it, but anyway I'll develop it further later
Subjectivity against subjectivism; the error of finalism 1:28:37 it's a variant of the same theme, but I'd like one day to take as a topic for philosophical reflection a rehabilitation of teleology, which seems scandalous, archaic, regressive — not at all. What would be regressive is rehabilitating a finality in nature — a finality, I leave aside for now whether there is a dialectic of nature — but the finality by which a stone falls because it wants to rejoin its natural place — as Nerval would say, one mustn't exaggerate ignorance — that's not something you can just decide, as if one thought the earth might be cubic. On the other hand — as you just said — if we make a real trial of pre-Galilean finalism, I'll start there to come back afterward to our story about music — pre-Galilean — the real analysis isn't to say "that's nonsense, this finalism, that's Voltaire, religion is nonsense, it's an error" — we barely know the subject, the truth — the real analysis is the one that shows why, for millennia, this error was made, good grief, why — it's almost miraculous that science managed to emerge, when you see all the obstacles
1:29:47 it's one of Bachelard's themes after all, the epistemological obstacle — what obstructs science? It's not stupidity, because that's a tautology — why does opium make you sleep? because it has a dormitive virtue — why am I not a good scientist? because I'm a fool, an idiot by birth, no doubt it's in my genes — that explains nothing, it's tautological. On the other hand, the notion of ideology in Marx allows us to understand that the Greeks could not institute a physics because there was the slave — there was no need to make man, as Descartes says, master and possessor of nature, and to ease men's labour — meaning through the machine, through the mechanical arts as he says — there was no need for physics, to the point that Aristotle finds himself saying, with that sort of calm cynicism of the slave-owning world, that if shuttles wove by themselves we would have no need of slaves — on this point he's more Greek and more conservative than Plato, who nonetheless comes a bit before him, than Plato who, in the Republic, does away with the slave, by the way — I note in passing — yes, that doesn't tell you — is he the totalitarian one? No, but no, he shows that the slave possesses absolute knowledge
1:30:58 if properly questioned — I don't know, and in the Republic there is no more slave, but that's not my subject, I'll set that aside. You were speaking of teleology — yes, finalism — the point is that finality — sorry, not finalism, finalism is when we think precisely of impetus, of the inclination of the falling stone — that's not it at all, the real analysis consists in saying that there is a displacement, in the Freudian sense, that we live so much in a world made by man, by praxis, which is what makes Marx say what immediately distinguishes the clumsiest architect from the most skilled bee: the architect has his house in his head — there's a teleology, meaning he has a representation, an end, Kant would say, but which, so long as it remains only an end, as we said a moment ago, is idle — I don't live in a house that's only a plan, I'm not safe in a house that's only a plan, I have to realize it in reality, agreed — and this is what makes the instrument the monkey sometimes uses with great skill to bring down a fruit, or a stone to crack a nut, not a tool, as Tran Duc Thao showed very well, for example, well
The architect and the bee: finality belongs to praxis 1:32:08 but I'm sowing a few seeds for future debates. On the other hand, I'm rehabilitating teleology because we're currently saying man was wrong to attribute a finality to natural beings which are mechanical and blind, which pursue their course — it's not because the moon is in love with the earth that it stays there instead of going off for a little tour around Saturn, right, it has no choice, it's because the mass of the moon is bigger — mechanical, it's a relation of force. The first thing you learn in a physics course is the notion of force, of energy, as we'd say today, and all the other concepts are built from it like a Lego set, out of the concept of force — force over distance per unit of time, over power, and so on. So, I insist, the analysis isn't finished, because we say to ourselves: what if the error doesn't consist in saying there is a finality, but in displacing it in nature — we must then put it back where it legitimately belongs, in the human and historical world. That's why I say we must rehabilitate the old teleology, otherwise we remain victims of the cognitive sciences, of neo-positivism, and of analytic empiricism
1:33:20 exactly, and here I'm being very serious — no, no, I'm not paranoid about a danger of neo-fascism — I've never said that Wittgenstein or Russell were neo-fascists, after all he deserves, along with Sartre, to have founded the tribunal against war crimes in Vietnam, that's not the question — but this leaves the field open to what? To what, in the German idealist tradition to which Marx pays homage in the third thesis on Feuerbach, when he says that at least idealism had the merit of insisting on the Tätigkeit, the activity of the subject — that's what I'm in the process of rehabilitating, the activity of the subject, which is not a mechanical activity precisely insofar as it is a subject and not an object — namely, that this movement must be restored, not left to the so-called hard sciences, which are in fact sciences of nature, if we accept mathematics — we must not leave them
1:34:30 the exclusivity — there, I get to it, because the faculty at work in the sciences of nature is the one Kant, and even we, still call the understanding, der Verstand, certainly not — no, not the Vernunft, reason, which is the faculty of ends, precisely — when we study this object, when we study why a supernova explodes because there are gravitational forces that made the star implode — I mean it collapses under its own mass, we're not in finalism there, it's purely mechanical because we're talking about objects — but you can't, you can't say there's no interest at stake in why the Americans caused 3 million deaths in Vietnam — it's precisely because it's a dialectic between freedom and necessity, since the system assigns a sort of directional scheme which is the
Philosophical imperialism, scientism and music as the art of becoming 1:35:55 Aristotle — Plato neglects their difference, right — meaning there's a single discipline, philosophy, a single science, and all the other sciences are parts of philosophy. Aristotle says it very clearly in Book IV of the Metaphysics: there's a science that studies being as being, and it resembles none of the so-called particular sciences, for each of them — mathematics, biology, etc. — cuts out a part of that science and reasons about the attributes belonging to it. So there's an imperialism of philosophy, and like any imperialism — I'm making my transition — secondly, this provokes wars of independence: mathematics will be the first to carve itself out of philosophy with Euclid, right; fifteen centuries later, physics will say goodbye, right — here we're in equations, no longer in in metaphysics — then chemistry, then biology, etc. And so philosophical imperialism will be followed — antithesis — by an imperialism not scientific but scientistic, that of the hard, positive sciences — well, there, everything must be explained, including the human sciences
1:37:05 and history, on the model of physics and chemistry — and in the Third Reich there were very great scholars, very good chemists, biologists, who were, otherwise, at the political and moral level, perfect scoundrels, with a reductionism — this is where we see the error of always putting techné, the means, on trial in a certain environmentalism — I'm thinking of Heidegger in particular, isn't that so — as if, when I kill someone, it's the knife that gets sent to prison — no, with the same knife I could have saved someone's life from peritonitis, from an acute appendicitis attack, all the same. So, once again, I mean, it's not enough to say finality, finalism, Galileo — that's the old pre-scientific, naive, speculative world, whatever you like — we're right, on condition of putting finality back where it rightly belongs, and from where it had been displaced by alienation — we had alienated our own aims as men onto the stars
1:38:15 I have no idea how hard it was for Galileo to make people understand that there were mountains on the moon, roughness — but the moon is a god, it's smooth, it can't be, right — all the same, we can see clearly the finalist conception of nature that I'm rejecting, but relocating — well, I'll close this long parenthesis, but it's important someday to give a talk on — and you put it very well — on teleology, because it's a way of achieving a dialectical reconciliation of chance and necessity, of freedom and determinism — but in any case I don't think we've strayed all that far from music, because if music is a lack in relation to our desire, it's precisely because — we become sufficiently, well, and it's precisely through that music that we rediscover this notion, ultimately, of finality — is it the case that your example of Vinteuil's sonata, where he finds himself again in a way, in a stroke, whereas he had forgotten himself — there, he rediscovers the truth in fact of his own course, in fact, because absolutely
1:39:53 restitution of becoming, without which the result is empty — exactly right, that's exactly it — we'll do that precisely in order not to conclude, and music is the art of becoming — there, see you next time, I think we'll have sorted out the sound problems by next time, to the next sonata, the next fugue, the next symphony, or the next bit of jazz, whatever you like, also for those who've had the patience to put up with these sonic mishaps — there, exactly, yes, yes, yes, sonic — and maybe visual too, I have the impression the image is a bit bluish — no, we don't have that pretension, at least the intention isn't — no, exactly, I think, if we look at the image, we don't have Kubrick's perfection, who filmed by candlelight — yes, exactly, well you shouldn't refuse to be filmed under these conditions — go on, I'll get back to you privately
