English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
What can I know? What must I do? 0:23 How does a philosopher... we said a quest for knowledge, for rationality, even if it's not like the scientific researcher — what is a quest for rationality and knowledge? If philosophy were only that, its place would be at the CNRS. If it were only the quest for knowledge, it is also a quest for wisdom. I'm not just playing with words — there's a fundamental distinction between what can I know, Kant did a great service to all who are being introduced to philosophy, by summing up the whole program of philosophy in two fundamental questions.
0:56 What can I know? A question the philosopher shares with physicists, biologists, they do scientific research, they too seek to know. And what must I do? That is not at all a scientist's question. The scholar can ask it for himself, but not as a scholar there where there are specific competencies. You'll notice the two questions don't differ only by the last verb. It's not simply the opposition between knowledge, knowing, and action, doing.
1:27 There are two verbs before that oppose each other too. What can I know? What must I do? The philosopher tries to speak with a bit of precision. You know? I'll dwell just a moment... I haven't forgotten the myth. I'll dwell just a moment on the second question. What must I do? To pose the problems — not to bother you, but because if we don't pose the problems, they jump up in our faces. These are words we use every day to talk to each other. We were talking earlier about creating connection.
1:58 Language is one of the first bonds. Two great... two great modes of exchange between men. Language and money. It's interesting, for instance — a parallel. Mallarmé drew that parallel. Speaking has a relation to things only commercially, and it's enough to silently place a coin in someone else's hand. The difference is that when I say what must I do, careful with that verb 'must.' Because in our everyday language, I understand it myself, in action — there's a car that suddenly appears at a stop sign.
2:31 And it says to me 'stop,' I'm not going to say to it 'what do you mean by stop' — doing philosophy is not the moment for that. But when we take a step back, when we don't have the excuse of the urgency of action, we need to see clearly. If I say 'I must eat to live,' 'I must obey the red light' — you see right away it's not the same verb. It's not the same meaning. I have a physical necessity, very quickly: I must eat to live. I must obey the red light. That's not physical, that's the law, that's morality, that's the right, whatever you want to call it.
3:01 And so the verb 'must' only really has meaning for the red light. If you look closely, it's a bit pretentious to say 'I must eat to live' as if I were deciding. I haven't decided anything at all, I have no choice. We should say 'I cannot' — you see how the can/must comes back — I cannot live without eating. There, we're being honest. I have no choice. Whereas the red light — we're among French people here — two in the morning, nobody around, no cop left or right. No, you shouldn't do it. Well, you can do it, but you shouldn't.
3:33 That's where 'must' has its full meaning. It's when I can do the opposite, which is not the case in the natural order. So that verb, 'must' taken in its strong sense — that is, when I ask myself the question knowing that I could also do the opposite — there's already a whiff of freedom hovering over that verb 'must' in its second sense. So I have a choice. Now, as for the myth, he posed the problem very well. He's a philosopher in quest of rationality, like the scientist.
Myth, oral and collective poem of the people 4:04 But I just pointed out that we too seek rationality in the order of action and in self-knowledge, and not only in knowing how many satellites there are around Jupiter or how many grains of sand there are in such and such. Know thyself, right. Well, I would say: what charm drew him to these dreaded shores? This is about Theseus, the island.
4:46 Because it seems he's prowling around near the kingdom of the dead. You know, in Racine's Phèdre. What charm drew him to these dreaded shores? What is prowling at the edge of the Empire of the dead? It's the word 'edge/shore' that interests me here for understanding the myth. What was he doing in that galley? Into what galley are you taking us? It's you who chose this subject of myth, and... All right? What are you going to do on these dreaded shores? Because these are formidable problems we're tackling, between Mythos and Logos.
5:18 Well, I'll follow on from the previous discussion. We talked about the people. We talked about the film. Now, the myth is, first and foremost, historically, the poem of the people. It is not the poem of a clearly identified author, from an era when humanity had already become strongly individualized and signs its works. That's late. The people who carved the gargoyles on cathedrals in the Middle Ages didn't sign them. That's late, that's individual.
5:48 But myth — if you take the literary genres, the literary genres par excellence, poetry, the novel, theater — poetry, which is even a generic term for creation, the poem, as we've seen. Now, it is the oldest of literary forms, but you can well imagine it was oral for a long time before being written, poetry. We talked about Africa earlier — you have to look at what's called in Africa a griot, who is at once a historian, who holds the memory of the community; without him the names of kings would fall into oblivion.
6:25 Now that it has been transcribed, in the Mandingue epic, which plays somewhat in West Africa the role that the Iliad plays for us, I mean. There's a paradox: the origin of the word 'literature,' littera, is the letter, is writing. The literary genre par excellence is a genre that began by being oral and not written. Do you see an interesting problem there?
6:55 But the author is the people, the mythos. Every child in Greece, every time they were told of the exploits of Achilles, listened as if it were the first time, even the fiftieth time they'd heard it, right? That's it, it's inspiration that comes from far away. And the name of Homer, the first to have transcribed this — we've retained the name of an individual, or of a team, we won't know, we don't really know from that period; the first ones were called rhapsodes. It becomes a rhapsody. But in the proper sense, that means rhapsode — in Greek proper it means to sew, rhapsode.
7:27 You know the pieces? What today we'd call mash-ups. Exactly! They took one piece and another and added a variation and linked their variations to the previous version to keep the audience hooked. So it's interesting to know that the author of the Iliad, first of all, is the people, is the collective. Let's connect this to the previous discussions. The philosopher cannot entirely ignore — if I follow Aristotle, for example, as soon as I say 'man is a political animal,' that's a translation, a collective animal, a social animal, which has a broader meaning, it's not reducible, and the politician, you may doubt it, in Aristotle's mouth.
8:05 You have an animal which, wherever it is observed — in space, as far as ethnologists are concerned, or in time, as far as paleoanthropologists are concerned — this is the case: we have never found traces, remains of humans who did not belong to a society. So the mythos, the poem of the people, cannot be ignored either, not by philosophical inquiry. There's another reason why it cannot be ignored.
Plato banishes the poets: Euclid's univocal truth 8:36 And to make that precise, I'll come back to the opposition well established by... Plato, who banishes the poets from the city, those who create fables — that's not serious, we, we seek the truth. And no doubt because he is the greatest poet of his time. It's a way of living, of being the only one, Plato. Well, to be prosaic about it, everyone agrees that, apart from its properly philosophical content, Plato's work is often an enchantment — when we did Phaedrus, the Symposium, it's the sheer banality of what he says, its splendor. Not only in the beauty of the things discussed, but in the staging, in the finesse, in the humor.
9:12 And why does he banish the poets from the city? Because he's seeking a univocal truth — his model was geometry: let no one enter here who is not a geometer. Don't forget that just before the emergence of the Socratic question, and thus of philosophy in its matrix form, there was the 'what do you call...' rather than the 'what is it?' — that's more radical, 'what do you call,' because at the outset, I don't know if it exists, but I hear people talking about it. They talk about God. What do you call God? Once we've established what you call it, I'll see afterward whether it exists or not.
9:42 That's the most basic question, you see, it's the Socratic question par excellence. Just before this emergence of philosophy, there was the emergence of the first mathematical modeling in history, linked to the name of Euclid — again, whether it's an individual or a team, historians will settle that. And so Plato is in search of a truth that gets everyone to agree. But you see, we have a philosophy that hasn't perhaps found it, but mathematicians produce propositions on which everyone agrees.
10:13 And above all, a rational discourse — I won't dwell on the links between rationality and democracy, all the same. For the first time, with the appearance of mathematical demonstration, it's no longer a matter of convincing you that I'm right, or you convincing me that you're right. I'm not asking you to agree with me, but to agree with yourself. It's non-contradiction that underlies mathematical reasoning, that's what I mean. I recall here — we're at the opposite pole from myth — that Euclid, when he arrives at the primary notions, the starting point of mathematical deduction, the primary notion...
10:47 You need a few undefined notions at the start in order to define as much as possible afterward. These notions are called axioms, postulates, definitions — we start with those. There. Euclid doesn't call them that, he calls them 'demands.' Ah, so it's no longer a relation to the thing, it's a relation to the other person, then. I demand of you that you grant me that through a point only one parallel can be drawn, and so on. So all mathematical truth is suspended on agreement between interlocutors. That's democratic.
Why myth comes back: Racine, Theseus and the Minotaur 11:17 So, the emergence of mathematics — there's a truth of fact. Now, it's not like myth — myth can be taken in every sense, it's polysemic, as they say, if we want to sound a bit learned. It's flimsy too, right. And I'll come back to my question: what charm drew him to these dreaded shores. There's a charm, but why does it come back when we think we're rid of it, we have a scientific, rational civilization — why does it come back so successfully? Look at the success films about Ulysses have today, across all age groups.
11:47 That's interesting — why? I quoted Racine earlier, that's nearly 20 centuries, almost 30 centuries after the time when Theseus's exploits are supposed to have taken place — assuming he existed historically, right? Why does it come back, and not always the same things but this one, of the Minotaur, of the labyrinth? It's because it speaks to us somehow. Philosophers cannot ignore this labyrinth, can they?
12:17 And you rightly said it — someone like Freud, who is not a philosopher, even though he has caused much ink to flow among philosophers — I recall that the three bodies of thought that were the most fruitful for philosophical reflection in modernity, I mean, starting from those great ruptures that inaugurate the world we live in, the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, within a historical hair's breadth of each other, late 18th and 19th century, which inaugurate modernity — without any value judgment.
12:51 It's not entirely insignificant to note this return of the imaginary — I come back here to Racine, who puts on stage in this play almost the whole time myths. Apart from a few that take place in Rome, which are historical plays like Britannicus, which aren't all about myth. People knew by heart this poet who addresses an audience that was well-informed at the time, and elitist as we'd say today, and everyone in the audience, in the theater, knew by heart the stories of Hercules, Theseus, etc.
13:29 Which allows Racine to say everything without saying anything. It's a limit property. For example, in Andromaque, I remind you that Orestes — we mentioned the story — Orestes is very much in love with Hermione, his cousin, whom he saw when he was very small, they knew each other as children. And when Hermione says to him 'Yes, it is you whose budding love first taught my charms the power of their weapons.' No need to spell it out, it's clear, because you see how it pushes...
14:00 But he doesn't say it, this wrapped-up manner — why does he come prowling again around the myth, the labyrinth, the Minotaur. And here I'll draw a first connection between mythos — not logos, but myth and history. We're not talking about the genre from myth to history, nor the structures of the imaginary. But still, if we look closely at the story of Theseus, since we're on the subject, this example — what is it? It's a young Athenian who volunteers to put an end to the rule requiring that every year fourteen young people, seven boys, seven girls, be brought to the Minotaur to be devoured — a symbolic reminder of the tribute paid in the era when Crete held power, when the Greeks were still subject to the great Cretan merchants, who were one of the sea peoples akin to the Phoenicians, right?
14:56 Well. So, in a way, Theseus is the one who went to lift the mortgage of Cretan domination. So that's inscribed in memory as a founding act, like that. And to do it — this is the side, you see, by which I'll show the myth touching history. But so as not to reduce it to that either, this same Theseus is known, like his buddy Heracles — our buddy — as demi-gods who were revered because they eliminate the monsters that prevent man from inhabiting this earth.
15:35 That, Heracles and Theseus. I quote Racine again in Phèdre: 'and the smothered monsters and the punished brigands, and Procrustes and Cercyon and Sciron and Sinis, and the scattered bones of the giant of Epidaurus, and Crete still steaming with the Minotaur's blood.' Nice job, as we'd say — quite a piece of work, that idea. There's also a part that belongs to the structures of the imaginary. I've just given an example of it.
Mathematical language, the language of myth, common language 16:05 In fact, to purge the monsters — the monsters that are within us, that's the figuration, that's it. We have internalized them. And so, there's the first position. We philosophers should be ashamed to think in images. And yet the image comes back to solicit us with its charm, to take up the term — the charm drew him to these dreaded shores. Well, this is to remind us — I'll get a bit more abstract now, sorry — that we mustn't be content with images alone.
16:38 I've put three characters on stage. The mathematician, the philosopher, and the myth-teller, the poet who unfolds the myth. The poet in whom a popular tradition is embodied. The bard, the griot, the minstrel. And look closely at the difference in language between the three. Mathematicians, very quickly, indeed from the start, from the birth of mathematics, from Euclid, understood that if they wanted to arrive at univocal knowledge, they had to drop our ordinary language, the one I'm speaking to you in now, the words of everyday life.
17:15 Because they are polysemic, ambivalent. Look at the word democracy, liberty. We crushed Vietnam in the name of the free world. And on the other side, people spoke of the 'people's democracies.' Where's the democracy in all that? These are problematic terms. And that's without even getting into the ambiguities of such terms — mathematicians invented a language of their own: we stop talking about ripples on the water, we talk about the circle. A circle that existed nowhere before the mathematician defined it. I call a circle the locus of points equidistant from a given point, in a given plane, to make more set-theoretic definitions, never mind.
17:50 There. So, I mean, that didn't exist before. The ripples on the water, I can see them; that circle, we can't see it, we can say it, pronounce it, conceive it. It's actually very simple to conceive. We cannot see it. That's what Plato called the intelligible world. Not sensible, the one I can see with my senses, but intelligible, in the intelligence. So much for the mathematician. At the other extreme, the mythologist, so to speak — strictly, the one who speaks in the form of myth, mankind — well, it's the exact opposite, it's a language of our imagination, everything can be taken for its opposite, all myths have variations.
18:28 The philosophers, in between — what language do they have? Do they have a language like the mathematician's? No. You'll tell me I'm pushing the paradox a bit far there. You're saying the philosopher has a common language. When you get a mouthful of philosophy, especially some Kant, or Hegel, it's Greek to you, right? Yes, well, the arrangement of words is complicated, but the words — the language we speak, the discourse is sometimes complicated, not with everyone. The deepest thinkers aren't always the most complex, by the way. But still, I mean, the words themselves — let me quote you a sentence from a philosopher renowned for his difficulty, Hegel, reputed to be one of the most unreadable.
18:59 When he talks about 'the pure porosity of matter' — you understood nothing, neither did I, but every word is ordinary. Pure porosity, matter, each of us greets these words. We have mental representations of them, it's not like Y equals F of X. There, nothing concrete is offered to the eyes. Well, there's another one of the complicities between the philosopher and myth. It's that we need figurative language to address human beings. We are not gods.
19:29 We need this figurative language. That means there is, within language, a part that is clear, that moves toward rationality, and a part of shadow. There is the unsaid within the said. Let me give you an example of a word used wrongly, at every turn, in the media. The word 'Western' or 'the West' — Saddam Hussein defies... We no longer say 'the West,' we say 'the international community.'
20:00 Now, that the West occupies it entirely, this 'international community.' 'Defies the West' — what does that mean? The West, in the proper sense, is the west, the direction. Since we know the Earth is round, west is wherever you want it to be. Poland is west of Russia and east of Germany. West is wherever you want on something round. Even at the North Pole, you're to the west. If you think about it a bit, that's a matter of topology. At the North Pole, whatever direction you go, you'll always be heading south.
20:31 Mathematicians have noticed this. So we use figurative language. I take the example of 'the West' and continue. You ask the question, does it mean the people who are to the west? We've seen that means nothing. Ah, it means the Europeans. Ah well, but the leader is the Americans. Damn, that doesn't work either. Ah, it means the developed countries. Yes, but Japan is a Western country. Dang, that's annoying, this thing. There are concepts like the concept of a stool.
21:02 which consist in representing something for me, and other concepts, occulting concepts as they're called, which consist in not showing something. We've just seen it. It means the capitalist countries, roughly speaking — well, there, it's a filter-word, we don't use it. We can't say that, it doesn't fly. 'Liberal' is better. Now, it's even become fashionable among liberals to say that capitalism is a bad thing, that liberalism is something else. There, that's what it means. To give you an example of how words have their part of shadow. And I'll say the same about you here — this isn't only meant to communicate with you, to teach you, calvary aside.
21:38 The things that I hide from you too — it's a personal game, one could say, there's also a part of shadow in words. So, ultimately, we shouldn't be too contemptuous of the figurative language of myth. We must be humble, and the old philosophical dream of a language perfectly purified of all reference — I don't know — metaphorical, imaginative, does not exist. In mathematics, there is no metaphor. As soon as we speak everyday language, we are in metaphor.
22:08 And yes, you are the reverse of Monsieur Jourdain. You know, Monsieur Jourdain is the one who spoke in prose without knowing it, quite delighted to be told, by his teacher, 'you know, you're a writer of prose.' We're the opposite: we are poets without knowing it. What do you say? 'The day is breaking.' But no, it hasn't gone to bed, these are images. There are no sheets, no pillows. Even if it resembles that — there are clouds, we have little crepes, as they say, little wisps, we reach twilight. It's misleading, it just resembles it. That's everyday language.
22:38 It's based on metaphor, but in "meta" there's the idea of beyond. That means I'm always saying something that goes beyond what I'm saying. I just gave an example. I speak of the sun, I'm not an astronomer when I say it rises. But yes, we say it sets too. It doesn't move, we know now, it's us who move. Well, that's... The guardian of peace. There you go. So, to come back to it, we can't just get rid of myth like that and then arbitrarily set up a hypothetico-deductive language like the mathematicians, one that would apply to our domains, to life, to death.
Socrates and Callicles in the Gorgias 23:17 It's a dream, we'd like that. But for that, you'd have to get the interlocutors to agree, the way mathematicians managed to do, starting from the requirement that each interlocutor agree with himself. That's the first condition, not to contradict oneself. I'll give an example of why this matters. Plato tried—and this is his whole heroism, really—to apply that same non-contradiction, that mathematical rigor, to ordinary language. When he's debating, and here we're not in mythology, even if this dialogue has itself become a kind of myth, I'm thinking of the Gorgias, one of Plato's most dramatically tense dialogues.
23:54 A dialogue where there's such intensity in the political debate that at one point it's on the verge of turning into a brawl. As long as people are talking, there's no war. You know? And yet what's being said, for instance, is quite something. And, in the course of it, there comes a moment when one of the interlocutors, Callicles—a little fascist who anticipates today's neo-Nietzscheans—says, I'm not what I say, I'll tell you straight out. I'll throw back at him all the arguments that the weak of the world, that religions, were invented by the weak to cast their spells and tricks, in order to trap the elite, the strong, in their nets.
24:30 Even though I never thought that elite men were... nor square either. Callicles, who defends force, says that in the city the law of nature should reign, where the wolf devours the sheep, where the eagle seizes its prey. Well, that's it for him, that's politics. He says it outright, crudely. And Socrates pays him tribute, saying, at least you have the courage to say what you think. Now we can make progress. So, Socrates tells him, go on, develop your idea. Well, the principle is that force organizes everything, like Hobbes later on.
25:06 Very well, Socrates, why not? So, do you agree that the whole city is physically stronger than a single individual? So you were wrong earlier to say that the city is made up of cowards, weaklings, the crowd, democracy—as De Gaulle used to say—which comes along to limit the possibilities of the wolf-man. Ah but wait, Socrates, I wasn't talking about physical force, I also mean the cleverest, that too—we hear a lot of that these days, losers, winners, cynicism, entrepreneurs.
25:39 I'm also talking about the strength of cunning, of intelligence, you see, and Socrates tells him: you reproach me for always saying the same thing, and I reproach you for never saying the same thing—one moment it's physical force, but he shows him his contradictions. Maybe you're right to say that force rules everything, but you? When he's caught out on physical force, he shifts to another definition. He tries this and that. But even so, in the dialogue, he never manages to convince us of what we see with you.
Marx, the titans and the gods; Lévi-Strauss, myth and music 26:09 That would be too good, wouldn't it? So, back to my story about myth. Let me jump in. We spoke about Marx earlier, that's rather more serious, we're not going back to fables. But Marx knew his mythology well. Marx belongs to a generation that comes after German Romanticism—never had myths been so revived as at that moment of that fabulous verbal enchantment, as someone put it, that characterizes German Romanticism, as one of its best translators, Armel Guerne, said—and one can include certain philosophies in it too, since there are German idealisms; it's an era when poets tend to philosophize and philosophers tend to write poetry.
26:46 There you go. Well, at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, Marx, who knows this whole background well anyway—what one learned at school—alludes to a very specific myth: the myth of the struggle between the Titans and the gods. You know, in Greek mythology, there's a curious relationship established between the Titans and the gods. The Titans are older. Forget the Christian God, the Islamic God, the transcendent God, the three religions of the Book.
27:20 It's not in that chronological order—Judaism, Christianity—there's a bit of that. But in the Greek world, it's not an all-powerful God; the Greek gods themselves are subject to fate, and they appear late. Before them there are the Titans, there's Oceanus, there's Uranus—sky, earth, titanic force, powerful force, earth, Cronos too. The relationship with the Titans is ambivalent: on one hand, they work for the gods, they make weapons for them. We're not far from Marx here—some work for others.
27:52 And at the same time, they're in conflict. Well, well, well, now we're even closer to Marx. I don't know if he had classes in mind, I don't know, I don't know—they knew how to do this. They show the relevance today of reflecting on the myths that are told to children as bedtime stories. So there's no divorce between myth and truth. Myth expresses a deep truth, but be careful, it expresses it in its own way. A path had to be traced there, to draw out the struggle between the Greek slaves and the free citizens.
28:27 That's what the struggle between the Titans and the gods is. Look closely at what slaves do at work: they work for their master, yet they're in conflict with him elsewhere—a structural conflict. And you find this not only among the Greeks. If you look at Germanic mythology, in Wagner, the house of life, the family, 19th-century, war, I don't know. I bring up Wagner because one of those who spoke most about myth in the 20th century was Lévi-Strauss—you know him, don't you—who had a training in philosophy.
28:57 At the time, there was no agrégation in sociology yet, and even less in ethnology. You had to be a philosopher to be a sociologist. Not so long ago, just a few generations back. And so Lévi-Strauss, after having centered his whole methodological approach on the disciplines of linguistics—I won't take that away from him, structuralist text had just appeared—then, starting with a series of publications, a series he himself called Mythologiques, in the plural, beginning with The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes—there's a lot of talk about food in all this.
29:36 The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, and The Origin of Table Manners, a third volume. Lévi-Strauss marks a shift inaugurated in the mythological series by turning his attention no longer to linguistics but to music. He says it's music that is the key to mythology. That's interesting! There's an analogous relationship to time between mythology and music. Everything happens as though in both cases one enters time only in order to exit it.
30:07 A bit cyclical, right? And—this is why I make this detour through Lévi-Strauss to get to Wagner—in the preface to The Raw and the Cooked, which is so much under the sign of music that he calls his preface "Overture," as for an opera. If you look at the chapters: "Cantata of the Opossum," "Fugue of the Five Senses," "Short Mass"—which is the title of a little opera by Manuel de Falla—"La vida breve," sorry, and so on, "Short Mass," it goes on like that. And so...
30:38 This parallel between an arc and that of sounds—there's no concept in music, nothing that speaks. No concept. Now opera mixes language and music somewhat, but music itself is pure, there's no concept, it's sounds, not words, it's purely relational. And in the Overture to The Raw and the Cooked, he says that the undeniable father of the structural analysis of myths is Wagner. And he notes, even the tales, even The Mastersingers. The Mastersingers won't give us anything good. You'll say again that I'm making detours, but they're detours meant to stay at the center.
Wagner: The Mastersingers and The Rhinegold 31:13 Like a spiral. Well. Yes. Since I'm talking about the Mastersingers, I'm not going to summarize the story for you, it's five hours long, that kind of thing. I love it, personally. At the end of five hours I'd listen to another ten, but that's... well, it's long anyway. And so... None of this is at all an opera of mothers and fathers like the others, where the gods bash each other up. Mythologically speaking, it takes place in the 16th century, a story about a shopgirl romance—I say that somewhat provocatively, I find the loves of a shopgirl more interesting than those of Philemon and Baucis. And there, I stand by that.
31:45 Will he marry her, won't he—whoever wins the singing contest, let me sum up the story very quickly. It's the guild masters, it's the 16th century, the father has promised his daughter to whoever wins the singing contest, to encourage artistic creation, being generous like the hundred guilds themselves. And, my daughter also has the right to refuse if she wants. And everything, everything is very pleasant in this relationship of courtesy among people, balance, courtesy, good nature.
32:15 For the second act, there's the inevitable scene in this kind of story where there's the serenade, the balcony, you see, the serenade. By the wicked... the ungrateful... of the cast. And he makes noise with it, his lute out of tune, etc. That wakes one person up, then another, and there we have a general brawl breaking out in the town. Everyone starts hitting each other like in a saloon, you see, it all erupts suddenly amid the shouting, and nobody knows why.
32:45 Ah, what a metaphor for German history! Geraniums in the windows, peace... It seems so far removed from all conflicts, the world of teddy bears, Snow White, with all that mythology at the heart of good old Germany. In one of the great secrets of the modern world, America is an enlarged Germany. White America, WASP, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, something more. I don't know—challenged, if I may use that barbarism, by Latinos, there you go. But still, the Eisenhowers, the Bushes, that's...
33:17 Even the English, originally, are Saxons. It's the heart of Germany, there you go. Very Germanophile culturally, I'm not bashing the Germans here. I'm like everyone else, as one should be. For me there's a bad France and a good France, there's a bad one... There. So, you're talking about the good one—it's nice, order is good. Not out of pleasure in throwing my trash in the streets like that, it's good that it's clean. There are geraniums in the windows everywhere. And garden gnomes.
33:48 Rules that order how to live, right. And then, suddenly, there's this general chaos. And when the night watchman arrives, drawn by the noise, everyone has already gone home. Not seen, not caught. Everyone quietly, decently, goes home. There, that's my parenthesis. You know myths, they say a lot and hide a lot too. Lévi-Strauss is right to see something there. There's insight there. With a good artist, you shouldn't judge by the importance of his ideas. And Wagner was nonetheless a combative little anti-Semite, like the German petty bourgeoisie of his time.
34:18 He was the son of a police commissioner in Leipzig. He was practically obliged, sociologically, to be anti-Semitic at that time. Well. But in his work he goes much further—further than he himself would have thought. That's what real artists do. What's interesting is the discourse of the work itself, not the discourse of the author about his work. I close the Wagnerian parenthesis. I come back to this parallel Lévi-Strauss draws between mythology and music. And he goes so far as to say: I do not seek in this work to show what men think in their myths, but how myths think themselves through men.
34:54 And even, why not, he adds, pushing it further still, how myths think among themselves. I'm illustrating this. I started with Greek mythology, the Titans against the gods. Well, in the Germanic world—let me pick up my chronological thread now—Wotan, who is Odin, same thing, the Zeus of Germanic mythology, or whatever. And just as the Valhalla is about to be built—that's the Olympus, the palace of the gods. Security, the Germans, thick walls. The palace of the gods, and of course, it's not the gods who do the work.
35:25 Nor manage it either. It's the Titans—there they are again. They're called giants in the Germanic myth, but they're giants. They build it, and they were promised, well, Zeus promised them, Wotan, I'm getting my names mixed up, promised them as payment—guess what? Well, the giants, not too trusting, the giants aren't reassured, but that's what was promised to them. If anyone here knows a bit about the story of the Ring of the Nibelung—well, The Lord of the Rings is no longer up for debate.
36:00 The goddess of beauty, well there you go. The German Venus, Freya, the free one. Well. So of course, Wotan's wife is furious about it. The German Juno, she's not having it, she's always... The shrew, the matron, wife of a... a philandering husband, shall we call him. He's like Zeus, Wotan, he loves to... the gods must get bored, because he's always chasing shepherdesses, mortals, women from below. That's all there is in Greek mythology too, isn't it?
36:30 We'll come back to the myth of Psyche later, it's important, it's a philosophy. So his wife tells him, but this isn't right, she's my sister for one thing, and besides these giants are boorish, abominable. He says, oh come on, come on, no scenes, no fits. And finally he decides to give the gold of the Rhine instead. Ah, you see how wealth intervenes in everything. All the gold that's in the Rhine. Because at the time, the gold was in the Rhine, it hadn't yet produced millions of deaths, gold wasn't being mined. As long as it stayed there, in nature, unexploited—but now the gold has to be taken from the Rhine.
37:02 He says—because one must renounce love. What do you want? The giants don't want to give up the girl, we understand that. So the sun—it's feminine in German, you know, anything that has a bit of warmth. In cold countries, they say that's beauty after all. They say die Sonne, the sun. And so, they don't want to let her go. And the fire god—I'll go fast—is a mediator, everything's fine.
37:32 Between the blacksmith gods, those who make weapons, who make fire to smelt metals, right? And who's part of Olympus, has a role within Olympus. He moves between above and below. He's a bit like Hermes, Mercury. The one with wings everywhere among the Greeks. The messenger of the gods, god of merchants and thieves. He's mobile. He's the technical advisor, the consultant. I won't say Séguéla—an absurd tribute to Séguéla. But anyway, at the moment when war is about to break out between the gods and the giants, over not giving the girl as promised.
38:07 And then you should see the argument. I refer you to the text of The Rhinegold. It's the story of wages—Lohn, the German word for wage. We work, we have calloused hands, you gods, you lounge around all day. And now you're squeezing me out. So he sends for his advisor. There it is, fire arrives. He's had to travel his whole life. He arrives, it's awkward. I've come too soon. In exchange for love, you too made promises. No one is going to give up—especially not a wife like that. They have to be given the gold. The only substitute.
38:37 This alternative: love or gold. Love or wealth. You see, mythology is serious. In how many films, how many novels, is there this question: does she love me for my money or for myself? Yes or no? Citizen Kane, look at that. At the end of the film, he finds himself—fortune, it seems it was Hearst, the American press magnate who served as the model, no matter—sitting face to face with his wife across a table thirty meters away, at the far end. With all the riches of the world flowing in, those statue-collector figures, you know the film?
Truth without our knowing it: slips, dreams and the smith 39:07 In his great Californian palace. And the woman says, darling, if we could just go to a club in New York. They're bored. It's an old problem, gold and love. One comes to compensate for the other. Yes, mythology is serious. Rimbaud, hardly suspected of allegiance to the powers of this world or to the priest, said theology is serious. That doesn't mean theology is true. It means it expresses a great deal of truth, perhaps even without knowing it.
39:38 Exactly as we ourselves express our truth without knowing it—sometimes we regret it a bit. That's what Freud calls the slip, the parapraxis, the failed act. You know? When I say "effort" instead, because it's already been three hours and I want to hide it, I say "poof," it's like a ball you push down into the bathtub, you know? And it springs back up in your face the moment you let go. I'm thinking of that example he gives, about the anatomy professor Freud had had at the Vienna medical school, who said: 'Today I come to the nasal cavity, and I warn you, it's complicated, it's a cavity.'
40:09 And in all of Vienna, those who really understand the nasal cavity can be counted on the fingers of one hand. That's him, isn't it? That's, um, the fingers of a single hand, you see. Plenty of examples like that, we all know some, I think. In short, as Hegel says, the Idea asks for only one thing: to externalize itself, to express itself. Without our knowing it, we say more truth in what we say than in what we think we're saying. Well, in mythology, I mentioned Mercury's wings.
40:41 You think I'm jumping from one thing to another? Not at all, it's all diabolically coherent. In Black Africa, you very often find wings on masks, in sculpture. Wings on the head, whole birds on the head, as among the Senufo in particular—works that so inspired Modigliani, anyway. Our ancestors the Gauls—what is it? It seems it's the wings of the ancestors, more complicated than that. Wings on the helmet, on the head, you see.
41:12 The raven wings of Wotan, in Germanic mythology. These are my thoughts, this metaphor of the unconscious. Volatile like that, flying out of my head, communicating themselves to another, like the hoopoe messenger of the Queen of Sheba, wasn't it, who spoke to Solomon. The hoopoe is a bird, you know. So there, the ambiguity of myth—I can't compare it better than to dreams. We're in the sphere of the imaginary, which is quite coherent after all. Let me attempt a rough classification, which I propose.
41:44 The field of the imaginary, you divide it into three. Into seven, into five, into six. Ah, imagination, we know that. I won't insist, we know it. Dream, images, the field of the imaginary, dream, memory. I see my grandmother, I'm quite happy, but when I close my eyes and think of her, she's been dead a long time, unfortunately. I picture her to myself, she's not present, it's a representation, it's an image.
42:14 Memory, dream, imagination, myth. Memory. The temporal thickness of myth that still comes to solicit us, even when we think we're rid of it, right? I've grown up. I insist heavily on this aspect. This is truly essential; I'll especially privilege dream here. What does analysis tell us? It's Freud, regarding dreams, that the dream still says something. It can't say just anything.
42:45 All right? But the dreamer doesn't think those things consciously. He often even has every interest in not thinking them. Well, in Greek mythology, to come back to it, we need to point out that there's the same conflict between the giants of The Rhinegold and Wotan's gods—it's the same conflict that exists between the Titans and the Olympian gods. So there's an invariant here, we're dealing with it today. You find this in the Bhagavad Gita too, examples multiply.
43:17 Here's another parallel: I mentioned the figure of the blacksmith. The blacksmith is the one who, once again, belongs to both worlds—the underground world, the mines, working the metals. Think of Snow White earlier—what do the dwarves do? They go into the mine, with a pickaxe. And so the blacksmith, who is the central figure in Germanic mythology, is also found in Greek mythology as the blacksmith god, Hephaestus, or Vulcan, as you prefer.
43:55 The anti-Narcissus. Narcissus is seductive because he seeks to please no one but himself. Freud made a very fine analysis of narcissism. He explains why we're fascinated by cats. We're fascinated by those who seem to us—rightly or wrongly—to desire nothing but themselves. So, to be free of our own contingencies; we're caught, seized by the object of our desire, while they are not. And such people, Freud says, are the kind who err...
44:25 Not to have any investment in the outer world, but above all, gazes turned upon themselves exert a great seduction. The blacksmith, that's not it, it's the god who is ugly, one of the rare ugly gods on Olympus, Hephaestus. Not so ugly as when he was born—you know what happened to him, right. Jupiter grabbed him by the foot and threw him far away, far from Olympus. As a result, he stayed lame. But I showed you that Wagner's Ring cycle is the blacksmith, Mime, what's his name, you know it, who tries to raise Siegfried in the forest so that one day he'll forge the sword, since he himself can't manage to forge it, in order to kill the dragon and take the gold, well anyway, all that.
45:05 Sorry, I'll move quickly, it's interesting, but we're not here just to tell stories, but to take some distance and reflect on this. Well, I was talking earlier about the Mandingo epic, which plays roughly the same role in West Africa, as a supplier of themes for endless variation—right now, as I speak, when night falls soon, which happens very quickly there, in Bamako, in Niamey, I don't know, you hear the balafons start playing in the streets, the traditional instruments, and you hear the songs that always tell of exploits, or variations, the exploits of Soundiata Keïta, a bit like China or the epic brothers of history.
45:43 Great conqueror, he subjugated the surrounding peoples. Well, he's plunged into the forge, into the underground world—we do indeed say the subconscious, that which is below, don't we? You see, it's really the forms that speak to us. So there you go. My dreams have a meaning, but it's not the one I gave them.
Hubris: Cape Sounion, Icarus and Oedipus 46:15 Applying that to the poem of the people, the myth has a meaning, and so I don't think it's entirely foolish when I say that I'm not trying to find out what men think in their myth, but how myths think themselves through men, and why not how myths think themselves among each other. We clearly saw there that between them, for instance, the German myth and the Greek myth, there were exchanges, visibly. It's not just the 'among themselves.' I wouldn't want to give a lecture but rather have a conversation, so I'd like it, starting from there—I've just laid out the elements, a few elements of the problem, right, two extremes: purely rational language, mathematics, and purely imaged language, the fable, the parable, the myth.
46:56 And between the two, the philosophers—what is there to do between these two extremes? Sometimes they borrow from mathematics, sometimes they draw inspiration from myth. Even in Marx, in Freud—I'll get to Oedipus, I'm talking about Freud. Which means it's the reverse; after that I'd like to hand over the floor, I'll finish on this point, provisionally. This is where it's very different from our own world: what the Greeks feared above all was excess, which was called hubris, which gives us 'hybrid,' 'monster'—I'll show the word later, you'll see.
47:30 There's always an excess, and so a cult of measure among the Greeks—it's there in their aesthetics too, I think. Look at the Parthenon, the proportions. Alright, one more detail, since I'm talking about the Parthenon. We need to get to the heart of the matter. I went to Greece late in life. And I arrived at Cape Sounion—those who have traveled in Greece surely know this spot that everyone goes to see. Some fifty kilometers from Athens, and generally in Greece it's a bit like Corsica and the Mediterranean, you don't see the open sea, it's not Brittany, it's not the ocean.
48:01 You see a peninsula, an island, a gulf, a harbor. And there, for once, you see the infinite. Three infinites. There is only the wind—sorry, the sea and the sun. And that's where the Greeks built the temple of Poseidon. Neptune. Right angles, columns, facing this formless world of the infinite. Greek man turns his back on nature. It's not made for man. As Bachelard said, the great philosopher of science, in the 1950s: you don't live in the infinite, in the infinite one is not at home.
48:34 He even says what that means. We do say 'to withdraw from the countryside.' Not to be taken into the infinite. So there, I think that's the end of my parenthesis on this temple. The Poseidon at Cape Sounion. One day, if you pass by, don't miss this simple spectacle. It took a certain nerve for these rules. You mustn't turn your back like that—in the end, to state our name, that's it. It's clear. Come out of the darkness. We who call for enlightenment must reflect a little on the matter. Coming back, forgive me, to where excess still lies within myth.
49:07 And excess upward, Icarus, you know, too high, and there he is, in the sea, you see. Oedipus, he has an excess of questioning. He pushes the inquiry too far. He wants to know too much. As it's said, that's the chorus in Sophocles: he torments his own heart too much, Oedipus. He should limit himself to wisely interpreting the new by the old.
49:37 Instead, he gives orders. I want to know, absolutely, let everyone set out to investigate. Who killed Laius? Since if there is plague in Thebes, the oracle said it is because the murder of Laius has gone unpunished. It's not yet established that it was he who killed him. No crime writer has ever crafted a story, I don't know, as well constructed from a purely detective standpoint, where the murderer is the one leading the investigation. And in good faith, moreover. There is an excess of knowledge. To the point that, when he learns he is the guilty one, he tears out his own eyes.
50:15 What good did it do me to have eyes, if it was for this, the thing that mattered? And that the myth still tells us truths, all the same. There, I'll stop for a moment with the example of Oedipus. What I'm saying is that this is not a truth particular to the Greek world or to the poet who invented this myth, where he supposedly represented his own private fantasies. We are not straying into the contingent and the particular. It's not only the poem of one people, it's the poem of all peoples together. This matter of measure and excess concerns everyone. There, I'll hand over the floor.
50:46 Thank you, Dominique. Thank you.
