English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Live readings: "Mouvement," one of the Illuminations 0:00 You know there are several genres in my talks. There's the question-and-answer genre, well that's a modern one. There are the workshops, each time on a specific theme, that's the most frequent one. But there are also the analytical daydreams, as we did last time, right? And that's an idea we owe to Philippe Moreau, whom I thank again, whom I'll thank forever for the rest, because he was our stage manager for a more-than-pioneering period. He called it—it's a somewhat shorter format than what I usually do, noticeably shorter—he called it "Live readings." We start from a text, this time, right? We're going to try to analyze it, how do we do that, right?
0:50 That is, to say nothing that isn't manifest, as we say, in the text itself. And not meaning injected from outside. So here we go, it's a text by Rimbaud, taken from the Illuminations, which I've already brought in three or four years ago, I believe. It's taken from the Illuminations, but the Illuminations aren't the most accessible Rimbaud—but still. First, there's some distance now. For a long time, people thought A Season in Hell was his farewell to the public and all that.
1:22 In fact, we now know that most of the Illuminations postdate A Season in Hell, and it's the complete opposite of A Season in Hell, which is very intense, dramatic, if I may say, dark despite the admirable ending. And the Illuminations, as the name indicates, are much more punctual, occasional. You have to take it literally first. There, a rainbow, there, a clearing in the sky. Literal meaning—you always have to start with the literal meaning in language.
1:53 An Illumination, and of course with all the figurative meanings you like. But let's look instead at this one, which is simply called Movement. Movement. The winding movement on the bank of the river's falls.
2:26 The gulf at the sternpost. The swiftness of the incline, the enormous surge of the current, lead through unheard-of lights and chemical novelty. The travelers, surrounded by the whirlwinds of the Val and the Strom, are the conquerors of the world, seeking personal chemical fortune. Sport and comfort travel with them. They take with them the education of races, classes, and animals.
2:57 On this vessel, rest and vertigo, in diluvian light, on the terrible evening of study. For, from the conversation amid the apparatus, the blood, the flowers, the fire, the jewels, agitated accounts on this fleeing edge, one sees, rolling like a dike beyond the hydraulic motive road, monstrous, endlessly lighting up, their stock of studies.
3:29 They, driven into harmonic ecstasy and the heroism of discovery. Amid the most surprising atmospheric accidents, a young couple isolates itself on the ark. Is it ancient savagery being forgiven? And sings and takes its post. Full stop. It's not very long.
Rimbaud the walker facing the industrial revolution 4:01 So, let's go through it again from the beginning. I remind you that our young man from the Ardennes—since most of you know that Rimbaud was born in Charleville, in the Ardennes, I'll skip quickly over all the anecdotal material—walked a great deal on foot, he was called the man with soles of wind. And for a long time, on the roads between Belgium and France, which was then in the full swing of the industrial revolution. So inevitably, he happened to see what was entirely new in the landscape, the first elements of what had begun in England, the industrial revolution.
4:43 You know what I call, between us, our modernity. Let me open a parenthesis on the notion of modernity. Because if I just say modernity, full stop—well, some people date the beginning of modernity to the end of hunting and gathering, as soon as agriculture and cities begin in Egypt. There, we're in modernity. Historians, for their part, flatly call the modern era the period that ends the Middle Ages and inaugurates what we now call, in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance.
5:17 No, I'm talking about your modernity, mine, ours. That is, the one arising from two great fractures, as happens every ten to fifteen centuries, within a tiny pocket of time called the end of the eighteenth century, the second half of the eighteenth century: the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution. We are, even now, still within the effects of those two fractures.
5:47 So, imagine Rimbaud, wandering between Belgium and France, and suddenly he must have seen what looks like a hydroelectric plant. I told you I don't like interpretation, so you'll say, aren't you contradicting yourself? No, you'll see, there are precise things. He speaks of the hydraulic motive road, for example, and then he speaks of the bank of the river's falls, he speaks of the ark—there must be bridges, footbridges, as there are many in Belgium, in Holland, on the canals too, by the way.
6:20 There we are. So he sees this hydroelectric plant, and here we have a sort of hymn, one of the most beautiful hymns to hyper-modernity—it's the complete opposite of today's environmentalism. This wasn't yet a tired generation, afraid that there are too many of us. Not them, not those who say we're too many—those people don't kill themselves. It's always others who are too many, never themselves. No, quite the opposite, there's a kind of...
6:50 The illumination is seeing the perspectives opened up by this world that's hatching. Yes, this surprises you. So I repeat now, if you keep in mind this fact that he's out walking, on a long walk on foot, and then suddenly he sees—imagine this vagabond, with his worn-out shoes, as he says, arriving in sight of the complete opposite: a world where everything, every screw, every belt, every wire, has a reason for being.
Rereading: the movement, the pronoun "eux," the flood 7:26 And so I take it up again from the start. The winding movement on the bank of the river's falls—we're already caught up in a dynamic. That's the title, it's Movement. On the bank of the river's falls, the gulf at the sternpost—I remind you that the sternpost, we'd now say the lock, if you like, the two gates of the lock. It's toward the end of the Middle Ages that the sternpost rudder replaces the old steering oar, so to speak. The swiftness of the incline—see how he accentuates every term connoting movement.
8:00 You know that in physics, celerity is the term used for the speed of light. The enormous surge of the current—all that is the subject group, as we'd say in grammar—here's the verb: lead through unheard-of lights and chemical novelty—we begin to see the modernity I'm talking about emerging, scientific-industrial, if you like. The travelers surrounded by the whirlwinds of the Val and the Strom—we're in the Ardennes, German-speaking territory isn't far, you know Belgium itself is bilingual and that Flemish is a Germanic language.
8:41 And so "Strom"—you think in English of "stream," streaming—it simply means the current. But the sentence implodes, magnificently: it's the traveler surrounded by the whirlwinds of the Val and the Strom. And then he characterizes them now. They are the conquerors of the world, the engineers, seeking personal chemical fortune. Sport and comfort travel with them. And there's this distancing pronoun, "them"—he's not inside it, he himself.
9:17 It's a whole new world, I mean, there's no use for a vagabond like him, right? Sport and comfort—that was new at the time, the word, it's of English origin. Sport and comfort travel with them. They take, still in the third person, the education of races, classes, and animals on this vessel. Those among you with a musical ear will already have guessed there's an allusion to Noah's Ark. I repeat, they take the education of races, classes, and animals on this vessel.
9:49 So, they take—you're interpreting, right? Ah well, you'll see, there's a word that shows it's true, that it really is about the flood. On this vessel, rest and vertigo, in diluvian light—I told you, diluvian is the adjective form of deluge—on the terrible evening of study; for, from the conversation amid the apparatus—so imagine, I don't know, the blood, the flowers, the fire, the jewels, an object whose function he probably doesn't understand—accounts, and accounts with a C-O-U-N-T, I mean, accounts, accounting, agitated accounts, on this fleeing edge—of calculations, implied—one sees, rolling like a dike beyond the hydraulic motive road, one sees what?
10:43 Monstrous, endlessly lighting up, their stock of studies. They, again, they—you see, I lingered on this pronoun on purpose, because it maintains this distance—driven into harmonic ecstasy and the heroism of discovery. The poem could stop there; it's a hymn to this modernity beginning to burst forth, and, and suddenly, on the next line, in this fall, on which I'm going to concentrate this evening's session, right?
The fall in the poem and the critique of ecologism 11:20 Amid the most surprising atmospheric accidents—I don't know, imagine, it happens often, in a magical way, that we go from rain to sunshine, a rainbow, I don't know, something like that... Amid the most surprising atmospheric accidents, a young couple isolates itself on the ark. Good heavens! But what's that doing there? We were right in the vanguard of historical modernity for its time, and suddenly there's something as old as the world, isn't there? A young couple—you see, it's a bit vague, he doesn't even say a man, a woman, they're teenagers, young people barely out of childhood, no matter—a young couple isolates itself on the ark, and suddenly there's this question that should be the focus of my talk this evening: is it ancient savagery being forgiven?
12:16 And instead of an answer, as if he caught himself, "and sings and takes its post." Full stop. So the image, if you like, to speak like a cameraman, the image remains, you see, a freeze-frame on this couple, up there, on the ark—"and sings and takes its post." So what is this story of ancient savagery, after all? Well yes, I'm known as the most anti-ecological man in Europe.
12:50 That's where I'll begin. I do say anti-ecological. It's not wrong that I'm anti-ecological, but I'm not against ecology. I try to have precise vocabulary, forgive me for bothering you with this, but otherwise it's confusion, and that always benefits those who are not the best-intentioned. What bothers me isn't at all that we care about our environment, because that's the origin of ecology after all—eco, what's around us.
13:22 You know that "eco" comes from oikos, which simply means the house, the household. That doesn't point to nature at the outset, quite the opposite. It points to a thoroughly human world. That's what also gives us "economy" from oikos, you see? The first economy is indeed the fathers and mothers of families. I'm not anti-ecology, I'm anti-ecologist—meaning I have a grievance against certain discourses, while being perfectly aware that there are problems that need to be addressed. Some are serious, and they're not at all the ones found in that discourse.
13:55 But on the other hand, I am anti-naturalist, that is, opposed to what serves as the backdrop for almost the entirety of ecologist discourse—it's a naturalist standpoint. Just take the notion of "natural balance"—you really have to see this. You know, in Namibia—it's a country in southern Africa, between South Africa and Angola—put that on Google Images, you won't believe it.
14:29 There's the highest dune in the world, almost right at the sea's edge. The sea brings a cold current, while the dunes come from the desert, so there's a collision of hot and cold air that makes fog. It's an extraordinary country. Anyway, very sparsely populated. And it was long a German colony—why am I mentioning this? Because it's heartbreaking for peoples who are starving, dying of thirst, throughout the entire dry season—nomads, and most peoples there are nomadic.
15:01 Now, tons of water arrive, there, from the horizon, coming—that's it, it's going to rain, we'll eat. I've lived in Niger myself, where in October you look at the sky—there won't be a single drop of rain until June. You know, these are places like that, it's as harsh as the Siberian winter, the dry season in those regions. So, tons of water arrive and rush into the sea, for no one—talk all you want about a balanced nature.
Savagery and forgiveness: Vigny's "divine fault" 15:34 What does this have to do with the text? Because he speaks of ancient savagery. And so he says—you won't win, say what you like, but Rimbaud, he does take nature into account. Love, after all, at the outset, isn't only among men, isn't only in history, it's among animals, it's the mating season, it's... Quite so. And that's why I'm dwelling here on this extraordinary question, is it ancient savagery.
16:04 There's always a bit of a wild side to love. You know, "savages"—at the outset, that means the one who flees, who saves himself; when we arrive, they're quite right to flee, moreover. The savages—when you realize, you realize what we did to them when we arrived. Because otherwise... And then it also comes from "selva," that's another etymology, but you can combine it with "selvaggia" in Italian, wild, from "silva," the forest in Latin.
16:38 "Is it ancient savagery being forgiven?" There are two mysterious words there: savagery and forgiven. Why forgive? Where's the fault? Ah, indeed! Let me take a poet very different from Rimbaud, a Romantic poet in a rather academic sense—I don't say that too pejoratively—but French Romanticism is somewhat overshadowed by the great Romanticism, the great Romanticism in poetry that everyone knows, not just specialists, is German and English.
17:09 It's northern, moreover—Madame de Staël said, "Light comes to us from the north," at the start of Romanticism. Whereas we're rather convinced that "light comes to us from the south." But, I don't want to turn this into a... We're not in a literature class, but let's say that French Romanticism is too often thought set to verse, with rhymes and all you like, but poetry is still something else. So there's more poetry in Rousseau's prose in the Fifth Walk, for example, than in the rows of verse found among the Romantics.
17:43 But here, I'm thinking of Alfred de Vigny. Don't confuse him with his exact contemporary, another beacon of French Romanticism, Alfred de Musset—so we have Alfred as a common factor. I have Hugo's contemporaries and all that. Now, Hugo, I'm not including him in the critique I just made. He spans the whole century, he's Romantic, Realist, whatever you want, the body of work is immense. No, but Vigny—no, I'm not straying off course. You know, when I seem to be taking a detour, it's because we're approaching the heart of our discussion tonight.
18:18 I was saying—why forgive, you remember, I haven't lost my thread. What needs forgiving? Would there be a fault? And Vigny writes a poem that's perhaps a masterpiece called The Shepherd's House. I recommend it to you. It too can be found on Wikisource. Type Alfred de Vigny, V-I-G-N-Y, and add The Shepherd's House. It's a hymn to woman. You see, I don't know what's gotten into me tonight on social matters, I'm ecological and feminist. You see? No, he had fallen in love with an actress and somehow he wrote a poem less tense, less argumentative than usual—a masterpiece, The Shepherd's House.
18:57 Well, anyway, it's on the mountain, a thick heather. Forgive me, it's so beautiful I have trouble saying it. "Where the hunter's steps can scarcely sink in. I will build for you there the Shepherd's House. Come hide there love and your divine fault." Ah, you thought I'd lost my thread? There you go—since the beginning, right? There's what is manifest in broad daylight, voting on the agora, the Greek city, on the Pnyx, that's the world of men, politics, and then there's what lies within the walls, the world of woman, Antigone, the family, right?
19:38 The bonds of blood, and not the bond of citizenship, which is less determined by nature and therefore freer—you can choose to belong to this or that political party, you don't choose to be someone's son or someone's sister. So yes, I'm aware this surprises some of you, that's not my fault. As Engels magnificently puts it, we must substitute the realm of freedom for the empire of necessity. So yes, love, because of its physical side, is always tied to a fault, everything that's organic, everything of the order of the body—you've been told since you were tiny, put your hands over your mouth when you yawn, don't show your insides—the organic is frowned upon.
20:27 There's a comedy—I'm changing sources, but it's on the same theme—there's a comedy, truly a piece of boulevard theater, as they say, little gems in the style of Feydeau, titled "Don't Go Walking Around Naked Like That." It's a bourgeois husband reproaching his wife for wearing rather revealing attire. There you go—what must be hidden? Ancient savagery. So, today I declare solemnly that, contrary to what I might sometimes suggest and which I'm denying tonight, we owe an enormous amount to nature, we owe it first of all the fact of existing.
Matter and form: man appears when nature disappears 21:07 Because nature provides the matter and man provides the form. But a form without matter—that, we don't know of. A square—have you ever seen a square floating in the air that isn't itself square? Yes, you can do that with a hologram, but that's not without matter, there are ions, I don't know—nature is never anything but matter. With the same amount of glass there is in this jar, I can make an ashtray.
21:37 The difference is the form. Matter gives existence, form gives essence. Let's review that—you see, these words aren't that complicated. Essence is what makes it be called that. That's the world of man, language. This is a jar. This is a glass. This is a microphone. This is a keyboard. There you go. So matter is prior—nature, excuse me, is prior to the appearance of man.
22:12 Only, here's the thing, and here I become anti-ecological again, and not anti-ecologist. I have to repeat myself, because for it to sink in, you see, against the dominant discourse, saying it a thousand times barely suffices to counter what we're fed every day by all the media. What's certain is that man begins to appear when nature begins to disappear. What do you expect? A split pebble in prehistory, and a little later, well, a few hundred thousand years later, a house on stilts, in the Magdalenian era, I believe.
22:51 There you go. Houses on stilts don't hang from trees. Among the Greeks, for instance, one escapes nature to take refuge in the city. And I've noticed, I think I already said this, yes, I already said it, but I repeat it because I note with happiness, gratitude, and appreciation that there are more and more new arrivals, new people, I'm now telling myself. So I'll act as if I'd never said it—I took a trip to Greece, just once.
23:27 And for once, it wasn't me guiding the girl, it was the girl guiding me. Excuse me, it's anecdotal. She was very proud because she'd been to Greece before me. And we arrive at Cape Sounion. Everyone here who's been to Greece knows Cape Sounion. It's about 50 kilometers east of Athens. And there, there's something exceptional in the Greek landscape. Generally, when you're in a small Greek port, you don't see the infinite. It's not Brittany, it's not the ocean—it's a cove, three little islands facing you, a peninsula, a roadstead, a bay, a gulf, a cove.
24:07 Now here, for once, there are three infinites. No, no, I'm not doing metaphysics with words that carry great tremors. I'm speaking philosophically. Infinite in the sense of indefinite, whose contour is not given. What is it? It's the air, the light, and the sea, and the ocean, and the sea, the immense one. That's all there is. So one might say, what's the connection? You were saying that the Greeks flee from that toward the city. Well, it's there, there, at Cape Sounion, on a promontory overlooking the sea, that they built the temple of Poseidon, the Greek Neptune, the god of the oceans.
The temple of Poseidon and hubris: Icarus, Antigone, Oedipus 24:46 That meant: this is not us, this is the world of the gods, this, the infinite, the indefinite, that. The Greeks had a name for this. For those who want to get too close to the gods, well, that's hubris, which gives us in French "hybride." It means that it mixes—that's what we call a hybrid, an animal world, it puts together a mixture, a graft. That's the relation: man must not mix with the domain of the gods.
25:17 Look at Icarus, he flew too high, and it cost him dearly. And the essence of Greek tragedy, the culmination of Greek art, tragedy, which brings together all the arts. Visual art, sight, text, music—because it was a bit like slam poetry, we'd say today. It wasn't, hey, what are you doing tonight? No, it wasn't that, there was a very rigorous meter, long syllables, short syllables—in short, all these arts, tragedy, always has the function of purging an unfortunate hero, an unfortunate heroine, I'm thinking of Antigone, who committed hubris precisely, who went too, too, too far somewhere, either too high, literally, I'm thinking of Icarus, or who wanted to know too much, sometimes even.
26:07 Who is that? Well, it's Oedipus. It's Oedipus. No author of detective fiction, in these six years—sorry, in all the history—of the imagination, has ever gone as far as this masterpiece of the whodunit, Oedipus, where the one leading the investigation is the guilty party being sought, and he himself doesn't know it. And then, the one giving orders, since he's the king of the city. You know why he's king, by the way—it's because he killed the monster that was terrorizing the city, he killed the Sphinx, bringing humanism in place of naturalism.
26:43 I'll explain later why I make this aside. And so, he got the reward that the city gave to whoever delivered them from the monster: Jocasta. And he doesn't know she's his mother. Well, he was separated very early at birth. Besides, Oedipus means "swollen feet" in Greek. He was a shepherd who found him with his feet bound like that, in the bushes. Now, what does Oedipus do? Come on, everyone should tell us what they know.
27:14 He must find the murderers of Laius, Laius being his father, but he doesn't know that. Otherwise, the plague will keep ravaging Thebes, the city. The plague arose since Laius died and his murderer wasn't found. So, he's the one leading the investigation. Do you understand now why he gouges out his eyes at the end when he knows? What are eyes for? Eyes search on the outside.
27:47 He risks... Whereas the temple of Apollo, you know, where there was the motto of philosophers since Socrates and Plato, know thyself. Thyself—the arrow that turns back into the questioner's own throat, right? It's not who killed Laius, it's know thyself, Oedipus. He torments his heart too much, Oedipus—that's what the chorus says at one point. He torments his heart too much, he searches too much. There's always the word "too much" in hubris.
The right angle and the birth of Venus in Hesiod 28:17 He is not content to interpret the new by the old. I'll stop quoting the chorus. So, that's hubris. Well, the temple of Poseidon, it's there at Cape Sounion. As if to say, and there, that's the opposite of the infinites, that's the finite, the determined, the right angles. Imagine the Parthenon, take it and put it on that promontory. There, that's a "us," that's the human world.
28:48 That's us, that's rationality, that's the logos. I knew an architect who had this lovely phrase, "the noblest conquest of man"—I said nothing, that's the horse, especially among the English. He would say, "the noblest conquest of man is the right angle." There, that was to illustrate how the Greeks, you see, escape from nature, from the monstrous, from the indeterminate, the infinite, the indefinite. The titanic world, as they themselves called it, because the ocean, all that, is the Titans.
29:21 You know Venus—her most familiar representation to everyone is Botticelli's painting, where we see a ravishing young woman clothed only by her hair, if she can be said to be clothed at all, on a shell that evokes the marine element, borne by the waves. Do you know what the original version is in Greek mythology? What is she floating on? On the semen of Uranus. I'm not making anything up, it's in Hesiod's text, the Theogony, Hesiod, an archaic Greek who left us all the origins of all these gods' names.
30:05 Long before there were the Olympian gods, long before there is Uranus and Gaia. These are Titans, not gods—it's too gigantic, it's not the Greek measure. I say this because there are some who still don't know all this. Gaia is the Earth, of course, the root of "geology," "geography" comes from there, and the sky, Uranus, spends his time raping her—there's no other word in Hesiod's account, that's how it is.
30:39 And she's fed up with giving birth, giving birth for nothing, right? So she asks one of her sons to cut it off for her—I'm not inventing anything, it's in the mythology. Those idiots Onfray and Deleuze who think Freud is a charlatan—well, castration is already at the heart of mythology. And yes, of course, before this horrible wound, the divine semen—it's a divinity, not yet a god, it's a Titan—the semen spreads out, and that's what gives rise to Oceanus, the ocean. I'm not inventing anything.
"Ancienne": love as the result of millennia of history 31:15 And from that, we understand better what the goddess of what floats on. Well, of Eros. Venus. There, in order to circle back around our ancient savagery—is it an ancient savagery that is forgiven? So now I'm going to turn our investigation's spotlight, no longer on "savagery" and "forgive"—we've understood a bit better "forgive" there, generally the erotic, the sexual, doesn't happen on the Place de la Concorde at 6pm, no—but on the word "ancient," careful, I've already told you, I'm sure the best among you, the most attentive, remember that it's the most common words, those that seem to pose no problem, not the technical, philosophical or scientific words, that are the most treacherous—well, in any case, and that must be questioned.
32:09 Is it ancient—ah, this naturalism, this one, I'm for it, the one that recalls that it's past, it's ancient, what is so moving in a young couple—I say this because I've lived in the suburbs for about ten years now, sorry, I won't tell my whole life story, but I used to be more of a Parisian, like many others, it was the prices that drove me out of Paris, let's be clear—ancient, savagery, this couple—since I've been in the suburbs, I see young girls waiting for their boyfriends at the RER stop, and I see them trembling because he's five minutes late, right?
32:56 And that's it, he doesn't love me anymore—then suddenly she sees his little head appear at the top of the stairs and suddenly we see her in paradise. But do you realize the millennia of evolution that this implies, to experience love like that? Read love in The Princess of Clèves, a novel written between the 16th and 17th centuries, with all the complexity of the Map of Tenderness.
33:27 Read The Princess of Clèves and you'll see that it's quite different from what the loves of Cro-Magnon man must have been. Ah yes, it's man each time—all this, if you like, let me tell you. But in man, there isn't only nature, there is something called history, historical materialism. If we neglect nature, we're not materialists. If we see only nature and neglect history, we're mechanistic materialists, not dialectical materialists. We're reviewing quite a few things with a little text by Rimbaud like this. Ancient savagery.
33:57 And what is so moving is this temporal depth, such that this couple is there. They contemplate this setting, where there's a mixture of trees, canals, water, buildings, factories. And sang this poem. Still, this kid, he writes that at 17 or 18 years old, it's unbelievable. In these matters, there were these texts, as if you repress them, you don't want to talk about them.
34:29 Ah no, no, he never talks about it. He kept them all the same though. I can tell you, even the one time someone finally got him to talk, when he was stuck by the rainy season in Ethiopia, fifteen days with the sound of rain on the corrugated iron roof, he finally spilled the beans—the guy kept trying to get him to say, well, you did do literature in Paris at one point. He said to him, yes, I knew all those characters. I quote: I knew painters, architects, poets, then he fell silent, looked into the distance and said, but not a musician.
