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 is to be done?": no revolutionary practice without theory 0:00 The subject of Bernard Friot's question. It's a fundamental, recurring question that you ask, which is a quotation, it's a question, you see what I mean, it's the question of what is to be done.
1:00 This is my starting point, it's the first one. A starting point which, right from the outset, is going to seem specious, since I'm going to show, right away, right from this introduction, that apparently it's a call to practice, Susan. I'm not imposing this interpretation on what you meant. But what is to be done, yes. There it is, but I'm saying how it could be misunderstood. It could be the discourse of the guy who is fed up with theoretical discourses, precisely, of the epoché, as they say in Husserl, of the great theoretical parenthesis, of the great detour, I'll come back to this, that Plato speaks of in the Republic, as it happens.
1:45 When he shows that if we want to solve political problems, my friend, we have to make an immense detour there. We'll come back to that. And that now, people are fed up with these detours. As Marx said, now, philosophers, you've had 20 centuries to interpret the world, now it's time to transform it. So, what is to be done? Marx, Lenin, that seems quite homogeneous. Except, here's the thing, that same Lenin says, somewhere, and this is a first answer to the question, the Leninist answer. For now, I'm placing you within an orthodoxy that I fully assume, that of Lenin, strictly speaking, namely, without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice.
2:19 What is to be done? Do theory, if we want to be practical. Economics, theory, if we want to be practical.
2:52 When? Never. There you go, so we never talk economics in order to be Marx. That's going to seem a bit strong, all the same. So, I don't want my theoretical detour to look like that. Like Socrates's interlocutor in the Republic, that I should make this immense detour, my friend, as Plato says, without which we cannot solve political problems, unless either those who are at the head of the state devote themselves to strict philosophy, or those who are philosophers come, quite simply, to the head of the state. It's stated in so many words in the Republic. In short, this revolutionary side that Hegel is going to see clearly, Vincent Clutter, in a text I'll quote in a moment, where he shows that it's not the content, of course, which is still archaic at that time, but Plato's method that is properly revolutionary, having understood that the rational and the real were nonetheless linked.
Descartes and the true use of mathematics 3:40 Namely, and so I come back to this for this theoretical detour, to avoid this pretext which consists in shutting oneself up in theory in order never to return to practice, I bounce off Descartes, who himself did not fall into this trap, precisely, and who, like all the great moments in the articulation of the history of thought in general and of philosophy in particular, did not fall into this trap, for if anyone was theoretical, it was indeed Descartes. He's the man of "I think," he's indeed the man of "stepping back," well, of the theoretical attitude in the very epistemic sense.
4:10 But here it is, in a passage from the Discourse on Method that I value very much, but which is developed in the Meditations and which he knows well, when he reviews the education he received at school, with that expeditious side—he devoted a lot of time to it, he wasn't expeditious in his studies, but anyway—as he says he learned hardly anything in the end, except that it left him completely confused, except, I took pleasure, after reviewing the arts, literature, morality, theology, very cautiously—the Discourse on Method appears a year after Galileo's condemnation, and Descartes's motto is obviously to mask himself.
4:44 So he says all of a sudden, I took pleasure above all in mathematics, that's apparently the only discipline where he took something in, because of the certainty and evidence of their reasoning—in the sense of theoreticism, certainty and evidence of their reasoning—but I did not yet notice their true use, we'll get to use-value and exchange-value, I did not yet notice their true use, and thinking, it's still Descartes speaking, that they should only serve the mechanical arts, and to facilitate men's labor—a striking sentence where Descartes anticipates the mediation there will be from the scientific revolution, which is in the contemporary continent, to the industrial revolution, which will soon come: the machine will free men from mechanical labor.
5:23 I was astonished that, their foundation being so solid, nothing more lasting had been built upon it. In short, what a strange paradox that the modern state of knowledge, in the matter that interests us most, law, morality, politics, what is most intimate to us as human beings, more important even than knowledge, in the end, than what must I do, more important than what can I know?—well, that's the domain of contingent opinion, where one builds only on sand, as he says, and that where, on the contrary, one is rigorous, where one has moved from doxa, from opinion, to episteme—mathematics—it's a pure speculative game, but one that corresponds to no practical application.
5:56 So, I'm referring to Descartes to show that, like him, I would like never to lose sight of the fact that if we take a detour through mathematics, it's not in order to sink into a mathematicism, into which, according to the scant and somewhat mysterious testimonies we have, the last Academy sank, when Plato died, where it fell into a kind of theory of number-ideas, in the epigonic period, it's true, the great Plato, the great political thinker, was dead. And so, in order not to sink into that, I say right away, in Lenin's wake, I come back to this, that if I take a detour, I'm prescribing a detour through theory, in which I'm now going to proceed, through Rousseau, and through the analysis of his speech—I'll show later why his speech is quite distinct from his discourse, his literal speech.
Rousseau, idleness and the tomb at Ermenonville 6:41 If I take this detour, once again, it's in order to remain, to return to, it's so as not to lose sight of the practical relation which is its horizon. And, I, I, you'll tell me whenever you want, okay? No, no, let's continue, and so it is indeed still about what is to be done, what is to be done, there. And we're going to summon mainly, principally, Rousseau. Quite right, I'm going to begin with Rousseau's answer to the question what is to be done, in matters of politics, it's indeed the Social Contract after all, a text that is obviously political.
7:15 Yes, the Rousseau of the Social Contract, but not only that one. But in order to lead up to it, I'm going to, by way of introduction, approach another text of Rousseau's, which seems exactly the opposite of what the Social Contract says, so that, superimposing the reading of the Social Contract afterward on top of it, and placing ourselves at the standpoint of a higher unity that lifts the contradiction, we may finally be in possession of what I call Rousseauian systematicity, which should be liberating with respect to the aporias and antinomies that are still ours today.
7:45 In economic, political, even aesthetic matters. And so, it's going to seem scandalous to approach the problem of the value of labor through the value of idleness. And this is a quotation from Rousseau, he says the word "farniente" even, in the Fifth Walk. Let me explain. And what is even more scandalous is that I'm going to introduce my first Rousseau text, that of the Reveries, where there is a praise of idleness, thus of the value of non-labor, starting from anyone but an economist or a specialist in political philosophy, starting from a dreamer, a wanderer and a freelancer—I'm speaking of genius—I'm speaking of Gérard de Nerval.
8:23 It's from him that I'm going to introduce it. And all of this is extremely deliberate in my mind. Why? Because we are one year away from the anniversary of Rousseau's birth, June 28, 2012. And in this perspective which also opens up some... I mean, there are even electoral perspectives, which certainly come to mind.
8:54 That's why I place myself, of course, in that wake too. And that's why I'm going to make deliberate use—not without my knowledge—of the symbolic order, since when we hold commemorations, we're not far from tombs, and tomb is said, isn't it, soma in Greek, and there's Plato's old pun in the Gorgias, soma, sêma. The first of signs is the tomb. What makes a sign for man, I mean, every sign is made to give presence to something that is absent.
9:24 And that's why, from the Neolithic onward, the first absence, making absence present, death par excellence, is indeed the tomb. So we're going to go to Rousseau's tomb, we're going to take a trip, I invite you on this famous detour we spoke of earlier—what is to be done? Take a detour, take a walk, a walk to Rousseau's tomb, it's 45 km as the crow flies from here, not very far, and I reassure you right away, it's a magical walk I'm inviting you on, since it can be done from an armchair. That's where I bring in Nerval, because Nerval did it for us in a text that went unnoticed, and which is nonetheless the text that opens, as I'll now place it, the list of Filles du feu.
10:00 We seem to be a bit further from economics and politics. Filles du feu—Nerval himself said to his publisher, what do you think of the title? I find it a bit frou-frou, with that inimitable style. Precisely, a bit frou-frou. Well, anyway. But let's return, in the shadow of a Michel Clouscard who wrote Traité de l'amour fou, to show that we're not entirely straying from the subject. So, Nerval, I mention it in passing, but since it's a biographical contingency, I'll leave it aside for now, I don't care about Nerval studies, Nerval spent his childhood, which also plays a role in his work, in the Valois, right near Ermenonville, where Rousseau is buried.
10:35 So it's a contingency of his life that Rousseau's tomb is an object especially familiar to him. There we are. But we have to wait until the end of his life, and many crises of madness, and stays going back and forth to the clinic and all, for our marvelous psychotic to undergo what Nerval himself calls, rather mysteriously, the natal turn, that is, to suddenly address in his texts the problem of Rousseau's tomb, of the Valois, and of the return to history. That's where I get to what characterizes the late Nerval, the one of the prose. Sorry, this is the least introductory thing about Nerval, but this delightful madman—I'd like us to snatch him a bit from that imagery—he's for me one of the greatest authors, and the novella I'm talking about, for me, invites us on the longest journey in the history of all literatures, I mean even compared to Homer's Odyssey.
11:17 I'm quite serious. This novella, called Angélique, which is a reworking of a title, of a text he had first called Les Faux Saulniers—we're not far from economics—which means salt smugglers, the Faux Saulniers, that's not the least of it, the Faux Saulniers, we'll come back to that. So Nerval, in this text, I'll go quickly, because it deserves another discussion, another talk, to comment on this text, which is very short in number of pages but very long in resonance—in this text he officially proposes the pitch, as we'd say now, its diegesis, which is to go in search of a book he had consulted on the quays, by chance while traveling in Germany, wandering along the quays like that, a book he can't find in the Parisian bookshops, by an 18th-century French author called the abbé de Bucquoy, and this book is a pretext, because the libraries are sometimes closed, sometimes on vacation, in short there are all sorts of pretexts for leaving Paris, the world of the library, the world of Borges, the world of the labyrinth, and going for a stroll in the Valois, not far away, in the sheepfolds of the Oise and the Aisne, as he says, and he doesn't tell us, but we'll learn at the end of the novella that the goal of the whole thing is to go to...
12:15 Bam! And not to his mother's tomb.
First triangle: Rousseau, Henri IV and Gabrielle d'Estrées 13:02 So, when he arrives at Rousseau's tomb—you may know the place, at Ermenonville, 3 km away there's the Château de Chaalis, which is part of the trip, of the Golden [Dorel], at the time—and here's where I want to get to, this first text I'm going to comment on—he arrives within sight of the Château de Chaalis, guided by a peasant, we'll get to class struggle, and I quote him: the guard's son who was showing us the castle tells us, here's the tower of the beautiful Gabrielle, because at the time, it had been razed, now there was, in the castle, the tower of Gabrielle d'Estrées, Henri IV's favorite, it's in this castle that Henri IV sheltered his love affair with Gabrielle, we're in frou-frou territory.
13:37 Here is the château of the beautiful Gabrielle, says the peasant, every evening Rousseau came to strum his guitar beneath her window—still the peasant speaking—and the king, who was jealous, ended up having him killed. First triangle, three people, Rousseau, three characters in my scene, Rousseau, the monarch, Henri IV, Gabrielle, as in Lacan's Purloined Letter, the king, the queen, a third party. In Poe's Purloined Letter, of course, and then Lacan's, bravo, the fatal triangle if ever there was one. So, precisely, Nerval begins by laughing, of course, in complicity with us cultivated readers, at a poor peasant.
14:12 He says, that's how people tell it, in a century people will believe this, the population conflates events three centuries apart. And all of a sudden, he catches himself, he goes to the next line, he says, this legend is perhaps deeper than one thinks. Colon. Rousseau, there, I wanted to introduce him through Nerval. Rousseau, by refusing the hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour—Madame de Pompadour—for Le Devin du village, a showbiz success, we'd say today, an opera hit, wanted to reward him with a pension as was done for artists. We have here a specialist in the logistics of art.
14:44 We know how one speaks of it. And Rousseau refused, it was unprecedented, this pension, to keep his independence. His motto was "Vitam impendere vero," to make one's life dependent on truth. And just as Spinoza polished lenses to be independent of the powers of this world, he, Rousseau, copied music. Since there's writing involved, he copied music. Anyway, we know the rest. He refuses the hundred louis and Nerval—I'm now taking up the literal quotation—ruined the monarchical edifice founded by Henri de Bourbon.
15:38 Everything crumbled, his immortal image remains standing upon the ruins. And so this little text, which up to that point, this novella, was a kind of little chronicle with journalistic verve—there, come take a little stroll through the Valois with me, etc.—suddenly took on colossal proportions, so that Rousseau appears as a demigod who rises like an almost phallic statue, you see, above the ruins of the Ancien Régime. And in short, this anecdote of the triangle, Gabrielle-Rousseau-Henri IV, strikes me.
16:13 Why? First, because it is structural. I mean by that that Rousseau initiates an aesthetic period—I'm thinking of Romanticism afterward—that for me, he isn't a precursor of Romanticism, because a precursor means someone who does a bit before what will be done much later afterward. For me, he transcends this Romanticism, but he even announces modernity, we'll see this in the Reveries, where sensation, impression, in the modern sense of the term, the impressionist sense, plays a more important role than the person—but I mean, he announces a genuine mutation of literary speech, which is quite visible in the Reveries besides, and in which—this is the most important thing—what the character of Gabrielle represents in it is wealth—to return to other matters—wealth is symbolically linked to woman, which has an anthropological value.
17:04 We must not forget that Marx recalls that the first social division of labor, which is at the origin of the division into social classes, is that between man and woman—the Manuscripts of '44—itself, saying that the pregnant woman, for example, in the Neolithic, could hardly go chase the mammoth with the others, there are separations. First division of labor, first social class—there are classes, there are sexes, and I'll add, in writing, there are genres. That's a bit less perceived. And when we write, we always write, whether we want to or not, in a determined genre, we don't choose our genre any more than that, there is no choice of genre, there is the genre of choice.
Wagner and The Rhinegold: gold or love 17:35 It's perceived, but differently. There, there, there. Not with the same dominance as sexes and classes. That's why I don't insist on it. So, when Nerval—this triangle, I say it's structural. Why? Because in this evolution of discourse, I'll move quickly on to Wagner, whom Nerval—this is why I value Nerval—was the first to point out, before Baudelaire, before Baudelaire's famous letters, of whom it's said that Baudelaire was the first to reveal—it's true that Baudelaire has a polemical genius, a generosity that did a great deal for Wagner in Paris—but the discreet and gentle Gérard, in the shadows, as unnoticed as ever, had, a few years earlier, pointed out the radical novelty and the value of the solution that Wagner brought to the aesthetic aporias of modernity.
18:16 That's not our subject, so I'll always move on until I get to Wagner. Why? Because in Das Rheingold, the work—the tetralogy, the longest work made by an artist since the Greeks, lasting four days, all of the Ring, sorry ma'am, in the whole tetralogy, the whole story, if we get lost in the meanders of detail, there's no need—there's a guiding thread, Wagner says: gold, love, right from the start, there's a deal from the very beginning, when the dwarf steals the gold from the Rhine—one can take the gold that gives power over the world, a metaphor, they're both dead, even Marx and Wagner, exactly—and one can take the gold that has power over the world, one can remove it from the Rhine, as long as it's in the Rhine it's natural and produces no value, it's when it's worked that... all this he says in the text of Wagner's poem, as they say, in the libretto he wrote himself—so one can take it, but on one condition, which the Rhine maidens sing rather imprudently: one must renounce love. We come back to Gabrielle and to woman in the triangle, right?
19:15 Either gold, or love, a kind of algebra, and there's this extraordinary line from the dwarf, Alberich the Nibelung, who takes the gold first to forge it into a ring and secure it as the capital of power over the world—he says this line, he says, well, I've renounced love, I'm perhaps the only one among all mortals who has dared to do that, who would renounce love in this world, but at least with gold I'll buy pleasure. This brings me to a second Rousseauian triangle—the first, then, was Nerval's, me the challenger, me Rousseau, I'm going to strum the guitar beneath the king's window, me the challenger, cloak and dagger, you see, beneath the king's window, the king—and I'll say it now—the commodity, that's Gabrielle. I'm not going to reduce woman to a commodity, but in this text, in this symbolic and mythical text, she represents the commodity, just as the real woman, the woman of history, the woman who is in history, I mean, the woman historically speaking, is quite the opposite of Gabrielle—she is not a kept woman, she is a producer of values. I've lived long enough in Africa, and so have you, to know how much women, all things being equal otherwise, were the greatest producers of value in the traditional economy, and so the woman spoken of in the Bible in Jerusalem, the woman who gathered...
20:25 ...all the debaucheries of creation, she symbolizes the extraction of surplus value, wealth, the king's woman, and so, as the dwarf says, with gold I won't be able to buy love, I've renounced that, that's the pact, that's the deal—there's an Alberich in the Tetralogy, interesting—but on the other hand, I'll be able to buy pleasure. Romance novels, cinema, are full of these films where the guy always wonders whether she loves him for his money or for himself—these are truly, truly profound existential problems.
The dialectical syllogism and the second triangle 21:08 If I go from triangle to triangle, I'm not digressing, I'm specifying, it's to try to recall what is propelled at the very heart of the dialectical motor. Nothing less than that. Why? Because there is dialectic from the moment there is a syllogism—we see this in Hegel's Logic, in more detail—that is, from the moment there are two extremes and a middle term, a middle term which of course surpasses these two extremes. For example, between me and the cliff face, if I'm a road worker, those are the two extremes, me the working subject and then the stone, the pebble, the worked object; between the two, there is this middle term which is the tool, which is going to play such an important role in Hegelian thought and which passes into Marx, the productive force—and apparently the tool is secondary, it's only a means, the essential thing is me and what I want to make of these stones, my house instead of the mountain, for example—well, not at all, says Hegel, then Marx, who confirms this and who takes it up from Hegel, namely that the worker dies of exhaustion in the labor process, the mountain disappears into the quarry, into the hole, what remains is the tool, it's the tool that will be passed on to later generations—the Stone Age, chipped stone, polished stone, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age—and it's on the progression of the tool that...
22:18 ...the progress of the productive forces will be built, as one says in more orthodox terms. So, if I introduce this second triangle—I haven't yet stated it—it's with this preamble, here it is: Rousseau seems to me to occupy the middle term in the dialectical sense, but for that I was taking this little detour through Hegel, that is, a dismissal of both and a higher synthesis of two figures that still constitute an antinomy in which we remain paralyzed, namely that of the libertine of his time, the libertine—I'll take Sade or Des Grieux, it doesn't matter, or Don Juan, or Don Juan even, because Don Juan is 17th century, but Don Juan is Mozart, and the 18th century when we take Rousseau.
23:02 And so, the first extreme, the libertine, founded on one category, pleasure, to go quickly, the other extreme, Robespierre, that is, virtue—they've tarnished the name of virtue sometimes, as we have the two extremes, always more one-sided, the extremes, the unilateral ones. And the middle term is what Rousseau is going to bring. And that's why I'm going to develop the Social Contract and the Reveries—it's happiness, happiness which is not the pleasure of the libertine, of the master, that Don Giovanni, well, that's the aristocrats, all the same, Don Juan, these are people who know how to make themselves heard by the sword—when Don Juan is attacked in the forest, he goes to rescue the gentleman.
23:41 It's still, after all, the old nobility of the sword ruling by force. So, neither pleasure in the reductive sense, that of the libertine, of course, nor the refusal of all pleasure in the Stalinist rigidity of this form of Robespierre's virtue—rather, the right to happiness.
Link between the triangles: use value and exchange value 24:11 We're not far from Friot now. But if I may interrupt you just to clarify a point that doesn't seem entirely obvious at this stage, the relationship between the two triangles, the one where... Very good question. Since we have, not necessarily geometric or mathematical, but the logical and symbolic relationship of meaning between the two triangles, the one that Nerval points to between the woman, the prince and Rousseau strumming the mandolin, and the one you just pointed to between Rousseau, who offers us happiness, between pleasure on one side and virtue on the other.
24:55 What an attentive listener, who saw very clearly that I made an illegitimate transition—I was planning to link the triangles afterward, but it's very good to ask the question now. But I've begun the embryo of an answer and I'll dive right into it. From the moment I said that Gabrielle in the first triangle, the woman, plays the role of, precisely, the extraction of surplus value, the concentration, the symbolic condensation of all the pleasure of this world by the owner of possession, of what is desirable, and of power, of capital. Whether it's Solomon—because there's the same triangle in Nerval's Voyage en Orient between me, Solomon, and then me, the blacksmith [piforgeron], the challenger, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the same triangle, which we find again—it's anthropological.
25:32 And so, since this woman symbolizes to the highest degree the fetishism of the commodity, precisely, here is the link with the second triangle, since I speak of the libertine on one side and Robespierre on the other, and between the two I place happiness—I want to show that in happiness, there is pleasure too, precisely, but not only that. There's the link. In the first triangle, pleasure is present as the king's woman, and in the second, it is present as happiness. We'll see afterward that this goes through a collective detour, through a relation to the other and a new recognition.
26:05 But the relation, that's it, it's pleasure. Pleasure, but which occupies... It's use-value. It's use-value, right. It's the importance of use-value. Marx never stops saying, God knows if anyone... Exchange-value and use-value. That's it. That's the two triangles... That's it, which absolutely must be distinguished. I believe no one has distinguished them, even opposed them, as much as Marx, apart perhaps from Ricardo, from whom he indeed inherited the essence of the distinction itself. Except that Marx shows the stakes involved, which Ricardo doesn't do. So, he doesn't confuse them at all, he shows clearly that use-value is entirely independent of the physical, chemical properties of the commodity, etc., which concern only its use-value.
26:41 On the other hand, he adds, to show that this distinction must never go as far as separation. Here I'll make a small logical parenthesis. It is to Aristotle that we owe this distinguishing. To pick up on his own words, Aristotle indeed says that, for example, this glass—we must certainly distinguish, since matter and form have nothing to do with each other, because with the same matter, glass, one could have made an ashtray and not a glass, which would not have the same definition, the same quiddity. Aristotle speaks to me. So, it is quite distinct. The matter, the glass in itself, contains this object no more than it does an ashtray.
27:18 On the other hand, it's not separable. I can't show you with my right hand the shape of the glass floating in the air like that, and then the shapeless matter on the other side. That's not possible. We can distinguish things while remembering that in reality they are not separable. And so, exchange values and use values. Marx insists a great deal, and here more than Ricardo, on the fact that for there to be exchange value, for the commodity to have an exchange value, it must never cease to have a use value. If there weren't a use value in the last instance, my exchange would be ruined.
27:48 There you go. Even though the two must never be confused. That's just a little reminder in passing. So, in usufruct — if you prefer, rather than enjoyment — in the usufruct, in the use value of woman as the first commodity, etc., there is what allows the mediation, the passage from the first triangle to the second. With Rousseau's concept of happiness, which I'll show is precisely inseparable from social justice. That's the difference with the master's enjoyment, which is based, as Clouscard says, on theft and plunder — in the fine apostrophe he addresses to Séguéla.
Voltaire, Rousseau and the right to happiness 28:21 I don't know if you saw it on video on YouTube. This second triangle — why do I insist on it? And here I'm forced to bring in a new reference, anti-Rousseauian if ever there was one, that of Voltaire. Here I'm speaking politically, I'm not speaking about the capability of one or the other as a philosopher.
28:51 The eighteenth-century philosophers will put it in quotation marks. And you never see Voltaire on the philosophy agrégation syllabus. So it's as a thinker that I take him here, mainly as a polemicist. And I take a text drawn from Voltaire's English Letters, specifically the letter on commerce. We're at the opposite pole from daydreaming by the lakeside. We're with Voltaire the industrious, the entrepreneur, as one would say today of the daily fare of the Medef. And he was a very shrewd boss. He had a bathing establishment at Ferney in Switzerland.
29:22 He had marquises who were his representatives at Versailles on one occasion, Voltaire did. And so, Voltaire — a superb text which I'm going to... By quoting it, we'll see to what extent, no need to insist, it's the opposite of the Rousseauian conception of happiness. Except that the common point which makes the profound unity of the Age of Enlightenment, so that even these enemy brothers meet on one point. So one point, I'll say it right away, is the concept of happiness. This whole century strove to say that men have a right to happiness. That is to say, not — I'm going to distinguish categories now — salvation, as was the case in the previous century with Pascal.
29:56 After death, what one wants — salvation, in short. Salvation, which I respect, is a different conception, salvation. Happiness, nor peace, is a Christian concept which is agreement with oneself. Happiness presupposes an agreement also with the external world, with reality, and a certain duration that is not found in enjoyment. There are two determinations which distinguish happiness from things it could be confused with. A certain duration, in time — happiness is often told in the imperfect tense in memoirs. If you notice, that is, the verb tense suited to long duration.
30:27 You shouldn't mind this — well, in Rimbaud: 'the slopes cradled it, magic flowers hummed, and beasts of fabulous elegance moved over the sea made of an eternity of warm tears.' Always in the imperfect. And so, as Proust would say, the only paradises are those we have lost. This temporal thickness — I'm going to insist on it because there's some working time involved — leads me to posit a hypothesis that will play a major role in my talk: that there is a historical value of happiness, just as there is a labor value, an historical accumulation of the possibilities of happiness that we owe to praxis.
31:13 And so, if I take these two determinations that distinguish happiness from what it might be confused with — namely a certain thickness in time on the one hand, and on the other, a relation to the other, an intersubjectivity, which I'll develop straight away by getting into the texts afterward — we arrive at my second triangle. This temporal thickness, I'm going to insist on it, because it requires working time, leading me to posit the hypothesis that will play a major role in my talk, that there is a historical value of happiness, just as there is a labor value, a historical accumulation of the possibilities of happiness that we owe to praxis.
32:03 And so, if I take these two determinations that distinguish happiness from what it might be confused with — namely a certain thickness in time on the one hand, and on the other, a relation to the other, an intersubjectivity, which I'll develop straight away by getting into Rousseau's texts afterward — we arrive at my second triangle. And third triangle — there are only three, I reassure you — third triangle, before, the last one before I move on to reading the texts that interest me, is the triangle made possible only from Rousseau onward. There's truly a Rousseauian break here, in the same sense as we'll take up epistemological breaks — a Rousseauian break that will lead Kant to say that Rousseau is the Newton of morality. This break consists in proposing, for the first time, a ternary conception for all problems of philosophical inquiry, and especially when it comes to philosophy of action, politics, and the human sciences,
Third triangle: naturalist, theological, anthropological 33:13 namely the tripartition between the point of view — good morning Philippe — the theological point of view, sorry, I'm saying it out of order, the naturalist point of view, sorry, the theological point of view, the anthropological point of view. It's Rousseau who first gives us this kind of liberating ternary — let me explain a little. Most positions taken in the theory of knowledge come down either to a naturalist point of view — as when Sarkozy says that for young people who commit suicide we should also be able to check whether they don't have problems with their genes, the debate isn't settled — it's monstrous, it's one of the most monstrous sentences of the five-year term for me.
33:53 I mean, but still, it shows that there's always the old point of view fought by Socrates against Callicles in the Gorgias, which for me is the most tense text in the history of political philosophy, the Gorgias dialogue, where even Gorgias is about to strike Socrates, if he weren't so old — still, he deserves a caning, Socrates — and the young fascist with all the pre-Nietzschean excess, I mean, saying that it's natural law, that force must reign in society, that the sheep is made to be devoured by the wolf, we'll see, and that collectivist and generous theories were invented by the weak to rule over the strong — well, that's the Nietzschean vulgate word for word in Callicles's extraordinary speech in the Gorgias.
34:29 I'm not dealing with Plato today, but if I open this parenthesis on Plato — and I'll open two or three more — it's because of a structural analogy between Rousseau's and Plato's philosophical positioning, each in relation to the historical and political crisis of their time. Let me explain. About fifteen years ago, in the philosophy agrégation, this topic was proposed: 'City and decadence in Plato and Rousseau.' Indeed, both find themselves closing out a historical period — for Plato it's the city-state that's collapsing and giving way to Empire; for Rousseau it's the Ancien Régime that's coming to an end.
35:05 First common point. Second common point: both — I'm thinking of Plato through Socrates's mouth — both recall that the cognitive aim, the 'what can I know' to speak in the old terms of the original philosophical initiative, Socrates, is not first. There's the 'what must I do' which is first and which is moral — moral, ethical, in the objective sense. I don't need to go into that subtlety for now. But the question of what ought to be is at least as important for giving philosophy its specific field, otherwise it would merge with — it would be at the CNRS, it would be in scientific research if it were nonsense.
35:40 I won't forget. But there's the question 'what must I do' on which science gives us no support at all, since one can be a very great scholar like Heisenberg and be an avowed Nazi, or like Konrad Lorenz — the list is long. There, there, there. The list is long, as you say. And some more contemporary figures too, but let's be a bit polemical for now. So this naturalist point of view, I'm getting to it, which consists in saying — why not, for now I'm not deciding between the three.
36:13 In fact, everything comes down to a mechanistic explanation, etc., where nature is the determining element in the last instance. It's the natural element, but in the sense of nature-as-object of physics. Physico-chemical nature — that's mechanistic materialism. Naturalist point of view, that's the thesis. The antithesis is the great two: theological point of view, that is, supernaturalist — you can't get more antithetical — no, it's God. It's God who makes me as I am, as I think, as I desire, etc., and the world as it is, etc. And finally, the anthropological point of view, which Rousseau is the first to bring with his concept of human freedom. That's the third triangle.
36:44 It's the last triangle. The third and final anthropological triangle, and so I'll summarize the sequence this way. In the first point of view, thesis, it's nature that makes man. In the second point of view, it's God that makes man. In the third, it's man who makes man. That's practically a quotation from Marx: man makes man. There you go. So, anthropological point of view where all of a sudden — or as Hegel says — not only does he make man, he makes God too. Well there you go. We agree. And when Hegel says that God is the result of history and not the origin — right now, when all the mystics seek God at the source, at the origin, which is a typical illusion, that is, not merely different from the truth but the inverse of the truth, very close in that to liberation theology — Hegel says that God can appear, in the limit, as the result of history, according to what our freedom will make of it.
37:24 But the classless society, as a stage of history, could for example be the descent of the New Jerusalem, if we want to speak strictly in theological terms — descending, that's the end of Revelation, as far as I know, when the New Jerusalem ceases to hover in the world of ideas but descends, we see it descend. Yes, yes, but there's the thousand-year reign here and now. Yes, yes, that's the famous thousand-year reign of the millenarians. As Rimbaud says, it's not unthinkable to possess the truth in a single soul and body. Thanks, Philippe. There you go. So, I go back to this third triangle, which seems crucial to me for showing that all the great anthropological initiatives since — I'll take Lévi-Strauss as an example — are obliged to position themselves in relation to this triangle, to show how reversible it is.
38:11 I'll take the example of Lévi-Strauss. There's the raw, there's the cooked — there's nature, that's the great one; there's the cooked, that's culture — he doesn't like to say history, I'm marked by that, I prefer to say history, but never mind, for now it's culture. So we can say what is set against nature is spirit in Hegelian terms, history in Marxist terms, culture in... It doesn't bother me as long as there's a radical break, which the first — which Rousseau is the first to establish, that's what I'm going to try to show in the Social Contract — a total rupture. Anthropology is made against nature, the way a flame can only subsist by consuming the piece of wood it feeds on — I mean, you're not going to have the flame here and the piece of wood over there at the same time.
Lévi-Strauss: the raw, the cooked, and the prohibition of incest 38:47 That's what the ecologists forget a little. A magical world where we would consume without giving back, without doing our business, where we could exist without producing. So this tripartition, which Rousseau is the first to carry out, I'm now going to introduce — I'll try to do a voiceover on Rousseau, try to make him speak, let him speak — so I'll start with the first text, drawn from chapter 8 of book 1 of the Social Contract, whose title, quite short, a page and a half, is 'On the Civil State.'
39:44 So, precisely, if I use Lévi-Strauss to illustrate what is irreversible in the tripartition initiated by Rousseau — naturalist, theological/supernaturalist, and anthropological — which sets the first two back to back and takes the best of each while leaving aside their nonsense and their abstraction, their one-sidedness to speak like Hegel — it's that Lévi-Strauss, precisely, I wasn't wrong there, yes, there's the raw, there's nature, yes, there's the cooked, there's culture, spirit, history, I come back to it, that's where I was — but the most important thing is what's between the two in Lévi-Strauss.
40:24 Likewise, I mean, the rotten, tobacco, alcohol — you know the raw and the cooked well, you'll understand what I mean — there's, for instance, alcohol, tobacco, that's fermented, it's between raw and cooked, it's a chemical cooking, and this intermediate moment for Lévi-Strauss is where he's profound and post-Rousseauian — he pays homage to Rousseau, I mean, it's not me forcing the text — he acknowledges that Rousseau was the first to establish what Kant called an unbridgeable gulf between natural determination and human self-determination, freedom.
40:56 That's why I refer to Lévi-Strauss here. And so this intermediate status — true anthropology, the concrete one, isn't found in a man who would have his nature here and his historicity over there, right? It's found in the human animal who is heir to a history, which comes not from nature but from his own labor — so the two are united, only mixed, and it's this mixture which is the true concrete, the synthesis of what a post-Rousseauian and modern anthropology should be. That is, where between the two, between nature and culture, there's a mixture, and this comes to Lévi-Strauss from far back, because — I'm dwelling on this because Lévi-Strauss is one of the first modern revivals of Rousseau in theoretical thought, though he moved quite far away from it in his later years —
41:40 In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, his doctoral thesis and his major publication, long unavailable and reissued about ten years ago, now available again. He shows clearly that the principle on which he bases his entire anthropology — which isn't mine, kinship studies, the study of kinship ties, but very rigorous — that the prohibition of incest, on which all kinship structures in all human societies are founded, the prohibition of incest itself is typical, like the rotten, tobacco, alcohol, of something that is neither wholly natural, thesis, nor wholly theological, I mean supernatural — and that is precisely the prohibition of incest.
42:23 He says, look carefully: the laws of nature are universal, and Durkheim saw this very well, human laws are on the contrary coercive. There is no law forbidding what one spontaneously refrains from doing. There's no law that says 'we forbid you to leave your hand on the flame' — you don't need one, because the penalty comes so quickly you don't need it. So there are laws only to forbid what you spontaneously want to do. I'll say what Durkheim saw very well: coercive law. And so, between the rules that belong to culture and the universal laws in nature — the rules in nature, the laws are universal, you have to eat to live, that's true for Japanese culture as for ours.
43:00 On the other hand, the fact that we eat here with chopsticks, there with forks — that's the rules. The distinction is classic: there are laws in nature, rules in culture, relativist, Pascal, 'truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error beyond.' But there is one exception, the prohibition of incest. Because he demonstrates — I'll skip over this — that it is not natural, it's not a spontaneous horror, because when you put rabbits together you don't see much natural horror populating Australia after a few years, right? And every breeder knows this very well, that it produces excellent results, and that if there were a spontaneous horror of incest, I don't see why there would be, since the origin of all human societies, such severe penalties to punish anyone who transgresses this taboo.
43:44 It's because we want to do it, precisely, spontaneously rather — which is what the tragedy of Oedipus shows. And so, the exception of the prohibition of incest, which is a purely anthropological fact that we don't owe to nature, but which is as universal across human societies as a natural law. There you have a typical example of a mixture, a scheme, one might say in Kant. The scheme is something common to both extremes of an antinomy, allowing for mediation. There. To answer your question. And where Lévi-Strauss and thus Rousseau?
44:14 Ah, that's the period — I'm talking about early Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss, before this thing became fashionable, before he drifted into a kind of anti-history, anti-whatever, where it's as if the great problem of the planet, well, deep ecology, is that there are too many people, it's too overcrowded, that it's all screwed anyway — we should perhaps recall that there's another analogy, correct me if I'm wrong, but it strikes me: in today's Guaino-esque discourse, delivered by our unspeakable presidential clown at the time of Lévi-Strauss's death, there's the same confusion, the same type of confusion about the noble savage, both regarding Rousseau and regarding Lévi-Strauss, ultimately.
45:02 Of course. There's the same cliché, the same fundamental misinterpretation. We agree on that. Because — I'll say it now, since I've been paying him homage up to this point — the essential criticism I make of Lévi-Strauss, and Clouscard and I often discussed this, I think we agree on this point, is that, fine, everything I've just read about his discourse and all that — only he arrives at this theoretical relevance, Lévi-Strauss, with a nice play on words: 'societies without history.' There. Meaning, implicitly, peaceful too, without palaver, and without History with a capital H, by the way — when what we would need, precisely, is this tripartition in the historical society we live in.
The criterion of beauty: the dogmatist, the relativist and Plato 45:39 So, that was to answer your question about how this tripartition becomes unavoidable, and afterward, how it is inherent to the emergence of dialectics, because it would take barely a generation from Rousseau to Kant to Hegel for these dialectics, which had been locked away since Heraclitus, Plato, to make their return.
46:11 It was pejorative. Even in Kant, dialectic is pejorative. It's negative. We'll have to wait for Hegel and Marx for it to come back to the fore. And what's the relation between my triangles and the dialectical notion that I'm bringing out? As I said earlier, dialectic is always ternary. That is, it presupposes two extremes, a thesis, an antithesis, and a middle term that sets them back to back. Let me take a very precise example. If I take the eternal question of the criterion of beauty — I don't expect to resolve it, but I'll show you how one can nonetheless open a path toward a solution by posing the problem differently, thanks to dialectic.
46:46 If I start with the dogmatic point of view on beauty — we've all been through this — the one who's in the schoolyard says, in answer to the question 'What's the most beautiful car?': 'It's the Mégane TDI, whatever.' Why? Because it's my father's. That's the dogmatic life. It's someone who's never seen more than one model. What is beauty? It's the Parthenon for someone who liked to travel outside the city, etc. It's what I know. It's Brigitte Bardot, whereas Hottentot women are callipygian — it's someone who hasn't yet entered relativism, hasn't traveled, hasn't yet entered relativism, skepticism, etc. That's the dogmatist. We all start there.
47:16 And then, some remain kids for a long time. And then — I'll go quickly — there's the antithesis, relativism, arched against it. And there, it has nothing to do with your canon of beauty, etc. That's where Plato, Socrates, suddenly appears, seeing right away the common point — here we take a dialectical step — between this apparent opposition, the way the libertarian claims to oppose the liberal.
47:46 He shows, as Clouscard does, the deep complicity of the two. It's that in both cases, the criterion of beauty is sought outside oneself. We're still far from 'know thyself.' That is, it's sought empirically. Rationalism hasn't yet been founded. There's no Socrates-Plato yet. So it's the duo, the specular and sterile relation between the dogmatist and the skeptic. And, challenging it from within — is that the middle term? And the synthesis, the middle term, well precisely, is that Plato says that in both cases — whether it's the one who says of the Hottentot woman, 'she's beautiful,' or the one who says Helen of Troy is the model of beauty — the common point is that in both cases I feel aesthetic pleasure, in both cases I say 'that's beautiful, I like it.'
48:30 So it's within myself that I must seek the answer, not in the object, in its composition, in its proportions, I don't know — it's not with the eye that one should seek the criterion of beauty. Somewhere there's a relation of pleasure, and if there's pleasure — in both cases there's pleasure — we agree. The Hottentot suitor, the Bushman, maybe doesn't have the same desires, that is — but he also feels pleasure like the Greek does when he gets what he wants. Or when he doesn't get it, for that matter. And in both cases, I mean, there's pleasure — if there's pleasure, immediate dialectic, it implies desire.
49:03 If I take pleasure in drinking, it's because I'm thirsty — there's somewhere the expression 'drinking without thirst' to show how much these birds want to keep drinking when they're no longer thirsty. And so, that's mathematical, in logic: if there's pleasure, there's desire. And so it's my desire that confers beauty on the other, as Spinoza said: we do not desire things because we judge them good, we judge them good because we desire them. Quite simply. This is a reminder that action precedes knowledge, the activity of knowing which is necessary, which is the detour I mentioned earlier, the theoretical detour — I don't know, we're not talking for nothing.
"What do you call?": dialogue and the return to happiness 49:33 The question of doing — one must make a theoretical detour, to be practical one must make a theoretical detour, and in order to transform the world one must stop interpreting it and become theoretical, which doesn't fall under interpretation but analysis. So, here's the essential point at which I pause, for now, with my Platonic example: the synthesis, the dialectical point of view, is the one that integrates the two preceding ones.
50:23 That integrates the two preceding ones. I mean, Plato doesn't say one is ugly and the other beautiful. But, I mean, the solution is: 'hey, what do you call beauty?' All the Platonic dialogues begin like that. Not 'what is it,' because that would already belong to the order of being — that's an astronomer's question. 'What is the sun?' I'm not an astronomer, I'm a bearded philosopher with my little potbelly, Socrates, standing at the foot of the ziggurat where the astrologer of antiquity observes the stars, asking 'what is the sun?' And I'm down below and I say to him, 'you, what do you call the sun?'
50:56 First difference: the astronomer engages in a monologue, he speaks to an object that will never answer him, that will never open up and say, 'here's what I am.' It's men who speak, not things. That's the first point — whereas Socrates, addressing not the sun but the one who names the sun, says to him, 'by the way, what do you call the sun, before knowing what it is? What do you call it?' He's speaking to someone who can answer him. Dialogue is going to begin to prevail over monologue. That's fruitful, to get an answer, and above all, we're no longer radical.
51:26 Because to begin with, I don't know myself whether it exists — virtue, freedom, death, love — I know nothing, but what I have at the start, like you, like all of us, is discourses. That's not where the radical question should begin. At the start, there are discourses — I never speak, say, of New York directly, but I hear it spoken of. So I insist on this radical standpoint by which philosophy began, which is to step back from words and recall what speaking means. So, the dialectical point of view is immanent to the very appearance of philosophy itself, it's not the property of this or that philosophy against another.
51:57 And, somewhere, it's the point of view that consists in rising to a standpoint superior to that of rationality, which sets back to back the errors of empiricism, whether dogmatic or skeptical or relativist. That's what I mean with my example. Once we've understood that the error common to dogmatists and skeptics — I go back to the callipygian woman and to Helen — is to seek the definition of beauty through the eye, externally, in experience, in the outer — 'empeiria' in Greek means experience, the sensible — it's not scientific experience at all, and which goes well beyond essences.
52:33 So, when he sends them back to back, he introduces a new category by asking what do you call beauty, one must intervene in the research on concepts, on reason, which will be able to integrate the two, to make them progress. There, that's a reminder I'm giving, and it explains why my reference to the figure of the triangle, of the ternary, of a ternary logic, is indispensable from the moment one wants to be dialectical. And the last, my last triangle, sorry, the second to last, the one that opposes the figure of Sade, first extreme, Robespierre, the libertine.
53:11 Wasn't it Sade you cited, or who was it? The second one, Sade or Des Grieux, doesn't matter. Yes, the libertine. Or Don Juan, the libertine, the figure of the libertine with pleasure as its principle, and at the other extreme, the figure of virtue, Robespierre, who guillotines even in the name of virtue, and that between the two there was the figure of happiness proposed by Rousseau in La Nouvelle Héloïse, in the Reveries — that's where I'll quote the texts — which could precisely send back to back the pleasure of the master, that of the aristocrat, of Don Juan, Des Grieux and other marquises, be it the divine marquis, so as to arrive at happiness, which is the right of the peoples, but which is completely revolutionary for the time and which is the key theme of the eighteenth century — that's where I was when you arrived — a theme so important for making the unity of this century of the Enlightenment, this theme of happiness, we learn it in school, I'm not the one inventing it, that even Voltaire and Rousseau come together at least on the essential character of this search, even if they have totally opposite answers, of course.
