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Nerval's triangle: the king, Rousseau, and Gabrielle 0:00 The first triangle, the gamekeeper's son who takes the peasants to visit the sites and tells them: "Here is the Tower of the Belle Gabrielle, every evening Rousseau came to strum his guitar under her window, and the king, who was jealous, ended up having him killed."
0:38 And Nerval pokes a bit of fun at the peasant who mixes up like that, three centuries apart, the local celebrities, Rousseau, Henri IV. And then he suddenly stops mocking and says, "The peasant is profound." Rousseau, by refusing the hundred louis from Madame de Pompadour for Le Devin du village, the pension that was given to show business, undermined the edifice founded by Henri. The whole Bourbon dynasty, the monarchy. Everything crumbled, his immortal image remains standing on the ruins. This sudden expansion, almost like a demigod, of the figure of Rousseau, like a statue on the ruins of the Ancien Régime, struck me while reading this passage.
1:14 I know my Nerval a little bit. And what I retain from this approach to Rousseau by Nerval is the triangle that Nerval brings out, of course a structural triangle: that of the king, power, wealth, Henri IV. Power, the power of money, of weapons, whatever you like, power, not in the Foucauldian sense, very concrete. The challenger, Rousseau who comes to strum his guitar, the one who is the challenger, class struggle. And the stake between the two, the woman, Gabrielle, here symbolizing and condensing within herself, like a metonymy, millennia upon millennia of condensed surplus value.
1:53 As is the case in all symbolic and mythical discourse, and as woman is spoken of in the Gospel or in the Apocalypse, the Jerusalem that has accumulated all the filth of her impudicity, etc. In short, the courtesan is not woman. Of course, it is not the millions of women who work and produce surplus value, more than any other human beings. There, that was to make this reminder, the triangle, I won't develop it further.
2:37 So, I move on to this distinction. In the Letter on Commerce, the last text I quote before quoting Rousseau, Voltaire writes "In France, it's marquis..." It's a letter where he wants to show that commerce needs to be rehabilitated, that it's looked down upon in the aristocracy and that this is nonsense, the English—this is my English letter—the English clearly saw how decisive it was.
Voltaire, commerce, and happiness; Rousseau as a consultant for Corsica 3:15 "In France, for context, in France it's marquis who wants, and whoever arrives in Paris from the depths of some province with a name ending in -ac or -ille—I'd say Raccoupe de Merville, that won't change anything for you—can say 'a man like me, a man of my quality,' and utterly despise a merchant. Yet I don't know which is more useful to his country, a well-powdered lord"—here Voltaire and Rousseau agree on this critique of the uselessness and parasitic nature of the aristocracy—"who knows exactly what time the king gets up, what time he goes to bed, and plays the role of a slave in a minister's antechamber, or a merchant who, from his office, gives orders to Surat and to Cairo"—globalization—"and contributes"—and this is the punchline of the text—"to the happiness of the world."
3:58 And here we clearly see, as opposed to religious salvation or mystical peace, that happiness is nonetheless tied to the world, to a real, material wealth—that's why I insisted so much earlier on the woman in the triangle, on the material support of the signifier, as they say in certain schools. There, I attach great importance to that. Here we have the bourgeois revolution in Marx's sense, explicitly. Of course, we mustn't forget that the greatest tribute ever paid to the bourgeoisie is the first part of the Communist Manifesto, where he shows that the bourgeoisie did a job, a job that liquidated religion, the family, to make of authority—guys, I don't know if better.
4:34 So, from that point of view, I had a student who was writing a very interesting thesis, which I mention here in passing because it's right at the heart of the debate—she's a literary scholar, and she studies a very little-known repertoire, that of popular plays, in the period between the Revolution and Waterloo, roughly, as a cutoff, from a bit before the Revolution to Waterloo, popular plays where we see this new couple appear—exactly the kind that The Magic Flute illustrates wonderfully, which comes from exactly that period, incidentally, The Magic Flute, that is, a popular couple where happiness is possible for the two of them, whereas before it was always commedia dell'arte, the husband, the business, wealth, money, Molière, merciless class relations—and suddenly, with the character of Susanna, for example, in The Marriage of Figaro, Susanna is not the usual soubrette of comedies, she holds her ground, she wants her happiness. In The Marriage of Figaro we already see a bourgeoisie, happiness, happiness—there, that's just a small reminder, in passing, that Rousseau's work is situated at exactly that moment.
5:33 So, I quoted Voltaire's text to make the word "happiness" surface in the punchline, to show the deep unity—I insist on this—of the Aufklärung, of the Age of Enlightenment, and... Despite the oppositions between Voltaire and Rousseau. Exactly. There, and this unity is all the more significant in the search for happiness in that it passes through viewpoints that are not just different, but completely opposed. We clearly saw that Voltaire was praising capitalism, trade, etc.—just let things happen, the entrepreneurs, and you'll see happiness come to the planet, it's the invisible hand of the market, already, all of that is there, it's not foreign to Voltaire's thought, who had sales representatives for his silk stocking factory at Ferney, and...
6:16 the viewpoint of Rousseau, who would have dreamed—both of them have a shortcoming, if you please—politics as much as economics, of dividing France into small landowners of equal acreage, and missing the industrial revolution, well, not entirely, when you look—I mention it in passing, for the record—at his draft constitution for Corsica, very little known, but where we see for the first time the political Rousseau, that is, what would he do if he were in power, they ask him, and there we see a Rousseau who calls for developing industry—I mention it in passing, if we want to be truly thorough about Rousseau.
6:47 Do the Corsicans know this text well? I don't know the Corsican autonomists, but everything relating to Corsica, near or far, is combed through with a microscope, a telescope, and they ask—ah, because Rousseau, it's the height of something, you see, because since he made... He must be a good guy, since he made a constitution for Corsica, so he must be good, he's a comrade. Okay, let's move on. So, if you want information on Rousseau and industry, a rare text, I recommend the draft constitutions for Poland and for Corsica. He did two on commission. Are they different? Oh yes, yes, precisely, because he did his research, he did a consultant's study.
7:19 He goes so far as to say we could merge the pieve—that means the canton—of Petrabugno with that other one, because there are mines of... It's serious. Oh yes, he got into coal mining. Rousseau in the coal business, yes. Feasibility consultant. There. Interesting, this is known. Whereas for the Poles, he also did his research, he imagined it all too. He criticizes the divisions, as for the Corsicans, I won't dwell on it. Yes, that'll be another... There. He only says this: he understood the Corsican problem better than anyone. The so-called insoluble problem about which Jospin said, they told me it was hard, Corsica, but I have no idea.
7:49 Well. He said, the Corsicans, it's you yourselves, your divisions, your clans, etc. Very good, a very good analysis. Let's move on. Which a Baudelaire would accomplish a few years later. Bravo. Exactly. As you can see, it's very much in the air of the times, it's searching for itself. Now, back to Rousseau, starting from there, because with you it goes very fast. Since Rousseau is the first—not in his early works, there's no worse prose, to be quick about it, than that of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, a bit bombastic, with its prosopopoeias, its 'oh's, its grand antitheses, etc.
Rousseau's prose and Nerval's Angélique facing the Riancey amendment 8:24 By contrast, the fluid sentence of the Reveries arrives, within a few years, in a laborious and clumsy writing at first, all at once producing a writing that heralds Chateaubriand and Proust, the sentence that doesn't end, that follows, as Baudelaire says precisely, the least convolutions of the soul. The ebb and flow of this water, its continuous sound, but swelling at intervals, striking my ear and my eyes without respite. We're not in that, we're in pure sensation, in impression as in Proust—damn, it's extraordinary. It's no accident, as I was saying earlier, that there are social classes, there's no greater truth.
8:56 At the collective level, there are classes; at the level of the couple, there are sexes; and there are genres. And this we neglect a bit, I mean, prose or poetry, these are genres—the story of Monsieur Jourdain remains ever relevant, I mean. The fact of having to speak in verse or in prose remains always an enormous stake. And since this short story, Angélique, taken from Les Faux Saulniers, starts from an amusing pretext, which is a book impossible to find in the Parisian libraries, and that's a shame because he needs it—why? It's a book he had found on the quays while strolling, that's true.
9:28 He needed it to prove—and that he was talking about a character who had really existed—he needed the book as testimony from the seventeenth century, no matter who for now. And he needs it. And why does he absolutely need it? Because a law had just been passed, this concerns publishing and bookselling, what I mean is—the Riancey Amendment, which, under the coup d'état, at the moment of the crackdown after '48, banned the serial novel as a genre. But yes, we don't know this. Now, it's the moment when it triumphs with Dumas, etc. Dumas is banned at that point.
9:59 Yes, there's the Riancey Amendment. And on what grounds? Nerval was at the lycée Charlemagne with Gautier and Dumas. Right? So, the serial novel—they know it well. I mean, it's their thing, it's their livelihood too, in the newspapers that were developing at the time. It was freelance work. So, I mean, they know what they're talking about. And Nerval, in a very amused way, who is the opposite of Dumas—Dumas who is three kilometers wide and who makes a fortune, and Dumas who stays in the shadows and who always had money disputes with Dumas, treated with great discretion and courtesy. He was Dumas's ghostwriter, you have to know that.
10:29 There was only extraction of surplus value in the theater, not in the novels. But, excuse me, but why is there a law banning... Precisely because it was such a popular success, I know it well, especially since that's what's more—all these novels had appeared as serials in newspapers, like our TVs today. But why the ban? Because it was a popular success and it encouraged a rebellious path that went along with the barricades.
11:00 Quite simply, it was a subversive genre in serial form. So, the pretext invoked wasn't that, it was to say you have to choose. And that's the text of the amendment. Either you go into genre, you write history, or you write a novel. But you don't do like Monsieur Dumas where you no longer really know if you're in the present, in the past, in anachronism, in whatever. Mixing genres is forbidden. Nerval takes advantage of this to make an anti-novel, as we'd say in modern terms. This short story is extraordinary because, taking pretexts to say that the book, if needed, he can't find it, he multiplies the pretexts for not finding it in order, in the end, to lead us into the Borgesian universe of the labyrinth of Parisian libraries.
11:36 He does them all, he knows them well. And what interests him is a book, what I'm saying. It's the object 'book' that is at the center of this short story. He even says, a novel to be made, or the unmakeable book. He then takes us to the Valois, to Rousseau's tomb, under a pretext. We could talk about this another time, it's not my subject, but what's essential here is to see that this amendment really existed, and to get around it he says, since I can't find the book, in the meantime, I promised your readers I'd fill in some copy, there, and he tells of his walks and goes to Rousseau's tomb. It's an extraordinary structure for a text.
12:10 That's a question. There. And he ended up finding the book. He donated it to the Institut and it can still be consulted today at the Mazarine. And it's striking to see how we make history and history makes us. Exactly. Really, there. Exactly. And he does well to say that a text can be constitutive of history, because this isn't about rehabilitating superstructures, a text is material. I think of Friot, when he says—when nurses were doing volunteer work, etc., it wasn't considered, so to speak, work; then suddenly they have a professional body, and he says it well, it's very nominalist and anti-substantialist in him, which I appreciate.
12:50 He says clearly that it's because there's a salary that it's a job. Absolutely. It's because it's institutionally, textually, contractually recognized, that it's a job. In the same way, this censorship story is extraordinary because Nerval plays with it and shows—he takes the opportunity to say where history begins and where fiction ends. You take advantage. Since it's forbidden, he says it could go up to a million with so many centimes per copy seized. So my story is serious. Because his addressee is the newspaper's editor, who is his employer. I mustn't put you out of business.
13:20 So my text absolutely must be rigorously historical, hyper-realistic. Forever—it's extraordinary as a challenge. Prodigious. That was to say, to reread if you want to understand my point a bit better, more concretely. Especially since Nerval's prose, whatever the subject, whatever the material, is delicious anyway. That's already been said. Reread this first story that opens Les Filles du feu, which runs some 80 pages—well now, its length, etc.—and which is delightful to read, called Angélique, and which is a reworking of Les Faux Saulniers.
13:52 You'll see, it begins in Frankfurt, it ends at Rousseau's tomb. It begins in Frankfurt at the book fair. It ends at Rousseau's tomb with an unfindable book. Well.
Reading "Of the Civil State": what man gains there 14:38 Here is the canonical text I'll start from, it being understood that, in order not to misread it, I won't propose a scaffolding, an interpretation, but I'll cross-reference it with other texts by Rousseau that will help avoid misreadings we might legitimately fall into. So here it is, taken from The Social Contract. It's called "Of the Civil State," and it goes like this: This passage—that's the demonstrative—this passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had previously lacked.
15:17 It is only then that the voice of duty succeeds impulse, and right succeeds appetite—we clearly see on one side the order of a naturalist and on the other the moral order—that man, who until then, in the state of nature, had regarded only himself, the status of a biological individual—that's the state of nature—finds himself forced to act on other principles and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. We have a truly dichotomous table: on the right, everything the civil state brings us—right, duty, morality, etc.—and then the rest, everything that belongs to nature, instinct, inclinations, in short all the terms in the same lexical field, without value judgment for now. Even though he is deprived in this state—this is where the algebra and accounting become interesting—of several advantages that he held from nature, he gains such great ones in the civil state; his faculties are exercised and developed, his passions are ennobled, his whole soul is elevated to such a point that—I always stop this sentence there, to comment a bit on what precedes the sentence I've just read.
16:27 "he gains such great ones"—what does one gain in the civil state? Because it's very elliptical, The Social Contract is an extremely abstract and dense text. "He gains such great ones... his faculties are exercised and developed"—one has only to see all that modern thought has produced regarding the relationship between language and thought; would our thinking exist, or rather would it even exist, if there hadn't been, for example, what the civil state brought—language, for instance? Imagine if we were still condemned today to expressing numbers only in Roman numerals, that we were still stuck there—imagine if we had to do equations with Roman numerals, how badly stuck we'd be. As soon as we're dealing with large numbers, we see that progress in the way of signifying a quantity is progress in the way of thinking it. Well, these are the great classics of modernity, I won't go back over that, but just to show that this text is dense and that this is what it means, all that the civil state brings—his faculties are exercised and developed. There could be a misreading about 'the civil state,' maybe it should be clarified in the...
17:21 no but I mean, for now I'll stick to what Rousseau says about it, to clarify that in the civil state, many people are going to imagine what they'll go get done at their local town hall registry office—no, no, no, no, we're in the state of nature, the animal, we're in the zoological order, whereas we're in the anthropological order, man being, as Aristotle already said—you took the words right out of my mouth—man is zoon politikon, we're in social being. Man is man; humans are distinguished from other species in that the relation to the other is not merely contingent for them, because there are also some social animals—bees, wolves, etc.—but it's accidental, an animal can be non-social, whereas there is no man who does not begin by being raised in society. The story of the wolf-children—I'm thinking about progress in modernity—shows very well that it's not enough to be born human to be a human being; one must receive language. Feral children, for lack of speech, are blocked at a certain threshold—that's well known. There, the passage to anthropology presupposes the relation to the other, and history, as Clouscard said so magnificently, history precedes being in matters of anthropology, being is code, the code precedes being.
18:31 Magnificent, so the relation, object of a future, the relation between subjects precedes the relation to the object in man. Yes, so "he gains such great ones" means that it develops—just as an illustration, to decondense the text a bit—his feelings are ennobled; sexuality, which exists in the state of nature, that's not something man invented, becomes love, or the institution of marriage—I take two different examples that contradict natural sexuality, because as soon as there is marriage—if I add on top of that monogamous marriage, which Clouscard studies in the Traité de l'amour fou—then, let's not even talk about it, because I mean it's not merely different from the state of nature, it's the opposite, because in the state of nature I sleep with as many females as I want, it's a matter of the balance of power that decides, that's all, as many as I can, and when the need arises during mating season; whereas monogamous marriage rather restricts the possibilities of reproducing the species, it doesn't extend them, so it goes against natural prescription every single time, it's anti-natural. This is important because Durkheim saw very clearly that what makes a social fact, as compared to everything else, precisely, is the fact that it is coercive in relation to what would have been spontaneous on a purely natural basis.
19:41 And even just the laughter or irony we might display in society is a mode of light coercion on a remark that isn't ratified by the social pact, which is more obscure than the contract, so on a man entirely encircled by it, to such a point that—I'm resuming my sentence, I had interrupted it, and why don't I interrupt it and just continue? I keep interrupting it, I keep this suspense going, this suspense, because if there were only what I've read so far since the start of the paragraph, we'd say to ourselves, good heavens, two things: first, we really gained everything, if we're to believe Rousseau, by moving to the civil state—good heavens, that's where morality is, right, duty, inclinations, instincts, at the end of the passage—that in the state of nature man is a stupid and limited animal, and that it's only in the civil state that he becomes an intelligent being and a man, the civil state creates anthropology and all that—and so frankly, second point, we get the whole falsehood of the teaching we've received about Rousseau leading us to believe he's a lover of nature who's a misanthrope who hates it—but there are plenty of texts by Rousseau that authorize this reading: 'man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,' 'everything is good coming from the hands of God, everything degenerates in the hands of man,' you see, famous passages, more famous than the Rousseau passages I quote—that's why I restore Rousseau's own words, to counter the received discourse about Rousseau.
The abuses of the new condition: a modern theory of evil 20:51 And here it's exactly the opposite, except that Rousseau isn't entirely naive: there's "his whole soul is elevated to such a point that"—end of the crescendo—and here begins a hypothetical clause: "if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the condition he left"—as one might sink below the animal of the state of nature, I take the text literally, that's Rousseau's own word—"did not often degrade him below the condition he left"—look closely at the verb tenses, we're no longer in the indicative—"he ought to bless"—if there weren't these abuses, and if there were only the passage from the state of nature to the civil state—"he ought to ceaselessly bless the happy moment that tore him from it forever"—we return to the indicative because this isn't nostalgic, it's irreversible, no going back to the state of nature, no degrowth, that doesn't work with him, no, no, no, we have demands—"that tore him from it forever, and which, from a stupid and limited animal, made him an intelligent being and a man"—first point of this entire paragraph is that we would have gained everything from the state of nature if there weren't what I call, for the first time in Rousseau, a modern theory of evil, for me, of Auschwitz—
22:01 the stalag, the gulag, whatever you like, unfortunately this world is a vale of tears, as Scripture says, and there's an embarrassment of choice—I mean, evil in anthropological matters, in Rousseau, comes from what he calls, somewhat elliptically, the abuses of this new condition. How can one abuse the civil state, given that it has brought only positive things? To abuse, first meaning, is to use too much—to abuse drink, right. How can one have too many rights, too many duties, too much freedom, too much of everything we've gained, all the qualities we've gained, too much intelligence, since we're a stupid and limited animal in the state of nature, etc.? That must mean something else, "abuse"—and this is where I take the word "ab," the same "ab" that's in Abgrund, the abyss in German, or Abort, that's the toilets in German, the lavatories, the place—"ab"—so abuse, Abgrund; when Mime the blacksmith in Wagner's Ring cycle confesses everything, he confesses to Siegfried that he's going to kill him, because he doesn't know that Siegfried will taste the dragon's blood and thus understand others' thoughts even when they're deceitful—he says everything, a beautiful metaphor for the unconscious—he says everything, and Mime says, "I just want to simply cut off your little head," and he says, "Ich will dir nur den Kopf," with this
23:11 terrifying—well, in short, that's for the Abgrund, and to come now to the abuse, that's this second thing about abuse, and it's a hypothesis I'm putting forward, so as not to take up too much of your time, but I'm ready to develop it as much as you like—go ahead. The abuse of the civil state, in Rousseau, is the reintroduction of the balance of force, that is, of the state of nature, within the civil state, whereas in principle, thanks to—we'll see why—labor, praxis, which I haven't spoken about yet, economics, I've only talked about politics so far—the moment human liberating action has freed us from the constraints due to the state of nature—one must eat to live, for instance—and the new anthropology that appears is not given; it's not simply that formerly there was the state of nature, and now we're in a civil state, and the problems are solved—and this is why I warn against what might be the biggest misreading one could make of this text, and very often, with founding texts—one might believe that the state of nature refers
24:21 to Neanderthal, I don't know, to Cro-Magnon, etc., and unconsciously one can't help thinking a bit of the first humans when reading the passage on the transition from the state of nature to the civil state—that's a misreading, a total misreading. The first word of this text is "this"—the demonstrative, an index, how to put it in logic, an indicator, "this"—meaning my subject isn't the state of nature, isn't the civil state, it's this passage. That's where, for Rousseau, it's ternary—it's not the state of nature, it's not the civil state, one might have thought it was a binary text, no, the essential thing is the passage. "This passage from the state of nature to the civil state, it produces in man a change," and that's the subject of everything that follows: it's the passage, and this passage happens at every instant, it's the change produced. Each new human being is born as a natural being, like a baby—it's a truism to say that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—everything must be relearned from scratch, and the—if I want to spin an economic metaphor—capitalization, the decisive and liberating aspect, in my view, of Rousseauian analysis is to add this third term.
Force, a concept of physics, does not found right 25:31 that is to say that by creating a third world, which is neither that of nature nor that of God, but by creating the world of man through praxis—I mean, if man retains relations of force—that's why I'm making this detour now through The Social Contract, I'll start with this text, which is in chapter 8, so as not to let the very beginning of the Contract be forgotten, and yet it's a text often commented on, the famous passage—the whole beginning of the Contract spends its time questioning a concept that would seem to go without saying and that governs all of physics, all objective science of nature, the concept of force. Look closely at the beginning of The Social Contract: it's the opposition between a state of right and a state of fact, and he spends the whole beginning of the Contract on it, and for me one doesn't understand the decisive aspect of The Social Contract—it's not the jurisprudence, I mean the reign of the sovereign, delegated powers, all that, the whole tradition of political philosophy since Rousseau will stop commenting—that's not what matters—but the decisive aspect of the properly Rousseauian contribution here, which existed neither in Hobbes
26:41 nor in the other political thinkers, is linked to the radical break between the state of nature and the civil state, which run in opposite directions, the way freedom runs opposite to gravitation—we'll come back to the sheep of morality—what's decisive is that, for the first time, Rousseau reverses the usual position of political reflection on the state. Let me explain: up until then, there could be a critique in the form of an ought-to-be applied to the state: it's not good that the rich are rich, it's not good that the tyrant is cruel, it's not good, he should do this—that's a mode of ought-to-be, we lecture the state morally like that, and there Rousseau completely reverses it by saying, no, if you look closely, I mean, there's an implicit contract, that's the whole beginning of the Contract, I'll quote the passages—the real world that surrounds us, society, real history, could not have been made by the balance of force—force reigns in nature, the first concept you learn in physics, you agree, we did that in tenth grade I think, I don't know if they still start physics in tenth grade now, it's been pushed earlier, but the first concept is force, with which you're going to construct all the others; with force you build the concept of work, force in relation to a displaced mass
27:51 then power, that is, this displaced mass but in relation to time—how much time it takes me to move it, whether it's in 10 seconds or 10 hours that I move a ton, it's not the same power—so all the fundamental concepts of physics are based on one concept, not an obvious one, that of force, and it poses problems for physicists, since a guy who worked at CERN in Geneva once told me, "give me the concept of energy and I'll deduce all of physics from it for you"—energy doesn't pose as much of a problem because it's a bit mysterious to us, but give it to me, that's enough, we manage to deduce everything—it's interesting, it's not far from force. Now I insist on this epistemological parenthesis—why?
28:26 To recall that it's no accident that, right from the beginning of the very first absolutely modern political treatise—you're speaking of it as if in passing—there's a radical critique and a ruin of the traditional argument for grounding de facto power, for validating the political status quo, namely force. La Fontaine has the right of the strongest, and from the moment he says, in famous passages at the beginning, "the strongest is never strong enough"—that's algebra, not morality, I'm noting a fact from history—"to always be the master"—look at the place of Rousseau here—"the strongest is never strong enough to always be the master, unless he converts his force into right, and obedience into duty"—and above all, Rousseau's decisive contribution, the same one I'm restating more concisely, is the delegitimization of any power that isn't founded on contract and right, by saying: even—and this is even more liberating—if it's force that makes law, then, and here he takes this up from Plato, I'll quote the Gorgias later, then a community will always be physically stronger than a single individual—that's us, the good news, guys, emancipatory—it's that we are the strongest; if tyrants are in power, it's because you want it, it's not your sin that scandalizes heaven,
29:36 it's your satisfaction, as with the rest, and I quote Rousseau: "force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them"—magnificent, magnificent, it's generous in a way, there's no evil in the slaves, and he quotes Aristotle, who said there are men born to command—a naturalist viewpoint, Aristotle typically the biologist, Plato is math, he's biology—men born to command, men born to obey—and Rousseau says Aristotle is right, but he mistakes the effect for the cause, the illusion—he says every man born in chains is born to obey, that's certain—one loses everything in chains, I quote him, "even the desire to escape them"—so it's interesting, watch out, good news guys, we are the most numerous in the city, all the more so now—so I mean, if the status quo persists, it's because we want it to, in a way; so we have to be consistent if we want to get rid of it, I mean, we are the strongest, and I take a striking example from Emile, when he speaks of social distinctions, he says there is no ineffaceable character, sorry, there is no ineffaceable character except what nature imprints, and nature makes neither the rich, nor the prince, nor the great lord.
30:46 So, there's nothing I can do if I'm born with some trait like that, or such-and-such eyes—what nature gives, I can't help it—but on the other hand, what men have made, what men have laid down, men can undo, by definition; when the contract is broken, I mean I am freed—and the passage, the only one I'm going to mention on everything he says about force, and which strikes me as crucial, is precisely this one, while you look for it, just an aside: when he says "we"—that's not at all today's subject, but we could perhaps talk about it later if it's a theme—it's not at all in our... but I'm thinking of it—he does say "we," that is, we'll need to recall Rousseau's positions on representative democracy, it's really "us," of course, but that's going to be the subject without mediation—I'll show you the weakness in Rousseau that Hegel saw so well, the critique of formalist law with individuals, and a contract that is contracted among particular individuals without the unconscious—I won't explain that now, I'll introduce afterward Rousseau's political texts, the poetic texts, precisely to show that this comes to fill this void, and what deep unity there is in Rousseau's thought—that's where my story about Gabrielle comes in earlier, as if I were caressing Gabrielle's backside, belonging to the order of possession, of power over the world.
31:56 I mean, that's precisely where we're going to address the problem you're raising - delegation. Yes, exactly. So for now I'll stick with this crucial critique, that it's no accident that the Social Contract begins by negating - he doesn't say it's not good that force should reign, that's not a moral claim - he says if it's only force that reigns, we can't do any anthropology, we can't understand how history... we're not going to build an anthropology, that's done, and here's part of the demonstration. Suppose for a moment - reductio ad absurdum - suppose we establish for a moment this so-called right of the strongest, I say that it results in an inexplicable gibberish, and not in wicked or immoral things, a gibberish, incoherencies, for as soon as it is force that makes right, the effect changes with the cause, as soon as one can disobey with impunity, one may do so legitimately, by hypothesis, since it is force that makes right, agreed, and since the strongest is always right, it's only a matter of making sure one is the strongest. Now what is a right that perishes when force ceases? If one must obey by force, one need not obey by duty, and if one is no longer obliged to obey, one is no longer obliged, and if one is no longer forced - sorry - to obey
33:06 one is no longer obliged - we see then that this word 'right' adds nothing - it's an almost linguistic analysis - we see that this word 'right' adds nothing to force, it means nothing at all. 'Obey the powers that be' - if that means yield to force, the precept is good but superfluous; I reply that it will never be violated - all power comes from God, I grant it, but so does every illness - does that mean it's forbidden to call the doctor? If a brigand surprises me at the corner of a wood, not only must I hand over my purse by force, but even when I could withhold it, am I in conscience obliged to give it? For after all, the pistol he holds is also a power - admirable passage where he shows there's an ideological scam going on: we're made to believe it's force, an attempt to found human affairs, the war of all against all, on a naturalistic concept - the old debate dating back to antiquity, to the very beginnings of political philosophy: are laws by nature or by convention, which is the whole subject of the violent clash in the Gorgias. All the same, I had promised this little digression on Plato, but since, as with Rousseau, this was the subject of the agrégation exam I mentioned earlier - 'city and decadence' in Plato and Rousseau, twenty centuries apart - I mean, just as Rousseau takes up a problematic for a historical constellation quite analogous - the collapse of one political regime and the passage from one to another - city and decadence
The Gorgias: rhetoric, Polus, and Callicles's thesis 34:18 What's the pitch of the Gorgias, the subject of the Gorgias - always as a pretext - it's oratory, rhetoric, same thing, the eternal battle with the sophist, the sophist rehabilitated by post-Nietzschean avant-garde thought, solar and company - there's no accident in anything I say - and Heidegger's anti-Platonism - we're starting to see the unacknowledged political undertones of a certain type of anti-Platonism which is not innocent - namely that in rhetoric, in oratory, of course he questions the specialist as always: I want to know what beauty is, I go to a Zeuxis the painter or a Praxiteles - I know nothing, I want to know; or about courage, I go to a general. There, of course, I go to the sophists - oratory, come on, they seem to convince the crowds and the media, we'd say today - and of course Gorgias, in front of these pretty boys, with a staging of aidos as Lacan says - we always think the Symposium is about beautiful youths, but they're actually forty-year-old geezers arguing in front of their favorites, as he recalled somewhere - it's he who says that, word for word, it must be recalled - and so he easily manages
35:30 to take apart - I'll move quickly through the dialogue - to take apart Gorgias in front of Callicles, who is his young disciple, because Gorgias of course doesn't start by saying oratory is the most beautiful of activities, the noblest - that's a value judgment, we don't yet know what it is but you've already told me it's the finest of things - so let's go back to the question: what do you call it? Ah well, fine, forced to come clean, I end up spitting it out - well, it's the art of persuading, that's it, and it's the greatest of arts, Socrates, because when it persuades the crowd and the power - in Greece we're not in Egypt, it's a parliament, and it's speech that can decide on the agora who will have power - that's interesting, that's important, first time in history that speech has this importance politically - the parliament is where one speaks, that's where power will be decided. So Socrates, wake up a bit, my friend, be a bit more bling bling, a bit more glamorous, show yourself where it counts, in front of the pretty boys, and the art of convincing - to convince, whether to seduce an individual or the crowd, and apparently the girls too - because Socrates answers him very easily, these are aporetic moves - I'll skip the first degree of Platonism, which is very useful because you go back a bit to critical skeptical life - but tell me, does the geometer not persuade? Ah yes, of course he persuades, so it's a rhetoric
36:40 Ah no, no, not at all, ah yes, the difference - and finally it leads to showing that oratory, which was supposed to be the finest of things, is somewhat sordid, because the great difference is persuasion in the two cases: the first is to arrive at a doxa - what does true or false matter, who cares, as long as the guy believes it - that's important to Choyer l'or in 2012, he just needs to believe it, I'll bring up a Buisson of communicators - sophistry - what matters is not the level of truth, the truth criterion, what counts is that people be persuaded, so a persuasion without truth-value. And then there are the geometers who persuade, but to arrive at an episteme, not a doxa - that's not what you think, my dear brother - some triumph, others fall flat, and then it's Polos, the discussion turns moral - it's the famous thesis of Socrates that scandalizes the sophists, knowing that it's better to suffer injustice than to commit it - how can you accept that, when he calls him a dog-sophist etc. - and who says there are no longer power relations, the fools must be duped and made to vote for oneself, that's all there is to do with the crowd, in short the men of superior elite - all this is said by Callicles, I could go on for 8 pages - we often say the interlocutor of Socrates says yes yes, no no - no way, he speaks for 8 pages without Socrates interrupting him
37:50 It's the most virulent outburst Socrates ever provoked from an interlocutor. The moral thesis - I'll skip Polos, he gets rid of him too - and at this point Callicles emerges - here I'll linger - the most radical, who delivers an extraordinary university-style outburst: that philosophy is all very well when one is young, agreed, agreed, but later, to keep on with these nonsense temperature-taking philosophical games, when one should be starting to do politics etc. - my poor Socrates, frankly, if you weren't so old you'd deserve the lash - because we find again the trial: they corrupt the youth etc., Socrates accused of being a softening force at just the right moment - and yes, exactly, and Socrates begins by saying that fortunately Callicles is in this assembly, he's the only one who hasn't been - as Socrates says, I don't understand, he translated, I'm not enough of a Hellenist, but he's the only one who hasn't been a victim of human respect - the others were too afraid of moral values - that's already very Nietzschean, in the better sense, they didn't go, like Callicles, all the way in their thinking - he's a little fascist, there was more clarity in it, and the discussion turns
39:00 he was hung up on common law versus human law, and Callicles's thesis is that: my own principle is that the law which is in nature, the common law, should apply in the cities, just as in nature the wolf devours an innocent lamb and the eagle carries it off etc., likewise in the cities the strong must command the weak - it's literally the rich must command the poor, and he who possesses much commands him who possesses little - it's stated in so many words - it's genetic, we're told, yes yes yes, the stronger, one must be born stronger, that's it, or born among the stronger - so this conversation, which is at the dawn of the question: are laws by convention or by nature - this is where we find the Lévi-Strauss dichotomy again, agreed - well, I say neither one nor the other; what Rousseau will show is that there is a connivance, a term, a pact, a term which is intermediate, of the symbolic order, between what is by nature, which is physics, and the contract, which is almost too clearly conventional - between the two there are pacts between subjects that are not quite fully stipulated - that's what I'm going to say, and to come back to this middle term between the extremes
40:30 So these detours through Plato - I haven't finished, on the contrary - are meant to clarify that this threat posed by sophistry, the emergence of a relativist subjectivity etc., which risks disintegrating the city Plato dreams of - Hegel gave the first anthropological, almost Marxist I'd say, reading of it. I mean by that Hegel takes up the Republic file again, that is, the proverbial image, as he says, of a utopia, an empty ideal - that's how it's received in the imagery of the history of thought - and he doesn't say, himself: yes, that's how it should be done, or no, it's totalitarian, it's the closed society, à la Popper etc. - it's well known that the open society, that is, the one that crushes Vietnam under bombs, Iraq - well, when someone writes the black book of anti-communism...
Hegel as a reader of the Republic; Kant's third critique 41:15 Yes, we'll come back to that. Can I finish? Just a second, I think I haven't entirely lost the thread, but I think it's useful for you to recall the thread with the passage on Rousseau, all the same. I said I was holding my thread. Yes, it should perhaps be recalled. The passage in Rousseau is the one that delegitimizes the notion of force as founding society, which refuses to take the natural principle as making the human sciences in general intelligible, the human community and thus the sciences of which it is the object.
41:47 So we went, that's it, through the Gorgias, and we arrive at Hegel. Since you're pushing me - I didn't want to, because you make a face when we talk about Kant, I say that affectionately, I'm joking, it's our private joke. I mean, Kant paid the finest tribute to the essential core of Rousseau in his last critique, the famous Critique of Judgment, which will serve as a reference for all symbolics, aesthetic anthropology etc. Afterward, Hegel used to say, when people came to see him: one must begin, sir, in philosophy, but I've lost the thread.
42:19 We used to begin with the Critique of Judgment. He who spends his time criticizing Kant elsewhere, when he pays a tribute like that... Yes, he criticizes gently. Ah no, no, no, it's a whole battle, no, no, the battle, especially against neo-Kantianism, I know well, well, that's another debate. But his entire body of work never stops fencing against Kant's morality. But here, for now, I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the extraordinary appeal and tribute, the summing-up that Kant makes of his whole critical work, which he can only accomplish with the third - another triangle - the third critique. The first deals with nature, we find my breakdown again, Critique of Pure Reason, that's Newton, excusing myself with Newton, New- the causality, let's move on.
42:52 Then, that's the answer to the question 'what can I know,' second question, number two, second vertex of the triangle: what must I do? That's the Critique of Practical Reason, morality, the foundation of the metaphysics of morals. And the third, which will try to make the synthesis, because for now, that left us hungry, the two of them. It's Kant himself who says it, he says: here, I've established, we now know how knowledge of the world around us is possible. It was a fact with Newton, thanks to me it's a matter of right, it's legitimized, thank you. That's what needed doing. I've clearly shown, first, that nothing of what we've learned in knowledge is going to help us with what we must do, it's not the same order.
43:25 Being and ought-to-be. We saw earlier there was the great scoundrel who was the great scholar. And a very wicked man too. And on the other hand, even in the smallest African village, we know very well that the most learned isn't the one we go consult as a sage - it's not the one who knows the number of satellites necessarily orbiting Jupiter, I mean, or the number of grains of sand in the Sahara. That's not why we go see the sage, it's to know: can I travel now, should I marry Aminata or not, that's it. What must I do? So this distinction, knowledge, wisdom, contained in the ambivalence of the word Sophia, and philosophy being condemned to limp, since it is in constant quest of both, whereas it's not at all the same object.
"What is actual is rational": Plato and world revolution 44:03 And Hegel, then - this is why I want to quote him - takes up the file on Plato's Republic to show precisely that what makes the greatness of this text is not what it says one must do, in the future state - he must, I don't know, nationalize women less, etc. It's how it expresses a crisis of the era, that's very Marxist. He explains it through the history of its historical moment, and he says this, which will bring us back to the heart of our subject.
44:33 The book of philosophy - there, thank you, it's his political testament.
45:05 So, at the heart of truth - I noted that Plato's Republic itself, which is the proverbial image of an empty ideal, essentially grasps nothing other than the nature of Greek ethos. He was conscious of a deeper principle - this is where the sophist appears, the new subjectivity - he was conscious of a deeper principle which was breaching this traditional ethic, but which at this degree - historically implied, there's not yet Christianity and absolute freedom - could only be an unsatisfied aspiration, and consequently could only appear as a principle of corruption.
45:38 Plato, moved by this aspiration, sought a resource against it. How to counter subjective arbitrariness? Against that. But since the remedy could only descend from above, he could only seek it at first in an external form, sophistry - external, particular to this morality - believing thereby to master corruption, and succeeding only in wounding intimately what was there most profound, and which was beginning to dawn: colon, free infinite personality. That's not the same as the citizen.
46:19 And yet he proved himself a great mind, because precisely the principle around which what is decisive in his idea turns is the pivot around which the world revolution then in preparation turned. And this is written by the philosopher who thought most about the French Revolution. When he says revolution, for him that has a meaning, he is contemporary with it, and he thought about it a great deal. Around which the world revolution then in preparation turned - which was then being prepared: colon - which is Hegel's most famous statement, there it is.
46:50 The most unfortunately famous, it's when we say what there is. The real. What is real is rational, and what is rational is real. Plato said it first. Agreed. And we'll see afterward with Rousseau how this is literally revolutionary. I recall in passing that we find the same revolutionary advance in Descartes. From the moment I said that good sense, the thing in the world most equally shared, I'm launching an atomic bomb.
Euclid: the postulate as a request addressed to the other 47:20 I'm saying, as Rousseau said earlier, that the differences of marquis, prince etc., that everything men have made, men can destroy, and nature makes neither rich man, nor prince, nor great lord. In any case, there's one point on which there's absolute democracy, Descartes - it's still good sense, because at that level we have all received the same share. And so somehow... No one complains of lacking it. And somehow, good sense, that is, because it's hard for the faculty to distinguish true from false, mathematical understanding appeared with the generation of Euclid, of Plato - it's a tribute rendered across millennia by this revolution. Somehow, for the first time, thanks to episteme, that's why I hold to it, and why I'm not obscurantist, and why I will always defend the Enlightenment, necessary, even if not sufficient.
47:58 But how is it necessary? Because for the first time, with mathematical discourse which put philosophy on the trail - 'let none enter here who is not a geometer,' inscribed at the entrance of the Academy - for the first time there is a discourse where I'm not trying to make my opinion prevail over yours or his. I'm not even asking you to agree with me. First, I ask - that's the term Euclid uses for postulate, axiom. When you take the original Greek text, these are requests. I ask you to consider that through a point etc. There's an appeal to the other, that's what I'm saying, at the origin of logic, contrary to what we believe - it's not a soliloquy of me to the thing, even a concept, there's a relation to the other.
48:33 Only what we shall have agreed together to be true, starting from a proposition-truth we shall have admitted together, will be true. There's an appeal to the city expressed in this lexical field where axioms and postulates are still called, in geometry, aitemata, requests. It's superb. We should have kept it. And we find my triangle again - there's me, the thing, and yet the other. So, for the first time, the only thing I ask of you, that I ask you to conform to the constraint - which is the same for me - is not to be correct, it's to be in agreement with yourself.
49:03 And that's mathematics. There's knowledge. It began first with mathematics, because, as Aristotle says, mathematics unites men, politics divides them. It's simpler to agree on the number of satellites orbiting Jupiter or on the parity of certain prime numbers than to agree on taxation or the way women should be dressed or undressed, since that's current affairs too, regarding the veil. There it is.
49:33 So I make this great detour through Plato to recall that, when I say Plato, for me it's not the individual Plato with his old reactionary reflexes, his political dream, which was Egypt, a world that doesn't move for 10,000 years - that's fine, where there's no troublemaker bringing anything new. There's that side to it. And on that side, Plato is the ideology, in the Marxist sense, of an Athenian aristocrat etc., prizing the past, what has lasted etc. When I say Plato, that's not what I mean. It's the Plato of his work where he advances rational thought and leaves a legacy, I mean, of rationality precisely, of recognizing nothing that isn't posited by the concept, which is first a prior definition.
50:08 It's not about doing mathematics. If it's posted that none - I close my Platonic parenthesis very quickly, and there'll be another one after - if that's posted on the pediment, it means we're not there to do geometry, we're supposed to have done it before, it's good training, but here we're going to work on concepts, not on mathemes. That's a distinction I make, that I propose. And it seems to me that it's too underestimated in the human sciences, that since the appearance of mathematics with Euclid, there's a kind of schism in Western thought between two modes of discourse, one of which is epistemic, but at the price of renouncing ordinary language entirely.
50:41 That is, because of these ambivalences, these ambiguities, mathematics did very well, I don't reproach it, in abstracting away from words like heavy and light, and replacing them with the notion of weight, of gravity, which is measurable. Because you could dispute for a millennium whether this satchel is heavy or light depending on whether I'm a baby or a King Kong. Agreed? We know very well at that point I'm not talking about the satchel but about myself. Whereas when we say it weighs 125 grams, there's a democracy, we agree, we know what we're talking about, but we haven't settled the debate about whether it's heavy or light. That's no longer the same order.
51:12 And that's an advance, that's the world revolution. And that's why for a long time the counter-revolution will always be irrationalist, with the Schopenhauers, the Nietzsches etc. We're not going to rail against what is positive in the Enlightenment. Because there are also negative things in the Enlightenment. There. So that's a parenthesis I held to. To recall that when I say Plato, it's the Platonic moment in history, it's broadly the Euclido-Platonic moment.
Return to Rousseau: dualism of nature and the city 51:42 If we could sum up the various detours to come back to Rousseau - so the Rousseau of the Social Contract who... All this starting from the critique of force in Rousseau. Yes, who rejects force. That's not enough. And we come to the rational and the real, the real and the rational. So it's force versus right. There's something else, because without that, we don't get there. The only legitimate statements - I hope we're doing this - are those on which we shall have agreed together, starting from things, to see how far we can agree together.
52:15 That's crucial as a procedure. Because it calls upon a community. I mean, it's not a solitary knowledge that overlooks everything. We used to reproach Sartre, who was on Clouscard's jury, for giving a very fine tribute, saying it's a great, placeable contribution and all. The only small reservation is there's a hubris of the author. I think it was Caroline. Yes, it's closed. There's a hubris of the author. To have done that all alone, it would need teamwork. Clouscard replied: that's all I ask.
52:45 Send me assistants and colleagues. That's all I ask. And for now, I'm left rather alone. I'm interrupted all the time. Well, if it's by Caroline. No, no, don't worry. There were interruptions well before. So... I'm going to stop, then, now, from... I was at the relation of Rousseau to the concept of force. That's why I made this long detour through Plato.
53:15 He takes up this old critique that Socrates makes of Callicles, that it's force, the natural principle, that must reign in the cities. So the dichotomy is reestablished. The law that reigns in the cities is not meant to be the same as the one that reigns in nature. That's quite clear. It's dualism. Between nature and culture, nature and city, however you want to put it. Nature-spirit, nature-history, nature-art. Techne, there. Techne, much more sharply drawn than in Aristotle. In Aristotle, art, techne, in its ancient sense, sometimes imitates nature, sometimes extends what nature by itself is not able to complete.
53:48 It's a bit more ambiguous in Aristotle. But there's still... It's more naturalistic than in Plato. Prosthetic man... We suspected Plato was more naturalist. We suspected it. Well, it's the famous Raphael painting with Plato pointing his finger toward the sky, Aristotle downward! Well. And the buttons, then, must be kept. And so, I think I've been clear enough about Rousseau's analysis. In decisive pages, at the start of the Contract - it's no accident, before speaking of the representative of sovereigns, he first speaks of the impossibility of founding a philosophy of law, and hence a politics and a government, on the notion of force.
54:25 I recalled that force is the constitutive principle of all the natural sciences, and that it was nothing but the concept of force that helped us render the universe surrounding us, the non-human universe, intelligible - the one that frightened Pascal: 'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,' there. Well, we've tamed it a bit thanks to Descartes' calculus. Yes, yes, and at the same time Descartes recalls what he says, the master, on the contrary, this force which will make us masters and possessors of nature. We need to have a home in the cosmos.
The temple of Cape Sounion and the Greek root of the West 54:55 As Bachelard used to say, I don't live in the infinite, because in the infinite one is not at home. And it's man who is going to make the city like a finite, an elsewhere from nature. Forgive me for making this parenthesis which may seem lyrical to you, but all the same it's rigorous. I went to Greece only once, rather late, and for once it was the woman who was guiding me. I'll tell you a bit about my life, but it's important for what follows.
55:25 She had traveled to Greece before, and she takes me to Cape Sounion, like any tourist. I go to Cape Sounion, magnificent. The temple of Poseidon. Now, usually in Greece, between the finite Greek and the infinite Oriental, one never sees the infinite the way one does in Brittany. There's a peninsula, an island, a gulf, it's like Corsica, you know the Mediterranean, it's very indented, full of inlets. There, you climb the acropolis. And then, except for a few places, all the same, you can see the open sea. And that's the case at Cape Sounion, where there are only three indeterminations in the aesthetic sense - because, as in Turner, one sees only, huh, without contour, wind, light, and sea.
55:59 I mean, these three great figures of indetermination can take so many forms. Well. And there, all of a sudden, that's where the temple of Poseidon stands. A rectangle, right angles, a horizontal pediment, vertical columns, just a small capital to negotiate the passage from the Oriental vertical, not too brutal, but what audacity! What courage, what heroism! To turn one's back on natural infinity which still fascinates everyone. And everything is mystical. And perhaps that's the domain of the gods. As for us, that's it. Bam!
56:31 As for us, it's the city, it's the polis, it's the determinate, the concept. There. That's why this rationalist revolution still matters to humanism. I make this long detour also to recall that, at a time when we're being made to believe that the roots of our West, our Europe and our France in particular, the eldest daughter of the Church, are Christian, I find it scandalous that no one thinks - to also recall, what about the Greek root? What do you make of it yourselves? Think of Western society without this double contribution which makes, in my view, its neurosis, because it's a double contribution that demands of us, as Westerners, that we assume an almost mortal contradiction between the Greek world, and then there's the Oriental world of transcendance - that's important, but there are both.
57:13 A small allusion to current events, which I'll close very quickly, I mean, it's a bit scandalous to privilege the Christian model. I have nothing against it. I agree it's been constitutive of many things that make us Western, but still, always fighting alongside a paganism which has its comings and goings, its revivals with the tales of the Grail starting from Chrétien de Troyes, and the Nordic countries, Christianized late, which have no desire at all to just let themselves be taken over like that by the transcendent God without idol and without image, and what else? Me, I want my Merlin, my Vivian, the sword in the lake, well, in short.
57:43 There, it's an old battle, we stem from this conflict between immanence and transcendence. I close this parenthesis - it's perhaps even the originality of our culture, this neurosis - it's no accident if the pathos, since the appearance of the end of history in Hegelian terms, that is, the end of prehistory in Marxist terms, let's be clear,
