English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Against the abstract universal, a concrete dramaturgy 0:00 And that's to reassure future readers. So there's both somewhat theoretical, somewhat abstract vocabulary. And at the same time, he often ends a paragraph with a very, very short sentence that refers to everyday life, a statement. Absolutely. You can see he's completely engaged with the real. With near-tabloid references, as we'd say today, really within everyone's reach. Absolutely. But Bernard, you said very rightly earlier, when Aymeric was talking about power with a capital P in Foucault, about the will to power in Nietzsche, he said these are abstractions. Yes. Hollow. We find here what Hegel reproached the young Romantics and his contemporaries for. That's what he did... We mustn't turn the absolute into the night in which all cows are black, either.
0:39 And what's striking about Clouscard, in contrast to this abstract universal, as Hegel put it, this bad universal—in contrast, there's a concrete dramaturgy. Political ideas are right in front of us. I mentioned earlier Pompidou in May '68. It's the union of the liberal and the libertarian that ganged up against de Gaulle. Against de Gaulle. But Clouscard turns it into a little scene. There's the good-natured uncle, Pompidou, the good uncle, the prodigal son, Cohn-Bendit, and the stern father, de Gaulle, a plot by the two former to get rid of...
1:15 There's immediately a dramaturgy. And likewise in Capitalisme de la séduction, you must have noticed while reading it, there's an admirable, almost a prose poem, called La maison de campagne, near the end of the volume, which is extraordinary. I think this is the occasion, since we've come back to May '68 and the little scene, to read a passage. Yes, absolutely. There's a passage we could read from Néofascisme et l'idéologie du désir, which is his first book in the sense of a pamphlet, because it comes after his thesis called L'Être et le Code. His first book is called Néofascisme et l'idéologie du désir, which is fundamentally an attack on Deleuze, on what he calls schizophrenia, on Anti-Oedipus, and in fact on this whole ideology which for him is nothing but the promotional arm of this new economy being put in place.
Reading the afterword of Néo-fascisme et idéologie du désir 2:02 In fact, he republished this text first 30 years later, then again 40 years later, as an anniversary of '68. So he explains what happened. With an afterword. Yes, that's right. Here I'm going to read this afterword, which dates from '98, because it has the advantage of being fairly synthetic and explaining a bit of his path. So, May '68 bears witness to the most remarkable ideological manipulation of the postwar period, the one that would ensure the passage from old France to the new France of savage liberalism.
2:36 In May '68, a psychodrama played out at the top of the state. It clearly revealed the stakes of history embodied in three mythical roles: the stern father, de Gaulle, the enfant terrible, Cohn-Bendit, the good-natured liberal, Pompidou. It's the clash of the three situations of the bourgeoisie, of the three possible ideological systems. On stage, the old, virtuous France, born of the victory over fascism, and on the other hand, the new France that was searching for itself and found fulfillment in the synthesis of a liberalism as repressive in the act of production as it was permissive in the act of consumption.
3:12 It thus took the underhanded alliance of the liberal and the libertarian to liquidate the old father, who had to leave. After this ritual murder of the father, the state at the top granted permission for the permissive, which opened access to the market of desire. May '68 also marks the great division among the three powers constituting today's consensus: liberal, social-democratic, libertarian. The first is given economic management. The second, administrative management.
3:43 It's more relevant than ever with the Socialist Party, it's in the regions, you understand what he means. To the third is given the management of morals, which have become necessary for the market of desire. That's how we get the new France. This consensual trio is not monolithic. On the contrary, it's a shifting system, endlessly renewed through alliances, exchanges, compromises. And each term only gains power insofar as it agrees to the others'. Newspeak calls that tolerance. So it is with the new order. The three constitutive and antagonistic principles of France have in fact hypocritically been reconciled in a shared renunciation of their original values.
4:20 Capitalist production, managed by the politicians of alternation and cohabitation, is consumed according to the libertarian model. This is also called the end of values, the end of history, and the denial of class struggle. — There you go, end of history, so an indirect echo of Fukuyama, since capitalism has won, so history is over. — Exactly, it's this alternation instead of an alternative. The alternative would be changing the mode of production. — Right, this is just a change of head. — Exactly. What we're seeing now, we're living through the biggest crisis in 70 years.
4:53 And we simply have a change of head, which we've always seen within the bourgeoisie, let's be clear. — Yes, yes. — One of the redistributions of power. So let me finish, I'll skip a small passage and finish. Before the Trente Glorieuses, society is organized, as we know, according to this duality: an exploited working class—which is proof that Clouscard isn't nostalgic for that... — No, right. — That's clear proof. Exploited working class and a bourgeoisie potentially or actually consuming. Some produced without enjoying, the others could enjoy without producing. The influx of new middle strata, thanks to the Marshall Plan, upset this conflictual division of classes.
5:26 Now the conflict is in people's heads, internalized. This is the new structure of consciousness and the unconscious. Because it's the same people who at times work and at times consume, according to the inescapable patterns of worker exploitation and the permissiveness of free time, of ludic, marginal libidinal consumption—now slave, now master of the world. Here he's talking about the middle strata, right. The key thing is these buffer layers that actually enable the arrival of social-liberalism and all that. Maybe we haven't clarified this enough. It's even more subtle. I realize it as I read. That's what makes it possible. These middle strata as a model, as buffers, made possible thanks to the Marshall Plan.
6:02 And indeed, with the crisis, that's what's interesting. We're really in the... — Right, and it needs, as much as possible, to be detached from the working class. — Detached from the working class, right. That's the very formula of fascism. It's detaching a middle class from the working class so it forms its own grand alliance. — Which is being re-proletarianized thanks to the current crisis. — Right, who then start asking themselves questions about how permanent their intermediate status is. — Sorry, I won't hold you up anyway. — Let me just finish with the quote. 'Thus a schizophrenic split occurs, a mad causality. In order to enjoy, I exploit myself. I is another, my opposite, my boss.'
6:32 I take that away from you, it's Rimbaud's quote. — Yes, yes, yes. — This objective neurosis crowns the liberalization of morals. And here, it's absolutely... What do you call it? It's practically prophetic. Neo-fascism will be the ultimate expression of the social-libertarian liberalism of the whole thing that begins in May '68. Its specificity lies in this formula: 'Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible.' — Everything is permitted, but there's unemployment, you know. Job centers, sorry. — Everything is permitted, right. Or the choices in the aisles at Lidl, but nothing is possible in terms of social transformation.
7:06 That's it, exactly. That's really the sentence that sums it up. That's why a DVD came out, explaining Michel Clouscard, called 'Everything Is Permitted, but Nothing Is Possible.' — There you go, so yes, it's a DVD. — Which fully explains... Let me finish just with the sentence. 'Everything is permitted, but nothing is possible. To the permissiveness of abundance, of growth, of new consumption models succeeds the prohibition of crisis, of scarcity, of absolute pauperization.' — And there, we're right in it. It's a text from '98 and we're right in the middle of it. — Right in the middle of it. — Exactly. It has to be said that when you're a Marxist, that's the kind of thing you can foresee. It's not a matter of prophecy. I say prophecy, but that's not the right term.
7:37 There are still things that are fairly predictable when you know a bit of economics. — There's less to distribute, so. — And so let me finish. These two historical components merge in people's heads, in minds, also creating the subjective conditions for neo-fascism. — So, on neo-fascism, we'll get to that. You mentioned the DVD we have in front of us, because there's a DVD about Michel Clouscard that you can watch and order, you'll tell us about it, because it's an excellent introduction. For those who might be afraid to dive straight into a book, you already have a starting point, a first introduction to the man, who is, by the way, an individually interesting character.
Clouscard, the Delga publishing house, and Hegelian-Marxism 8:15 He's a 'figure,' as they say. — Right, a man of the people, an athlete, pre-qualified for the Olympics, for the 100 meters and 200 meters. — Nothing hidden, that's nice to hear. — Yes, and at the same time, agrégé in philosophy, his works, etc., and his rejection of the intellectual bourgeoisie. Broadly speaking, that's what we can say to simplify. So there you go. Go ahead, Aymeric. — Absolutely. A doctoral student in philosophy. — Doctoral student, yes. — Yes, doctoral student, doctor of philosophy. — Sorry. So it's a DVD called 'Everything Is Permitted, but Nothing Is Possible.' A documentary on the thought of Michel Clouscard. It was made by two very promising young men, since they also made a DVD on Rousseau, and they're preparing another one on Diderot.
8:50 They're called Océan Gagny and Fabien Trémot. So the DVD is called 'Everything Is Permitted, but Nothing Is Possible.' You can find it in all good bookshops, and also on the website of Éditions Delga. So here we go, Delga, D-E-L-G-A. It's easy, it's www.editionsdelga.fr. — And for the record, because it's a question you asked earlier, Michel Clouscard lived on Rue des Frères Delga. — At number 49, to be precise. — Because you can explain where that name comes from.
9:20 It's less lavish and grand than that. — It sounds like it, but there's no system behind it. — It's true that we founded a publishing house of theoretical Marxists, of the human sciences broadly speaking, publishing Lukács, Losurdo, Maurice Cornforth on logical neo-positivism. A lot of political texts, I'm thinking in particular of Henri Alleg, whom we're currently republishing. And others, sorry if I'm forgetting some. But indeed, at first, we found ourselves, let's say, among philosophers, in quotation marks, because that's the accepted term, around Clouscard, and we really tried to relaunch things.
9:57 There were things to be done in terms of Marxism, and especially after the Althusserian censorship, the censorship of Hegel, because it really was... Hegelo-Marxism is a huge chunk. I'm thinking of Gramsci, I'm thinking of Lukács, that's really what made Marxism a theory... Lenin, of course. Lenin, first and foremost, whom Althusser himself censored, it bothered him. This reading Lenin made of Hegel. When Lenin re-reads the Science of Logic just before the Revolution, he says this passage, the most idealist one, in fact, is the most materialist. It's the most concrete, which pays homage to Lenin. After the Revolution, he had courses on dialectics given, systematically.
Why France: counter-revolution and colonialism 10:30 There you go, there's a huge... a continent, literally, of 20th-century Marxism, still to be explored. It's no surprise that it was around Clouscard that this got launched. A question, in fact, at bottom, about this counter-revolutionary philosophy, from Sartre to Althusser. My impression is that it was nourished and encouraged by the bourgeoisie and by the French university system. Is this a national specificity or is it a phenomenon that occurred in many other countries? I have the impression that it's...
11:00 France played a particularly strong role in this operation. There's even an English Marxist philosopher, whom I know poorly, but he said an important thing. He said that Paris was the world intellectual capital of reaction. He's talking about the '70s. That's it, exactly. He described it that way. So, he's a Marxist. Christofferson. No, no, no, not at all. Perry Anderson. Ah, Perry Anderson. You're talking about Christofferson, who says roughly the same thing about the United States. Yes, it's one of your Marseille colleagues, a publisher called Agone. Agone. There's a very interesting book by Christofferson on this period that provides a lot of keys.
11:34 But indeed, France really is... I believe Marx said somewhere that it's the classic country of class struggle. I don't know if it still deserves that term. I hope we could... But it's a country of class confrontation. You can't deny it. If we can say that this response by the bourgeois class reflects its fears about the reality of the struggle. Probably. And I believe Lenin, in Imperialism, described the French bourgeoisie as one of the most intelligent in the world, in the sense that it knows how... The French bourgeoisie knows how to appear republican at certain moments.
12:05 Except in the colonies. Yes, obviously, it's not for everyone. It's like English-style liberalism. It's not for everyone. Nobody's watching. Yes, it's off-camera. That's it. So, Voltaire, for instance, at the moment when the real stakes are settled, bashing priests when it no longer matters, at the moment when the most important struggles are happening. I'm not saying ideological struggles aren't important too, but well, that's part of that arsenal. We know it well. This Voltairean bourgeoisie, we know it well. This business-minded bourgeoisie, you find it all there.
12:36 Because I was drawing a parallel in my mind. There were these philosophers, on this school of thought. And then, on the terrain of history, there was Furet, doing the same work of deconstructing the history of socialism. You're raising a question. It's not about... There you go, yes, yes. Why France? Why France, yes. An addendum to Aymeric's answer. We mustn't forget, and this is the big difference with England or Germany, that from the Liberation right up to the '70s, in France there's a Communist Party that represents one French voter in four.
13:06 And it's frightening. So there's a battle to be waged that's less necessary elsewhere. Elsewhere, Franco takes care of it. Of course. In England, trade unionism liquidated any revolutionary trade-union tendencies a century and a half ago. In Germany, it's the front line, need I say more. It's the front line, NATO, Eastern Europe, the first communist who pops up gets liquidated by that grey general who had served Hitler so well in crushing communists and who gets promoted again once NATO takes over. So I mean, in France, there really was a specific job to be done. It's no accident that we had the most counter-revolutionary intelligentsia, because France had the greatest revolutionary potential, quite simply.
13:42 That's it, exactly. And there, answers had to be found. And as for... We alluded off-camera to the fact that in the colonies, one can indulge oneself contrary to the great principles we uphold in the Hexagon. Let's not talk about the colonial past in the past tense. I was born in Vietnam, in Indochina, as it was called then. I was born in Hanoi, under American bombs, already—which were there for the Japanese at the time. I mean, it's history I know fairly well, which I taught for a few months, on a mission south of the Sahara. It's not in the past. It continues. Of course. I mean, what just happened in Libya is really extraordinary.
14:14 What just happened, and this got no media coverage anywhere, were pogroms against Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, who were lynched by the thousands on the pretext that they were Gaddafi's mercenaries. You have to have worked... Not even mercenaries, they were just employees. You have to have... No, no, no. In the propaganda, they're called mercenaries. Precisely, in reality, you have to have worked there. There was work to be had. One month in Bamako, no need to spend 10 years there, or in Niamey, to know that a Nigerien or Malian with no work, if... I know that the caretaker's son in Moazin, whenever he had a free moment, would go off to Libya because there was work there.
14:45 Well, there you go, that's all. Quite simply. They were lynched, they were lynched. And what's supposed to be the opposition here, the Socialist Party, all it found to say was to fall in line with Sarkozy on NATO, and even play the watchdog ahead of NATO, because Obama was quite pleased for once that it was the French out front and not the American boot, no reason to be shy about it. Even if it means handling logistics, satellites and all that, seriously, behind the scenes. All the Socialist Party found to say was that they could have gone in sooner and hit harder. And it's starting again with Syria.
15:15 It's really extraordinary. And a tribute to Jules Ferry, no less. That one takes some nerve. At least go to the Panthéon—I don't like Mitterrand, but at least he went to the Panthéon, there's Rousseau in the Panthéon. But Jules Ferry, that really takes some nerve. On top of that, they'll tell you, with that kind of Jesuitical logic, 'yes, but back then, everyone was colonialist.' That's not true. We know Clemenceau's speeches. God knows Clemenceau massacred workers. That's not the left. That's it. But at the same time, it's clear. And at the same time, they'll say, 'yes, well, that's the colonialist side, but it's still the school system, etc.'
15:46 But what exactly were the 'black hussars of the Republic'? That needs saying too. We need a bit of class-struggle analysis, after all. But God knows, I have absolutely nothing against schooling for all. But what was that Third Republic school system? It was an ultra-chauvinistic, ultra-nationalist school, whose purpose was to send people off to die on the 'blue line of the Vosges.' There was the same thing on the other side of the Rhine. We can see what that led to. There isn't even a small nuance to add there. In making that kind of apology, we find that same social democracy. It's built into its apparatus, its software, sorry for that somewhat...
16:20 But it's clear. We find it in Guy Mollet. These are people... We find it in a certain freemasonry. Sorry, I'm not lumping everyone together, including freemasonry as a whole. But there's this colonialist tendency in a certain freemasonry, including within the Grand Orient, including on the left, including progressive circles. These are people who, at a certain point in their era, accepted colonialism, promoted colonialism, in the name of republican values. Here again we find these internal contradictions within the French bourgeoisie.
16:50 There's always an empire of good against evil. There you go. And it's really... I remember Jean-Luc Mélenchon's first reactions. It was the same. In the first day or two, thankfully he's since corrected himself somewhat. But he too charged in, all gung-ho. What is this social-democratic, colonialist software? These people really need to ask themselves some questions. Historically, social democrats were the war-mongers of 1914, and they were colonialists. I mean, if there's a difference between communists and social democrats—sorry, I'm getting a bit off topic—but I mean, I'm quite willing to talk about Stalinism, I'm ready to do the whole...
17:25 We need to look at it, but that doesn't necessarily characterize... It characterizes a particular country, surrounded by 14 nations from the outset, plus Nazism, etc. Those really are exceptional conditions. If there's one thing that characterizes communism within the broad family of the left, that is, in its opposition to socialism, it's that these are people who refused war, imperialist war, and who refused colonialism. Say what you like, but... So this social democracy that's in power and that praises Jules Ferry, that's absolutely scandalous, and people don't see all its implications. It's not enough to say 'ah well, I'll take the good side, the bad side...'
17:55 Marx mocked Proudhon when he said 'the good side, history walking on two legs, etc.' That's absolutely ridiculous, that's not dialectics. We're not going to lecture people from Marseille—coming from Paris to teach Marseille people, who know better than us—that it was a socialist named Jules Moch who shot at anti-colonialist communists in the port of Marseille, if I remember correctly, and that it caused several dozen deaths, I mean... Oh yes, absolutely. Because dockers were refusing to load American weapons for the Indochina war. Oh yes, that... Marseille does have a memory of that, even if it's poorly maintained.
The class surpluses and the true marginal 18:27 We're a long way from Clouscard—the Algerian War, though, Clouscard grew up in the shadow of the Algerian War, after all. There you go, there's that too. He talks about it little in his books, though, but he lived through it firsthand. He talks to me about what he calls the 'class surpluses.' He shows that, for example, one of the causes of May '68, in the Marshall Plan, there are the surpluses of the Marshall Plan, the surpluses of consumption, and there's also an audience, an audience for '68, and he shows well that there are simply people who are surplus because the system can't manage to integrate them. So, for instance, you had the surrealist cadets of the bourgeoisie who start doing the Saint-Germain-des-Prés scene, already Montparnasse before that, etc.
19:05 The neighborhood, what he calls the neighborhood. It's a very interesting sociological concept. These people need to be placed somewhere. They think of themselves as extremists but are actually a form of centrism, in fact, because they don't choose. In the class struggle, they don't take sides, in the end. They're bourgeois who no longer have a bourgeois economic solution. Absolutely, yes. So, you know, the Poujade surplus, the small... you see the problem, people who don't fit into the system. Pierre Poujade, the little grocer. And you have the surplus of the repatriated. It's not their fault, any of them.
19:36 But there you go. He doesn't dwell on the Algerian War, but... And all of that leads to '68. Sorry for the anecdote, because this isn't written down anywhere, but it can be read between the lines. But I remember very well a moment when he was at the Old Navy café, while writing L'Être et le Code, and a young guy comes up, a young guy with what you'd call a marginal look—you'll understand why in a minute. Yes, yes. And the young guy says to him, 'Michel, what do you think of marginals?'—meaning, we're the real dissenters, the real revolutionaries, etc. And at that moment, there were two workers of Maghrebi origin working with a jackhammer on the building's façade renovation.
20:11 And he says to him, wait, who's the marginal here? Is it you, waking up at 11am to have your coffee at noon? Or is it Abdallah? I mean, who's on the margins of society? The other guy walked off sheepishly. He says, the real marginal is Abdallah. He's the one. If there's anyone who's... Right, it's not you. You're inside the system.
Rock, the reduction of a popular music 23:24 After listening to this piece by Miles Davis, we come to the musical question, because Michel Clouscard, who's always very attentive to class expressions in everyday life, wrote a great deal about music, and about certain music which he considered very impoverished, weakening, in a way idiotic. So, can you expand on that, Dominique? Very gladly, especially since this has been the subject of countless discussions, all the more so since our mutual best friend, who is very much alive, and whom I greet in passing, namely René Commer, a restaurateur in Calvi, Corsica, who isn't even Corsican by origin, founded the Calvi jazz festival.
24:02 So, I mean, we've often had occasion to talk about it. Actually, you talk about idiotic music and all that, well, it's not just value judgments. No, no, I understand. I mean, of course, of course, but he's not... If there's someone who doesn't go around promoting elitist music, I don't know, the Saint Matthew Passion, or the Well-Tempered Clavier, in opposition to rock, it's certainly not him. But Michel Clouscard, who didn't come from bourgeois culture to begin with, who's self-taught in that regard, I mean.
24:33 In fact, he used to say himself, with a lot of humor and self-deprecation, he'd tell me, 'I'm like the autodidact in Nausea. I started reading novels with the letter A, Edmond About, Le Roi des montagnes'—he exaggerated a bit, but that's to make the point. And very quickly, he understood what he held against... I mean rock. Let's be precise. It's a generic term. To be precise, there's the rock'n'roll of the '50s, with an alternation of strong beat and weak beat, which is already a bit richer, a bit more complex than what came afterward with pure binary, disco.
25:09 I'll go very quickly. Because the names keep changing, but there have always been avatars of this kind of music, with a small permanent Latino alternation, even before the war, from rumba to salsa, passing through the lambada, there's always that extra soulfulness for dancing, fortunately, a bit underneath the North American or English-origin binary bombardment. What he criticizes rock for is not that it has amplified guitars—he has no purism about that, he doesn't care.
The blues of the African slave and the fate of Charlie Parker 25:39 He loves popular cultures. Luis Mariano, in the southwest, was very popular at that time. What he criticizes is, as you said, the reduction, the simplification of a properly popular, revolutionary music, which was jazz and which was a miracle. Jazz is after all the most learned of popular musics, the most popular of learned musics. I had the opportunity, really, it was... it was an election for me, in the elective sense of the term. I was entrusted with the direction of a music training center in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, at the request of the association of musicians of Niger, funded by your taxes, by your taxes, I hope you're not paying too much, from the European Union, at the time.
26:18 Right? Which had judged that real development costs too much, it's not for Africans. On the other hand, culture doesn't cost anything. A music center project is cheaper than a transnational highway. Of course. That, we can go ahead with. And for Africans, for young Africans, access was practically free in a country, right? It was... At the time they knew Vanessa Paradis better than the music of their own country. Of course. There is indeed a reconquest.
26:48 They say that music, through world music, African music, is conquering the world. No, it's Africa that is being conquered by the great Anglo-Saxon lobbies of the binary beat. Because when you really know traditional African music, it's a bit more complex than the binary beat. And you quickly fall flat on your face if you dance like in the clubs on a Saturday night. I mean, Clouscard saw very early on that something unique is happening in world musical history over the last 40 years. That is, from Tokyo to Abidjan, to Buenos Aires, to Paris, to New York, everyone listens to the same hits between 10pm and 2am.
27:20 It's something staggering. Whereas not so long ago, even a few years after the Liberation, in the Southwest, popular music was more the tango, more the musette in the Northeast, etc. There were real popular musics, that is to say, in the sense that a given flower only grows on a given soil, a given plant, and hence the diversity, fortunately the biodiversity that implies, which is the exact opposite of a single music coming from above, from Big Brother, where the hit plays at 6am, then at 6:05, then at 8am when I'm shaving, and it ends up with all of France humming it, and we say, that's not bad, that thing.
27:55 And we think we're making popular music, I mean, whereas this people music was made to break popular musics, if you look closely. I'm making a pun on pop music and popular music, they're in inverse proportion. So he was very sensitive to this aspect. There was jazz, which was an advance, but the music of the worst exploitation of all time, that of the African slave, having left the Gulf of Guinea, arriving in the conditions we know when he was lucky enough to arrive, not being thrown overboard with chains in case of inspection, arriving in North America, in this case, since I'm talking about jazz, not South America, and who, out of habit, on his own African traditional musical scale, I don't want to be too technical, but I know this fascinates the listeners, the blues, etc., on his own traditional African musical scale, is asked to sing what in a Protestant country—the Lutheran chorale, you're going to stop being naked, you're going to put rags on your head, and you're going to go to the temple on Sunday.
28:47 And God knows with what enthusiasm they went, they were probably the most sincere believers. Oh yes, yes, it's very far. And since they can't sing the scale of C, each one sings a bit with his own grids, likewise, since we don't know how to make quarter tones, that's right. And what does he do? He sings the C scale out of tune, but he brings his own modalities, and that creates this miracle, which is the blues, which is going to be the most popular music on the planet—I'm talking about the blues—which gets sublimated in jazz, or reduced to its simplest expression in the organ, that is to say to a chip, a musical minimum wage, I mean, it's still the African slave who produced the music that makes white people all over the world dance, not only white people, fortunately.
29:29 A pentatonic scale laid over the well-tempered keyboard. Exactly, exactly. With the third for the seventh. Exactly. The famous blue note. And besides, the students—I don't mean students, because I have nothing to teach them—the traditional musicians, who are often masters, and from whom I had nothing to learn, but whom I would bring in to motivate the young people to reconnect with their tradition. Besides, it went very well. And these musicians, when I played jazz for them, immediately understood the blues scale. They didn't need... It comes from the riverbanks, from the Niger, in this case. So Clouscard understood, leaving aside the aesthetic and technical discussions, the historical and social stakes behind this issue.
30:06 That is to say, for once, there was an unprecedented cultural emancipation, when poor... Poor Charlie Parker, I mean, I say poor, because you, the black man, you're going to stand there, you're going to play until 2am, you'd better take some heroin. That's how it was, with contracts. Phony, he didn't earn... That's how it was at the start. Afterward, he earned a bit more than minimum wage, but I mean, that's how it was at the start. This guy was on the lookout. He listened to Bartók. He listened to Bethlone. He listened to Monk. Stravinsky, who wouldn't even agree to receive him.
30:38 So what we clearly see in Clint Eastwood's film is that these people were censored, in the end, as early as the 50s. And in Clint's film, we see that quite clearly. Toward the end, we see the next generation, the guy with rings on every finger, who starts making 3 notes with his sax. It's Parker who knows how to make more notes on his horn. That's the music that's coming. It's variety music. I mean, the binary beat, and you're going to have your fill of it, like a slave doing push-ups. I mean, you're going to have your fill of it every Friday and Saturday night for the next 40 years.
31:10 I mean, it's really extraordinary. There, I've answered your question. He saw the isorhythms. It's not at all about going back to learned music. It's the opposite. You had a revolutionary popular music. Why was it liquidated? I ask you. For the same reasons that the gains of the working class were liquidated and libertarian liberalism put in its place—the chronological coincidence is at least troubling. Yes, exactly. There were tons of subjects he addressed like that. And he's the only one who addressed them that way. Yes, exactly. Because other philosophers weren't interested in, say, Sartre. You can't be interested in rock, of course.
From "liberty, equality, fraternity" to "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" 31:40 Those are choices. And even less did she theorize it. Yes, even less. It's even worse. Rock was a promotional instance of this new ideology that was being put in place because it was, I mean, living on hatred and beer. For example, Clouscard, before—it's simple. There was liberty, equality, fraternity. That's the ideology of the French Revolution. That's the Republic. That's what we've been trying to defend against the attacks of liberalism for 200 years now. This question still hasn't been settled. Well, before, the bourgeoisie, to smash that to pieces, had found its trick. That's work, family, fatherland.
32:10 As far as I know. Well, work, we've understood well enough what that means. It's other people's work. Right. Same thing, I have nothing against family. I have one. But there, we understood everything else it meant. Eliminate the other three. Right, that's what it served to do. We understand this ideology well. Right, back to daddy's ways. Well, afterward, they found another one starting in the 60s, roughly. That's sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Right. So we arrive in these permissive years. Everything is permitted and nothing is possible. Again, when I say sex, sorry, don't think I'm making a puritanical speech.
32:40 But you see clearly the use that's made of these instances. It's always the same. It's not the societal that's the problem. It's when it's instrumentalized against the social. Right. It's when this ideology of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll has the function of smashing liberty, equality, fraternity to pieces, of destroying the republican heritage. You got cut off. Yes, no, and then of launching this economy of desire, sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, which is going to replace it. What they call the new markets. Right, the new markets. Women, youth. Right. No misreading of Clouscard, as Aymeric just said.
33:13 Clouscard is the anti-puritan par excellence. So, no misreading. He has nothing against women. He notes that women's emancipation—I've alluded to the admirable book you published about... the feminists of the CGT. It's a completely hidden history of feminism and these militant women went through a lot, especially at the time, for real women's rights. There, Clouscard has nothing but admiration. But this struggle was co-opted in an approach I call ontological. The only technical term I'm going to use, it's not very difficult.
33:43 In short, everything that is already-there before man. Nature, God, everything that is there before man. I mean, it used to be God, now it's with a certain ecologism. I have nothing against ecology itself, but a certain ecologism, I mean, there's an already-there, there's a balance in nature. And even the slightest human action risks messing it up. It's a frightening ideology in a way, I mean. I've lived long enough in the Third World to recall that the greatest cause of mortality in the world, despite AIDS, is still malaria, inoculated by a guaranteed organic mosquito.
34:13 Well, I'll just mention that in passing. So we mustn't confuse the environment, which I defend, and nature, which I fight against. A little distinction to keep in mind. Nature is also the hunger that wakes us up every day and that has to be fed. It's all that. It's submission to the law, quite simply. And technique, praxis, is a way of trying to free oneself from it for millennia. So when Clouscard shows how the magnificent struggle of the CGT feminists, for example, was co-opted for the benefit of girls parading in the 70s—I'm talking about it, it's not too harsh—but we are not castrated like...
34:48 What is this struggle? What does it have to do with the union, with the working class, it seems a bit bubble-like. When the CGT said we must defend time to live, that is to say reducing working hours, there were bourgeois feminists who said no, we must work as much as men do. Not even... You see, right there, as soon as we talk about class struggle, we can't agree anymore. But what do youth, women, regionalism—Corsica, Brittany, Occitania—have in common? What do they have in common?
35:19 It's always an already-there. It's a matter of birth. It's appallingly reactionary, in a way, if it's not mastered. I'm the first to acknowledge that France scandalously left Corsica in a state of underdevelopment. Well, France—the reactionary governments that succeeded one another in France, it's not the French people. Corsica and other regions, too, were left in a state of underdevelopment, etc. But I'm not going to demand Corsican-ness and identify with all those who have traveled there, alas as those who know it well are aware, and who wage this kind of identity struggle when given free rein.
35:54 So when Clouscard rails against this, it's the exact opposite of a reactionary struggle. It's the exact opposite. It's to get out of the reactionary dead end into which struggles that should have been vanguard struggles have been placed. So if the societal were the flower crowning social gains, he would have nothing against it. But as Aymeric says, the societal is something that's given to you. I gave the example of the female or male minister. I mean, if what's given to you costs capital nothing while making you believe you're progressive, then he denounces it.
The pill under capitalism and the new markets 36:28 There you go. Roughly that's it. I want to come back to a question that concerns women because I think... I don't remember which book anymore... never mind. He talks about the question of contraception and the pill. And to properly situate his reversal, that is, he says, here's what's progressive about it. The pill is the ability to regulate births. Of course. So as not to be overwhelmed with unexpected children. It's excellent. Progress. That was transformed by the system into a tool allowing men to say women are consumable since, after all, they're on the pill and there's no danger.
36:59 With the humor that belongs only to him, he was the only one to suggest that the pill is a victory for men. That's what you're saying. At the outset, it's wonderful since it does allow birth control, a family life. At the outset and even in the end result, that's not the question. But at the same time it opens the field, and that's where the story lies. The pill under socialism poses no problem at all. It's the pill under capitalism that poses a problem. What does that give? They say, they're on the pill so we can do whatever we want with them. Man's word about girls. That's why I'm very happy and I thank all six of you present.
37:31 There are all the technical teams too, that we pay tribute to Clouscard on that score, because he's often taken for someone reductive. Yes, exactly. Whereas he's the only one to theorize the most difficult and subtle societal problems, where ambivalence is often the rule. You can't say unambiguously that this is progressive, that is conservative. Where one can serve as a mask for the other. It depends on the state of the class relationship. Exactly. The technique itself says nothing except the use made of it by the ruling class.
38:01 And the role of the economy in the last instance in Marx. Right, if I stab someone with a knife, it's not the knife that gets sent to jail. We don't put the knife on trial. Obviously. So you were talking about hunger as an elementary need, and then we have in this economy of sex and drugs the organization and promotion and setting up of a system of manufactured, incited needs, which opens the field to a considerable economic activity. Which is, as we'll see with the drug problem, all the more developed for being forbidden.
38:31 So the forbidden status allowing a profit, a surplus profit. So we get to the heart of the debate. As a prelude to my answer to your question, if I may, I don't want—you were kind enough to mention the DVD—I don't want people to think I'm here to advertise for my publisher. But Aymeric Monville here present really had the presence of mind to devote to Michel... We're starting to see a lot, there's demand, I see it in bookshops, for Michel Clouscard, but he's starting to emerge from the appalling solitude in which he died three years ago. He lived, yes. But as if, thanks to the crisis, he suddenly became audible again.
39:03 There you go. And so, for all those who say, but who is this Clouscard, he wrote this little book, it's not frightening, it's about sixty pages, which condenses the essentials of what we've said and what I hope we'll say and what we'll bring up without getting lost in detail and in the labyrinths about the man, the necessary biographical elements without falling into anecdote, and above all the outline of the fundamental concepts by which Clouscard is absolutely unclassifiable within...
39:33 in any case is completely at odds with the dominant ideologies of his philosophical or sociological field, etc. So there, so I'll answer now your question, it's what he calls the new markets. You just have to look, we're roughly the same generation, I think, Bernard, roughly, at the number of magazines, journals or products—I look at the children's/youth section of the bookshop—products that didn't exist 50 years ago. I'm not putting them on trial, just pointing out the economic logic, the child as an economic category. Before, children were dressed like adults, just smaller, I mean, etc.
40:08 You'd go have a suit made at Thierry's or wherever. Whereas now, you have a market for zero to such-an-age, then another, etc. So-called women's magazines, I mean, which are often alienating, quite reductive for the image of women, multiplied by 300,000, I mean, the new markets, not to mention the magazines on, I don't know, alternative medicine and essential oils you have to hold in your hand at the full moon for it to work, I don't know, I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's multiplied, so he shows that we mustn't put it on trial like some right-wing, reactionary conservative people who say it's nonsense, it's whatever—it's not nonsense, these are economic advances for capitalism because it suffered a trauma—there I'm getting to the essential—the great crisis of the 1930s, and if I mention it, you can guess it's because the most serious crisis since then is the one we're now replicating; we started by saying it would never be as bad as the one in the 30s, now we say it's worse, we can see how serious it is—so, it was a crisis of overproduction in the 1930s, I forget which American economist said the absurd spectacle of crowds starving in front of overflowing granaries, that's it, and then coffee
41:18 burned in locomotives, milk poured into the gutters, I don't remember a cartoon, never again, so if we keep daddy's ideology, of saving, of effort, where basically you don't consume, starting with Giscard we understood, enjoy yourselves, right, enjoy yourselves with bling-bling for the poor and then a luxury minority too because that works, right, so that's why these new markets appeared, because otherwise capital would have thrown in the towel long ago, so we're not talking about indifferent things if it has survived until now, it's because it managed to generate fields of the economy that were marginal until then, I'm talking about video game consoles, absolutely, if I may say so, against Althusserian terrorism, I've worked a bit on Hegel, I think like Lenin that it's the Hegel-Marx convergence that gives all its power to the revolutionary movement and that on the contrary when we split them apart, we're in the periods of political poverty we're experiencing, and the astute thing is that if there's overproduction, if we keep the morality of saving, of effort, I mean, it's easy to understand, I mean, you don't sell off the products, but what's important is that the discourse to promote them
42:28 isn't entrusted to an advertiser, be it a Séguéla, it's entrusted to ideology, thoughts—I come back to Deleuze and Foucault—about flows, but for me, flows remind me more of Facebook, desiring flows, that is to say the new economy, desiring flows remind me more of Facebook than of Billancourt, I live passing through the flows, but of course, desiring machine, flow, we're right in it, and when... Deleuze, we accept the libido, but I don't accept the Oedipus, I take from Freud what interests me, what develops the market, right, that's it, I choose, I do my supermarket shopping, that's really it.
43:01 So it's a good opportunity, thanks again to him, to have recalled how he's the only one who dared to venture like a Christopher Columbus onto unknown seas, onto this terrain that remained fallow, precisely the analysis of the mores of consumption, there's a Marxist La Bruyère side to Clouscard. Yes, yes, in history.
Disappear, workers: relocation and the country house 43:37 There you go. So on these markets, I had a thought here, on these markets, at the edge of legality, which are more promising than others. Exactly. And then there's also the fact of relocations, that is to say the relationships he stresses between the places where production happens, which are set aside in our contemporary society. We no longer talk about the producers. The workers—I'm thinking of the title of a film about a Marseille factory called Workers Disappear. So it doesn't exist anymore. There's only consumption left. Actually, that's not true.
44:08 And when I hear, personally, all the critical discourse about, oh, it's the Chinese again, it means that in fact the production apparatus was sent over there. And there's none left here. There's none left here, but they'd still like us to keep consuming since otherwise they'd be producing for nothing. And so he insists, and this is what I'd like us to develop a bit, on the fact that as long as the producers don't decide what they produce, that it will be the banking machine with the ruling stratum that will produce, consumers will be sold anything. Including drugs. Precisely, as you're talking right in the midst of neo-capitalism.
44:39 Yes, exactly. I'll remind you that the title of the small book Aymeric Monville devoted to Clouscard is called Neo-capitalism According to Michel Clouscard. There you go, that's it. Precisely, you speak the truth, I was smiling because he has an admirable formula. At one point he talks about ecological neo-colonialism. Ah, there you go, very interesting since we're talking ecological. I'll take an example because I lived in the Drôme at one time, he used to come see me, so he had a good look at the Luberon, the place where Lacan treated Althusser's depression, well, he did a whole analysis of the Luberon. Ah yes, there you go.
45:10 We start with rural misery, the populations, the peasants leave for the city, so that's, boom, I mean, land is freed up. And there's the land freed up, we see the Dutch and the bourgeoisie at bargain prices, there, to build this admirable chapter called the country house, a place of reconciliation between the miserly bourgeois father and the prodigal son with an immigrant worker in a place doing crafts, which serves as guarantee, the third-worldist guarantee.
45:43 The country house, which is also the price of the rural exodus, of the guy who found himself a worker at Billancourt at the time, that was it. So that answers... It becomes the idyll of old man Grandet and his hippie son. And there he makes a little scene of it, that's it. I'm not talking about the same milieu. There's a Molière side to Clouscard too. Workers and peasants disappear. Oh, the imagery peasant, that one, we adore him. He's never been more present than since he became recyclable, since he trims hedges and landscapes the environment of the next vacationer.
46:14 It's the peasant who no longer produces anything. Right, exactly. Who mows lawns. Or when he produces with some old wooden contraption in an eco-museum. Right. That one, we like him fine. But the peasant who broke rocks, who broke rocks to make the field. And you know that in the South there are plenty of rocks. Yes, absolutely. It's not easy being a peasant in the South. It's never been simple. That one, we talk about as little as the worker. It disappears. Of course. And when you say workers disappear, I really like that phrase, meaning, disappear from the field. Yes, we don't want to see you. From the camera. There have to be some. In reality, they're more present than ever. When you count, you know how to measure. We know very well we've never had so many workers.
46:45 The class in-itself and the class for-itself. But I can't see you anymore. But there, you no longer exist. I can't see you anymore. And on top of that, you have demands. That's enough now. Really. And that too is a mutation of state monopoly capitalism. We have to come back to these great economic analyses of the mode of production, of the evolution of capitalism. It's that from that point on, there's such an organization of society that it allows workers to be relegated to the periphery, to the suburbs, to the exurbs. Of course. Before, you had, you see, a bourgeois building.
47:15 Well, I know that era was hard too, but you had several floors, including up to the maid's rooms. They were terrified, actually, because there classes mixed. You'd cross paths on the stairs. Right, that's it. And there, this organization of space, which allows, along with rural exodus, this exurban sprawl for car use, not to drive the family around on weekends. It's really this car for going from one place to another, with travel times that keep piling up.
The illicit at the heart of capitalism and conclusion 47:45 It's total control. And of course, the icing on the cake, control over morals, to the point that Clouscard is going to speak of anthropological training, of training toward libidinal, playful, marginal consumption. But we haven't actually answered the question about the illicit. I think that's important in Bernard's question. Yes, it's an additional dimension. So we think that, since he often talks about the drug market, but in economic terms, the enormous stakes it represents. I'll note in passing that the current events in the Maghreb, and particularly in the Sahel, particularly in Mali, as an involuntary counter-homeland, I mean, it's not only that.
48:19 We can't reduce such complex things to a single factor. But since what I'm about to say is rarely discussed, there's also the immense trafficking of South American cocaine which, for roughly the last ten years, now passes through West Africa, through the desert which is so easy to cross, with so little control. And for these poor countries, controlling their borders is difficult there too. And there are these stakes as well. So it's not marginal in the economy. No, not at all. But moreover, what he points out—and he says it, he says it in the broadcast with Séguéla, against Séguéla, on Apostrophes precisely—he points out that in the very etymology of capitalism, in its program, if I may say, in programmatic terms, in its software, as I was saying earlier, and since always and more than ever, the illicit is present, and we see it today with the crisis.
49:03 It's illegal. Three-quarters of financial activity... Oh yes, absolutely. Yes, quite so. There are still people who don't know, but everyone knows that 80% of American financial exchanges take place, not with Europe, nor with Japan, nor with China—no, sorry, 87%—with the Cayman Islands. That's it. That's where it happens. No, but that's still... Yes, of course. So, the illicit... Who can know? When there's a construction site, say, Marseille-Yoyeur, it's marked how much from the General Council, how much from the region, well, they try to have relative transparency.
49:37 But when it's a villa or a bank, they don't show you—to capitalize that bank, it took 2 million deaths in Angola. Yes, that's right. No, but we don't say that. Trafficking opium from the high plateaus of Afghanistan. Right. And for that, chasing out the Taliban, installing Karzai, who's the country's top trafficker, along with his brother, I believe. With his brother, yes. Right, with NATO's blessing, going through Yugoslavia, the wars in Yugoslavia, the drug route. Right, Kosovo, etc. What Clouscard says—he's not denouncing small marginal things, and it's not the little dealer on the corner he's after.
50:07 He knows very well that's not where it happens. He denounces the very essence of capitalism as it drops the masks. Now, whereas during the 19th century and all of liberal competitive capitalism, dad's capitalism, so to speak, the one before the Marshall Plan. The one of Max Weber. It needed respectability, a morality of honor, of thrift, of effort, etc., which did the worst harm. Yes, fortunately. But now that's over. There's no more morality. Now the masks come off. Yes, yes. No, absolute cynicism. Then you're a crook, then you're good. Exactly, that's it. Workers, disappear. And that's what he denounces. And take the head of the IMF if it's offered to you. It goes together.
50:37 We're quite agreed. I'll say, that's it. I think we've reached the end of this program. We haven't covered the whole considerable field that Michel Clouscard covered, but I invite you, on the one hand, to watch the DVD as an introduction, and then to read his works. So, the main ones, well, Le capitalisme de la séduction, Néofascisme et idéologie du désir. We could have talked about current events since, in essence, he says that after May '68, two political forces emerged, ecology and neofascism. Cohn-Bendit and Le Pen. We're right in the thick of it.
51:08 We're right in the thick of it, they're the two actors in this consensus. But what's missing is the expression of the working class's basic needs. It's cruelly lacking. Well, he helps us think about this dramatic oversight for general history. I think others are listening. And thank you for bearing witness to his contribution. And then, I think we'll see each other again because there's a lot to say about what he said, and everything he brings us for future reflections and future struggles.
51:38 Thank you, Dominique. Thank you, Radio Galère. Thank you, Aymeric Monville. When we sing the time of cherries and gay nightingale and mocking blackbird will all be in celebration.
52:27 The beautiful girls will have madness in their heads and lovers the sun in their hearts. When we sing the time of cherries, the mocking blackbird will whistle far better, and lovers will have the sun in their hearts.
