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A comment pointing toward Domenico Losurdo 0:00 For once, I'll break with habit and start not by answering a question, but by commenting on a comment, if you prefer. I'm referring here to the most faithful of the faithful, and I'm not here to hand out good marks and bad marks. But anyway, as a recurring matter, I'm thinking of our comrade whose pseudonym I take all the more seriously because I don't know his real identity. I have a few suspicions like that, but I have several.
0:38 And they're each as gratifying as the other, actually, each as gratifying as the other. I'm thinking of Rackham the Red, a very fine pseudonym. Rackham the Red, who tells me this. Don't worry, it's quick. Thank you for this remarkable work of popular education. To all subscribers, I strongly recommend the excellent book by Domenico Losurdo, Rackham the Red.
1:08 And there, I really pay tribute to him. Well, he never misses an opportunity to say very kind things about my talks. But no, that's not the point. The point is that he never misses an opportunity to direct whoever reads his comments on my talks toward other sources than mine. Other sources that are allied sources, sources coming from comrades who range across the left, the left, or toward other movements, or toward sovereigntists.
1:39 I'll come back to this later, regarding the red-browns, a confused notion. And in the Spinozist sense, confused and mutilated, Spinoza would say. He has this generosity and this intelligence to hold several sources at once. He has no cult of personality, or rather he has the cult of several people and of the collective.
2:09 And indeed, that's not what displeases me most in his interventions. So here's an example, this isn't just an avatar of what I've just told you. I strongly recommend the excellent book by Domenico Losurdo, The Class Struggle, a Political and Philosophical History, end of title, published by Delga in 2017. It's a book to read and to spread, which brilliantly defends Marxism. And I'm all the more touched by it because, if anyone left a void—that year was terrible, we lost Jacques D'Hondt, we lost Domenico Losurdo, didn't we?
Lothrop Stoddard, theorist of American racism 2:42 And really, around that same time, within a very few months of each other. And these are losses—phew—hard to replace. I don't want to use big words like irreparable, but in any case unrepaired to this day. And I think of Domenico Losurdo's genius as a source-hunter in particular. It's thanks to him that I came to know the extraordinary Lothrop Stoddard.
3:12 Obviously, you don't know Lothrop Stoddard. Lothrop, yes, that's his first name, L-O-T-H-R-O-P. Let me call him Lothrop. I'm not joking. If I'm laughing, it's not because there's anything funny about his ideas—it's quite grim—he's one of the most radical theorists of American racism. From before the 1914 war, late 19th, early 19th century. Anyway, Lothrop Stoddard, who had an enormous influence on many American leaders, and even more on the leaders of the Third Reich, to the point that one of the Reich's ideologues—I'm thinking of Rosenberg, the most often cited of Hitler's ideologues, who gravitated around Hitler—Rosenberg borrowed from him the notion of superman, subhuman.
4:13 They go together. The reason you say there's a superman is that there's a subhuman. In short, the notion in German, subhuman: Untermensch. There's Übermensch, the superman. Über, that's 'over.' Übermensch and then Untermensch. Yes, yes, I'm part of that group too, with a name like Pagani, a spaghetti name, a macaroni name. I say that because I was called 'spaghetti' at school, but that's fair game. And in Nice.
4:43 Primary school. So already, I belong to... I say that because this same Lothrop Stoddard had divided the European races into three categories. It's not north to south. So, the elite race, by far, is the Scandinavians. Roughly, the closer you get to the ice, the more superior the race. I'll say more important things afterward. And then, when you get down to the 'wog,' well, the 'wogs,' as it were.
5:13 I mentioned people from Nice, Corsicans, Pieds-Noirs. They wage little civil wars among themselves. I remember my aunt, you know, felt pity in Corsica for the Sardinians. In the years right before the war, when poor Italy was starving—imagine the Sardinians coming to Italy—they'd arrive with a bag slung over their shoulder containing old fermented sheep's cheese that they'd keep for a month. It was their only source of food. Anyway. And that didn't stop the Pied-Noir from being racist against Arabs.
5:50 Which Clouscard magnificently points out: the civil war induced by capitalism among the poor. It's not that there's a civil war among the poor by nature. So, back to Lothrop Stoddard. So, between these two extremes, what do you do with Switzerland, for example? It's a bit too far south, not quite the Scandinavian countries. There are Germanic areas. He calls it the Alpine race. It's not all 'race' like that for him. There's the Nordic race. Okay, let's be serious. If I'm talking about this, it's for one very specific reason.
6:23 You see, everything I owe here—I didn't even know he existed. And it's the genius of Domenico Losurdo as a source-hunter to go digging in the archives of people who have no interest from a strictly philosophical, cultural standpoint, etc. But who nonetheless serve as unavoidable markers in the path of ideas. And unfortunately, not the best ones. But ones that had an impact, alas, on the events of history. Since we're in a cycle questioning the real scientificity of the historical sciences.
6:56 So, Lothrop bears a mortal grudge, in the United States, against a whole host of inferior races. You wonder why I'm being roundabout? But not the Jews. Not at all—there was no Zionism yet, nor a State of Israel at the time. It wasn't at all an ally, a pillar of American strategy in the region. We mustn't say anymore that the Jews, after being the targets of antisemitism throughout... No, and the Jews were not a threat to the United States in the Midwest at the end of the 19th century.
7:36 No, what he holds a grudge against, as you might guess, is above all the Indians. A good Indian is a dead Indian, right? Well yes, that's been said in the very country that calls Putin a murderer. And which didn't just say it. A good Indian is a dead Indian. The Indians, the Blacks—that's a large minority in the United States. And then he starts speaking ill of the 'yellows' too, since there's beginning to be Asian immigration on the Pacific coast, etc.
8:07 So he lists them. You'll see why I laugh. Excuse me, there's nothing to laugh about. And at the end, he says, well, we need to get rid of the Indians, the Blacks, the Yellows, and the white socialists who support them. He's so foolish that he ends up giving the game away: it's not color that's the important thing in racism—and the white racists who support them. You see, I owe it to Domenico Losurdo to have come into contact with flagrant instances of the first order of greatness, if you like, or of the lowest baseness, however you want to put it, of this kind.
Losurdo on Nietzsche and organizing the answers 8:43 So there, I thank Rackham the Red, and I commend him for pointing you toward Domenico Losurdo's books, an author of extraordinary erudition, who among other things—I'll stop this little parenthesis on him here—wrote a monumental monograph on Nietzsche. Well, the book weighs almost a kilo, but it's by far—I also recommend it to those who claim allegiance to Nietzsche and turn him into an idol. That's not at all the case with Domenico Losurdo, but he knows him well.
9:14 He is fair to him, and the book is a thousand times more nuanced than what those who believe Marxists dismiss Nietzsche with one wave of the hand might imagine. So I spend my time, you know, saying that he's still worth more than the Nietzscheans of the Cold War. Poor Friedrich. So there, thanks again to Rackham the Red. Don't miss his interventions and don't hesitate to follow his recommendations—they're always extremely well-founded, from our point of view.
9:53 I'll move on now—I'm moving to another pseudonym, AT, both letters capitalized, who says to me—it's even shorter—good evening Mr. Pagani, would it be possible to do commented readings of some passages from L'Être et le Code? A very rich work, but very difficult to access. So first, I take note of the suggestion and I do hope to have the opportunity to do it.
10:23 You can well imagine that I won't be the first one gratified to do this. And I'll be all the more gratified since I can see this might be gratifying for those who are waiting for it. Except that, mind you, I read this question just after having, in the last round of answers to questions, last time, in response to a comment, quoted a long passage—not from L'Être et le Code, but from Le capitalisme de la séduction—about the country house.
10:58 So, I've proved motion by walking, so to speak. So I refer AT—though I presume he must already know this, unless it hasn't been broadcast yet perhaps—to our Q&A sessions, since next Wednesday we don't have a workshop. I'm making this suggestion provided the technical crew can manage it. I'm already asking a lot of them, I wouldn't want to add to it, but if we could broadcast at the usual workshop time, that is, 8:30 pm—let me take this opportunity to answer someone who was asking at what time, since he saw that we broadcast on YouTube, he was asking about the time of the live workshops, simultaneously on Facebook and on YouTube.
11:50 It's always at 8:30 pm in principle, for now we haven't deviated from that, but there you go. So, I propose that next Wednesday we have a recorded session, well, a recorded intervention, I'll respond. It's an excellent idea from Pierre-Alain, that instead of trying, during a workshop devoted to a specific philosophical theme which already takes a lot of time, to squeeze in and find a few minutes at the tail end of the session to answer questions—given the interest of your questions and sometimes their complexity—to devote an entire session exclusively to answering questions.
12:31 So, this is the second one we're doing this evening. The first is already in the can, so to speak, and I suggest, if the technical crew allows it and makes it possible, and sees no objection, that you go watch it next Wednesday at 8:30 pm, at the usual meeting time, while waiting to meet again face to face, so to speak, on Wednesday March 31st—Wednesday, so not next week, but the one after.
Durkheim: treating social facts as things 13:04 There we go. So, I moved through that quickly, because the question was easy. There's another question too, well, that already deals more with substance. I said it first, didn't I? It comes, you know, from the depths of vice—no, I'm joking, but the pseudonym, it took me a while to notice, actually it was Pierre-Alain who drew my attention to it, because I'm a bit distracted by some worries at the moment.
13:38 And I was reading 'King Duvis,' that's his pseudonym, King like the king, you know, king of vice, and I thought it was a name, you see, from the Balkans, Serbian, I don't know, 'King Dujevitch,' right? Well, so, bravo for this—I'd forgotten—Rackham the Red, who is also a king of vice in his own way, in the same vein: good evening Mr. Pagani, would Durkheim's sociological method, by treating social facts as objective facts, then be limited by the absence of a philosophy of the subject?
14:19 What a fine and good question! And what pleases me most about it is seeing that King Duvis has clearly grasped the link between the elimination of the subject, which I denounce, in the current vogue of neo-positivism—it being understood that I never put on trial either science, nor scientism, nor positivism, whose limits I can recognize, but which I do not put on trial—it's a courageous line of thought, with undeniable advances, in its time.
15:00 But I do put neo-positivism on trial, the kind that not only takes little account of Auguste Comte's advances, but above all skips over the later advances that enriched and completed the scientific field Auguste Comte placed at the center of his thinking—and as for the so-called human sciences, since that's our subject, you know, and in that sense, King Duvis's question is very central to the cycle we're developing right now. Auguste Comte speaks mainly of the natural sciences, the sciences that were then called—at the time people said the exact sciences, now the hard sciences—I won't go back over it now, we'll have the chance to come back to these labels, though I did give a clarification last time, didn't I, I call hard sciences the natural sciences, plus mathematics,
16:10 which is not a natural science—there, we'll come back to that. So, that's the field, roughly nine-tenths of it, covered by Auguste Comte's texts. As for sociology, the human science par excellence, at least from that period onward—because for my part, and I believe it's the same on Marx's side, it would rather be history, you know, the human science to be given priority—I would say then that Auguste Comte is the first, or one of the very first—I have to say these things carefully too, there's never a birth ex nihilo—but anyway, he's one of the very first to utter the term sociology, the syntagm, the word, but it remains merely programmatic in his work; there was no development at all of the human sciences yet, so the additions, the advances made after Auguste Comte, whether in particular the lines of thought developing the symbolic order and the importance of the unconscious,
17:21 whether it be the unconscious limited to the individual—I'm thinking here of Freud—or the unconscious, mind you, of class—I don't say the collective unconscious, mind you, I'm not going to fall back into that sympathizer of the Third Reich, namely Jung, right, I know he has many defenders, and I'm going to shock more than one, man or woman, because when you say 'depth psychology' it always impresses people, as it happens. So I specify here that these advances, which have shown their extraordinary fruitfulness, completely obscured for some time now—King Duvis is entirely right to say, in treating social facts as objective facts, Auguste Comte—sorry, Durkheim—doesn't he open the way, you know, to this limitation, to the near-absence of a philosophy of the subject, and when I say 'near,' it's out of epistemic caution—it's not, one should say, an almost total absence of a philosophy of the subject today.
18:33 To comment on exactly what he says in his question, I'll just replace part of his question with Durkheim's own words. He says, 'By treating social facts as objective facts,' says King Duvis. Durkheim says outright—it's obsessive with him, particularly in a very interesting book, the first work to technically develop the notion of sociology, which is The Rules of Sociological Method.
19:03 Before Durkheim brought out this great monograph, the first work of sociology applied to a social phenomenon, suicide, titled Suicide. Both were published by Presses Universitaires de France, quite hard to find nowadays, and even by other publishing houses. So Durkheim never stops repeating, in The Rules of Sociological Method, that social facts must be treated as things, which was an excellent idea in his time, in reaction against a mode of thought that claimed to be spiritualist, that claimed to be whatever you like, the so-called philosophy of introspection—that's what it was called then, think of Rodin's Thinker, I'm oversimplifying a bit because I don't have time, but nobody uses the so-called philosophies of introspection anymore—well, no, I'm referring you to Théodule Ribot, people like that, you can forget Théodule Ribot, R-I-B-O-T.
19:59 But you know Rodin's Thinker, holding his head in his hands, and introspection is a bit like that—no, you have to look outward, at what's going on in a stadium, when a goal is about to be scored, people who are gentle, kind, sociable, who suddenly turn into furies, or into a kind of hysteria, to show that there are things that only social relations produce; you have to treat properly social facts, which are neither psychological nor biological, etc. So, in that sense, Durkheim's objectivist stance is interesting—there, I'm answering King Duvis's question on substance—but when he says that this opens the way to the elimination of philosophies of the subject, as we can see today in cognitivism, or in the neurosciences—well, I'm no specialist, I'm not criticizing, you know, this or that experiment,
21:09 what do I know about it, or this or that model built within the framework of the neurosciences and the neuroscience laboratory—I'm criticizing the way it's presented to the outside world, as if it were a thought, a philosophy, mind you, that came to add anything at all to concepts such as substance, attribute, subject, or predicate. There. Anyway. So what I would like to make clear to King Duvis is that if I defended Durkheim's objectivist standpoint, it's because I'd be quite happy today to have a tenth of Durkheim's sociologism, because those who today are producing the elimination of the subject in thought, that is, who treat not only social facts but man in general as a thing, mind you—in other words, we must stop distinguishing something from someone, there's only something.
22:15 Don't think I'm exaggerating; I'll give you a very topical example in contemporary thought—in contemporary media coverage, at any rate. I would love to have a tenth of it, because he at least took into account, mind you, facts that only appeared since what Rousseau calls civil society. The passage from the state of nature to civil society—there is never a biological argument, strictly speaking, in Durkheim. On the contrary, he shows well, for instance, that in the totem—it's not just totemic religions—the totem is a way for whoever adheres to the totem as a divinity within the people concerned—this has been studied in Oceania and of course in sub-Saharan Africa especially, but not only there, in North America too, of course—that in the totem, the individual, whether conscious of it or not, grasps the unity of his community, his sociological unity precisely.
23:21 It's not an individual whim to recognize the divinity of the totem. It's a consensus of the people in question. So, once again, it's very good to have made a connection between the statement taken in isolation like that—treat, consider social facts as objective facts, as things, in short, be wary of any subjective intervention—yes, and, I don't want to go on too long, but this would deserve a whole development.
Criticizing subjectivism without eliminating subjectivity 23:51 Do not confuse the critique of subjectivism with the elimination of subjectivity. I'm addressing philosophers here, I can't explain everything at once, in any case. Don't confuse them. The best way to fight against subjectivism is to extend the field of subjectivity. It's to recognize the immensity of the fields where what is determinant in the final instance comes from subjectivity, and not from enzymes, stimuli, and mechanical reflexes that correspond to it.
24:32 That's what I'm saying here. It's no accident that the later Clouscard insists on the importance of this subjectivity. Yes, perhaps the most orthodox of Marxists in a way, wasn't he? Who held such a grudge against Marxists, plural, right? Who, by decoupling Hegel from Marx—Althusser in particular—had forgotten that Marx had only become himself, starting from the Theses on Feuerbach, by freeing himself, after a very brilliant youth, from Feuerbachian naturalism, from the moment he recognized the importance of the development of subjectivity within idealism.
25:20 He said German idealism, of course, which, even though in a mystified form, had the merit of developing what Marx calls Tätigkeit, the activity of the subject. There, subjectivity is an activity. I referred last time to that almost delirious part of Aristotle's Physics, which is entirely understandable for its time, when all thought was finalist, still animist if you will, since we were just talking about totems not long ago.
26:01 Even the immense Aristotle, the immense logician, the immense observer that Aristotle was, who asked his master—Alexander, whose tutor he was—when Alexander went off on his campaigns to the Indies, to send him scouts, saying 'bring me samples of animals, of plants.' Well, anyway, Aristotle, also an immense naturalist, mind you, explained—remember—the acceleration of falling bodies by comparing it to horses which, when they smell the stable on returning at the end of the day, speed up because they smell the food, the oats, you know, they sense, in short, the nearness of home.
26:41 Now, for Aristotle, just as a falling body is going to rejoin its home, which is 'down,' mind you—if it falls, it's because it's the effect of what he calls a natural motion, that of heavy bodies, that of 'grave' bodies—heavy and grave mean the same thing—which have their natural place below, as opposed to light bodies like smoke, whose natural place is above. You know that in Newton's tube—and that's many centuries later, well after Aristotle, some 1500 years later—you know that in Newton's tube, smoke falls like a stone, at the same speed, mind you, as a lead pellet.
27:22 It's interesting to note that when Kant talks about matter, he asks how much smoke weighs. At least he manages to frame the problem, that's good. So, you see clearly that in this delirium of Aristotle's, there's an alienation—that is, the subject doesn't notice that he's thinking of the object as though it were a subject, as though the stone, the pebble that falls, had a soul. I can't be any clearer; I won't go into it—there are so many occasions to go into detail, I won't do it now, but that's what I call taking subjectivity into account.
28:01 In making this critique of Aristotle, I'm highlighting subjectivity. Isn't that so? Here, the subject is sacrificed to substance. There you have a fine definition of substance. From Hegel's pen, that's it, the substantial. It's the subject who forgets his own activity and alienates it in the object. Isn't that so? Who speaks of the subject as if it were an object. Let me take a second example and I'll stop there. The question is short, but the stakes are profound. That's why I'm taking my time.
"The wind shakes the trees": the trap of language 28:31 When we say — this is an example I gave during the workshops, especially last year, I developed a few points about it — when we say, for instance, the wind shakes the trees. I talked about it in a cycle called Return to the Logic of the Subject. You see we're always dealing with the same subject no matter what we're talking about. Philosophy, know thyself, since its origins. But we're not going in circles, are we? We do it in a spiral and we progress each time we come back to prowl around and draw again from its origins.
29:05 Namely, when we say the wind shakes the trees, what is the subject? Our schoolteachers, male and female, gave us the irreplaceable advantage of teaching us to hunt down the subject. The subject is the one who answers the question who is it that? Twice who? Who is it that? Not what? That's the object. The subject is who? Who is it that? Who is it that shakes the trees? The wind.
29:35 The wind, subject. I warned you: watch out here, this is the grammatical subject. It's a metaphor. We act as if the wind had hands like this and said you're going to listen to me, yes, well, you see, to the tree. You see, the oak and the reed, that's La Fontaine. We act as if — and grammatically that is indeed the case, it's not just as if — grammatically, students would get their knuckles rapped if they didn't say that here, "shaken" is used in the active voice, as they say in grammar.
30:05 So the wind is active and the trees are passive. There you go. And that's the trap that language leads us into. Language, when we don't reflect on it. Language before Socrates, when he says "What do you call...?" When we don't question the words of the city, the words of the tribe — when we don't question the words of the tribe, then M-A-U-X, evils, multiply upon the tribe this time. Believe me. Because if the words think in our place, look what they suddenly make us say, right there.
30:38 The wind is active — the wind is no more active, physically speaking, scientifically speaking now, since we have to speak of the exact and hard sciences and of nature. This is the moment, isn't it, to make this reflection, which is so little ecologist. There's nothing anti-ecological about it though. Namely that the wind is itself the effect of high pressure, low pressure, differences between warm air and cold air. After that, ask the climatologists, who know more about it — meteorologists, of course.
31:09 The wind is no more active than the trees. It's a chain of passive effects. And you saw the text by Descartes that I read last time. Those long chains of simple and easy reasons which geometers customarily use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations had given me occasion to imagine that all things which can fall within human knowledge follow one another in the same way.
31:43 And there, Descartes is right about the wind and the trees. Descartes denounces unconscious animism. The Aristotelianism immanent in that spontaneous vision of the world around us, of the pre-scientific world in which we are all immersed. And here I quote Descartes again, for we were all children before being men, and I go on with his sentence that we forget, because that first part is often quoted, but people forget to quote what comes after, which is admirable: that we had to be guided as children by our appetites and our tutors — our appetites and instincts, that's normal — and our tutors, who were not always in agreement with each other, so that we would not have the same power of reasoning if we had been guided by reason from the moment of our birth.
32:35 Extraordinary. One day someone will have to do a close reading of texts as rich as Descartes's. So, there you have it. When Descartes says things follow one another in the same way, that is, the wind is no more active — it is so metaphorically. And that confirms for you that everyday language is poetic. So, ah, I never said that when I say the wind shakes the trees, I didn't know I was making poetry. Well, there you go. You're like Monsieur Jourdain in reverse.
33:06 Monsieur Jourdain is quite surprised to learn from his tutor — isn't that so — and he's flattered. By his tutor, who is paid by Monsieur Jourdain, so he has every interest in flattering him — that he has been speaking prose without knowing it. But you, you're making poetry without knowing it. Well, you know, I often say the day rises — an absolutely banal sentence that seems to be me stating a fact. No, no. I'll say it's a fact, but one that others can, I don't know, corroborate. But it's not an astronomical fact.
33:39 The day does not rise, it does not set, neither does the sun. Besides, it's not the sun that moves, it's us. It's because the earth keeps tilting that suddenly the sun seems to rise. No, it's us going down, it's the earth tipping down on the other side, on that side. There you go. I'm speaking crudely on purpose. So once again, we have a big job to do, don't we, to de-substantialize our relationship to the world around us. That was the multi-millennial work that took us from ignorance to science.
There is no natural balance 34:11 Knowledge matters. So, there you go, I won't develop this too much, but I wanted to come back to the fact that I'm very glad that King du vice — and here it's rather a king of virtue, of philosophical virtue anyway — because virtue means courage, doesn't it, in Latin. Strength, above all.
34:42 And I'm very glad that he is concerned, that he has well remembered that one of the calamities of our time, of the great regression we've been living through since — there are several markers — the fall of the Berlin Wall, isn't that so, the Star Wars program, which forced the Soviet Union to get down on one knee, you can't at the same time finance Cuba and bring about Vietnam's triumph, isn't that so. They shot down more than 3,000 aircraft, the Vietnamese.
35:14 How many American planes have been shot down in the Middle East? How many? None. More than 3,000 thanks to Soviet missiles, SAM-6, SAM-7 at the time. All that costs an enormous amount. Anyway, I won't rewrite history, will I. But ever since wild capitalism — what do they call it? Neoliberal. Whereas it's... I refer you here to the admirable conversations between Antoine Vatan and Aymeric Monville, isn't that so, as if liberalism had changed face and discourse.
35:51 It's always the same. Isn't that so? I touched on this earlier regarding the notion of natural equilibrium, which joins that of the invisible hand of the market, isn't that so, or the return to equilibrium, as if there were a normal state of the economy or of nature. As if normal and its opposite, pathological, were natural notions. There you go. The Earth is no more pathological, nor less normal, when its surface is at 400 degrees.
36:21 That has been the case in certain eras, even much hotter, isn't that so, than during the ice age. I wouldn't want to leave this point without recalling what I didn't have time to add last time. That is, people tell me, ah yes, but stop with your quibbling. You know very well that what is vital for us, for the human species, is that a certain temperature and a certain balance, between too hot and too cold, etc., be maintained.
36:55 150% agreed. 150% agreed, you're putting man at the center. Now, those against whom I'm railing, those who are ecologists and not merely concerned with the environment but with nature — for them, it's not man they put at the center, it's precisely nature. Because if I'm told that for the survival of humanity, and not only its survival, for its harmonious development, for its growth, for the optimization of its stay here below, and even beyond in time, isn't that so, into the future if you prefer, we absolutely must prevent the temperature — by fighting, including against the part man plays in that temperature rise.
37:40 There I am the first to agree, I reassure Raoul Leboeuf on that point. And this can often take the form of urgency. But on condition of saying that it's for the sake of humanity and not for those shrimp, isn't that so, that I told you about, which all the scientists who specialize in the question know well, but even the general public, isn't that so, the hot water sources in the ocean depths, isn't that so, those shrimp paddling about at ease and cheerfully at 400 degrees.
38:12 400 degrees, four times hotter than boiling water. We couldn't live there. So it mustn't be that temperature. So it's fine to say, as a human being — well, one last point, I'm crossing a forest with a friend who's guiding me. I didn't know this forest and I'm watching out. It's an old side of us, like we all have, sublimated predators, sublimated, who don't act it out, isn't that so?
38:42 It's better to go on a safari, yes, a photo safari, isn't that so, than a safari with cartridges? That's sublimation, it's serious, it's a real change. So I'm watching out for a deer crossing the road, and my friend, who senses this, whom we've talked about, tells me, listen, don't wear yourself out, there are no animals in this forest, they wiped them all out, there's nothing left. I'm disappointed, I'm like you, I'd like there to be wild animals in this forest.
39:12 esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier, as Dante says in the Divine Comedy right at the beginning, isn't that so? Esta selva selvaggia, selvaggia, wild, comes from selva, the forest. I would like that, but why? For our pleasure. But yes, I say it, it sounds cynical, but no, it's the opposite, it's generous. That's what makes it absolutely necessary, isn't that so, to preserve and save endangered species. But not for some so-called natural balance.
39:44 Nature is no more balanced when the number of ants is multiplied by 10 or when it's divided by 10, isn't that so? Any more than the loss of the dinosaurs was an irreparable harm to the universe. We really have to stop raving. Fortunately there was no man around at the time of the dinosaurs, otherwise we'd be told that man made them disappear. We'd find that's all we do now. Every time there's a problem, there are mice terrorizing the inhabitants.
40:14 As I speak, there are disasters, floods, as there regularly are in Australia, and mice fleeing the floods, because now the disaster is too much water instead of drought. So people will say, you see, everything is thrown out of balance, as my grandmother used to say, atomic energy broke the climate. The mice take refuge in human dwellings, isn't that so? There is no state of equilibrium in nature.
40:49 The equilibrium, for the dinosaurs — fortunately it disappeared, because that's what allowed mammals to make their place, otherwise we wouldn't be here. And for that matter, under the reign of Tyrannosaurus rex, we poor mammals didn't have the leisure to survive for long. There you go. I don't want to interrupt my answering of questions. I find your questions so interesting that I perhaps linger too long each time, but can we ever do it enough?
Gaullists and communists are not red-browns 41:20 So now I'll answer Estavisky. I won't comment on his pseudonym, but I do urge you to look it up on Wikipedia — I don't know myself, what are your sources, isn't that so — even if there's a lot to say about the supposedly ideology-free ideology of Wikipedia, but still, it's a precious database for those who have nothing else — to inform yourselves about, not Estavisky with an E in front, but Stavisky plain and simple, isn't that so? The Stavisky affair, which played such a large role on the eve of the Second World War.
41:52 There. But I'll answer our friend and faithful comrade who very regularly follows, and I'm glad of it because his contributions are always very interesting, our talks. He says this to me: aren't those who most threaten the liberal-libertarians, from the point of view of the system in place today, precisely those whom this system — that is, the liberal-libertarian system which is the dominant ideology — is beginning to single out by calling them the red-browns?
42:39 I had told you we'd talk about it. Those who challenge the liberal-libertarians on both sides, the old left and the old right, roughly the new Gaullo-communists. Now there's a very politically rich question. Because if I now take its philosophical quotient, let's try to clarify the notions at play here. I told you earlier, what could be more confused right now than a notion like red-brown?
43:10 If we lump the Gaullo-communists in there, in that case, all those who are anti-Atlanticist — because the only thing De Gaulle and the communists had in common, or the main thing, politically, was anti-Atlanticism; historically, it was finding themselves side by side in the Resistance and saving honor. On the right, the Gaullists, on the left, the communists — we're talking statistics here, we're in the human sciences.
43:40 Nothing prevents — and there were others too in the Resistance. A Christian, a centrist, that's rare. But a royalist, that happened. It's not that the land of France was, like that, subjugated by the Prussians — no, no. The only thing in common was anti-Atlanticism. So if all anti-Atlanticists are to be placed on the side of the far right, what a gift that is to the far right, to say that!
44:16 What a gift! The far right has always fought first and foremost against communism and Gaullism. The supporters of French Algeria, the criminals of the OAS, the Secret Army Organization, who carried out shootings in the streets of Algiers in the last years of the Algerian War — you don't know what a "ponctuel" is? I take a revolver and the first Arab I see in the street, I shoot him. Whether in Algiers or Paris, look it up, that was the era...
44:49 It was intense! Oh yes, you can say it was intense! It was even on that occasion, isn't that so, that the "barbouzes" were created, as they were called on the Gaullist power's side, isn't that so, the barbouzes, who tried to track down these far-right extremists of French Algeria and the OAS. Now, these people were above all gunning for communists and Gaullists. Susini, who was — these names are forgotten now — Susini, who was one of the leaders of this movement, said at the time, check this, I may be confusing him with General Salan, but one of the two, General Salan, who was a rebel general, isn't that so, who had rebelled against General de Gaulle, who was part of that "quarteron" of generals, as General de Gaulle called them, who had already been active in Indochina — we'll talk later about colonialism and the neocolonial rhetoric.
45:51 You see how it's all connected after all. Yes, he said — the first thing I'll do, because he was planning to parachute OAS members onto Paris, you know, I won't recount everything, but it's the famous night when Prime Minister Debré said on the radio to all the French people, our information confirms that the authors of the coup d'état in Algiers, in French Algeria for instance, are going to try to gain a foothold in mainland France and to parachute in.
46:27 So he told every Frenchman, go on foot, on horseback, by car — the phrase became iconic, famous — oppose them, etc. Tanks had taken up position in front of the National Assembly, and as for the navy — I'll go quickly — as the navy didn't go along, some units didn't go along, it all fell through, into the water, so to speak. But at the moment he was planning to land in Paris, Susini, or General Salan, said, the first person I'll have shot when I get back to Paris is Mauriac, the novelist François Mauriac, of the Gaullist, Christian, Catholic right, whom I respect — I mean, for me, they're not, they're not my worst enemies, I've fought them enough, I voted against them, back when those people were in power, I can't — so no one needs to lecture me.
47:22 On the other hand, I mean, I would give anything for that right in exchange for the wretched left we've had since. You wince — you're right, but it just shows you still have a lot to learn, those of you who still wince when I say that. Remember all this well, isn't that so: General de Gaulle's policy met with opposition from the communists — indeed, de Gaulle's last speech, in '68, when he came back from Germany, was to say there's a Communist Party plot, etc.; to the very end, he opposed the main sections of the working class.
48:04 But if that had been his only opposition, against him there was above all those who were furious that he was selling off the colonial empire — the far right — and secondly, there are three things, I'll tell you right away: his empty-chair policy in Brussels, his contempt for the European Commission at the time, what he called the volapük, the "thingamajig," speaking of Europe, and thirdly, his opposition to Atlanticism, to Anglo-Saxon dominance, to Atlanticism — I didn't say to America, to Atlanticism, I didn't even say to the Atlantic Alliance — when, during the Cuban missile crisis, de Gaulle said that the French armed forces stood alongside the Americans against the Soviet Union.
48:54 He remained in the Alliance, but there was no question of staying in the integrated command. There, I won't go over it all, will I. But that's to tell you, to tell you to be careful when you say red-brown and confuse it with the Gaullo-communists. There is nothing that most red-browns hate more than Marxism and communism. Isn't that so? Because the red-brown par excellence, isn't that so, or rather the brown who reddened himself, is Hitler.
Hitler, false socialist, and the return of the far right 49:28 When we say National Socialist Party, that was very clever. Don't take my brother-in-law for an idiot. I'm not talking about the physical individual — maybe Hitler was unhinged — but he was surrounded by people who thought things through. People from the Ruhr, people who said he's the man we need, people who held a meeting with him just before the gravest decisions of the Third Reich. Isn't that so? That's important, what we're looking at here. And people whose businesses were doing better than ever.
50:00 And not only in Germany. There you go. Don't forget that Hitler always kept Ford's portrait in his office. Now, Hitler, National Socialist Party, national-brown, according to those who — that's not how I define brown, but anyway — national-brown and socialist, red. Whereas the first thing he did, isn't that so, even before the Final Solution for the Jews, because before creating the death camps, he proposed to several countries that they absorb the Jewish community he wanted to get rid of, to remove their presence from Germany.
50:40 I recall that the Swiss government, which was one of those he had approached to take some in on its territory, had replied "one more Jew and we'll sink." You see, I'm not just placing the blame on Germany, am I. And then look at the French press at the time — people didn't yet know about the death camps, so the masks weren't yet on people's faces. Isn't that so? And don't forget that "Mister Hitler is a gentleman" from British Prime Minister Chamberlain on his return from the Munich Conference, isn't that so.
51:15 What ultimately decided Stalin to make the German-Soviet pact was that he saw it coming. He finds Hitler likeable and it's us who are the enemy. Let's outflank them. I'm serious. One must not joke around with notions like red-brown. I seem to be making a detour. You know, there's that famous Godwin point.
51:45 This gentleman, this Godwin, found it very amusing to observe how, in a political discussion, in just how many seconds the accusation of Nazism or fascism comes up. The quicker it is, the more delirious it is, the more it's nonsense. It's still curious that people mock the idea of warning against a fascist and Nazi danger at a time when the figures - and here I'm no longer in the realm of opinion, this can be measured, can't it?
52:16 Where nothing is moving forward politically in Europe, where everything is regressing except in terms of numbers, the green and neo-Nazi electorates. It's still curious. In Austria, in Germany, look at the figures, don't take my word for it. In Holland, in the Scandinavian countries, how many Scandinavian countries would keep the government they have without the participation of the far right in power, openly the far right. So, we need to be very careful, because before criticizing the notion of red-brown, I mean, I'm the first to criticize it and I say it's confused.
52:57 That's precisely all the more reason to clarify it, not to act as if it were something to be defended either. I'm not attacking it, I'm not defending it, right? I'm showing its inconsistency when we talk about it from a distance. That's all, simply. The greatest danger today - and don't forget, if you read the introduction, the introduction on the first page, the front page of our site, I thank Pierre-Alain for making it so clear and interactive, as everyone who has visited it says, and it pleases me when they say it - don't forget that the first page, the introduction, is the only place where I say what it was that suddenly made me, that connected me, as they say today, to philosophy so early on, right?
53:48 It was 'never again that.' I was born in 1945, never again that. That's what's coming back, like never before, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which pleased - the only thing that ever really scared the Nazis was the Red Army. Sorry, I say 'scared' but colloquially, because I'm quoting Clouscard. There, they didn't laugh, mind you, they stopped strutting around. And yes, I wonder if that isn't the real, deep origin of Russophobia.
An objection on the "decolonials" 54:19 It's that they can't forgive them for having done Stalingrad, in a way. Yes, I know, I'm pushing it a bit. Listen, let's investigate. There, next question, let's investigate. Don't take my word for it, never take my word for it. So, here's another confused case, right, well, one that starts from notions on which enormous confusion reigns. The question is a bit long, I don't know if I'll read it in full, but I'll still try to read it at speed.
54:55 Hello. Shocked by Christian Reynier's question in the chat, I'm reacting at length, at length, sorry - I specify here that the person speaking is a regular, Stéphane Galland is a regular, not to say a follower, a faithful listener, viewer of my talks, and I'm very glad to greet him here.
55:28 So, without further ado, I'll read his question. Christian Reynier too, right, who asked me one of the most pertinent questions I've ever seen in our comments. So he says this: Christian Reynier in the chat, I'm reacting at length, sorry. First, I note that the question is asked - it's a bit complicated - with an implicit certainty of being understood by Mr. Pagani, who, on the contrary, in his answer falls into a total misreading of the term decolonial.
55:59 So, let's put things in order - this gentleman is reproaching Christian Reynier for having asked the question in such a way that I couldn't understand it, even in good faith, I couldn't understand it - correct me if I'm wrong - I couldn't understand it, and that as a result I made a distorted case against those who claim the decolonial project. So I'll now go back to his sentence. Mr. Pagani, who, on the contrary, in his answer falls into a total misreading of the term decolonial, no doubt due to an ignorance on my part - by no means shameful, you see how nuanced and delicate he is - of certain, in brackets, media and theoretical debates going on today.
56:42 So here, I specify very precisely, I start by answering this part, that Stéphane should certainly not think that I stay away from these debates. I never make an issue of it, that's true. I don't see why I should add even less to what's chattered about on TV panels. I'm not going to advertise for the advertising. I won't name names here, but there are people who, if we didn't talk about them so much - even just to refute them - we would have stopped talking about them long ago.
57:14 There's a self-fulfilling side, right, to spending your time contradicting people who really aren't worth it, neither by their position nor by the level of their arguments. I say this without naming anyone because there's an embarrassment of choice. So I want to say here that I stay at a distance, but they shouldn't think I don't do my research. I'll come back to this since they cite among... I'm not getting ahead of myself, I'll read the rest first. I then note that this certainty of being understood is no doubt fueled by Mr. Pagani's regular attacks - well noted - against gender studies, race studies, etc.
57:55 That 'etc.,' I'll replace 'gender, race' with one word. Go on, one word that saves us all that. You must know it. But I say it for the audience, right, it's a philosophical word, it's ontological. Today, right, the return of identity-based, imaginary and fantasmatic thinking, right, rehabilitates all ontological entities. So as not to talk about social class, so as not to oppose exploiters and exploited, they'll set man against woman instead.
58:27 You see, you young people are starting to catch on - the young and the old, blacks and whites, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Among heterosexuals, dominant heterosexuals versus dominated heterosexuals, and vice versa among homosexuals while we're at it, why not, right? That's what fills the TV panels, I'm barely exaggerating, right? When you see all the controversies there have been around MeToo and... As if certain women - ideologically, sociologically, politically, socially and economically dominant, belonging to the dominant society, men and women alike, right -
59:09 had been elected by the women of the earth to speak in their name. It's still extraordinary - how many times have I seen African women outraged, right, by this discourse. So, let's stay with this for now, let's come back to the decolonial. So the common thread of what I want to say is the ontological aspect. So I'll continue, because there's a lot to say, so I'll stick closely to his text.
59:40 So, Dominique Pagani's misreading is no doubt fueled by the regular attacks he makes against gender studies, race studies - hence ontological - in the social sciences, which would be, theoretically speaking, mainly indebted to the pseudo-advances of French Theory. French Doctores, right? The counter-revolutionary philosophy that appeared in the wake of '68 - of '68 of course, Cohn-Bendit, not the '68 that is, the one that triumphed in the media.
1:00:12 Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, very good. And that's not at all the case with Stéphane Galland. As for me, however, I find them often interesting nonetheless, just as I find Mr. Pagani's so-called attacks stimulating and interesting - so here's someone extremely nuanced, Stéphane Galland, and it's all the more interesting: he finds interesting things in decolonial discourse, just as he finds interesting things in my way of criticizing identity-based clashes.
1:00:44 But then, what does he lament? I can only object to the simplifications that lead, for example, to using the generic term 'decolonials,' and worse still, to thinking that all researchers thus labeled swear only by Foucault and co. Fine. So here I'll be very precise. If Stéphane Galland doesn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater - that's what it's called in English, throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Anticolonialism and neocolonialism of development aid 1:01:15 That is, the baby is the resolute hostility to and struggle against every form of colonialism. We agree on that, Stéphane? Because there, I don't know, I don't know Stéphane's age, I believe he's still younger than me, and I believe he wasn't even born when I was fighting against French colonialism. And with comrades, right, some of whom did time, right, during the struggles for independence. We have lessons to receive from people at that level? At that time, the word 'decolonial' didn't exist.
1:01:46 I'll come back to the semantic nuances. Anticolonialism, yes, decolonization, yes, but it's already done - and this is the awkward part, you see - it was done on the side of yesterday's imperialisms, right? With the persistence of countries' lack of sovereignty, that is, another colonialism came along, I'm not telling you anything new, a neocolonialism, well, I'm not telling you anything new, a neocolonialism which I made a few allusions to last time, which is incredibly more rapacious even than the old one - and that's saying something - because it also has more means, and that is what a good part of what's called, no doubt by unconscious antiphrasis, 'development aid,' actually is.
1:02:34 I quoted Clinton once when he said it should be replaced by 'trade, not aid' - trade rather than aid. Well, just a very short parenthesis - have you ever seen one country help another become its competitor? Which is madness, as they say in Abidjan - the man in the street in Abidjan, in Africa, the Ivorian, he says 'that's madness,' right? When we fall into delirium without even noticing it, that's madness. We're going to help Nigeria, which will soon have 200 million inhabitants, at breakneck speed, one of the most populous countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
1:03:12 We're going to help Nigeria become one of our competitors in cutting-edge industries, etc., when we can't even manage among ourselves, selling each other the junk of the English, the Germans, the Italians. Look at the fights between Paris and Rome, if only over the Saint-Nazaire shipyards. Just that. And now Germany, with the design of the new fighter jet meant to protect us from the Russian with a knife between his teeth, right?
1:03:51 Just as there was the clash between the Rafale and the Eurofighter a generation earlier - we can't even manage our own competition, and you want us to help countries that aren't even in the game yet? Just imagine South Africa and Nigeria having Germany's military strength. That's what 'development aid' means, word for word, if we take it literally - helping them become a developed country. What does that mean? There's only one way to say 'developed country.' If we say 'poor countries,' etc., all that's subjective, like heavy and light.
1:04:23 On the other hand, remember that there's only science where there is measurement of the measurable, even if it hasn't yet been measured, but of the measurable. When, in the calculation of GNP, the share of agriculture becomes a minority, or even marginal, as in countries like England, we say we're dealing with a developed country. That's just how it is. Rightly or wrongly, it's a value judgment, do as you like.
1:04:53 Right? We say industrialized countries, developed countries. Yes, countries where industry is the main source of value, even if it can be cutting-edge industries, right, and there isn't a single smoking chimney. We assemble electric motors, sorry, punch cards, computer systems, sorry. So there you go. What are we seeing here? That development aid, as such, has never existed.
1:05:23 That we help a country pay for its police and army so that it votes for us against the Russians at the UN. Yes, that has a political meaning. But we'll never put it that way. Because public opinion would be furious. Well, yes, and they'd be right. We're buying our clients. Since Antiquity, it's a Roman term, clientele, that meant those whom politicians bought before elections in Rome. It's even 'the client.'
1:05:53 You understand that afterward, when the one who pays says 'the customer is king,' it's a bit funny, in a way. It's obviously not that they buy them... So I'll clarify, I'll sum up what I just said. If it's about fighting against colonial or even neocolonial dominance, there's no problem. But the decolonial semantics, that's new. And he tells me, but no, there are still intelligent people who aren't Foucauldians, etc. Obviously, these people, I continue, are not all followers of Heidegger, and without even realizing it, since we're on that topic.
1:06:31 there exist voices that would call themselves decolonial while claiming a classical lineage. So, he says, you can be decolonial and on the left. Well, yes, I would even say that the struggle against colonialism never came from anywhere but the left at a certain time, as far as I know, if we take the exception of De Gaulle precisely. And you understand why he was so poorly regarded by the far right precisely because of that. So I was surrounded, in my colonial adolescence, by people who wanted De Gaulle's skin, literally, well, my parents' friends.
1:07:11 So there you have it, I know what I'm talking about. That didn't stop me from voting against De Gaulle when I was an adult. I'm not saying there's worse on the right. I don't know. But apart from De Gaulle's case, it was the left that was decolonial. What are they trying to convince me of now, that there could be a so-called decolonial discourse on the left? I would say an anticolonial discourse on the left. I would say that's by definition on the left. That's hardly a discovery, is it?
One does not use the adversary's words with impunity 1:07:42 But I don't think that's the case with those who claim the word decolonial. When you borrow the enemy's words - and yes, there's a semantics of today, right? There's a wooden language of today, the one that says 'resilience' instead of 'resistance.' Because 'resistance' brings back bad memories, especially since it triumphed, since it created social security, everything we've been destroying, everything we're now trying to destroy, and pay-as-you-go pensions. No, that's not Stéphane's case, far from it. But you have to see what's behind it.
1:08:13 You don't use the enemy's words with impunity. The enemy, as I said earlier, is the one who pits identities against identities. Black against white, instead of exploiter and exploited, whether black or white. And I couldn't cite a better ally here than an immense Black man, an immense man with black skin, right? An immense musician, an immense singer - you can guess I'm thinking of the immense Paul Robeson, whom they do everything to make you forget, though young people shouldn't worry if they don't know him.
1:08:47 He had a formidable bass voice. Not only classical - he actually did mostly popular song and spiritual, gospel, but well, he sang whatever you like, he even sang the Internationale like no one has ever sung it, vocally speaking. Orchestrally speaking, it's Toscanini who conducted, at the end of the war, by far the most beautiful version. The immense conductor Toscanini. So, back to Paul Robeson, look him up, R-O-B-E-S-O-N, Paul Robeson.
1:09:17 You won't believe what's said about him. When he came to Cardiff, in Wales, in England, in the 1950s, in the middle of the miners' strike, he said 'your struggle,' and the trains were full of English workers coming to hear him, white workers coming to hear him - there wasn't yet mass immigration at the time. No. They came to hear him and he said, 'our struggle, we Black Americans, is the same as the one you white people are waging here against capitalism.' That's not the discourse we hear today.
1:09:49 Now they tell you, you can't reduce everything to that, right? So I'm going to shock you. I'm doing it on purpose. But I'm going to shock you, though I'm not saying anything untrue. I'll say Arabs are very well received in France, very well received in Paris, and very well received specifically on Rue George V, at the Hotel George V. Yes, when they're called the King of Morocco or the Emir of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Ah, but you see, it's not true that Arabs are poorly received. But they're not the same ones.
1:10:19 Ah, but it's not the ones in the housing projects and the estates. So it's not - it really is a question of class. That's what I'm saying. And like the vast majority of Arabs, of African Americans to put it in politically correct terms, of Africans - they say 'the whites,' they don't say 'the Euro-Caucasians.' Like the vast majority, socially, economically, and largely because of colonial history, but especially now because of capitalism's grip on the planet since the end of the Cold War, without underestimating the challenge from China now, but I mean there's still a lot to be done militarily to achieve a balance.
1:11:05 What the Soviet Union used to do at the time - that's what's never forgiven. I repeat, the proof, right, is that, like the vast majority of Maghrebis for example, of Malians, are connoted with poverty and immigration on an empirical level around us in everyday life, on the bus. Inevitably, the notion of class becomes a notion of race. In short, ban the term 'racialized.' Yet this term 'racialized' comes up almost every five lines under the pen of one of Stéphane's references.
1:11:40 There, I have to warn him, because he says they're not all like that, the decolonials, some of them are on the left. And what example does he give me, right? Let's go. 'If these voices aren't the ones we're made to hear the most, it's perhaps because they're the ones that, at a deeper level, carry the most weight.' But frankly, it wouldn't occur to me to consider that, say, Marxism is a betrayed cause simply because the voices of Clouscard, Pagani or Friot aren't a priori the most audible today - noted.
Achille Mbembe, Agamben and Heidegger 1:12:10 But I share nine and a half tenths of what Stéphane says. Or of saying 'decolonials' as a stigma. Personally, I warn him. I'd rather we say anticolonial, or for... especially anti-imperialist. In short, 'I especially want to invite you to discover the richness of decolonial thought.' So that's certainly addressed to me, which seems to me precisely not to be one thing. He's right.
1:12:40 There's the worst as well as the best, right, in there. 'I find it unfortunate to note here and there' - so, in mainstream discourse notably, but also within academic or intellectual circles - 'the same caricatures of decolonial thinkers who, it seems to me, deserve to be better known.' So here are these references now. Like the Senegalese, Souleymane, Salomon. It's pretty, Suleymane. I have a classmate, whom I've stayed in touch with, named Suleymane.
1:13:11 Bachir Diagne, philosopher and epistemologist, of course, or the younger Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese philosopher and economist. The Cameroonian Achille Mbembe, historian and political philosopher. The French Nadia Yala Kisukidi, a specialist in Bergson notably, or the more radical Norman Ajari. I'll come back to Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian Achille Mbembe. But what is Stéphane doing getting mixed up in that mess?
1:13:41 Because he's an intelligent, cultured person, but he brings back the very dominant thinking he claims to denounce at the same time. There's nothing more Western, right? And even nothing more worrying in Western thought than Achille Mbembe's references. Not Stéphane's references - Achille Mbembe's. I'm not lumping them together. I'm warning him, right, with the best of intentions. Achille Mbembe constantly cites Agamben. A pure-blooded Heideggerian.
1:14:12 Heidegger is someone who said we have a duty of Eros toward the Führer. Who said the enemy is 'the Asiatic,' at a time when he wasn't hiding it, at a time when he wasn't even trying to, while visiting Le Thor to see a great Resistance fighter like the great poet René Char, right? That's where Agamben found them both, incidentally. You see, watch where you tread. It's an anti-technological, anti-ecological, anti-humanist mode of thought, typical of what's most troubling in dominant ideology.
1:14:50 But then, differently, better argued, isn't that so, than that of Montbeuf? Obviously, and that's why one extreme right can hide another. Often, the only thing considered as extreme right is the one which, as is the case with the Rassemblement National for example, is above all a super-Poujadism, has always been the extreme right of Poujadism, which is to say one already condemned by history, already economically defeated by big capital, all that.
1:15:21 But I'm not saying anything good about it, because the day will come, the day I fear above all else, the day when capital is in such crisis, raise your eyes, because we're not very far from all that, in such crisis, that all of a sudden they turn against always the same ones, against the unions, and then we'll see the Rassemblement National line up as one man, help Macron and the others, there you go. Whereas now, they'll tell you you're a neo-Nazi if you don't vote Macron, and the trick is done.
1:15:52 That's not at all what Stéphane says, but I wanted to go all the way, right to the urgency of what needs to be thought now. The moment an Achille Mbembe spends his time criticizing what he calls Western philosophy, thought, as though there were something malevolent in the West that he calls virilism, brutalism—that's the title of his latest essay. I follow him, Achille Mbembe, my dear Stéphane, but I don't feel like forcing myself to advertise for people who are already talked about enough.
1:16:25 Largely, you say they aren't well known. I mean, compared to those who are interested in African thought, etc., already, I admit that's not many, but among them, he's one of the best referenced. He's the idol of the middle classes, of what is emerging as an establishment, so to speak, in the cultural, economic and social sense, in French-speaking African countries, for example. For example. So we shouldn't turn him into some underground, corrosive figure either.
1:16:59 I'd like to show a few passages, I don't know who thinks I'm speaking gratuitously, but the person who reviews Achille Mbembe's book says this: one should follow with extreme attention the analyses that Achille Mbembe provides, an attentive reader of Fanon and Césaire—well, that was the era of the struggle against the colonial world, at the time when the colonial empire was at its height—whose diagnosis of our era cannot fail to lead to prognoses.
1:17:33 In Brutalism, then, a recent publication, he takes stock of what has happened to Africa and shows that a universalization of what happened to it is at work, orchestrated by capitalism. Already, I prick up my ears at the trial of the universal, we'll get there. This leads him to evoke transformations of such suddenness, scope and violence—notice that all these terms are vague, none of them lends itself to a unit of measurement—such suddenness, scope and violence that he calls this multi-faceted mutation "brutalism," which gives the book its title and its object, along with the image of the world that results from it.
The illusion of an increasingly brutal world 1:18:11 Before we go on, I want to warn against a very contemporary illusion, one I understand very well—I don't find it criminal, far from it, I understand being pushed toward it by current events, which seem to say there's more and more brutality in the world around us, more violence—indeed, people on the right complain about it constantly, to the point that their supreme value is becoming security, so we need to be careful with these words. Now, at the international level, all historians of the contemporary world, all the specialists, I mean, who have figures, statistics, who know very well how many died in the Iran-Iraq war, for example, more than a generation ago, it turns out there are incomparably fewer deaths in today's geopolitical conflicts—and God knows there are atrocious ones, my first thought goes to Yemen, for example, and of course, above all, regarding that region of the Middle East and Syria, well, the Syrian people, in the plural, even the Syrian people, with their historical and anthropological richness.
1:19:19 So even taking into account the atrocious violence they are subjected to, there is incomparably less violence and death than in the era of the Khmer Rouge, who were—I'm going to scandalize again—who were financed by those who were the enemies of pro-Soviet Vietnam and who were smiling at Maoist, anti-Soviet China at the time—you'll understand better the world we live in now, and why the fact that China and Russia are once again side by side multiplies the aggressiveness of Uncle Sam, who's losing his cool, to the point of waking him from his baptism—well, I won't go after the old folks after all.
1:20:11 So, important, very important, to inform yourselves well about the figures, don't take my word for it—there were far more deaths and violence in the sixties and seventies than there are today. Especially at a time when there wasn't even yet the emergence of middle classes who have no interest in wrecking everything, who are starting to grow in Indonesia, say, at random, in Latin America, and who don't have everything to lose with total, radical violence like that which took place in total wars like Vietnam.
1:20:47 You know more American bombs fell—there, for once, I'm not pointing at Atlanticism, but squarely American, the planes were American. Even though the entire Atlantic alliance fully supported the Americans in the Vietnam War, except General de Gaulle—see the Phnom Penh speech—more bombs fell on Vietnam, more than on Vietnam actually, but this is less known, on Laos, which currently still has a government that claims to be communist.
1:21:18 More bombs fell on Laos during the Vietnam War than—listen carefully—on the whole of the battlefields of the Second World War. Yes, yes, even counting the geographic extremes, the Normandy landings and the Pacific war. Add it all up—there were fewer bombs in all of that, and I'm not even talking about the carpet bombing the German civilian population endured.
1:21:49 It was well known that the goal was to demoralize the population, that was the purpose of the bombings, especially that of Dresden, which caused more deaths than Hiroshima, even though the city had already practically fallen into Soviet hands. But we'll talk about that another time. Beware of this illusion, because the title of Mbembe's book is "Brutalism." So now that you know it's an illusion, what he develops there, thinking that capitalism has never been so brutal—I'm not saying it's gentle, I'm saying it encounters more and more opposition in many countries.
1:22:28 The fact that in Bolivia, right now—and this makes me glad—Morales's supporters have returned to power, in a country where the CIA, you know, there are specialized schools where you learn how to remove guerrillas' eyes with a little spoon in torture chambers, that's taught, there's a school in Maryland in the United States that teaches how to conduct interrogations that way. To be fair, they were inspired by the French colonial wars, Algeria and Indochina.
1:22:59 That's what inspired them, because the common enemy in every case was communist subversion. Don't take my word for it, look at the newspapers of the time, I'm not arbitrarily interpreting things—it's the communists who support the FLN, who support the Viet Minh, etc., and in Latin America, need I say more, it's Castro, etc. You see? So nothing is too atrocious to oppose that. But I'm glad that despite all the force at their disposal—
1:23:30 Particularly with the capitalists of those countries who make up what's called the comprador bourgeoisie—bought—the mercantile bourgeoisie, not mercantilist, that's something else, that's the Chinese and the Germans—comprador of those countries, how does it happen? There you go. How does the population finally manage, at what cost of sacrifice, to get back on its feet in Bolivia, for example?
1:24:01 This is what proves that, whereas at the time I'm speaking of, in the 1960s, Bolivia was headed by a Hugo Banzer—yes indeed, there were only good Spanish names at the head of Latin American countries. There was Geisel in Brazil, there was Hugo Banzer in Bolivia, there was Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, look it up! Throughout the Cold War, with the CIA, people like that, they were comfortable—the first communist who showed up ended up cut into pieces.
1:24:34 I'm thinking of a country like Guatemala, it's atrocious, the one with the most deaths, nearly 400,000, for a country with such a tiny population—it's enormous, it's as if we'd had 10 million dead here. Eduardo Frei in Chile, right? And I'm sure I've just forgotten someone. There you go, so now it's Morales, right? And yes, he has the face of an Indian, and his supporters who came to power allowed themselves to put Áñez under arrest and extend her custody for a month.
1:25:09 Madame Áñez, the one who took power during the coup that was organized essentially from outside in Bolivia, she who said "The Indians just have to go back to the altiplano, up there in the misery of the Andes, or into the Amazon jungle, and leave us alone." That's what it was. That's what our media presented as a triumph of democracy over the totalitarianism of Morales and other Venezuelans, right?
1:25:40 And other Chavistas, Chavezians. Let's calm down, there's a lot to say. So neither Mbembe, and even less Stéphane of course, swim in those waters. But they can be manipulated simply by not being watchful enough, the way I try to be. That's my job as a philosopher—this time I'm no longer in geopolitics, but in the words we use.
1:26:14 —to fight against colonial oppression, archaeo-colonial, neo-colonial, as much as you like, we'll never do it enough. But not to take up the term "decolonial." As if that were today's urgency and problem. Likewise the term "racialized"—and that's why I got to Achille Mbembe—he repeats it every five lines instead of highlighting what I said earlier when I spoke of the emirs who were very well received at the Hôtel George V. There, the most racist people, even among the hotel staff, will roll out the red carpet for them.
1:26:50 Precisely because they eat "red" at home, those ones, we're comfortable with them. There are beheadings in public squares, as was recently done to Shiites in the Emirates. There you go. Let me continue with a few passages of Mbembe's statements. This term, brutalization, image, thought, matrix scene—there's all this vocabulary reminiscent of the French Doctors, which doesn't teach us much.
Adotevi against the ontology of negritude 1:27:27 But it's not a big deal, it's a dispute between intellectuals, no big deal. For Mbembe it designates the process by which power, as the geomorphic force of men, constitutes itself, expresses itself, reconfigures itself, acts and reproduces itself. Same thing repeated while loading up the words. And reproduces itself through fracturing, fissuring. I'm also thinking—this is Mbembe speaking—of the molecular and chemical dimension of these processes, including the toxicity of the waste to which nature and bodies are exposed. Okay, a bit of seriousness please.
1:27:58 There's better in African thought, my dear Stéphane. I mentioned two great African philosophers, from Benin. I won't go looking in Senegal, where there has always been an establishment keen to show its difference. Just as there has also been a street that isn't listened to and which as a result takes refuge in Islamism because that's the only thing it's left to oppose with—and which I don't approve of. But let me cite two philosophers for him to finish with, because there isn't only this question, but I'm very touched by his intervention, which is very nuanced and measured.
1:28:33 I mentioned Stanislas Adotevi. I believe there's a video devoted to him on our site, to celebrate the reissue at Delga of his admirable work "Négritude et négrologues," in which he puts on trial the use of the term "negritude" as it became starting with people like Senghor. You see why I'm thinking of Senegal? When it was Césaire who used it, back then it was a banner that allowed one to fight against the colonizer, who despised the Black man.
1:29:11 But Césaire didn't refrain from saying "Negro." He wasn't politically correct. On the contrary he said "beauty is Black," "grace is Black." He claimed it as a value. He didn't espouse the politically correct discourse of today's dominant class. It's in American universities that this language emerged and was born. It's curious that a Mbembe criticizes capitalism so virulently but doesn't go after its source, right at the source.
1:29:44 It's precisely those universities where you're practically shot on sight if you use those words. Now, Adotevi says very well that starting with Senghor, negritude serves to extract an essence, an ontology of the Negro, in the sense that Senghor now uses it, no longer Césaire's sense. That is, the Negro is instinct, roughly, and the white man is reason.
1:30:14 Now, Mbembe critiques reason, taking up the critique of that hyper-Nazi Heidegger without knowing it. Mbembe, I'm sure, isn't at all informed about Heidegger's Nazism. That's not his field. Or when he sees a few allusions to it, he must think it comes from ill-informed people, or he speaks of Heidegger from a distance, my poor friend. The closer you look, the more terrifying it gets. Especially when you read his notebooks from the 1930s, when our friend Heidegger spoke without any veneer.
1:30:46 But where Heidegger never wavered is in denouncing precisely the technology that's leading us to the abyss. That's what Mbembe repeats, what our French Doctors repeat, and of course, you know, environmentalism—you understand why I denounce it beforehand—environmentalism, not the legitimate concern for our environment, in which there is not only nature, as I hope you're beginning to suspect. But where there are millennia of nature transformed by human labor and which have become landscapes, admirable ones, even if Antarctica—which doesn't look like a landscape the way the Norman countryside does—even if those sites deserve, all the more, to be preserved and defended.
1:31:29 So I'm clarifying here what that means. It means that the Black man has instinct, the African has instinct, the white man has reason. It means the Black man dances while the white man builds tractors. Listen, I don't know if it's true, but I know who that suits. And I know who it doesn't suit. So if you want us to fight colonial oppression, in the realm of ideas, Stéphane, there's work to do, but first we have to denounce the identitarianism circulating in a certain Dakar intelligentsia.
Hountondji and the refusal of the "supplement of soul" 1:32:08 That's not the case with Stanislas Adotevi, nor with another great Beninese philosopher I'll cite, Paulin Hountondji. Paulin Hountondji, who had a small bookshop in the dust of the dry season in Cotonou, which I used to visit when I worked for Hachette—not to sell him books. I mean, I didn't sell books, I went to see the ministries to get new African-authored school textbook collections into national pedagogical institutes.
1:32:44 So I was doing publishing, not sales, even though the ultimate goal, of course, is huge sales. I used to go see him because that bookshop fascinated me. Whereas there was a monopolistic state bookshop at the time in Benin, the Libawol, he had the courage to have his own small private bookshop, in which, amid the dust, you found the complete works of the Marxist classics. It's extraordinary. And that's not the only reason I found the bookshop wonderful. It had all the other classics too, Hungarian literature, French literature, but it's extraordinary.
1:33:19 The Librairie de la Renaissance—I pay tribute here to these African intellectuals who have far less media presence than those our friend Stéphane cites here. I'm thinking especially of Achille—the others, indeed, deserve to be better known. Now, he was invited by the Collège de Philosophie—I'll finish with this anecdote about Paulin Hountondji, which is more than an anecdote. He rose up against ethnophilosophy.
1:33:51 This philosophy which would claim there is an African philosophy, different from Western philosophy and even opposed to it, one which could even save us. He showed that all of this was an invention—and it's true—of missionaries who fought against Marxism and fought against universality. You know, the first counter-revolutionaries, almost from the very time of the Revolution, people like Burke in England, were already saying "I have met Hungarians in my travels, I have met Sardinians, I have met Flemings, I have never met man in general."
1:34:28 Well, well, well, wouldn't it be nice if everyone stayed in their identity bubble. It's not "workers of all countries, unite," it's "workers of all countries, tear each other apart"—tear each other apart between Hutu and Tutsi, tear each other apart between gay and straight, between men and women, while the MEDEF twiddles its thumbs, the MEDEF in which there are men and women who profit from it, as I've told you. And in the end, everyone knows perfectly well, if they think about it for a moment, even if they struggle to do so, so much does the din of the dominant ideology prevent it.
1:35:04 So Paulin Hountondji was invited to the Collège de Philosophie. Someone stood up in the room, a Frenchman in his sixties, to say "You're exaggerating, there is still an authenticity to African thought." And he started developing vitalist, spiritualist themes. And Paulin, very courteously, told him: "Sir, I don't believe Africans are condemned to serve as a supplement of soul for a Europe lacking in values. It has to come from us, from a sub-Saharan African."
1:35:35 That's the lesson in knowledge and wisdom. Right? I wouldn't want Africans to be condemned to serve as a supplement of soul. I already started with dance with Senghor, see what I mean. Oh, I love African music, I do. When I worked to defend and showcase the reach of African music in Niger, I met experts who said to me "You work with music? Is there music in that country?"
1:36:06 First of all. The guy who only ever brought home two Claude François records and one Julio Iglesias record was asking me if there was music in the land of the Tuareg and the Hausa. I think of the Tuareg because there, it's the women who are the musicians, exceptional ones, in that African life. So I remember very well there were others who said to me "Do you teach them Mozart?" Things, because for my part I covered all genres—jazz, rap, provided it was well done, with a press book to help it sell better.
1:36:36 For the young musicians from the projects, all this was still within the framework of development aid. Recording studios, all that, royalties. I remember some saying, "Why are you making them listen to classical music? That's going to disturb their culture." You see? "You don't like African music? Oh, I love it! You take their music but you don't give them yours." What a fine form of cooperation. Come on, we have to be done with all that, Stéphane. We have to be done with exoticism. We're staying among white people here.
Reading on ethnophilosophy and conclusion 1:37:07 You see? I'm glad that, with his diviner's gift, decidedly, Pierre-Alain, whom I salute, finds this for me like that, pulls it out of his sleeve. I'm very pleased for my colleague and friend Paulin Hountondji, a great, great, great Beninese philosopher. Let me read what I have in front of me. There's apparently a review of one of his books. The pretext for these two works is the same: the denunciation of ethnophilosophy, defined by Paulin Hountondji as the imaginary search for a collective, immutable philosophy, common to all Africans, albeit in an unconscious form.
1:37:46 Ethnophilosophy rests on a myth, that of primitive unanimity, on an illusion, that of philosophy as a system rather than as history. Ah, drat, that sounds like Marxism—on an abuse, that of treating as philosophical oral literatures which do not present themselves as such. I've spoken enough about the griot to know that he himself says he is neither philosopher, nor historian, nor poet, nor prose writer, nor musician, but all of that together. At the origin of this inconsistency, a brutal and determining fact: contemporary African philosophy—here he's alluding to Senghor—insofar as it remains an ethnophilosophy, was elaborated above all for a European audience.
1:38:26 And he adds in other works — he might mention it here — inspired by missionaries. Or in the words of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, who writes on this subject, a colleague of Paulin's, admirably incisive pages, I quote: "philosophy appears in its status as one of the objects of the mimetic pursuit of the masters' mode of existence, which ends up occupying their place within the system of opposition whose structure remains unchanged" — meaning that whether he is Black or white, it's the master's thought.
1:38:56 From this double critique arises the demand for a free thought, an autonomous debate that is no longer a distant appendage of European debates — which remains the case with Mbembe, in whom I find the whole thought of a Foucault, a Deleuze, and alas a Heidegger, the most right-wing thinkers on the ideological spectrum, and Agamben — a distant appendage of European debates, but one that directly confronts African philosophers with one another, thereby creating within Africa a human milieu in which and through which the most arduous theoretical problems can be posed.
1:39:29 There you go. Thank you very much, Pierre-Alain, for giving me the chance to read that excerpt. I believe the debate is not closed, Stéphane — I don't claim otherwise, do I even have the means to? But I simply wanted to recall a few obvious truths that are never obvious amid the noise of TV panels or the specialized press — let's say, exoticophile press. I know I'm harsh, but I'm still passionate about it.
1:40:01 For once, don't think it's that harsh — I'm far from the truth. It's cynical, you know, what African identity is being made to serve. It's something, it's the finest revenge of the former colonials. I'll finish with just one indication. You see, these aren't arguments, these aren't reasonings, these aren't proofs, just clues. Let's be epistemically modest. When I was a kid, I was surrounded by far-right people. That's normal — in the colonial empire, most people were like that. It was already happening when I was very small in Indochina, that's my proto-history.
1:40:39 The danger was the communist Viet Minh, and so on. Everyone who was for independence was an enemy, and so on. They had to be crushed under bombs, and so on. And in Africa afterward, don't even get me started. These far-right people had a recurring theme: they said we should never have brought them electricity, modern healthcare, hospitals, the radio. They were happier without it — generous of us, with all that. They were happier without it.
1:41:09 That was the far right's argument — they should have been left in their jungle. That's exactly what I hear from environmentalists today. I'll stop there. Because we never say that. Because of course, everything has been done to make people forget that it was the far right who said that. Which is now a vulgate that considers itself left-wing.
