English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The image of the train: the gaze that draws closer to the subject 0:00 I will never thank Pierre-Alain enough, I mean, I will never thank him enough for suggesting that we devote sessions like this one, whether live or recorded—this one is recorded—exclusively to trying to answer your many, so rich and so interesting questions, for the vast majority of them.
0:33 So, actually, I'm going to start with one that isn't really a question, but rather a letter that touched me so much. Well, "touched" sounds a bit subjective, sentimental—it's more than that, it's something that reassured me in a wholesome way, gave me back hope. I haven't lost—sometimes I tell myself the effort of transmission is quite a challenge when you see what our correspondent was saying earlier, whom I answered on Durkheim, who rightly said that everything is designed to eliminate the notion of the subject and even make it disappear from memory.
1:17 With a false objectivism—because I have nothing against objectivity, mind you—a false objectivism of poor quality, which only looks toward the object in order above all to keep silent about the subject. I'm introducing this series of answers to your questions with an image that I'll take up again at the workshop. I've long wanted to open one of the chapters on epistemology, the hard sciences and the human sciences, with this image I'm proposing.
1:48 It's a pedagogical construct, I mean, something everyone has been able to observe. Especially if you take the train—yes, this story of mine takes place on a train. Here we are, on a train. I try to think of trains somewhat earlier than the TGV, because the TGV goes so fast that I sometimes lose my bearings. I remember once wanting to impress a friend by saying, wait, you'll see the Vercors, etc. We were going roughly from Paris to Nice. And in fact the Vercors had gone by twenty minutes earlier and I was still waiting for it.
2:18 Anyway, no, no—on trains you have time to, you see, you look toward the horizon. There are sometimes extraordinary things on the horizon, sunsets, sunrises, over the sea, over the mountains, whatever. But on the horizon the scenery is almost motionless. You see, the farther away from the train, the more motionless the scenery. You can guess where I'm going with this. The closer the gaze gets to the train, that is, to the source, to the laboratory, to the starting point of observation, to the subject.
2:56 Who is looking, right? Up until then the gaze was absorbed in the object. There, far away, the trees, over there, it's beautiful. And when you get closer to it, and when you're right above it, it's downright terrifying. We were in the eternity of the mountains, in the beauty of the lake, or of the sea which, as the poet says, takes away and gives back memory. And then suddenly, we're in a frightening acceleration of universal becoming, right?
3:29 You see the ground rushing by at full speed, like that. It's frightening. The subject is that. There, I'll come back to this during the workshops. It took thousands of years to move from scientificity, mathematics, Euclid—that's the first one. Then physics, then chemistry, then biology. So it's normal that it takes time for the human sciences. Because there, there's a resistance opposing it. The gaze gets closer to itself. We're more and more implicated.
3:59 I won't let intelligibility, science and truth into my secret garden. There, the whole point is to show that there are plenty of areas that have long been not secret. All right, let me get back to what struck me, when I said, wholesome. First of all, unlike most of the questions I answered earlier, this isn't from someone familiar to us who writes to us.
A letter from Berlin: capital as milieu 4:32 I mean, someone who shares his comments with us in a familiar way. This is someone who, from what he tells me, for the first time—it's a first contact, the first time he's writing to me on our site. From Berlin, I'll come back to that. It's the first time he's writing to me, but he tells me he was already following us. So there, it's not at that level. We've known each other for a long time without knowing it.
5:03 In any case, I didn't know it. And now here he is deciding to write to me. And Pierre-Alain, would you mind reading the text? I know it bothers you, but... Because I find you have a good, slow diction. And I'm a bit embarrassed to read it myself. So: Dear Mr. Dominique Pagani, dear comrades, I have just attended, I would even say participated inwardly and ardently, through the intervening screen—but a screen that doesn't act as a screen—in your luminous talk on the Greeks, myth and music, together with Aymeric Monville.
5:35 A living, luminous and illuminating word, in this dark winter, in the heart of former East Berlin, very close to the Sionskirche—if you can say it better than me. Sionskirche! Sionskirche, where I have lived for so long. First as a teacher and translator of Victor Klemperer's war diary, then as a retiree. I have long followed your various talks, notably at the Tropiques bookshop, and I find myself entirely reflected in them, as in a friendly word, a fraternal speech, constantly inaugurating the very ancient, the deeply buried, bringing it to light as an unheard-of, infinitely precious novelty, a beginning.
6:17 It is for this breath of life that I thank you. Gislain Riccardi. I'll hand it back to you. Thank you, Pierre-Alain, sorry for having imposed on Pierre-Alain and exploited his talent as a reader, but I could hardly see myself reading these words myself—far too kind words addressed to me here. Gislain, the first name, the French first name.
6:47 Riccardi, a surname of Italian origin, like mine, right? Writing from Berlin. Already all this rang a bell in my mind. And from which Berlin? From Prenzlauer Berg. Well, I'm not going to bore you telling you about my youthful holidays. But there, I wanted this to be read in full, because he doesn't really talk about philosophy in it—although he clearly has a rather rare philosophical relevance, because he synthesized everything that, in my opinion, might be of some use in what I say—neither philosophy, nor really music yet, having followed my musico-philosophical conversations, if I may say so, to borrow the expression, in the Bricmontville variant, who have the knack—neither philosophical, nor political, nor really musicological.
7:49 And he says, perhaps the essential thing. The essential thing will be for [what lies] between the very ancient, the deeply buried, to use these terms, and what seems absolutely new. As if between the most ancient and the most incredibly unheard-of new, there was a middle ground between the two extremes, which conceals both one and the other from us. It occupies the middle.
8:20 That's the world in which capital confines us for the time being, for now, historically speaking. And it's no coincidence, because capital is precisely what reigns in the middle. In the middle of what? Of political philosophy. I mean it in that sense. If you look closely at the three stages that, for example, Hegel follows in the Philosophy of Right—with categories, mind you, that can be criticized in every way, but which follow one another in this way—family, civil society, the state.
9:01 It's not merely linear. For there to be a family, for example—not just some fleeting union, but the family, that is, not merely what answers to instinct, but to an institution, marriage—historically speaking, it is marriage that creates households, households in which there's father, mother, child. Marriage is an institution, so the family presupposes the state; you see, the state, which we think comes last, we can already see Hegel coming, the state is the ultimate perfection, but it is also there at the beginning, it is also at the beginning, it is what Rousseau calls the civil state, it is the principle, isn't it.
9:47 One day I'll comment on an extraordinary text, one of the least read by Rousseau, called "Letter on Virtue." I recommend looking for it, because it exists in extremely inexpensive editions, little booklets like that, between 2 and 3 euros. "Letter on Virtue." I believe in the edition I'm referring to—I think it's the Éditions des Mille et Une Nuits, but I'm not sure, my memory is increasingly failing me on that score—the booklet contains the "Letter on Virtue."
10:19 And then another one, since I'm forgetting—it'll come back to me. But I recommend the Letter on Virtue, it's worth its weight in gold. It also deals with debt, from the individual to the collective. And it has nothing to do with guilt-inducing debt, right? You know that it's the same word, "sin" and "debt" in German, "Schuld." It's the very same word, yet the complete opposite. So, there, I wanted to tell Gislain that I haven't forgotten him, that I fully intend to answer him, but that an avalanche of worries, not only health-related, has prevented me from taking the time needed to give him a reply worthy of his very beautiful message.
Boulez-Chéreau, sound recording and stagings 11:04 So now I'll answer Dimitri. I think it's Dimitri, or is it Dimitri, I don't know anymore. I think it depends each time. "Hello, following the workshops on the Ring of the Nibelung, so we're back to the Ring, would it be possible to post directly on the site the references for a good-quality audio version?" I have the chance to use Deezer, but it seems that the streaming of Boulez's recordings at Bayreuth is done at 128 kbps.
11:34 So, he knows better than me about this. I presume these are playback or fidelity standards and that indeed it's quite low. I was wondering whether other recordings of performances were equally worthwhile. So let me tell him right away, before answering his main question about proposing good-quality audio versions, that the Boulez-Chéreau version—one of the most interesting in terms of staging, especially since it was, after all, the centenary, quite an event, two Frenchmen from the Parisian avant-garde coming to celebrate the Wagnerian total artwork in the apparently pan-Germanic temple of Bayreuth, which is not at all the case, by the way, of the tradition of theater, which has always been sulfurous in the artistic avant-gardes—so, in passing.
12:24 I'd like to pay tribute, in passing, to the immense Wieland Wagner, who died too soon—he died too soon—the composer's grandson, who no doubt produced the most beautiful stagings, unfortunately very rarely photographed and even more rarely filmed, as far as I know, at Bayreuth. So yes, that version is very poorly rendered on video. It's underexposed in terms of lighting, first of all, and then the sound has a hiss. Some people tell me it's done on purpose to discourage piracy.
12:57 That's not impossible, I'm no specialist. There. So that's what spoils the picture a bit, not to mention that if you don't buy the DVDs and rely on streaming, you can pretty much forget about getting a full version, except for short excerpts. There. On the other hand, there are complete versions available. Now, when people generally ask me about interpretations in the so-called classical repertoire—I'm not sure Wagner is really a classical composer, not in the strictly musicological sense anyway, since classicism ends with Beethoven, but Beethoven at the same time inaugurates twentieth-century avant-garde music, you see, so none of this is so simple.
13:45 No, seriously, every time I'm asked for interpretation recommendations in the classical repertoire, I immediately share all available references, whether on physical media or streaming, and I split them into two categories. Those that are very well recorded, therefore relatively recent historically speaking in the history of recording, that are in high fidelity, digital, that is, avoiding hiss—although, I should note, it's better to have an analog recording with a very, very slight hiss but with an admirably airy and transparent sound, than a digital version that reverberates unbelievably, recorded carelessly in a church, or simply—or piano recordings in particular; the piano is a nightmare for the sound engineer.
14:38 It's one of the hardest instruments to record because the signal is violent and brief, occurring over a very small fraction of time. There are aggressive frequencies, so to speak, that must be captured without distortion, which is quite complex. So, back to the Ring: if I split it into two, let me start with the recent ones after all, because it takes a serious musical culture and serious practice with this repertoire to be able to tell that a performance has remained unequaled to this day even though it was recorded under the most deplorable conditions.
15:15 The limit of audibility—there are recordings like that, you know. I even have recordings of Debussy where Debussy himself is at the piano, accompanying one of his mistresses, Mary Garden, who sings his songs admirably. And all decadent Paris—not meant pejoratively—all the impressionist Paris of the time was fascinated by her slightly ethereal English accent. In short, "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair," to borrow a Debussy title. This isn't even part of the history of the record.
15:46 The record didn't even exist yet, not even on wax. These are cylinders, wax cylinders, from the early twentieth century. I don't know, among the very first sound recordings. You see. That said, even at that level, which is the worst in terms of listening comfort, even there we get precious indications of the tempo taken, of dynamics, of accelerations, things like that—that can't be changed. Or conversely, slowdowns.
16:20 So, for now I'll set aside the older recordings, so to speak. There are some that are recorded quite well, not in stereo, without the depth, which now sounds a bit metallic, a bit compressed when it comes to large masses like the orchestra and choruses, sometimes bordering on saturation in the fortissimos, but which are nonetheless genuinely good recordings. The recording itself is the most important dimension of the medium. There's the cutting, the pressing, but above all, if the original recording isn't good, none of that matters at all.
16:55 So, if I take the modern, digital recordings, etc., there are versions of the Ring by Barenboim that are good in audio form, since Dimitri is asking me about this. I strongly advise against watching the video, it's dreadful. There really are stage directors who want people to talk about them and not about the composer. That's how it is. Don't think I'm a purist bothered by modern staging.
17:28 If I see Così fan tutte performed by two men and two women sitting at a bar counter, an American bar in a modern apartment, dressed in jeans, that doesn't bother me at all—when the staging is subtle, intelligent, when the actors act well, and when nothing distracts from Mozart's music, but on the contrary enhances it. But when it's the complete opposite, when the staging takes a diametrically opposed stance to the music, I won't give examples because it would be damning, there.
17:59 No, no, I've seen productions of Parsifal where Klingsor was played by a drag queen, so to speak, in drag. The staging was very interesting; it's not out of purism that I say this. So there, but Barenboim made a fine version, as he also made a very fine version of Tristan, by the way. You know that Barenboim has been fighting for years for Wagner to finally be allowed to be performed in Israel, because for obvious reasons, given Wagner's pathological, militant antisemitism, it is banned—it was long banned, I'm not sure anymore whether it still is...
18:39 ...in Israel. Barenboim, who is a Jew of Latin American origin, etc., is one of the finest servants of Wagner's music. And not only that—he's also an immense pianist who has given us a very beautiful version, among other things, of Beethoven's sonatas. So, there, I say, here's a good-quality audio version. More recently, there's a version—here, even the staging pleasantly surprised me, let's say, it isn't as dreadful as the one I just mentioned, and moreover it's understated, quite decent, and with one or two vocal exceptions—there's a big problem in answering Dimitri's kind of question: the Wagnerian voices.
Wagnerian voices and Adam Fischer's Valkyrie 19:23 There are voices that have disappeared, there are schools of singing that have disappeared, and that will come back—I'm not one of those who say we'll never see the like of that era again—but which remain unequaled to this day. There's a consensus on this: those phenomenal voices, which even with poor recordings, where the microphone was right next to the singer sacrificing everything behind in the orchestra. I'm thinking of the fabulous Melchior—often Scandinavians, the great Wagnerian singers—Lauritz Melchior, a singer of Danish origin, who used to carry beer crates up the stairs while singing, and it was a classical music producer who heard him singing on the stairs and said, 'You there, you sing like that?'—and he became the greatest Wagnerian tenor of all time, a voice of velvet, with phenomenal power, but always sheathed in velvet and with a love of beautiful Italian-style sound that is so rare among performers of the Wagnerian repertoire, who take pleasure in exaggerating the alliterations that Wagner scatters through his text with K's—König, Krone, Kühn—nonsense!
20:26 Well, there. So I'm thinking of Adam Fischer's version—there's a complete Ring cycle you can find on YouTube, and there I can indeed say YouTube because it's worth watching the staging... If one had to start, I wouldn't even say start, no need to necessarily follow chronological order, you can catch up later, but start with the Valkyrie, the first act of the Valkyrie, which is so difficult to render because it's intimate—in the whole Ring, it's...
20:56 I often say, and it's statistically confirmed—surveys have been done—that it's the part women are most attached to. When you ask women familiar with this repertoire which part of the Ring they like best, they say the Valkyrie. Because there's a heartbreaking human drama, right, between a brother and his twin sister, victims not just of the gods, giants and dwarves, but of fate—simply of being human. And it's admirably rendered with very well-controlled acting, because, like singers, it's terribly difficult to be a good singer, but if on top of that you ask them to be actors too, it's one of Chéreau's merits, in the Boulez version, to have been one of the first to ask singers to act while lying down, positions in which it's difficult for the voice to also make an acting effort.
21:48 I thank Pierre-Alain for giving you a taste for this. The staging is very understated. We're here—let me comment quickly—in the house. The Valkyrie doesn't yet take place in historical times; we're not yet in humanity, we're still in prehistory, so to speak. These are barbaric times. These are Wagner's stage directions: deep in a forest, an isolated house, with a tree. You see it there in the middle of the tables, a tree, standing in the middle of the house. A sword has been driven into it, which an old man once came and plunged in up to the hilt, and no one has been able to pull it out of the tree since.
22:23 And there. And this is the scene where poor fugitive Siegmund, who has just been revived by the water given to him to drink by Sieglinde—not yet knowing she's his twin sister—finds again, after an entire lifetime, well, after an entire childhood, since they were separated at birth, and they're about to spend a night of love together, brother and twin sister, from which Siegfried will be born, the hero of what follows.
22:54 There. It's an admirable recording. It's admirably sung here—in particular, there's, when he arrives—the husband, Hunding, isn't he—a terrifying bass voice that underplays a restrained performance, all the more terrifying for it. There. In short, the complete opposite of a theatrical Wagner, an intensely musical Wagner that consequently becomes a dramatic masterpiece too, incidentally. Don't forget that for Wagner, drama is the indissoluble union of action and music.
Three stereo box sets: Solti, Böhm, Karajan 23:25 He himself says that, doesn't he. So, there, in terms of versions—otherwise, well, there are certainly some standout references. There are three references that stand out from the rest, three complete recordings of the Ring, well recorded in stereo, that stand out from the rest. That's—I've been telling you about rather recent things—but there's Solti's complete recording, Georg Solti, on Decca. Decca, generally speaking, has the best recordings, the best sound quality in classical music.
23:57 So, the complete Ring on Decca by Georg Solti. Let me remind you that Solti was the first to record a complete Ring with this kind of sound quality—modern, in quotation marks, that is, after the emergence of what's called high fidelity, so in the very early 1960s, even the very last years of the 1950s. Forgive me, that's the audiophile in me talking, but listen to a version of Petrushka, Stravinsky's ballet, whose orchestration is dazzlingly rich, and which requires a vividly colorful recording.
24:35 Listen to the version made by Ernest Ansermet with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande on Decca—don't say when it was recorded, but when you learn it was between '57 and '59, it's hard to believe: it has a sound quality far more spectacular than stereophonic recordings made later. There you go—and it's not nothing either, the last remnants of the great Wagnerian voices, now somewhat aged, the extraordinary Wotan—you know, I once watched a whole series of programs on France Musique, at a time when people used to talk about the tetralogy of Wotan's weight, Wotan's tragedy, not Siegfried's—Wotan's—and Wotan sung by the one they call the Wanderer, the Erran, the title Wotan gives himself in the Ring once he no longer acts, once he settles for coming to observe, the Erran, the Wanderer—I'm thinking of course here of Hans Hotter.
25:47 twice H, Hans, J, E, N, H, O, T, T, E, R — Hans Hotter, his Wotan is unforgettable, just his farewell, his farewell to his daughter at the end of Die Walküre, Wotan's farewell sung by Hans Hotter, already with the unforgettable Birgit Nilsson who consoled us for the disappearance, well, for the fact that we no longer have Kirsten Flagstad — you notice I'm saying Scandinavian names, Birgit Nilsson the Swede came to replace the Norwegian Kirsten Flagstad, who is the summit of Wagnerian female voices, with a few exceptions I'll mention when I move on to the heroic versions — so that's what I mean, Solti's Ring with Hans Hotter as Wotan, Windgassen who doesn't do so badly in the role of Siegfried, even if we're very far from Melchior whom I mentioned earlier, but with a valor and commitment that do him great credit, an extraordinary mime who has a very important role
26:57 the blacksmith Mime, an absolutely extraordinary bounding mime, both as an actor and as a singer — as a vocal actor I mean, you hear him even if you don't see the staging, it wasn't filmed of course, there are what are they called, making-ofs, parts of the making-of that were filmed, you can find them streaming from Solti's Ring — and I also can't fail to name the magnificent Alberich, I mean a leading role, Alberich, dark baritone, of Gustav Neidlinger — now there's a happy coincidence, or a diabolical one, that his name has as its root Neid, which means envy, in the crude sense, you see, not desire, envy, Neid — now every time Siegfried sings to his sword and says Nothung, neidliches Schwert, envious sword, you see there would be a lot to say about that on the symbolic level, desiring sword
28:07 envious sword, sword of envy — so that's for Solti's Ring, I tell you there are two others which are magnificently recorded and which are great successes, immense musical achievements. An immense conductor, I no longer need — we don't need to introduce him when we know the great charismatic conductors of the 20th century — I'm thinking of course of Karl Böhm, with a direct advantage at Bayreuth. Solti recorded in the studio under conditions of sonic perfection; Böhm recorded at Bayreuth with the magic of live performance, but also with that famous — because usually live doesn't have the acoustic qualities of the studio — but there, all the sound engineers, I mean the sound engineers here, not the conductor, agree that the design Wagner imposed for the construction of his theater at Bayreuth results in an exceptional acoustic. I won't give the whole history of that, but it's very interesting. So there, with roughly the same cast, we find the immense Birgit Nilsson, our Brünnhilde
29:17 but under Böhm's baton this time, who is an immense classical conductor, one of the greatest Mozart and Strauss conductors too — all that's far from here — an immense conductor in a general sense, so again with Windgassen too — and then a third version, Karajan. Well, Karajan — I seem to have reservations, no, because for example for Die Walküre it's perhaps the best, I mean strictly from the acoustic point of view, from the audio point of view, that is, the musical part without the staging, which unfortunately wasn't entirely filmed either. So Karajan, all that's in the 60s-70s, with tribute to an immense French singer too little known to the general public, the immense Régine Crespin as Brünnhilde — I'm not, I salute Madame Crespin here — with the unforgettable Sieglinde, Siegfried's poor mother, the twin sister we glimpsed earlier
30:27 the staging — Pierre-Alain kindly agreed to show us a clip — Gundula Janowitz's Sieglinde, the kind of singer Karajan pulled out of his sleeve like that, the equivalent, as in jazz Miles Davis nonchalantly pulled unknowns out for us, Tony Williams, a young drummer who was 17 and became one of the greatest drummers of his time, and perhaps one of the greatest of the entire last 30 years — he pulled out for us a young white man, I don't know, Bill Evans, no less, on piano, but yes, that's a find of Miles's — and then a young man who had barely emerged from rhythm and blues, who came from a somewhat turbulent youth, into a kind of gospel mysticism, I'm thinking of Coltrane, the immense Coltrane, undoubtedly the greatest post-Parker soloist — that's a find of Miles's — well, Karajan is a bit like that, the number of great soloists who came out of his sleeve is unbelievable. Here we have the cast, it's magnificent, here we have Thomas Stewart's Wotan
31:37 and in his Twilight of the Gods we have the extraordinary bass Karl Ridderbusch — there, we can see it well, Madame Crespin, thank you. Well, after all these girls parading by, these are the nine Valkyries, we can move on, some of them only sing for a few seconds — right, otherwise the great Helga Dernesch of course, and you see in Twilight of the Gods we see the Alberich of Zoltán Kelemen coming up from below again, and always of course the marvelous Gundula Janowitz and the Brünnhilde of Helga Dernesch. So, I tell you, Karajan under stunning sound conditions — Karajan is a champion of close-ups, that's why he succeeds so well with Die Walküre, he's one of the first great charismatic conductors of the 20th century, truly one of the maestros who understood the changes the studio, in the modern sense, imposed — the magnetic tape on which you can cut when there's a mistake
Studio and live: Furtwängler and the voices of the 1930s 32:48 an attack that wasn't very clean, you can start again in the studio — of course that doesn't have the magic of live performance, for which, as they say in Africa, there isn't — pardon — even if there's a mistake, you keep going to the end, a bit like in jazz, improvisation, you can't stop and say, well, here I'd rather put a sharp on my score, no. That's why Bill Evans, once, when asked if jazz had to be summed up in a single word, what would it be, he answered, this marvelous and so sober answer, 'honesty' — not many musical people can say as much. So that's for the productions that really have a foolproof listening comfort. But no, there are, unfortunately, often extracts — but what wouldn't I give, if I went to a desert island I'd take these extracts, if you want, I'll tell you. So I'll start with the most appalling one sound-wise, extracts recorded in England in the 1930s by Furtwängler, the greatest Wagnerian conductor, of course, with few exceptions
33:59 Furtwängler's Twilight of the Gods in particular, with voices — there's the Melchior I told you about earlier, there's the unforgettable Frida Leider. If you want to see how Wagner conceived Isolde in Tristan, you listen to the duet from Tristan, that's enough — Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Lauritz Melchior — Melchior, remember that name — and Frida Leider, that's it, you play that, Duett, Duett, the duet, the duet from the second act, this duet of which Wagner said love never succeeds in life exactly as one would wish — so I wanted to make sure that one day it would go all the way, and that all-the-way is in the second act of Tristan. Take advantage of it, it's madness, an admirably mastered madness from the point of view of musical writing, which moreover opens doors to the music of the future — in short, and why do I mention Tristan, because she lets out cries that are in the score, and those cries are cries — youthful cries, but it's extraordinary, it's true — of course the stagings seem a bit dated to us, whatever, but the voice, the freshness
35:09 because you'd think that when you hear the old voices you'll be struck by something a bit dated — it's the opposite, Wagnerian voices get a boost of youth in the 1930s, these are people who gave themselves entirely, because there was no studio, there was no recording, there wasn't — pardon, to use the African expression again — which meant one was entirely present, there was a scruple towards listeners, to do the best possible at every moment during the live performance, taking into account the acoustics of that hall, the atmosphere with that particular audience, that evening, in that particular place. And here, my God, Frida Leider in front of Furtwängler, how moving. There's the immense Furtwängler, who underwent a denazification trial at the end of the war, and for whom the greatest Jewish musicians came forward to say, oh no, not him, not him, of course he stayed in Germany, but because he thought, in good German political wretchedness, to use Hegel's expression, that one had to stay against barbarism by continuing, by perpetuating great German humanism on the spot, by playing Beethoven, you see. And then, at the end
36:20 as the Reich held it against him more and more — Goebbels in particular — he took refuge in Switzerland. But the immense Menuhin, Yehudi Menuhin, came forward to say, not him. He came and forced the Nazis to accept the premiere of the music the Nazis called degenerate music, the Variations op. 33, a masterpiece by Arnold Schoenberg — it was premiered by Furtwängler in Berlin, right under the noses of the Nazis. There, that's the photo of the man we see there. Well, if you look at these pre-war versions, when he isn't yet broken by all these tragic fates — France has problems, Germany has problems — so let me ask for just three seconds, just the time to grab the book, you see, because you might think that these questions of preference are a bit subjective, right, that after all good performers, all that, blah blah blah, there's even the notion
Bruno Walter and the first act of Die Walküre 37:30 of connoisseurship in a certain sense. Sorry — there's a work I've already presented to those following along, on the Ring, let me show it again, it's from Fayard editions, here — Guide des opéras de Wagner, a sort of Michelin guide where everything is done, very well done by excellent musicologists, where you follow the text line by line, the score too, line by line — but you also have right afterward a discography — that answers the question — and in this discography there are the complete recordings and then there are individual acts, and unfortunately we don't have — and this is also a version I recommend, to the point that in this book I say if you needed only one Wagner record, it would be that one — the recordings of Die Walküre, not by Furtwängler but by a conductor of the same level, Bruno Walter, the good Bruno Walter with his legendary kindness, right, Bruno Walter — so there, excuse me, Die Walküre
38:40 there, the isolated acts — I'll just read you a single extract from this work, the review of the recording of the first act of Die Walküre: very good sound quality for the period — don't think these are recordings where you have to strain to hear through crackling, no, no, it's a bit compressed, but I mean, it's very good sound. So Lauritz Melchior — I've mentioned him several times — singing tenor, of course, the frightening Emanuel List playing the husband, Lotte Lehmann — and not Frida Leider this time — as Sieglinde, the Vienna Philharmonic, no less. Let me read you this: 'A miracle, always as present, if you needed only one record to know Wagner, here it is, on the eve of the Holocaust' — I'll try to read this coldly — 'Bruno Walter and the two greatest Wagnerian singers of his time offered the most human vision' — you see, I was saying the Valkyrie, joyful as well as mortal — 'of the drama of the most forbidden love'
39:50 'and the most passionate, at a time when Wagner was performed broad, thick, majestic, Germanic — well, Walter imposed a clarity, a lightness, a diligence, an emotion that we would no longer find even today, when a slimmed-down Wagner is fashionable' — an allusion to Boulez — 'the prelude sets the tone, the storm is that of souls and not of the weather' — the prelude sets the tone, the storm is that of souls — 'the flight is from destiny and not from men, and the Vienna Philharmonic, from the very first instant, plays with shimmers, with silks' — you see, nuances — you'd say with old sound recordings you shouldn't be able to hear — I swear that with this rather deficient recording compared to today, you hear things you no longer hear with 28-track stereo — that's where you see the great conductors and the great orchestras. So again — 'and the Vienna Philharmonic, from the very first instant
41:00 'plays with shimmers, with silks that we won't find in him again even when he's conducted by Solti — whereas of this orchestral hedonism, pure source of emotion, a later Böhm, a Boulez I've mentioned, a Karajan especially, with other orchestras, will remember — for the voices the evidence is total: Emanuel List is immense, cold, sharp, but also attentive, jealous, superior; Lauritz Melchior, the most beautiful Wagnerian voice for me of all time' — Lauritz Melchior, with a male, powerful, imposing singing style, can dare every tenderness, every vulnerability, a heroic Wagnerian tenor, a Siegfried who plays vulnerability, isn't that beautiful — 'his brilliant voice bends to all the shadows as to all the subtleties. Lotte Lehmann has a voice that becomes flesh, embodying just as definitively the suppressed suffering, the hope, the dazzlement' — in short, a man, a woman, their slow discovery, a man, a woman, an approach both delicate
42:10 'and sensual, remains a monument of the history of singing, forever indispensable.' Well, you'll find this at EMI, first act of Die Walküre by Bruno Walter — and note carefully, because Bruno Walter recorded it other times too. So that's it for my discographic recommendations, I'll stop there because I could go on for days and nights — but let Dimitri not hesitate to either leave me his number, or I'll answer him on our messaging system, or I'll tell him to contact me on Messenger and I'll give him my number, let him not hesitate to call me if he wants details about this or that version, which I'll gladly give orally. There, thank you very much to Pierre-Alain who's showing us the covers of what I've just read, you see, the great trio, right, Die Walküre first act by the good Bruno Walter whom you see on the right, right — I say to those
43:23 who are admirers of Gustav Mahler — Gustav Mahler, undoubtedly the most popular of the three great post-Wagnerians, that's how they're classified, the post-Wagnerians, the three great ones, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, even if Strauss is probably the most popular in Germany — Mahler, Jewish, Bohemian, German-speaking of course, Austrian, in short, Mahler, Central Europe, Mitteleuropa — Mahler, who was a fervent Wagnerian like almost his entire generation. It's extraordinary that this sort of scoundrel, this antisemite Wagner, has never been so well served on the performance level as by Jewish performers — it's extraordinary, this priesthood that among the greatest of them devoted to this music — I'm thinking here of course of Bruno Walter, who was a student of Mahler's — Bruno Walter, whom you see, thanks to Pierre-Alain, you see his photo
44:33 and at the moment when they were recording the cry, with this colossus Melchior, the one who sang while carrying billiard crates up the stairs — you see he had the chest and the frame for that — so Bruno Walter was Mahler's student. When I say there are schools that appear and disappear, that'll come back, but I mean it's not every day such traditions are renewed. Thank you very much Pierre-Alain for these overwhelming documents. There, and again the sound recording is more than audible, it's really of good quality, the best they could do at the time, let's say. There, thank you very much Dimitri, again I hope we'll talk about it again in whatever framework he'd like — otherwise, I'm addressing Emmanuel — Emmanuel De Moitelle, I say De Moitelle if I'm reading his username correctly — who's simply asking, it's a bit — I was asked about the good versions of the Ring, and audio, and now I'm being asked what to start with to get into Clouscard. Let me read it quickly: a greeting — I'm looking for a reading recommendation
Which book to start Clouscard with 45:43 for a beginner who has already heard of Michel Clouscard but has never read him, what order would you recommend? Thank you in advance for your answer and thank you for your work — I hope this is addressed to the whole team, there are more and more, let me slip this in, people — and it makes me so happy — who send a collective thank-you to this team without which I would frankly not be much, indeed nothing, as far as my actual transmission is concerned. So, on that note, where to start?
46:21 Well, it's complicated because I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on it, but I'll start with the answer, quite simply — I would say Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, because it's one of the most accessible, and at the same time this work chronologically stands at the hinge between the early and the late Clouscard. So I recommend that; otherwise, the work — perhaps for me the one that continues to impress me most — is L'Être et le code, but you have to skip the preface and that sort of thing, which is technical, unless you have philosophical training, but that's not so important — it's important in the history of ideas, but as for Clouscard's own work proper, it's a real, extraordinary detective novel. L'Être et le code is a study of a pre-capitalist social formation — in fact it's France under the Ancien Régime, from the obscure times of the Middle Ages up to the Revolution, not included — so it's the whole Ancien Régime, the formation of our country
47:31 which is being talked about so much these days, right? As Hegel would say, philosophy always arrives too late — well, I hope it's not too late for France's sovereignty, but if we're talking about it so much now, it's because it's already quite late. So there, of course, L'Être et le code has been magnificently reissued by Éditions Delga — thank you Pierre-Alain — there, with this magnificent Caravaggio painting, right, where we see a lamb being swindled at cards, a painting of staggering psychological finesse, just to speak of its content, but which is above all, from a purely pictorial point of view, a finished masterpiece. And otherwise, the work that's had the most success — and it's no accident, undoubtedly the most popular, in both the statistical sense, the one with the greatest number of readers, and at the same time the one that interests just about every background, no need to be either a philosopher or a sociologist
48:41 except for a few small passages, allusions here and there, but that's not a problem, you don't have to understand all the allusions he occasionally throws in between two doors, so to speak — what matters is still the substantial content of what he says, which he never stops repeating, hammering home — you can trust him to drive the point home — and I'm thinking of course of Le capitalisme de la séduction, which has also of course been reissued by Éditions Delga. So there, I read a large extract during my last workshop, quite simply — there, that's the new edition from a few years ago, thanks to which, right, there's been a return to Michel Clouscard's fundamentals, and his audience keeps growing thanks to these new publications. There, I should note that Le capitalisme de la séduction is perhaps his best work in terms of the study of mores — I'm thinking of someone who asked me the last time about the relationship between Clouscard and Balzac, right, because there's a sociologist Clouscard, there's a philosopher Clouscard stricto sensu
49:51 as in Critique du libéralisme libertaire, where he crosses swords with the most important philosophers of his time, the Althussers, the Foucaults; there's the historian Clouscard, that's the case with L'Être et le code, right, a historian in the true sense of historical materialism; and then there's the Clouscard attentive to mores, modeling today's mores — and that's Le capitalisme de la séduction. So maybe that's the one to start with — and around the same time, in a somewhat more political, narrower sense of the term, Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, which has the merit, if only in its title, of announcing what's happening now — what I was denouncing earlier, when they want to forbid us from too readily brandishing the accusation of fascism, right at the moment when, curiously, it's coming back as never since the last war — it's rather curious, right when it most needs to be said, they say no, we're not starting that again, that's it, Godwin's law syndrome. So there, I recommend
51:03 Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, which is shorter, simpler, and I've mentioned Le capitalisme de la séduction. So there, after answering quite a few new faces — there were the regulars too, of course — but anyway, I mean, and I'm delighted about it, again a — not one of our followers, a companion — I'm thinking of Jean-Michel Toulouse, who is a comrade, towards whom I express here all my gratitude, not only for his following, but if I have one criticism to make of him, it's his self-effacement. He should speak up even more
A request for political philosophy 52:16 often. He always has something to reproach me for, and the reason — he thinks I don't talk enough about political philosophy. That basically sums it up. I won't talk behind his back, I'll read it. He's not wrong. I give the impression, right, when I talk about Nerval, about landscape or nature, I seem not to be talking politics. That may be where I'm being the most political, but let's not assume the problem's solved. Let me read his message. Good evening to the whole team. Thank you very much to the team. Thanks to Dominique for planning a cycle on political philosophy — implying he should finally decide to do it — and more particularly on democracy, a term totally distorted by bourgeois ideology.
52:59 One can only agree. Working on a thesis on this topic, I would be honored to see Dominique and those interested — that's why I want to read this message — I would be honored to see, see Dominique and those interested — otherwise I won't allow you to publish this text — at my defense in October 2021, God willing, as Francophone Africans like to say, who like these somewhat archaic expressions of ours in French — so instead of saying bankers or international financiers, they say the funders. I'm already looking forward to the sessions he'll devote to these questions. In the meantime, let's wish ourselves a 2021 full of struggles and also of success in advancing our goals. Warmly. Let me take this opportunity to let Jean-Michel know that I'm trying to meet his request, though not always within the framework of our workshops, which are more transversal, but thanks to a comrade who was estranged for a long time — and God knows that's understandable — from a certain French Communist Party, from a certain Communist
54:12 French Party, and who has rejoined it recently — not at all because he agrees with all the theses being developed, especially at the top, on the contrary he's fighting to rebuild unity at the grassroots, democratically. That answers a bit what Jean-Michel Toulouse says here. And I'm thinking here of Jean-Paul Legrand, with whom I started collaborating on a series of broadcasts, which I hope will resume if I manage to deal with my little worries, a series of broadcasts called Lectures en commun — that is, Readings in Common, plural — right. We'd already started together — these are people he brought together himself, right, on his own initiative, since we only knew each other through the internet. And so he was kind enough to ask me to come and lead, to comment on a text by Marx, the famous 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. And when I saw the audience he told me was very keen on theoretical formation, I had the pleasant surprise, almost a bit intimidated, of finding myself facing Laurent Brun of the CGT. Let me take this opportunity to give him a warm, fraternal greeting.
55:26 And it was I who was honored to find myself facing such a valiant fighter, of the kind one would like to see more often, both in the Communist Party and in the CGT. There, let me say it: for me, a good communist is someone who is never quite in harmony with his party.
55:56 And I'd say the same goes for the CGT. So there, I promise Jean-Michel that this will meet his request if he checks out this series a bit. I also do interviews with Oscar, with — who's also at the PRCF — Victor Sarkis, sorry, a brilliant, very young colleague, but a very brilliant philosopher, either when I comment on one of his contributions in Initiative communiste, which is the PRCF's publication, or when he writes on the blog, the platform founded by Benjamin Lelouane, called 'Le gros rouge qui tâche,' which only publishes contributions of a high standard.
56:52 I'm thinking here of our comrades Michel Clouscard, Étienne Burle, and of course Victor Sarkis himself. There. And I confess to Jean-Michel that what he's asking of me is the most difficult thing. It looks like the easiest, to drop the reflections on dialectics, I don't know, but the theoretical, and really get to political matters, especially in an already pre-electoral period, and so his question has every merit of being right in line with current events, present and to come, increasingly so — but let him know that this is what's most difficult.
57:38 Remember Hegel's saying: 'You can never be more than your time, but at best you can be your time' — at best, that's what's most difficult, to stick to what's most current. I promise to keep working at it, and as soon as I see something clear, I won't fail to try to convey it, and let Jean-Michel know well that if I haven't done so up to now, it's because, as Merleau-Ponty says — sorry to quote a philosopher who isn't even a Marxist, but who never dragged Marxism through the mud, who's a great figure — as Merleau-Ponty said in the 1950s, one doesn't satisfy people with an approximation, an imposture, as I'm not sure
58:19 sometimes of what one ought to put forward in terms of recommendations, to use a very vague and very broad term — cautiously, for now I haven't developed it, but I promise to dig a bit further into that furrow, and to make sure there are publishable results. Thank you Jean-Michel. So now I have to answer, not an old companion — well, a companion of long standing, because I'd love to be Jean-Michel's age, even if he's no longer 20, as they say.
Racine the courtier: the dedication of Andromaque 58:56 But as for Oscar Bineau, it's not long since he was no longer 20, let's say. He's a young musician, brilliant, an excellent saxophonist, who knows the musical world well, particularly the jazz repertoire. Sorry to give a technical rundown like that behind his back, but still, individuals are worth more than anything one can say about them. I thought his question would be about everything I might say, sometimes, rightly or wrongly, about music.
59:29 Well no, no, no, no, not at all. He's asking me — and you'll see why I'm not answering you today, Oscar — because your question is so rich, so interesting, that I'd like to devote a special session to it, because it will make us revisit things so important, transversal to many workshops. Indeed, he'd like me to go back over the reading I did of Racine's Phèdre. I did a whole series on it, and I also took it up again in La logique du sujet.
1:00:01 Let me read you his question anyway, which will seem enigmatic to those who haven't followed this seminar on Racine's text. In the last session, you said, speaking about Phèdre, that the logic of this text rises to its highest light when we bring in categories that didn't exist before Marx. Now I know plenty of people who'll say, but what does Marx have to do with a text by a tragedian from the time of Louis XIV, a courtier author — so much of a courtier that when he dedicates his tragedy, Andromaque, which was his first great success
1:00:40 they used to say 'handsome as Andromaque,' exactly as in the previous generation, that of the Corneillians, they used to say 'handsome as le Cid.' So, dedicating Andromaque to Madame, the wife of Monsieur, to Madame, who did rather well for herself, who prided herself on being a patron of letters, and he flatters her — you'd say in slang, he sucks up to her — with a style all his own.
1:01:11 But I can't help telling you at least the end of his letter, after listing all the qualities she has, that she alone knows such fine things, fine letters, that there are no more rules, we needn't burden ourselves with rules, the only rule is to please your royal highness. But let me tell you his final flourish anyway, to show just how far a bootlicker can go — but you'll forgive him for it, because writing it like that, I'd ask for more of that sort of bootlicking, listen carefully. At the end, after listing all her qualities: 'here, no doubt, is the least of your excellent qualities, but it's the only one I could speak of with some knowledge.'
1:01:49 'The others are too far above me. I cannot speak of them without lowering them through the weakness of my conceptions, and without departing from the profound veneration' — here I cut Racine's text, I put on my period plumed hat, I make a double bow, I twirl around, bend one knee — 'without departing from the profound veneration with which I am, Madame, Your Royal Highness's very humble, very obedient, and very faithful servant.'
Theseus and the daughters of Minos: desire for speech and Cretan domination 1:02:19 Good grief, we're a long way from Marx, a long way from the Paris Commune, but what — I don't know. And yes, I am there in what used to be called, at a certain time, the sociology of knowledge — I wouldn't say sociology, I'd say historical materialism as a tool of knowledge — to understand, better than Racine himself could, the truth of his text, the truth, right, that lies behind his own back as he writes, for as Rimbaud says so well, right, it's the 'I' that is another, who is the true author of the text, right, it's not the 'I' that thinks, that says 'I am like this, I like this, I like potatoes with cream, I don't like peas.'
1:03:04 So, I had shown a very precise point, I had said that when Phèdre makes her confession to her husband's son, who is at the same time the king — that's not done, as they'd say in the housing projects, that's not done — a triple crime, right, against her husband, against the king, and the fact that it's to her stepson with whom she's committing infidelity. So you understand why she says to her confidante: 'When you know my crime and the fate that overwhelms me, I shall die no less, I shall die more guilty' — it's a tragedy of confession, we've already seen that, I won't go back over it.
1:03:45 On the other hand, at one point she recapitulates the story of Theseus, that is, of her husband, because her dream, in fact, is to have her son — right — perform the same exploits as his father, or else, her impossible dream, is to have Theseus young, the one who possessed her sister, the elder Ariadne, you know, the one with the thread, there. And so Ariadne and she are the daughters of Minos, right, so as to understand the passage I'm about to quote, and she says of Theseus, speaking to her son: 'When from our Crete he crossed the waves, worthy object of the wishes of Minos's daughters, alas, what were you doing then?'
1:04:23 "Why without Hippolytus?" etc. In short, she would like—impossible, of course—for Hippolytus to have already been grown up at that time, or he wasn't even born yet, anyway, here we have the tragic reversibilities of time. But what interests me is "Worthy object of the wishes of the daughters of Minos," so Theseus, already arousing, you see, erotic interest in the broad sense, romantic interest, of the daughters of Minos, "Worthy object of the wishes of the daughters of Minos," that is, there are only two of them, she herself who is saying this to Hippolytus, and her sister Ariadne, her elder sister, even though they hadn't seen him when he crossed the waves, when he was still on the boat coming from Athens and about to arrive in Crete to put an end to the doings of the Minotaur, which devoured every year the tribute the Athenians paid to Crete, that is, seven young men and seven young women—it's myth, but just the number fourteen like that, you can clearly see there's an initiatory side to it.
1:05:23 But anyway, I was saying, still, there is a historical dimension—that's true, historically, and this is not myth—that the sea peoples, and in particular the Cretans, the Phoenicians, dominated the eastern Mediterranean before Athenian power emerged. In other words, Athens and all that was subjugated, dominated by the Cretans and the Phoenicians, who were admirable sailors, merchants, and who also made wonderful mosaics and paintings.
1:05:55 But look, put "Minoan art" into Google Images—Minoan art—look, look at the curls of the dark-haired girls and their makeup, which is so pronounced that one of them has such red lipstick that they call her, even though she dates from almost 1500 BC, they call her "the Parisian." You see, the archaeologists who discovered her. Well, so, when in our Crete, he crossed the waves, worthy object of the wishes of the daughters of Minos, they are in love with him because he is preceded by the rumor of his exploits.
1:06:28 They are already in love with a discourse, a speech, even though they haven't even seen him yet. And Racine is an exact contemporary of a La Rochefoucauld, known for his maxims, who said—I know some who say—that he would never have been in love if he hadn't heard love spoken of. You see? So what does Marx come to do in all this? For now, I've brought in some Lacan, right? The importance of language in desire—there, one isn't in love if one hasn't heard love spoken of, fine, but Marx—it's that the Greeks paid the tribute and there is homage paid to the one who delivered the Athenians from the Cretan yoke, to the hero who celebrated independence, and a political dimension.
1:07:11 That's what I'm answering for now to Oscar. But it's so, so unexpected, isn't it? You will search in vain in the criticism and in the glosses and in the analyses that have been done—if there have been any—on Racine in general and on Phèdre in particular, right? It's one of the most troubling plays, so troubling even for himself that Racine fell silent for ten years. He stopped writing for ten years after Phèdre, as if his descent into hell, so to speak, had reached a degree, somewhere, of something unbearable.
1:07:43 I'll go back a bit to what he said at the beginning about my train of thought, when you see what's very close by, right? When the subject knows himself almost too well. He stayed silent for ten monstrous years, until, at the request of Madame de Maintenon—the bigot responsible for the last days of Versailles being so somber—he came back to write plays intended for the orphan girls of Saint-Cyr, the young ladies of Saint-Cyr, right? Plays supposed to be edifying and moralizing. Yes, in fact, they are among his most monstrous works.
1:08:13 If you read Athalie, which is drawn this time from the Bible rather than Greek mythology, just read Athalie's dream—put that into Google, "Athalie's dream," you'll find a wiki source with all the sources. It's dreadful. Bones that dogs fight over and that lay scattered in the mire. It was during the horror of a deep night. There. Oscar made me fall into Racine, but Oscar is a musician, he'll forgive me, because there is a charm to Racine's melody—haunting, permanent, never binary.
1:08:43 There, he'll find me again, captive, always sad, troubled even to myself—one, two, three. Racine is like that. It's not something a thousand people have already done, a thousand could do. I'm not mocking Corneille, it's magnificent, one is left breathless by the loftiness of a Corneille. But there isn't that fluidity, that verbal magic, that perpetual incantation that one finds in Racine. That's why I'm dwelling on this. So, I don't want to answer the heart of his question yet—let me read it in full now.
Hippolyte: the six months and the castration of memory 1:09:17 "However, although I found your analysis very interesting, it remains a bit obscure to me"—let me reassure him, it isn't simple for anyone, what I'm trying to raise. "I had the feeling, no doubt wrongly, that you were making the connection in a more or less allusive way." No, not wrongly, you understood correctly, I couldn't go much further than allusion. "...with the Freudian categories"—yes, yes, I used them. I used them because Hippolytus begins by saying, at the start, the son of Theseus who is leaving to go find his father, and he says: "For more than six months, far from my father, I know not the fate of a head so dear to me."
1:09:48 Hello to those who say the human sciences are incapable of having the rigor of the natural sciences, that it's all bunk, that it's not real science, that it's not rigorous. Really? Well I tell you the rigor here is arithmetic. "More than six months"—count it—six. "Far from my father, I know not the fate of a head so dear." And a few acts later, forgotten, he no longer speaks of his father, he makes a confession of love, he who has never loved any woman and thought he never would, that love is fine for weaklings, that what he loves is the hunt, chasing the boar or the stag through the forests with his confidant.
1:10:19 He's afraid of women, he's afraid of the court, he doesn't like—he detests in his father's story—he adores the exploits and the suppressed brigands and the punished monsters, and Procrustes and Cercyon and Sciron and Sinis and the scattered bones of the giant of Epidaurus and the beach still smoking with the Minotaur's blood. But when you were reciting it, he speaks to his confidant of less glorious deeds—he judges his father—less glorious, his faith, his fidelity, offered and received everywhere, in a hundred places, in short, a ladies' man.
1:10:53 It's the world upside down, a son moralizing his father. "You chase after women too much, you should get to work." Helen has her parents stolen away in Sparta, Salamis witness to Periboea's tears, so many others whose names even escape him. I'll skip the list of women held against his father, and there is this extraordinary line: "Happy, had I been able to erase from memory an unworthy half of so fine a story." I keep the exploits against the monsters, the western side, I keep that, the avenging hero, the Zorro, or whatever you want to call him, what's his name, the other one, the boxer, the Soviet one, the boxing match—I'll open that up.
1:11:33 Anyway. And Rocky, I believe, Rocky 2, 3, 4, 7. And I keep that, but I remove the most important thing in Racine, Eros. Well yes, that's called a castration, I'm not interpreting. "Happy, had I been able to erase"—erase, does that mean "ravish"? There, "Raub"! "Durch Raub," says Loge in the Ring, doesn't he? How will they get back the Rhine gold, the one who renounced love to obtain it?
1:12:03 "Durch Raub!" It's violent, like castration, isn't it? Or even more violent, like infibulation and excision. I've lived long enough in the Sahel countries. So: "Happy, had I been able to erase from memory an unworthy half of so fine a story." That's where I allude, yes, to Freudian territory, but I said I was speaking of arithmetic rigor. When he makes his confession to Aricia, when he finally admits that he too is in love, when he says, "But it's too late, now enslaved under the common law, by what turmoil do I see myself carried away from myself?"
1:12:44 Yes, I'm using Racine's text to help understand what's called the syndrome—I won't say depersonalization, it's more serious, it verges on psychosis, on madness—but in any case this estrangement from oneself that occurs in periods of crisis, right? "Myself, as the sole fruit of my useless efforts, now I seek myself and find myself no more." I'm just quoting, I'm not interpreting, I'm citing this text—and which one? Well, when he says at that moment: "For more than six months, ashamed, despairing, carrying everywhere the wound that tears me apart, against you, against myself, vainly I test myself, present, I flee you, absent, I find you, in the depths of the forests your image follows me," etc.
1:13:34 At the start of the play: "For more than six months, far from my father"—no connection at all. And here: it's been six months, I've been in love with you. It's been six months, as soon as my father turned his back, I fell madly in love with you. Yet they say I'm bringing in Freud, or that Freud isn't operative here. Really? Even arithmetically, it's operative. And they say we can't claim Racine had much chance of having read a single line of Freud. There. So I'll close this parenthesis—it's not Oscar Bineau's intent to put Freud or Lacan on trial, that's not it.
The unconscious of the unconscious 1:14:04 But, even if he says very modestly, "I had the feeling, no doubt wrongly, that you were making the connection more with Freudian categories"—yes, at that point—"than with those of Marx." But let's not forget that one encompasses the other, that the individual unconscious, the one addressed by Freud and Lacan, is itself included within the historico-social unconscious that a Clouscard developed and for which Marx opened the first path. That's where the connection lies, isn't it—let Oscar reread the 1859 preface and he'll see that the infrastructure of the productive forces determines, within the superstructures, the entire legal, aesthetic, political, religious, philosophical field—in short, he says, the ideological field.
1:14:56 You see? So we mustn't forget that. If we separate categories like that, if there's the unconscious over here and the political over there, it means we've understood neither one nor the other. And as much as I'm relatively familiar with Marxist concepts—he's very humble there, not modest, modesty is showing off, you play modest in a drawing room to appear... no, no, this is humble modesty, it's toward others; humility is toward oneself. It's knowing that one isn't much—I don't know about Oscar, but that's my case, and I'm quite glad to know Oscar shares it.
1:15:30 "And as much as I'm relatively familiar with Marxist concepts, as much—but that's my own problem—I haven't yet read Freud, due to my family upbringing, and I've always been wary of him, endlessly postponing reading him, mea culpa." The fact that he feels the need to get into it is already, in itself, already a kind of repair. "So I couldn't even precisely define what you're alluding to, even though I understand well that it has to do with the unconscious and repression"—well, I haven't said much more—"a passage where Hippolytus discovers himself a stranger to himself, or Phèdre transferring her fantasy of young Theseus onto Hippolytus."
1:16:03 And yes, except it's too late, one cannot go against time. What she loves is not Hippolytus, it's the young Theseus. The one she was too young at that time to have—it's too late. At the same time, a little jealousy toward her sister, right? "Ariadne, my sister, wounded by what love did you die on the shores where you were abandoned." But look at all these flute-like sounds, I'm speaking to a musician, look at all these vowels: "Ariadne, my sister, wounded by what love did you die on the shores where you were abandoned."
1:16:37 What music! There. "Besides, I imagine the connection with Marx also lies on that side, that of the historical unconscious." Yes, indeed. Provided we see its full richness, that is, that it penetrates the erotic unconscious, the musical unconscious, etc., the poetic unconscious. Provided, of course, that these are not juxtaposed categories but articulated and combined ones: the unconscious plain and simple, Freud's, and the unconscious of the unconscious, the Marxian unconscious, to speak as Clouscard does.
1:17:18 "Besides, I imagine the connection with Marx also lies on that side, that of the historical unconscious which, if I understood correctly, in order to reach consciousness, must go through a process of anamnesis." But of course—yet you're not going to tell me things are made easy for us. Go and find, in today's dominant ideology, anything that tells you, if you want to find your way in your love affairs, you need to know your class position. No, instead they'll tell you to look toward cognitive science, pheromones, you know, molecules that are given off by the girl or the boy. "In short, I expected you to speak to us of the expression of something unspoken concerning the social relations of Racine's own time, or something along those lines."
1:17:58 No, I did not want to explain what Racine says through the class relations of his time. That would be easy. No, no, that's not it. No, I'm showing, on the contrary, what remains valid always. Racine suddenly opens up, in a flash, in a few glimpses, as it were, he lets us catch sight of what should reform, generally speaking and for any era whatsoever, our way of approaching such works, whether poetry or music—that is, of relating them to the unconscious of the unconscious.
1:18:34 "So, in short—I who was hoping for the highest illumination"—that's kind, but it's expecting a lot of me—"everything remains at the very least rather vague. So, do you think you could come back to this specific point?" I have done so in part this evening, I hope we've made a little progress, but we haven't reached the end of it, namely what Marx allows us to bring to the reading of Phèdre more explicitly. I insist on requesting a special session to further develop the sketch of an answer to the question I've just raised. In any case, thank you Oscar, bravo for your music, and thank you for this remarkable question—warmly and fraternally yours.
