English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Xanthippe, the shrew, and the sexual division of labor 1:30 We talked about several female figures, Antigone, Julie just now, a third female figure for X, because here too it's a bit tricky to find something with X. So, X is Xanthippe. Xanthippe is Socrates' wife. Xanthippe means "the blonde mare," and Socrates practiced... she was much younger than him but she had an impossible temper, she was the shrew, she'd throw buckets of piss at him, her screams were absolutely terrible and all that, and Socrates said he had chosen this particular woman precisely for her bad temper, in order to exercise his patience against his wife's impossible character.
2:29 So, how can we explain this attitude of Socrates? Is there some masochism involved? Or can we consider Xanthippe a bit like the first woman, Pandora, that is, the one who arrives to bring misfortune to men? I see you want to trap me. The trick Zeus devises to punish men, he invents woman. You want to deceive me with the image in my book Femininity and Community — we always come back to it — and I do think, indeed, speaking in general terms of femininity and community, that somewhere, yes, there is something original that goes back even further than Xanthippe, or somewhere, as they often say, "woman is fickle," or somewhere "woman threatens" — yes, we'll see afterwards what that entails, the fact that I'm setting aside the fantasmatic process by which such a judgment can be formed.
3:21 But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean that, originally, it's surely no accident that Marx says the first social division of labor — and for him, that means the origin of social classes, so that's no small thing — the first social division of labor is man and woman, says Marx. Because when hunting game, obviously if I'm eight months pregnant, it's an impersonal matter, I mean, I'm not going to chase the mammoth with the others, so I stay at home, that is, in the cave, the den, the house on stilts, whatever. And that's where the assignment of woman to certain tasks comes from — I'll be very precise — tasks that concerned the functions through which we always remind ourselves of our former savagery.
4:03 Namely the kitchen, the bathroom, our natural determination, eating, making children, reproducing. If woman was originally assigned to that task, it's this division, this division of labor, that needs to be abolished in orthodox Marxist terms. I'm not justifying this division, quite the contrary. It's a reminder. And so it's no accident that the questioning of the law of the city comes from a woman in the tragedy of Antigone. That's no accident either — it's as if to say, your guy business is getting old, meanwhile it's my brother and he's being devoured by crows. So, I said earlier that Creon overdoes it with the law, so I overdo it with the family — maybe I should have rephrased my question more precisely: why does Socrates say yes to Xanthippe and no to Alcibiades? More and more precise. Ah yes, since between the two, Alcibiades was considered the most beautiful — no comparison between the two. We've talked a lot about Clouscard.
Why Socrates refuses Alcibiades: the seduction of the dominant 5:13 today his best-known title is The Capitalism of Seduction — a fantastic attempt at seduction by Alcibiades toward Socrates, admirably described with great humor by Plato in the Symposium, where he tries everything, including getting into bed with him at night in winter under the same cloak, and in the morning, believe it or not, he neglected my flower because he thinks himself the most beautiful man in Athens — how dare he snub me! Well, that's exactly Clouscard territory. He refuses class domination.
5:44 Because Alcibiades' seduction is what we today call "bling bling." The droit de cuissage. That's what Rousseau criticizes. It's this false beauty that emanates from whatever, at a given moment, expresses the attributes of the dominant one, of the one who holds the master position in the power relation. If jeans — and I have some, I'm not criticizing, I wear them all day, it's rare that I don't — if jeans, and that's why I chose jeans for the cover of Capitalism of Seduction originally, became...
6:14 Whereas originally, it's truly the clothing of the poorest, the cowherd boy — there can't be anything worse, it's not even the shepherd, it's the cowherd boy outright. If it became emblematic of the establishment... Because when I was a kid, jeans were still frowned upon, but yet there were millionaires who'd check into the Carlton in jeans. What a paradox! I say, so much for poverty! And I note that it's because jeans are, par excellence, emblematic of the world of the Western, of America, and since that's the richest country in the world, automatically wearing jeans means participating a little in that.
6:53 I remember my vacations in East Germany — the dream of an East German woman was that I'd bring her back a pair of jeans from France. Because it looks a bit rich, but that's how this seduction gets people so well. How can you overlook the most handsome one? Physical traits play into beauty, but it's with that. The Pascal text you read shows well that it's not reducible to physical beauty. But then, conversely, take Xanthippe, who is absolutely dreadful. Can we explain that? Is it masochism? So, forgive me, I'm going to get myself in trouble again with my Corsican compatriots, but that's the reductive Mediterranean chauvinist viewpoint.
The archaic wife and the Greek city against the infinite 7:24 But at the same time I found it in Africa too, it's deep, in archaic society. I mean, you have the wife for what's needed, for the worst of a wife's duties; for the rest, for love, you find that wherever you want, with boys, with other women — it's clearly separated in archaic society. There's no conception of Eros there, which comes later, after Tristan, to avoid anachronism. Suddenly there's the monogamous couple, which is a recent invention in historical terms — endogamy, sorry, exogamous monogamy as Clouscard says — that's what inaugurates the Tristan-Mark-Iseult triangle. But in Socrates' time, I mean, a wife was bought like the dead — but the question in Africa is a function one must always be wary of, woman — let me explain, because people aren't fools — it's dreadful and it's unjust to link woman to what defiles, to what is impure.
8:23 There are peoples in Africa where a woman is forbidden even to think in her head, let alone say aloud, the name of her husband while she has her period. Because it would defile him, because it might spoil the hunt, as they say, while the hunt is on, etc. So it's old, it's an impurity. Why? I said it earlier. Because it's the Neolithic hunters who decided to assign woman to the home, to the cave, etc., so to tasks where one is determined by nature — and that's the Greeks' obsession too.
8:54 That's why homosexuality was so widespread among the Greeks, because anything but nature — it's the opposite viewpoint of today's dominant discourse — the Greeks. One escapes nature in the city. The city is a refuge against nature. Nature terrifies the Greeks because it is infinity. There's no value more anti-Hellenic than infinity. Go to Cape Sounion near Athens. Have you been there? Yes. I was overwhelmed. Me too, as the ancients say, seized by the hair. Sorry.
9:26 Because there, infinity is everywhere. It's vast, vast, vast. Usually it's a small, well-bounded landscape, a peninsula. It's not the ocean, it's the Mediterranean. It's carved up, with inlets, bays, gulfs. And there, at Cape Sounion, did you see? There are three infinities. The sky, the sea, the wind. What the Greeks call the panic, which comes from Pan, infinity. And behold, facing this infinity, you saw the temple — it took daring.
9:58 I turn my back on infinity and I do what is human. Rilke, in an admirable poem in the Elegies, denounces lovers who embrace one another with too much fervor. He says, have you not seen on Attic steles the prudence of the human gesture? How the arm is lightly placed upon the shoulder, despite the vigor swelling the chests. That meant: what is ours, we humans, is to touch each other thus. The gods press us more strongly, but that is the gods' affair.
10:29 So there's this Greek obsession with metron, with balance, with measure. Infinity is the realm of the gods. It's hubris to want to be infinite. So we, moderns, are the worst thing for the Greeks. We, romantics, moderns — the Hegelian triad — we, romantic and Christian moderns, always seeking infinity, instead of having the wisdom of the lintel that ends the vertical ascension, the hubris of columns going up like the Tower of Babel, like Icarus, too high — the lintel, the horizontality that comes to temper, the tympanum that comes to temper the columns — for us it's the opposite, for us moderns, and I include the Muslims as well as the Christians, transcendence, the bell tower, the minaret always higher, like at Beauvais, the highest vault in Christendom, where the crowd, while the cathedral was being built, stood around shouting hurrahs, each guy adding a bit more, until it collapsed on the faithful during Easter Mass.
Xanthippe, woman of traditional society 11:18 So, that's what makes Xanthippe... in some way, many Greeks had a Xanthippe at home. A bit cantankerous, we know women well, always sulking, grumbling, while downplaying the objective reasons she has to be angry when you look at the society of men. Because when men make war, afterward the women have to do the mourning, they gather up the corpses of brothers, children, fathers. I go back to Corsica, sorry, but a small village of 70 inhabitants — there are many like that in Corsica — there are more names on the war memorial than there are inhabitants, I'm talking about 1914.
11:52 It's the department with the highest number of dead per inhabitant. They sent to the front the least educated people, which is fairly logical from an accounting standpoint, terrible as it is to say — but an engineer, you're not going to send him to the front; shepherds, mountain folk, Moroccans, Corsicans, those are the ones you send. So, I see Paoli Joseph, Paoli François, Paoli Antoine. That means there's a woman who lost her husband, her two brothers, her son, all in the same war. So there you have it, the Xanthippe in question is the woman of traditional society.
12:23 That's not where the stakes of love are played out.
