English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Zero, negativity, and man without qualities 2:00 Their nothing. So Dominique, a vast question to finish with. Why would there be something rather than nothing? And take us into metaphysics a little. Gladly. All the more so since the philosopher I most often invoke, I'm thinking of Hegel — I'm not a Hegelian, there are things about Hegel I don't like, I don't subscribe to the whole of Hegel, but he's the one who seems to me to cover the most, who offers a true or real equation, which is the philosophers' goal, that's why I'm talking about Hegel.
2:35 because he's the philosopher of negativity — if there were no zero there would be no dialectic. Earlier I alluded to Malraux, who said that between the communists and us, in '45, there was nothing, there was zero. And that zero has become a whole since Mitterrand, right up to Ranger. Why? The anti-Gaullist right and the anti-communist left have become one whole. That's been steering things since the '70s. So I take this question of nothingness and zero very seriously.
3:08 Historically speaking, it must in fairness be acknowledged — the Arab mathematicians themselves proclaim it — that it was the Hindus who first developed it. It was Arab merchants who, with their import-export, so to speak, acted as intermediaries, in the strict sense, by ship, from India to us. And that made it possible to create algebra, whereas we were still stuck at arithmetic. Algebra being an Arabic word, as everyone knows. So zero may well be the very essence of man.
3:42 Man without qualities. What characterizes man — to borrow Musil's famous title — is the fact that he cannot be defined, he cannot be defined by qualities. That's also why I'm a bit scandalized when I hear: but man hasn't invented anything, look at the firefly, it invented the LED lamp, the LED lamp, the badger invented excavators, whatever — it's nonsense. We've really forgotten to mention the essential thing, which is that the badger is condemned for all eternity to live in loose soil where it can dig burrows. The badger on granite: zero. And at the North Pole, let's not even talk about it.
4:18 Whereas man can live in a temperate zone, in a desert zone, set up a station in Greenland if he feels like it, even at the South Pole, and soon on Mars, if he wants to. Man is not determined by his environment and his biotope. He creates his own biotope. He creates an envelope between what is strictly given by nature and the life that is his own. And that envelope between the two is called the city. In its most extensive and perhaps most sacred sense, in a way. Not a city on any one model, neither Greek nor anything else.
Pascal, Prometheus, and man who shapes the world 4:48 The city, that is to say not merely that aggregate we reductively call society, but the city with a certain organization. So zero is crucial, because man by himself is nothing. And here I'm going to demonstrate it by means of Pascal now, who knew the problem of zero well. Yes, the void — but we mustn't forget that Pascal died just as infinitesimal calculus was being worked out, and that the Church, on learning of Pascal's death, tried to race to be the first to get hold of his manuscripts, since Pascal's work on what's now called Pascal's triangle in schools made it possible to solve Zeno's riddle, the discontinuous — but let's not stray — so, linked to the notions of zero and infinity, I'll be very precise: Pascal, who was a mathematician and an immense thinker, I mean you have to look closely, the sentences he utters at a certain point: the finite is annihilated before the infinite. That means 1, 10, 100, 1000, 1 million — all of that is also nothingness in the presence of infinity.
5:58 1000 compared to 1 is a lot, but 1000 and 1 compared to infinity is likewise 0, no different from the rest. The finite is annihilated — he says it plainly, without hedging, is annihilated, meaning it equals 0 at a certain point. And there's a point: the finite is annihilated before the infinite. What connection am I drawing here? Man. Man is finite, we agree on that. Through his body in space, through death in time, man is finite. So man is zero.
6:29 If he becomes aware of this finitude — and he's the only animal compelled to become aware of this finitude, structurally. A magnificent poem by Hölderlin where he says: but they cannot do everything, the gods, mortals can reach the abyss before them, thus with them, with us men, the echo changes, for time is long, but the true comes. Admirable text, Hölderlin says that man is even superior to the gods — the gods do not know the trial of death, so they do not know the feeling, the joy, of separation and reunion. Let me go back to my reasoning: the finite is annihilated before the infinite.
7:08 Now, man is finite. Here I'm in the thick of mathematics. I'm continuing my chain of reasoning. Man is finite in space, in time. So man is zero. By nature, he is nothing. If there were only nature, he would be nothing. He is not viable. Because the myth of Prometheus had seen this very well. The other animals are equipped. One for cutting through the air, lightness and speed. The bird, I don't know. Another has strength. Pachyderms, etc. And when it comes to man — you know the myth well — poor Epimetheus, which really means the one whose mind is a bit incomplete, the one who isn't sharp, when he gets to man, he has distributed qualities so freely to everyone else that by the time he reaches man he has nothing left, and man is stark naked, he has no scales, no hair, no fur at birth, he is not viable.
7:50 By nature he is nothing. That's the whole point of the Prometheus myth, that's the refrain: he will take negativity, knowledge, the concept, fire. Fire is suppression. Fire consumes its fuel — there is flame only insofar as the wood is no longer wood, or the paper or the fuel is no longer what it was. The flame is dialectical, it is so insofar as something else is not. And it's the same with man's relation to what nature gives: man can exist only insofar as he shapes a world in his own image. Hegel, in the Aesthetics, when a child makes circles in the water and enjoys making circles in the water, that's already a prefiguration of the artist. It's a kind of passage.
8:31 It's a way of recognizing, somewhere in the real — which seems indifferent to itself — an echo of his own action. He recognizes his own image. And of course, the great text on the master and the slave, where Hegel says that the slave, by dint of shaping the world around him, of fashioning it with his own hands, ends up having a relation to the world less despairing than the master's, who never finds again the image of his desire in the outside world. This is wonderfully illustrated by a film from the '60s by Losey called The Servant — I don't know if you see what I mean — you see the extent to which the master is a slave to the slave, when the slave decides to go on strike, when the English manservant says: there's ash on the floor, I'm used to picking it up, I don't care. So this zero is crucial, because this negativity is neglected — it's even the most neglected thing of all. We talk about Lordon, it's no accident he claims allegiance entirely to Spinoza, who represents the affirmation of absolute positivity. That's the weak point in Spinoza — and I know, in paying homage to Spinoza, I remain a Hegelian.
Against Spinoza's positivity: infinite desire 9:32 Hegel says that every philosopher has two philosophies, his own and Spinoza's. Agreed? But still, there's a determination of the era that imposes limits too. That is to say, when he says the soul is an idea of the body — which prefigures Freud — the soul believes itself independent, autonomous, and not at all: it only registers the determinations the body sends it. But for him, the body is mechanical. It's the body of Descartes, of Galileo, of his own era, which Euclidean geometry suffices to account for.
10:02 The logic of identity — we're far from dialectical logic, which deals with contradiction and hence negation. That's the weak point, there's no negativity. That's why it's so fashionable now, through this dominant ideology which denies man any negativity, which would like to reaffirm positivity. Positivity of what? Of the ruling class — it's quite extraordinary. And that's how human rights, a positivity, get imposed by fire and sword: whoever has an interest in human rights, otherwise we land with the Marines, the GIs, and bomb you for three generations — it's quite extraordinary. So there you have it, it's a whole dialectic of the negativity of the positive and the positivity of the negative. I don't want to muddle the cards, sorry, but still, I mean — art shows this well — man had to have this zero side in him to push him toward creation, toward creativity. That is to say man can only be at ease, unlike any animal, in a world that bears his imprint, because otherwise he is zero. Hence the infinite desire in man. That's why I'm wary of saying now that we consume too much.
11:13 From what period, what year, did we suddenly cross over, did we go from not enough to too much? I'd love to know. I think desire is infinite, there will never be sufficiency at that level, not at all. But like Socrates against Callicles in the Gorgias — so you say the man who possesses the most should rule in the city, so he must have 40 hats on his head and 30 pairs of shoes on his feet — the other is exasperated. No, I'm not saying that, but I am reaffirming human negativity — Hegel, in a striking text from his youth, says it's what you see when you look a man in the eyes.
11:49 That's why it's so hard, and why no animal can bear the gaze of man. He says: because there, death has withdrawn. We are negative. And he says it is the night of being advancing here to meet each person. Oh! There it is.
12:19 Thank you.
