Copyright © 2011 Fordham Universiy Press All righs reserve No par of his publicaion may be reproduced, sored in a rerieval sysem, or rasmied in any form or by any means-elecronic, mechanical, phoocopy, recording, or any oher excep r brief quoaions in prined reviews, wihou he prior permis sion of he publisher Fordham Universiy Press has no resposibiliy for he persisence or accuray of URLs for exernal or hirdpary Inerne websies referred o in his publicaion and does o guaraee ha any conen on such websies is, or will remain, accurae or appropriae. This work was originally published in French as Dieu, La justice L'amoul� La beaut: Quatre pette onfence © Bayard Ediions 009. This work has bee published wih he assisance of he Naional Cen er r he Book-French Miisry of Culure Ouvrage publi avec e souien du Cenre naional du livre-minisre anis charg de la culure Nancy, JeanLuc. [Dieu, la jusice, 'amour, la beau nglish] God, jusice, love, beauy: four lile dialogues / JeanLuc Nancy; ranslaed by Sarah Clif p. cm Icludes bibliographical rerences ISBN 9780833457 (cloh: alk. paper) ISBN 97808334264 (pbk.) 1. God. . Jusice (Philosophy) (Philosophy) 3 Love. 4. Aesheics. Tile. B40N33D5413 011 194-dc22 011010768 Prined i he nied Saes of Amerca 13 1 11 5 4 3 Firs ediion
Copyright © 2011 Fordham Universiy Press All righs reserve No par of his publicaion may be reproduced, sored in a rerieval sysem, or rasmied in any form or by any means-elecronic, mechanical, phoocopy, recording, or any oher excep r brief quoaions in prined reviews, wihou he prior permis sion of he publisher Fordham Universiy Press has no resposibiliy for he persisence or accuray of URLs for exernal or hirdpary Inerne websies referred o in his publicaion and does o guaraee ha any conen on such websies is, or will remain, accurae or appropriae. This work was originally published in French as Dieu, La justice L'amoul� La beaut: Quatre pette onfence © Bayard Ediions 009. This work has bee published wih he assisance of he Naional Cen er r he Book-French Miisry of Culure Ouvrage publi avec e souien du Cenre naional du livre-minisre anis charg de la culure Nancy, JeanLuc. [Dieu, la jusice, 'amour, la beau nglish] God, jusice, love, beauy: four lile dialogues / JeanLuc Nancy; ranslaed by Sarah Clif p. cm Icludes bibliographical rerences ISBN 9780833457 (cloh: alk. paper) ISBN 97808334264 (pbk.) 1. God. . Jusice (Philosophy) (Philosophy) 3 Love. 4. Aesheics. Tile. B40N33D5413 011 194-dc22 011010768 Prined i he nied Saes of Amerca 13 1 11 5 4 3 Firs ediion
Authrs Au thrs Nte vii God uestins uestins an a n d Answers Answers Justice The Idea f the Just 5 Th a t Wh ich ich Is Due Du e t Each 4 Lve Imp Impssibl ssiblee Justice 4 uestins and Answers 5 Love 6 uestins and Answe An swers rs Beauty uesti uestins ns and a nd Answe Answ e
The llowing texts are transcriptions of talks given at Montreils Center r the Draatic rts as part of a series entitled Little Dialoges" Organized b Gilberte Tsa Director of the Center the series was designed to address children The transcriptions were done with care and pre cision and I wold like to express ratitde here r this work Nonetheless a transcription can never captre the rhth or the tones to sa nothing of the whole pragatic context of a talk which theselves conve a great deal of inration s we well know conication" is inseparable fro its evet This is all the ore tre of talks addressed to children and of the exchanges that l lowed Th e children, both bos an d girls were between six and twelve ears of age The were extreel attentive dring talks and as o will see the were not withot qestions at the end hat these enconters cold have eant r the I cannot sa bt r e the were risk endeavors vii
I only know that r me the aim of the talks was not to popularize the issues nor was it to indulge in a kind of at" of skil regarding my treatment of them It was a matter of once again n ding myself in cntact with think ing in the very process of its awakeningr whatever the rms or degrees of its elaboration thinking is always essentially in this state or better in this movement It is not the case then that an elderly thinker is placing himself within reach of children here: rather within him a contact with this awakening is searching for itsel an awakening without which there would be no thinking [i ny auit de penser] (I indeed used the innitive form of the verb)
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rn b nn r n Mh
It is not without trepidation that I am allowing this transcription to be published. It should thus only be read it seems to me in an attempt to hear something of its actual articuation. This was also the result of diculties inher ent in the theme I had chosen I had selected it because of certain philosophical interests I have tried to develop in the course of a work I have elsewhere called a deconstruction of Christianity But since it was out of the question to introduce this theme or this concept as such it was neces sary r me to proceed without oending the religious con victions of the children but also without giving in to any simplication (it being the case that r me atheism and theism are but two symmetrical and connected postulations both based in the same metaphysical presuppositions with regard to being). transposition into writing of something that was not at all a text and that was the result o a very particular rm of address risks at each step erasing both the diculties encountered and the precautions taken I can do nothing but warn the reader of this here at the outset
es I am going to speak to you about god but rst I am going to speak to you about heaven [ciel] ou know why of course If god exists he is in heaven The word ciel is a rather odd word in the French lan guage because it has two plurals which some of you chil dren may know There is the plural cieu, which you probably know and then another plural ciels, which many of you probably don't know because it is used only in refeence to painting One speaks of the ciels, of the skies of a painter the ciels of Vermeer r example ieu is an exclusively eligious word One says dans les cieu" is in the heavens" or in heaven" It is a wod miliar to those in the Christian radition o with a Christian background One says r example Hosanna in the highest heaven [des cieu]" Hsanna is a Hebrew word that comes om the religious vocabulary of Judaism The plural cieu, which again has its origin in an exclusively religious vocabulary has to do with the ct that 3
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in antiquity it was thought that there were many cieu, many heavens It was thought that the ciel was a sphere that what we see as the ciel was a sphere surrounding the earth and that there was a set of onentri spheres one inside the other There are dirent versions of this belie but aording to the best known there were seven heavensthe number seven having always had a sared valuewit the seventh heaven being the highest Sometimes still today when we want to say that we are absolutely delighted or estati we speak of being in seventh heaven" There are thus many heavens [eu], as if to indiate the extreme or utmost nature of the highest heaven the highest heavenly region And this plural exists in Frenh beause the Frenh omes om Latin whih omes om the Greek whih omes om the Hebrew of the Bible The same plural also exists in the Arabi of the Koran As r the other ciels, those of painting this rers to the way in whih a painter represents the ciel, that is the sky But why is there a plural unique to painting? o doubt beause the ciel is a dimension or a partiular element of our vision of our pereption of the world and of our way of being in the world There is the earth there is w hat we see on the horizon and then there is what is above The sky [el] appears r away at a distane elevated transparent transluid almost immaterial We might say that the sky is on the side of the open It is the dimension of opening When we look at the earth bere us on the other hand everything is always losed everything stops at a ertain distane We will ome bak later to what is involved in this dimension 4
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of the to the place of the in our experience and in relation to th e ro le it plays in religious traditions But r now let's ask about what's in heaven [ ] Already I am speaking the language of religion or at least of the three great socalled monotheistic religions tha t is those religions with a single god the thre e great religions that predominate in the West Later on I will say ust a wo rd or two about those religions th at are not monotheistic In heaven" [{ ] is also a phrase that belongs to religious language It is oen said in religion that those who have died or the souls of those who have died are in heaven" It is also sometimes said that angels are in heaven" I won't be speaking to you today about angels however or about the souls of the dead though we can discuss this later if you want Finally it is also said that god is in heaven" So let's ust note this: in heaven" [ ] has to do with god wit h the realm of god with what is divine I n deed the divine is t he heavenly the celestial [] The adective heavenlyis also a word that is more or less restricted to a religious vocabulary though it also sometimes appears in a certain poetic language. is also a rst name a girl's name with the diminutive and the masculine Perhaps there are some Clestes Clestines or Clestins here in the audience though I myself have yet to meet anyone with this name The heavenly is the dimension of the divine the div ine as what is elevated lied up above the earth and also as a result so elevated and so immaterial that it is innitely distant Finally heaven [ ] like the seventh heaven of 5
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antiquity or the seventh heaven in the Koran is always the highest the ost elevated. It is the place of the one who is called in the Bible the Most High" the one who is absolutely high. ow this is not unique to the three great Western monotheisms. There are many religions in which god or the gods bear the name of height. To give ust one exam ple: the main god of the Iroquois Indians at least in their taditional culture is called or used to be called Oki" which means the one on high." There are many other religions like this in many other cultures I know I have probably not yet said anything that surprises you Heaven [e ciel] is divine and reciprocally the divine which has to do with god is celestial. Today in the twentyrst century what is up there in the sky in the heavens [le ciel]? We all know quite well whats up there There is a whole bunch of things that are not at all gods. There are clouds airplanes and further away satellites and spacecraft; there are all the other planets of the solar system; there are all the other systems beyond our solar system and then a very large number of other systems called galaxies. Its hard to get an idea of the magnitude here but I know that with a telescopeyou may have heard of the Hubble telescope which is currently in orbit and was ust recently repaired with considerable ertone can observe what is very very far away I dont know exactly how far but its at an enormous distance. ou know that we measue these things in light years that is the distance that light or a photon of light which trav els at 186,000 miles per second can travel in a year. 6
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As far as we can see there are things but there is no god; no telescope has ever seen god ou will of course say that this is to be expected because you all have some sense whether you are believers or not whether you ome from a religious mily or not that god is not visible So it's perfectly to be expected that we don't see him But that also means that heaven [le ciel], in the reigious sense of the term is not the heavens [le ciel] above what we see with our eyes or through a telescope You know that some time back we sent to Mars a little space probe which could be seen trekking across the surce of the planet Someday soon we may be able to send something even further away It's thus not the same l. When religions speak of heaven [le ciel] and of the height of the heavenly [cleste] of the Most High they are not speaking of what is up above In ct our sky or our heavens [e el] are not above either because they are also below All you have to do is dig through to the other side of the earth to see the heavens above the Australians who are below us as you know because they are in the souther hemisphere in the land down under" as we say So the heaven [le el] of religions means something else e el, or les eu, the celestial the most high I t means a place very dierent from the world as a whole In this sense we have to say that the sky or heavens [e ciel] of airplanes spacecra and galaxies the heavens of the astronomers are a part of the world They are part of the world part of what is called as you know the universe This religious idea of heaven [le el] rers not to something in the world something higher than everything else nor to another world a world that would be above the
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world because that would ust be the same thing It desig nates we migt say a place dirent from the world as a whole But a pace dirent from the world as a whole means a place that is dirent from all places. T hat then means a place that is not a place Playing a bit with the French word endt which as a noun means pace, and as an adverb n the rght de I would say that it's a place that is not a place not even a raway place but not an enve or ipside either It is not a place in the world but it's also not as if we were going to the other side of the world as if we were looking at another side or ce of the world As if this other side or ce were god as if the face of god were on the backside of the world like the backside or hidden ce of the moon ou know perhaps that we always see the same side or ce of the moon because of the way it turns around the earth and the way the earth turns on itself Only spacecra circling the moon have been able to photograph the other side But it's still another side whereas in the case of the world the world in its totality the universe in its complete totality assuming we could get to the end of it in every direction there is no other side by denition Since space ends at that point there are no other spaces places or locations There is no place outside the world So when we say heaven [e e] or the divine as what is in heaven we are talking about something that would be nowhere in no place and at the same time as a result everywhere Something assuming we can say some thing" or someone" who would be nowhere and everywhere
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And ne being nowhere and everywhere means stritly speaking nothing when we are talking about the things of the world this means that the heavenly or the divine designates something that is nothing We really dont have any other way of saying this Something tha t is not a thing neither a thing nor a person in the sense that a person is a thing For a person is there ust as muh as this glass is So we are talking about something with an other manner or way of being than the being of all things and all persons To give you an analogy its a bit like air whih is more or less everywhere and nowhere though this isnt om pletely true beause there are plaes where there is no air where matter is so dense that a moleule of air annot penetrate But if you nd the analogy at all helpful you an use it so long as you remember that air itself is none theless something This something or someone that would not be outside the world beause there is no outside of the world but that would be something other than the world as a whole other than all things is nowhere neither within nor else where and it is at the same time present everywhere but in a very partiular mode of preseneand thats what religions all god or the gods Wha t an we say about god or th e gods if we dont start with religion if we dont plae ourselves in a religion that says god goes by this name and has these harateristis" ? For instane some say that god goes by a name that one is not allowed to pronoune This is the Jewish god: four letters that must not be pronouned Or else he is simply 9
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alled godwe will return to thisand that's the Chrstian god, alog with the question of Jesus Christ, whih we an also return to later Or else god is alled Allah, the god of Islam Or else he goes by many dirent names in all those religions where there are many gods, in what are alled polytheisti religions In these ases, the gods have proper names For example, in the Shinto religion of Japan there are millions of gods The way in whih god or the divine is everywhere an be seen there in the way gods are everywhere, on every orner and in every plae In the streets of Japan you see statues of gods or of divine beings more or less everywhere But I'm not going to get into this direne between polytheisti religions, those religions with many gods, and monotheisti ones, religions with a single god, beause this would be muh too long and ompliated For our pur poses we an assume that god or the gods play the same role or have the same ntion more or less everywhere, at least up to a ertain point, and that we an try to think what this means in the same way From here on, I'm going o stay within the amework of our Western, Mediterranean, European ulture, and thus within the amework of the three religions with a single god, within the three monotheisms, and these are the Jewish religion, the Christian religion, and Islam And I am going to ignore all the internal direnes, the inter nal divisions, within eah of hese religions Common to this group of religions is the notion tat there is only one god And in eah of these religions god is alled god" Notie here that gd is a rather peuliar name: gd is a ommon namea god," or the gods" in 0
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polytheisti religions with many gods example in the Geek and Roman eligions of Western antiquity One thus spoke o f the gods" but no god was alled god " Zeus r example was a god and even bere Greee the Egyptian Osiis was a god and I sis a goddess But none of these gods was alled god" When we use the name gd as th e name of the one god we are doing something rather unique sine we ae saying that thee is a divine heavenly being who goes by the name of all divine beings It is as if we were to say that the name of a poplar" tree is simply tree As a result the name gd perhaps does not name someone it is not the proper name of someone but names the divine as suh the divine as a unity or single thing as if it wee a person And this is the ase let me say in passing of dieu in the Fenh language as well as r all European languages and it is also the ase r Allah, whih is the name of the god of Islam But Allah is a transrmation of a very old omon name or noun of Semiti origin namely the word meaning god" This language is the origin of a group of ommon lan guages that then gave rise both to Hebew and to Arabi and other languages Already in very anient ivilizations then thee was a supreme god who was alled preisely god" and Allah is a transrmation of But now we ome to the key question: oes god exist I hope you have already understood that this question is pehaps not the right one Asking whether god exists in th is way would be a bi t like asking whether Clestin upont exist Is there someone named Clestin upont? I ould look on the Internet I ould look at all existing names and I either will or will not nd a Clestin upont
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But to ask whether god exists is to ask the questio of whether ther is somewhere a someoe or a somethig that would aswer to the ame of god Whe eligio says th at god exists it perhaps ever says exactly that But let's say that the religious aswe more or less comes dow to armig: Yes god exists" If that is the case let me assure you tha t amog all religious people ad ot simply amog theologias that is scholars who study various aspects of religio but amog priests imams o rabbis those who ae ot ecessarily scholars but who are cocered with what religio represets ad with the relatioship betwee religio ad the people of a particular religious commuity there are very w people today who would say: es god exists ad he is i ct ight up there i th e seveth heave all you have to do is go up there ad you will see him He has a face with a log bead " A Muslim especially will ot say that It is perhaps i Islam that there is the most acute sese that god looks like othig absolutely othig This is repeated throughout the Kora More geerally what religio says i this form ca be uderstood I thik eve outside religio I myself for example am speakig to you completely outside ay reli gio We ca thus uderstad these thigs i a differet way Fially i speakig of god we are speakig of this ame that is like a proper ame ad yet is ot a proper ame sice it does ot ame someoe who would be some where someoe who would have certai characteristics proper to him or her like those of Clesti upot But god ames the possibility that there exists for us collec tively as well as for each of us sigularly ad idividually
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a relationship with this nowhere and everywhere In othe words god or the divine or the celestial would name the ct that I am in relation not with something but with the ct that I am not limited to all those relations I have with all the things of the world or even with all the beings of the world It suggests that there is something else which I will here call the opening something that makes me be that makes us be as humans open to something more than being in the world more than being able to take things up manipulate them eat them get aound in the world send space probes to Mars look at galaxies through telescopes and so on It suggests that there is all this but also some thing else What is this something else ? We have some idea of this other thing and perhaps more than an idea a eling through the ct r example that we know what it is to feel great oy or great sadness what it is to el love or I wont say hate but at least a eling that is very r from love When I have such feelings or moods I sense that there is something immense innite which I cannot simply lo cate somewhere For when I el oy or sadness love or hatred force or weakness there is in all this something that innitely exceeds what I am my person my personal ity my means my location my way of being someone in a particular place in the world In all this there is some kind of opening Now the god of the three monotheistic reli gions and all the other gods as well god himsel repre sents nothing other than this To take the three monotheistic religions in their histori cal oder what is the Jewish god? We might say that the Jewish god is the Father but perhaps thats not the best
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image The Jewish god is essentially the Just One He is Justie, the Jdge, not in the sense of the one who brings justie but as the one who appreiates the just or right measure of eah and every one In the Bible, he is the god who trieth the hearts and minds (Psalm 79. But that does not mean he's a superop who looks into and knows what is deep within your heart It means that eah one, with his own heart, that is, with what eah is most proundly, most personally, has a measure, an absolute mea sure in himself and r himself of justie I am myself, and eah is him or hersel and this way of being absolutely onesel� of having r oneself a unique and singular mea sure, one that distinguishes eah absolutely om all others, but that an only be put into ation in one's relationship with all the others, that is what is meant by the justie of god The Christian god is Love This is a phrase om what is alled the ew Testament god is Love It means tha god is not someone but is, instead, love Love is a unique relationship between someone and someone else, a relation that goes far beyond everything else It is not a relationship of pleasure, of getting along, of liking one anotherI like you, you like me It is the t of reognizing in the other what is absolutely unique about them This is atually the way parents love their hildren They don't love them be ause they are beautiful, kind, harming, and so on, sine when they ome into the world they are not yet any of these things The god of Islam is the god who is alled the Meril at the beginning of eah hapteror of the Koran The Meril is the one who aknowledges in eah 4
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man his shotomings and frailties, and who gives him the possibility of standing tall and worthy despite his shot omings and ailties The Just, Love, the Merilthat is in the end what heaven is or the elestial in the sense of the divine This brings us bak to the image of the sky or the heavens, that is, to the fat that, above the eath, there opens a dimension that is no longer even a dimension but the opening, wide open and bottomless There is nothing to see at the bottom of those heavens, just as there is nothing r our physial eyes to see at the bottom o end of the sky Its not a ques tion of sending spae probes or of looking through tele sopes There is nothing to see at the bottom of this sky or this heaven iel] But what has to be seen, or known, or undestood, or t is that there is t his dimension of open ing At this point, at least r the moment, it matters little whether one is a believer or a nonbeliever It atters little whether one belongs to one religion or religious ommu nity rathe than another or to none at all Of ourse, this does beoe important late on, and there is muh to say about it But at the point we are at right now, I would say that this doesnt matter hat matters instead is under standing that what is at stake here is the impossibility of losing this opening That is, the impossibility of being a human being as one might be a stone a tree, or perhaps also an animal I say pehaps" in order to simplify things, beause there are some people who would be unhappy to hea me make suh a sharp distintion between human beings and everything else To be a human being is to be open to innitely more than simply being a human being 5
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You are probably going to say to me This is a very general idea, nd I understand what you are saying here One an all this idea Love Justie, Mery, or the open ing Aording to Pasal, who was a thinke, philosopher, religious gure, and very learned man of the seventeent entury, man goes innitely beyond man ou are going to tell me that these are all j ust ideas hy all any of them god? hy have religions used this word god? hy even outside of religion is it not so easy to do without naming god in one way or another? Beause it is not enough to use abstrat names like Love, Joy, Mery, or Justie in order to name this dimension of opening and of going beyond t is neessary to be able to address oneself to or to relate to this dimension hy address oneself to this dimension o establish a onnetion with it? In order to be ithful to it hat does it mean to be oneself as muh as possible, and thus to be as muh a human being as possible? t means nothing other than being ithl to this opening or to this in n ite going beyond of the human by the huma It means being ithl to the sky or the heavens, in te sense I've spoken o This delity might look like a delity to someone, just as indelity is usually understood as an indelity to someone The religious name of this delity is ith" or i, from the Latin des; this same word and this same notion of delity an also be found in the word condence
Faith is the relationship of delity As a result, as a rela tion of delity to , faith takes the shape of a delity to someone, someone who is not of this world, and who as a esult is not some person outside the world either, but who 6
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is to be understood as I just said in terms of this relation ship of delity This faith delity or condence has in a certain sense nothing to do with what is called belie In religion there is belie When one believes one says that god does this or that In Christian belie� for example, which is probably the one most of you know best it is said that god has a son Jesus Christ who was incarnated and who died on the cross to save mankind And then there is a third person called the Holy Spirit There are so many things that could be said about this But all that is the content of belie that is the way things are presented in a particular religion the way one explains the reality of god But belief can always lead to thinking that things are like this One imagines a ther and a son How is the ther able to have a son when the ther is a god and the son is a man? The Christian religion hre speaks of a mystery Islam on the other hand says that this simply cannot be that it runs absolutely contrary to the nature of god that it is impossible for god to be in many persons that he is absolutely one that it is impossible r god to have a human son and so on This huge opposition is in the end an opposition only in the way of presenting things I t has to do with belief And belief has to do with a way of presenting things I believe that right now it is nice outside for example It's a supposi tion I would have to go outside to know whether it's true I� on the contrary I say I don't know what it's like out side but I am ithful to the idea that it's nice out [This is of course absurd] And so I am going to go out in short sleeves and I won't take a raincoat or an umbrella es I
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would be takng a bg rsk, and that would be rather slly But thats elty Fdelty does not onsst n belevng, and tus n supposng, n aordane wth what we know, that thngs wll be n onrmty wth what we beleve Fdelty means not at all knowng about ths hen one s thl to someone, one does not know n the end about ths person at all, nor about what he or she wll beome later on n l But f one s thful to hm or her, one s thful wthout knowng Let me stop there One an say at least that n the name of god and n the name of god as the elestal or the heav enly there s at least the ndaton of the possblty, perhaps the neessty, of beng thful wthout any knowledge or even any quasknowledge, and thus any bele of beng fathl to what I alled the openng, wthout whh we would perhaps not even be human bengs, but smply thngs among other thngs wthn a world losed upon tsel Montreul, May 4, 00
Qestins and Answers
ou said that in the Jewish religion god is just But if god is j ust, wh y a e thee childen bon with handicaps o things like that?
ell, youre ight ou are asking one of the most important questions in relationship to god, a question that has often been asked since the beginning of modern times It's a question that has oen appeared since the eighteenth century, though it was also raised bere that hy is there evil ? In the three great monotheisms there is a single, common answer In religious terms, it is said that if god ceates man, it is in oder to create a free being, one that is le to be or to become what he is And so if god guaranteed human beings in advance al the conditions of a perfect existence, one that required no questions, then we would obviously not be free You are among those who were born handicapped Two things might be said here It is possible that certain people seem to be more unjustly teated than others by god or by nature But this goes hand in hand with the fact that men have been able to invent all sorts of solutions to problems of handicaps and diseases, even if we are vey far om solving all these problems But man is also the one who can allow a handicapped person to realize himself as a person, whether this be by medical means, technical means, or some other Justice, in the sense of divine justice, justice r the whole world , does not mean that everything is evenly dis tributed and that nothing else needs to be done That
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would be to imagine the creation of the world as a sort of Lego game where there is nothing le to do
Whee does the sky, or where do the heavens, begin?
heard j ust a little while ago an extraodinary phrase from an astronomer who was here earlier He said that someone had told him that The heavens [le iel] begin right at gound level This wonderful statement suggests that the sky begins ight on the gound 'm speaking in an imagistic and symbolic way t means that where the earth ends, the sky or the heavens begin, that is, the dimen sion of opening begins At the same time, wheever there is ground, however close to the earth we may be, there is sky This question might suggest something else, precisely in relation to painting and to the skies w e spoke of earlier in painting Try to look at th e way th e great landscape painters, like the Flemish painter Jacob Ruisdael or the English painter John Constable, worked with landscapes ou will see there precisely this relationship between a big sky, oen full of clouds, and the earth t is as if the whole painting were done simply to show this opening of the two, and thus the line that runs between them and keeps them apart JLN
[qi les page]
When you were speaking earlier about the god of the Jews, why is one not allowed to pronounce his name?
Because thats the Jewish way of saying things The Jewish god is the rst in the history of monotheisms All
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0
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monotheisms in ct have a common source; they all come according to the account in the Bible om Abraham; they are all Abrahamic religions And each subsequent religion recognizes the others as its ancestors As for the last one Islam the Koran speaks of Jesus Christ of Moses and of Abraham The Jewish god is the rst who is presented as singular as unique First of all he is not exactly claimed to be the one and only god for all men but the one god of the Jews of Israel the god of Israel Like the gods of other religions then he has a name but his particularity resides in the fact that his name since it is the name of the Most High is a sacred n ame a name different from all other names and thus it not to be pronounced In the Bible he sometimes goes by the name that we pronounce Yahweh It is made up of ur letters in He brew and when it is pronounced with the vowels it makes Yahweh But there are other places in the Bible where he is called as I mentioned earlier el, or in the plural elo, but it's the same thing One might say that this is the rst step toward the dis appearance of the proper name of god and the replace ment of the proper name by a common name which then itself becomes a proper name
Why and how does god exist?
JLN
Oh boy
(Laher.
GOD
ou're making some people laugh I said earlie that the question of te existence of god cannot be asked It's such a hard question There are two aspects to your question First, as I was saying earlier, god does not exist as some thing o some person So far so good? Thus even if I say that god is nowhee, he is at the same time everywhere If I say, as Chistians do, that god is Love," then love is at the same time nowhee and everywhere ou no doubt love certain people you understand quite well that love is not a thing that can be located somewhere Sure, you can send a cad with a heart on it, but this is just a sign of love, not love itsel An so, in this sense, god does not exist And when you ask why or how god exists, then you have aleady begun to think of a person, a very powerful person who created the worldand this is something I haven't spoken about at all yet Isn't that what you ae thinking of? ow if one imagines god as someone who created the world, and if one understands creating te world to mean making it, then it's a little like imagining god to be like the person who made, well, this bottle In ct this is a good example Who made this bottle? A ma chine, a set of machines, no doubt, along with people in a ctoy Probably few people and many machines If I imagine that god ceated the world in this way, then this means that god is an enomous machine, with a vey small brain somewhere, perhaps, but especially a very powerl machine able to make this huge thing in which we nd ourselves But that's going o pose all kinds of problems Because we would then immediately have to ask who made the machine It's r that reason that in the three 22
GOD
monotheisms the question of reation is one of the most sinating the question of reation out of nothing e usually use a Latin expression r this eation x nihilo, whih means eation om nothing That does not mean that god is a huge mahine that makes a world with noth ing as material It means preisely that there is nothing there behind it all It means the world is there hen the world is thee there is thus either god or the question of god or what tried to speak of earlie the possibility of religion But in everything I've said to you it was never a question of the reation of the world hat is interesting is that in other religions in polythe isti religions there is no reation from nothing there is always something there It might be alled haos pimary matter or example the great originary ow whose owing milk makes the world The ow and her milk that's the rst state of the wold This epresentation of god as maker of the world of god as mahine that shions the world was no doubt neessary inevitable so long as we did not have the knowledge of the world that we have today That is why god was not Beause if he had been if he had begun to exist what would there have been before him? You were talking about the name of the Jewish god How an people know hw he is alled when no one an tell them his name?
That bings us right into the thik of eligion In the religious narative of the Bible god said his name to Moses He told him all the while telling him that one
JLN
2
GOD
must not pronounce his name That means that god alone reveals himself, that he is the only one able to reveal him sel to be a le to say a name that at the same time is unspeakable From where do we get the idea of believing in god? Because if god in the beginning created the world om nothing, who created him?
was trying to address that just a moment ago, but we would really have to have another talk just on creation Believing in god is something that is a part of all civili zations, all human societies, except our own modern or contemporary society, which no longer believes at all in god, or at least not in the same way There are, of course, exceptions, people who are completely within a particular religion, who take up all its terms, who speak, r example, of the world being created by god But today even someone who epresents things to him or herself in this way under stands, or at least should understand, that creation, or what is caled creation, has absolutely nothing in common with the making of some thing Do you understand that? ts not as if creation were just a bigger and more powerful making f it were, it would mean that we were imagining god as a someone with great means at his disposal The creation of the world is a way of saying that the world is there There is nothing to look r bere, ecause there is no bere There is nothing to look for outside, because there is no outside Yet there is still the inside to be asked about hat is happening inside? hat is happening is precisely that it opens, that it opens up, that it opens in nitely to something other than the things of the world JLN
24
GOD
This is very diult I grant you But that is what a reator god means in the end This reator is not some thing that an take the plae of what physiists have ana lyzed as the rst moments of the world You've probably heard people speak of the big bang or of what some physi ists even all the rst void of the word whih is never ompletely a void one of this prevents there being some thing given at the beginning of the world If it is given you an always say to me that it is given by someone It is indeed given But the giving of this donation of this parti ular gi has nothing to do with an operation that would have taken plae at an earlier time by another being om another world beause then all we are doing is pushing things bak in an innite regress othing what is that exatly if it is nothing? I wish I had with me here an enormous book I reeived a ouple of months ago om a German olleague in philosophy a huge vehundredpage book alled Nohing, Nihs in German Your question is really right on Let me try to say this othing is the something of that whih is no thing Hene it is not something And yet it's not nothing It's the t that there is something For exampe I an say to you that that glass there is something If I take the glass away there is no longer anything For the glass to be there there also needs to be nothing otherwise I anot plae the glass there I f there is a bottle there I annot put the glass in the same plae If there had been something in the plae of the world the world ould not have been plaed there Hene there is preisely the nothing And the world omes in this nothing 25
GOD
There is a very beautiful stoy in eligion, in wat is alled a mystial rm of the Jewish religion known as Kabbalah It says tha god reated the world not at all by making something but by withdrawing, by breathing himself in by emptying himsel By hollowing himsef out, god opens the void in whih the world an take its plae This is alled the imsm in the Kabbalah I annot even really say that the world omes out of nothing, that the world is in nothing othing is every where It's the fat that you an be here, that I am here, that the glass is here, that the world is here, and so on othing is the t that there is something in general, all of us This fat, the t that there is the world, has no rhyme or reason But what's the point, one might then ask? God is pehaps always a way of answering there is no point, no rhyme or reason, and that's why it is good I is open, it is available Available r any number o f things but at the same time nothing Sometimes what we do best is nothing, doing nothing, letting things be ow I am not telling you to do nothing I'm not saying that the best thing to do in shool is to do nothinggod rbid or am I saying that when there are eletions the best thing to do is to do nothing But, more deeply, when one eally thinks about one's li, about what one does A little while ago, when I spoke to you about joy or love, even about justie in the sense I tried to desribe, what is all that about It is really nothing hat do people who love eah other do? othing, nothing but love eah other That doesn't mean that we must do nothing 26
GOD
ill we ever be sure one day that gd exists o doesn't exist?
o neve beause that is not th e question I an see that this is a very diult question beause it keeps on oming bak If god exists in the way religions say then this would be preisely the only existene of whih we annot be sure about whih it is not at all a question o being sure not at all a question of knowing It is simply a matter of being faithful Let me return one more time to the example of love or justie or mery To be just or to be not exatly in love but loving to be in iendship hen we have iends we are often operating in the realm of knowledge e say know that this iend has done this or that and so don't like him any more he is no longer my iend This is normal and 'm not saying that there are not sometimes reasons r saying this But nevertheless one also some times says If you are my iend you are going to get over this you are going to rgive me for this you are going to understand this In suh ases it is not at all a question of proving the existene of something or the That is why from this point of view it an truly be said and we would be in agreement with many people with the greatest thinkers in all the great religions that to laim that god exists o that he does not exist really omes down to the same thing hen one says that he does not exist one is saying that he does not exist like someone o something that would be omparable to everything else that exists but simply in a greater more powerful and higher way And when one says that he exists one is saying more
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2
OD
or less the same thng one s sayng that he exsts dr ently om e erythng else that exsts One s sayng that hs presene, hs exstene, s a ealty wth whh we have a elaton that has nothng to do wth any of the other relatons we have wth thngs n the world hy are there people n some elgons who beleve n many gods?
I went b y ths petty qukly, s o you're ght to want to ome bak to t Fst, I would say that ths shows that god an take on many drent rms or es Ths does not mean that god s a beng apable of metamorphosng hmsel� of trans rmng hmself and takng on all knds of guses or ds guses It means, rather, that one an relate to the prnple of the dvne, to what s absolutely drent om the thngs of the world, through a plualty of gods It s at ths pont that they beome persons, or quaspesons, eah wth a ds tnt name and eah dented wth a partula ton One alls on eah god n a partular rumstane r example, there s a god whom one alls on r brths, another when there s a death, another so that the havest s good, another so that a voyage s suessl, and so on These are gods from whom one asks somethng In ths askng there s always an appeal to what s ompletely other There s, o ourse, a great drene between elgons wth many gods and relgons wth just a sngle god Everythng I have sad has been om the perspetve of monothesm, that s, of elgons wth a sngle god But, on a deeper level, thee s somethng n ommon e should also speak hee of a very mportant rm of thought that I ]LN
2
GOD
dont quite know how to address I am speaking of Bud dhism, whih is not a eligion with a relationship to gods or to the divine, but whih an nonetheless be presented as a form of thought or of spiituality absolutely without god But it would take too long to develop this in an y detail How was god able to open the void fo the earth when he was already in the void ?
Preisely, he ouldnt He didnt do anything Thats what I was talking about earlier with the sim sm. At that moment, god did not open the void to the earth rather, god is the void that is opening up This will always be a ather poor way of putting it You ould ask me how it is th at the void is able to open up If I myself want to open up But one annot treat this as if it were the ation of some person You say How was he able? but one might j ust as well say that it is a question of a sort of nonability or powerlessness JLN
And what about the underworld [les enfers], and everything that happens after one is dead?
Yes, the underwold You are right to ask about that Its interesting that you put this term in the plural, beause les enfers is an expression from antiquity and be re that, from Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions I t has t o d o with the idea of j ustie, a n idea o f j ustie translated into human terms, that is, the idea of a justie that rewards and punishes And so its the idea that god, as j udge, sa ys Youve don e wrong, you are ondemned to
JLN
9
GOD
this punishment" O else the opposite You have done nothing wrong and you are not ondemned " t is a way of imaginin g or epresenting things t is in fat rather remarkable j ust how large a role this representation has played in ertain religions, and espe ially in etain rms of the Christian religion, even though it plays a muh less important role in ontemporary Christian religion But while this epresentation of hell and of the devil has muh less urreny today, it still has mean ing Its just that it does not have to do with saying, After death you will be punished or rewaded r what you have done in li," but rather, Ae you able during your li time to be faithful to what tied to explain earlier, that is, ae you able to remain faithful to something that innitely exeeds you ? " This is hard And its just as had r me as it is you and everyone else Hell means that if you are unable to do this, you are ondemned t means that you ondemn yourself You ondemn youself not to bun ing in hell among a bunh of demons that tortue you but, rathe, you ondemn yourself to shriveling up and withering away as you ae, in your li, right now When you believe in one religion, why ant you believe in another religion at the same time?
This is ompliated n Ameria there are Jews who all themselves Jews r Jesus" n Ameia its sometimes a little like those restaurants that seve CambodianBasque uisine f you want to be strit about things, this is abso lutely impossible dont know exatly how this works r these Jews r Jesus" ts etainly respetable, but its ontraditory,
JLN
0
GOD
beause the Jewish religion says that it awaits the Messiah who will be sent by god and Christianity says that the Messiah has already ome and that he is Jesus ow I might very well say if we had the time that the fat that the Messiah has ome does not mean that he has truly ome Within a partiular religion there is a preise way of guring or representing god what he is what he does and so on So normally one annot mix everything up Yet there is something ommon to all religions as tried to bring out earlier So an understand why people would want to take a little of this and a little of that why they would like one aspet of one religion and another aspet of another religion At that point there is no ontradition I t means that one is not of any partiular religion n any ase we would have to distinguish between the t of being of a partiular religion and belonging to a partiular religious ommunity f you belong to a religious ommunity if you are Jewish for example if you are a little Jewish boy you must be irumised If you are a little Christian boy this isn't an issue though you do have to be baptized The two things are not mutually exlusive So it's possible to do all kinds of dirent things If you are a little Muslim hild you must pray ve times a day I t is not the same prayer that it would be for a Jewish or Christian hild; you are not going to all on god in the same way So if you want to belong to all three religions at the same time it's going to be a little ompliated There are some people who do this very well 'm think ing r example of the Japanese There are ma ny Japanese
GOD
who are at once Buddhist and Shintoist I won't even en tion those who are also Christian, because they are really Christian oly r certain ceremonies There is no contradiction in being both Buddhist and Shintoist For the Shintoists, thee are millions of gods who are present everywhere, in everyday li, presences of an order dirent from any other presence, but presences nonetheless, whereas, the Buddhists, there is no pres ence at all And these two things are not contradictoy each can very easily be related to the other ithin monotheism ths going between eligions can get rather tricky There is, r example, the case of a very great Muslim mystic named alHaj, who was con demned by the Islamic authorities of his time, that is, long long ago, because he had practically become Christian fom within the Islamic religion Thee are texts of al Halj that address Christ, all the while emaining within Islam hile there ae very clear dirences in the way things are epresented in the three geat monotheisms, and even some very big dirences between the three major rms of ChristianityCatholicism, Protestantism, and Ortho doxythere is at the same time something that runs through all these monotheisms om the very beginning of estern civilization, and that is pecisely the notion that god is the one who is not there, who is not someone, who is somewhere else, always somewhere else In this regard, there is truly a great proximity between the Jewish god, the Christian god, and the god of Islam It's even because of this that between the three the worst sometimes hap pens At the same time, these three religions are incredibly close to one another
You are not being presented with a text here, but rather with the transription of a spontaneous talk, with all of its aidents and approximations This transription has been made with a great deal of are and intelligene, but the written form inevitably loses the better part of its move ment and intonation This loss extends to the point of distorting the meaning of the talk a little onetheless, have insisted on keeping this transription without touhups other than in some minor details wanted to avoid trans rming it into a piee of writing of whatever kind t is neessary to retain within the trae of the event its harater of trae, along withsne this is the themeall the injustie this might bring But it is also to do justie, albeit neaively [n crux] to the living word addressed to oth ers, to what, n ally, all writing must seretly refer did, however, deide that it was neessary to introdue a number of headings in order to puntuate, r the eyes and r thinking, a text in whih a ontinuous ow would risk oring no bearings Finally, would like to express a regret here did not talk about the death penalty, although in my response to the seond question it would have been natural to address it hesitated, thinking that the question would perhaps ome from the audiene, whih would have been prera ble But then the moment passed That the question did not ome up shows that, r this audiene, it was not im mediately present
The Idea of he us
eraps you do't quite kow what is just ad what is't ad from ow o, whe say you" this aer oo, will be addressig the hildre ad ot the adults preset You probably a't ome up with a idea of it o the spot like this, but oetheless you ertaily kow what it is to experiee a ij ustie, to el that it's ot fair" or eve tha t that's a real ijustie," as the artoo harater Calimero always used to say Perhaps he is ot so well kow aymore he's a little bird with a piee of eggshell o his head So you do all kow somethig about the sub jet we all the just ad the ujust A little while ago, a boy who is somewhere i the room, after learig that was goig to talk about the just ad the ujust, expressy asked me st what are you goig to talk about? [De q
5
SC va pa1� au juste ? " This remark poves that he has an
idea of what this represents For that atter, we could begin with this remark Just what are you going to alk about?" The boy who asked me this questionlet's call him Simonwas well aware that he was making a play on words, even if he pehaps didnt yet know how to explain its subtleties In posing this question to me, he hoped to nd out what precisely, or exactly, we were going to talk about Thats not the same thing as saying it isnt j ust," which has nothing to do with precision or exactitude Ths difference between the just," as moral and as opposed to the unjust, and the just" of exactitude could be the undation r all of our thoughts during this dialogue we might even come back to it at the end Its easy to see that the just" of exactitude does not mean the same thing as the just" that is the opposite of the unjust " For instance, one could say, The contents of this bottle lls just two glasses" If it doesnt end up being the case, say, if the contents of the bottle lls only one and a half glasses, one wouldn' t say that it was unjust As with many of our words, our ideas, our noion, to use a more learned term, or an even more learned term that philosophers use, our onep, we have an understanding of the word us that could be called intuitive or spontaneous We know well enough what it's about, but we still have to open up the idea or the concept Perhaps by opening it up, well come to realize that the word we thought we understood opens onto difcult problems and questions that we hadnt suspected bere That's what we are going to try to see together 6
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Let's go bak to what I alled the moral" sense of the word st, that is to what is just in opposition to what is unjust I think that many of you would agree that what is just is what aords with justie For the original title of the dialogue we hose hose the j ust the unjust" the just j ust being the quality of what is just and onsequently the quality of what belongs to justie and what is unust being what is ontrary to justie j ustie A diulty immediately immediately arise ari sess thoug though h only a minor diulty of language but one that obviously opens onto other problems When I talk about justie" many of you probably think about what happens in the ourthouse [a palazs de ie] The ourthouse as you know is the plae where hearings are held where judges sit and where trials take plae People an be aused de fended by lawyers and then judged and what we all a trial results either in a onvition or in what is alled a aquittal aquittal of o f the th e dend dendant ant Aordin Aordingg to its everyday every day usage the word sice makes us think rst of all of the justie that rms a part of our large state institutions There is a ministry and a minister of justie But in the ourthouse and in a hearing the law is applied through being inter preted by judges by lawyers lawye rs by the dendants dendants themselv themselves es or by those maki ng the th e a ausations usations This Th is justi j ustie e justi j ustie e as institut institution ion is not the quality quality of what wha t is just jus t It is the th e insti insti tution tution that th at applies the law Is the law always alway s just j ust ? All of you are are prepared prepared to say no though though perhaps perha ps you have hav e no exampl exa mplee to to give as to why We are spontaneously m istrustf ist rustful ul of the aw I think ever e very y one has a irly strong sense that if the idea of justie or o f what wh at is j ust gets gets onse onsedd with the th e law law then somethings gone wrong In a w months it will be illegal in Frae
SC
to smoke i all publi plaes but r ow it's ot yet the ase ase So whih is i s the more j ust i this situatio situatio ? If oe a eve say suh a thig whih is the true just" j ust" ? I belog belog to the geeratio that saw the begii of seatbelts while you well you get ito a ar ad automatially automatially put o your seatbelts It is a re e x r you ow but I was i my late tweties whe the requiremet to wear a seatbelt was r st itrodued ito law There were people at that time who were very uhappy ad who ud this law ujust They felt that rig people to strap themselves to the seat of a ar was a restritio of their freedom I was i a ar ai det at aroud that time ad I was't wearig a seatbelt If I had bee wearig oe I would have bee less badly ijured Today everyoe osiders it just that the law re quires quires us to wear seatbelts seatbelts Oe ould give may examples of this type of situatio r there are a lot of them Simi larly you've grow used to there beig a wide variety of give ames these days a muh greater variety tha was the ase twety twe ty or thirty thi rty years ago Thi rty years ago there was a law that preveted people om givig ertai types of rst ames to Freh hildre r example ames be logig to the traditios and laguage of the Breto ul ture Some parets who had give their hildre Breton ames had to appear bere a tribual This might seem strage ad oldfashioed these days but it was't that log ago ago eve if it seems that th at way to you So you uderstad uderstad well eough that that the law is't ees sarily j ust But that does' does'tt mea that ea eahh of us a simply s imply deide ot to obey the law just beause we do't thik it's ir That is aother questi questio o I that t hat ase as e it is a matter matter of
SC
k n owng how the law s deded, through whh dsus sons of tzens or o r ther represent representatves, atves, and so on o n For our purposes, purpos es, though, though, onsder ons der the followng llowng f we know that th at the law la w on ts own s not always j ust, that must must be beause beause we have an dea of the just n tself, of the true just, of juste as an dea or deal and not only of juste as an nsttuton So we ha ve an dea of juste beyond beyond laws, laws , perper haps even of a juste r whh there an be no law, or a juste that annot be enlosed n a law one that exeeds law All of us have had the elng or the sense that there s the just and the unjust wthout ther neessarly beng related to the law Many of you probably know how t els, n lass or at home, to reeve a punshment that was not objetvely warranted warrant ed Some of you have ertanly ertanl y been punshed beause a buddy of o f yours was olng around and the teaher punshed both of you, or perhaps even the whole lass The role of a teaher s not to be r to eah ndvdual t s to mantan mantan order r everyone everyone o o matter matter you reeve an undeserved punshment, and you exlam, Thats not r!" ou know other rms of njuste as well a end shows up wth a new vdeogame onsole that you dont havet doesnt matter whh one, t wouldnt be far of me to t o do d o advertsng advertsngan andd your yo ur parents refu re fuse se to to buy one r you Thats Tha ts not far far But B ut why ? It has ha s nothng to do wth the law The reason ould nvolve money, mon ey, the t t that t hat your frends frends m mly ly has greater means at ts dsposal than yours does It ould also nvolve the prnples of your parents, who prer that you not spend threequarters of your tme playng vdeo games Inden tally, ths deson about your upbrngng ould be ex tremely r wth respet to your work and your future 39
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But I'm not here o play the role of your parents You know, then, you have a eling or an idea that there are suh things as the just and the unjust without being able to give a general meaning o priniple r them For exam ple, s it just r everyone to have a whatsit" onsole? Maybe you're prepared to answer yes," but how many onsoles of how many dirent types is it ir r everyone to have It's very diult to take suh things into onsid eration If you read magazines or wath television, you know that we live in a world in whih we are made to believe that everyone should have every onsole, every omputer, and every possible or oneivable video game However, you also know that all this has gotten a little out of hand and that it annot really be an issue of justie So we have an idea of the just and the unjust, but we don't know how to dene preisely what they are e have a sense that they must rer to something in exess of the law, to something other than the law, and perhaps that they rer to underlying prniples that would allow us to say what is truly just But what are those priniples ? If one leaves aside the law as it is written in the penal ode and understood by lawyers, what does one enounter? One nds another law, alled the law of the strongest This ould perhaps aount r why the friend has one onsole more than I do or why he has a onsole and I don't, sine he is stronger in the sense that his mily has more money, whih is a kind of strength Many of you perhaps thin that the physially strongest is in the right and that it's fair r him to win if he overpowers his opponent At that point, j ustie has beome onsed with the results of a ght However, I'm sure that many others among you 40
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thnk that the law of the strongst s not a law at all and that t can't be a law It s otherwse known as the law o the jungle" and precsely n the jungle where only anmals lve the strongest domnate the weakest. So the ex presson the law of the jungle" plays on a contradcton n the jungle there are no laws but rather relatons of strength. The use of strength alone cannot be just that too we know well Even f we are oen tempted to assume that mght makes rght" we know that strength by tself can not be j ust It s nonetheless a model that s oen used the lms of Schwarzenegger r example though he has been makng wer of them recently snce he's now governor of Calrna and no longer has tme to make moves those of Van Damme or even vdeo games lke Street Fghter. All of these deploy a model of the upholder of the law of he who s n a poston to do j ustce because he s the stron gest because he s more muscular because he has lke Schwarzenegger two submachne guns and three bazoo kas and because he has the power to destroy everythng. So we say that he takes the law nto hs own hands Ths model can be very seductve one could easly be convnced that ths s what s just Stores of ths knd always take place beyond the law the law s powerless and the polce can't do anythng but then Schwarzenegger appears demolshes everythng and saves the day ctvely he destroys everythng but actually he's always actng n the name of a just cause n these lms There s r example some poor lttle grl who s threatened by terrble gangsters Even n Schwarzenegger lms even accordng to the vew that the strongest are capable of makng ther own
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laws, we still nd the idea that tere must be a just cause into whose service that strength is put So deep own, we do know what the wod js means We know, for example, that it is unfair to divide a cake into unequal pats t would be unir, yes, even if Schwarzenegger did it, even if he came and cut a big piece r one person and a vey small one r you You know this situation well , r it happens a lot at mealtime ou check to see if the person beside you has the same amount as you do Yet you also undestand that it can be entirely fair to give a very small piece of cake to someone or, indeed, not to give him or her any cake at all f a child is diabetic, r instance, it is dangerous for him or her to eat too much cake So what is just for that child and r his or her health s to give him or her as little sugar as possible We also know that its unfair to pay les s r wo rk done by a woman than r wo rk do ne by a man, but this happens very oen t i s unfair, but the law does not prevent it from happening However, it is ir to be paid more r work that is 0re dicult or more danger ous than r work that is less so What do we nd at the end of all these observations? We all know that it is just to give to each what he or she is owed To render to each his d ue or to give to everyone what he is owed is a very old denition of justice The formula or phase has been around ever since antiquity, so it really is as old as our civilization And, al though people have been discussing it during all that time, it continues to occupy us today; in ct, maybe its not possible to put an end to this discussion Thats what m going to show you now 42
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In saying that it is just to give to each hat he or she is due, e have a pretty good denition of the just. et I'm sure that you see here probles immediately arise. What is actually due to each? We'll come back to this, but rst e need to talk about a preliminary diculty that is perhaps less easy to see. To give to each hat is due to him or her brings together to principles under the term eah. First, there is a principle of equality: each" person is considered eactly like all the others. Then there is a principle of dirence proper to each person hat is due to icole is perhaps not hat is due to Sa·d, and hat is due to Gal is not necessarily hat is due to Jonathan Thus there are to principles at ork here: equality and dirence. If you'll agree, I propose that e call these to principles equality" and singularity." Singularity is hat is proper to each person insoar as he or she is a singular being, insor as he or she is unique Equality and singularity are inseparable in the idea o justice, and, at the same time, they can come into onict ith each other, though perhaps not into contradiction. This gives us insight into something very important the just and the unjust are alays decide d in relation to others. In the just and the unjust, it is about others and about me, but its alays about me in relation to others. I must be given hat is due to me just as others must be given their due. This means that there can never be justice r one person alone; su a thing doesn't even make sense. So justice eists solely i relation to th e other. I t is r that reason that th e notion o making ones on justice is utterly meaningless Hoever 4
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it is certainly true that each f us in ur singula pesn has the right t a recgnition that is cmpletely particular t us It wudnt be j ust, r example, t decide that evey ne had t have red hair r that everyne had t wear her hair tied back T the contrary, the particular nuances f hairstyle make up a part f wha t each peson is in his r her singularity, even if it is nly a tiny part But thenthis is the secnd part f the denitin what is due t smene? Wee not posing the questin here f hw t give r rende t each persn what he r she is due But one can easily distinguish sme elements f what is owed t everyne everyne has the right t live, s that means that everyne is wed the means t live, t ed himself or to ptect herself fm the elements Every ne has the right t be educated, s its i each child t be able t go t schl I am well awae that sme of yu ae prbably thinking, Im nt s sure thats ir" And yet, schling r all children is an aspect f justice, since to have n educatin r culture is t be incapable f develping all f nes pssibilities thrughout ones li Likewise, f curse, eveyne has the right t health and s to being caed r, and everyne als has a right t those things when a particular tene that could perhaps qualify as unjustinvlves being brn disabled It is just tha t peple in that situatin have access t certain kinds care, that they be given the use f wheelchairs, perhaps, that there be access r the disabled, and s n S it is just r thse prvisins t be put int place by the law Fr instance, these days the law requires that there be wheelchair access in transprtatin systems and in public places This discussin abut what s just and abut what must be 44
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reognized by eveyone as being just in a given soiety ould go on r a very long time thee ae lots of things we eognize as being just in matters of eduation hous ing health salary work onditions and the onditions of li If we had moe time to pursue it this disussion would also bring us around to the side of the law. The reason why the law is always hanging and evolving is beause we realize that there is suhandsuh a emand justie regarding something that up to that time we hadnt paid muh attention to or that wasn't very visile. So this would bring us one again to the side of the law and to what will always be in need of hange rerm and modiation. For instane we now realize that smoking is vey bad r your health an r the management of what is alled publi health owing to the treatment of all those who sur from aner or pulmonary diseases aused by tobao use It is r this reason that the law must hange. The law doesnt hange evey day but thee ae always good ea sons to onside transrming it or to onsider reating new laws so that soiety an beome more just. But straightaway it must added that we will never manage to state exhaustively what is really owed to eah singular person How ould one sum up what is due to eah of us insofa as eah of us is a unique person insofar as that person is Niole or Sad or Gal or Brahim? In a ertain way we ould say that the only thing that mattes is that the person be reognized as someone singular Its an innite list at what point ould I ever be nished being just to Niole or Sad? At what point ould I eve be nished reognizing him or her not only as a buddy o as someone 45
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who interests me becase he lent his console to me or helped me with my math bt trly to recognize him or her? Jst by asking sch a estion we can see how the moral sense of the word js cold not be frthe removed om the jst" of a je in the sense of exactitde and adjstment There is no adjstment possible with the rst sense of jstice If yo like we might say that jstice is necessarily withot pecision [an jsee] or adjstment I can of cose by clothes for Nicole o Sad bt it wold be bette if I boght those clothes in sizes that t them (Addeed o a hild in he w) Sre yore laghing now bt if I boght yo a pair of jeans in my size yod look pretty sil ly So clothing mst be adjsted ntil the person has n ished growing Bt what is to be adjsted when yore inteested in the decorative aspect of clothing What is the most jst a ble black or gray pair of jeans? Obviosly its not possible to say Of corse there are lots of things that ae more important than clothes There are things that each of s wants things that make each of s happy things that each of s dreams abot Bt thee are also some isses regarding which we are not necessarily very jst with orselves I am thinking abot the diabetic child whom I talked abot earlier All of s or at least a lot of s like sweets bt it is dangeros to eat sweets when one is diabetic ikewise yo often dont want to do yor home work and yet yo have to Bt if yo think abot it r yoselves yo can always go even frther There is no way to conclde the list of what is trly d e to each
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At the limit, theres only one thing that is owe to each, an that is what we call love not only the love we n in love stories, the kin of lo ve that makes us snicker when a boy kisses a girl or when a boy kisses a boy o a gil kisses a girl, but love in its broaest sense. We know very well that to love someone means to consie him or her r who he or she is, an to be reay to o everything r this peson, to give him or her eveything because he or she is owe everything This oesnt mean that you are pepare to give anything whatsoever to this person, incluing what is ba r him or her. Obviously, paents an caregivers are there to try to gure out what is just an goo. Thats why thee ae chilrens rights that are not the same as the rights of aults. Aults have the task of thinking about what is just, even if they can never know exactly what its about. An ault who is j ust to chilren is not an ault who thinks he or she knows what is just youre going to stuy math an Chinese, youre going to wear jeans of this color, an youe going to take up this careerr if one takes math an Chinese, one can o lots of things, an so on. No An ault cannot know what is just precisely because it is not a question of knowing. However, he or she must still strive to think about whats best, an in a i ection r which in the en only love can point the way. As a consequencean I am going to stop aer this so that we have time r iscussionone coul say that to be just, once everything is sai an one, once the minimu
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o what is owed to everybody is recognized is to understand that e eryone has the right to be recognized. won't use the word love again since this word can cause us to mix up sentimental notions with other more serious ones We'll use another word instead: reogniion This recogni tion must be in n ite. t is a recognition without limits so it's undamentally impossible to realize it in its entiretyit is imossible to adjust. So now we can say that to be just is not to claim to now what is just to be just is to thin that there is still more just to be und or understood. To be just is to thin that justice has yet to be done that it can always demand more and can always go urther. n the history o the Second World War those who were called the Righteous Ones [Le Jses], according to a designation o the Jewish tradition om the Bible were people who not being Jewish saved Jews gave them shelter and protected them against the laws that were at a certain mo ment unortunately those o France and azi Germany Why were those people called the Righteous Ones? Because in spite o the law in spite o their natural anities not being Jewish not having the lin o religion or community with Jews they nonetheless said to themselves People cannot be persecuted because o their religion. t's not a good reason. Actually it's the most unjust reason in the world. t is totally unjust to say ou are being pun ished because you are Jewish Esimo Arab Malian or whatever. This is quite simply what we call racism and in this precise case racism as antiSemitism. So those who were called the Righteous Ones were quite simly those who new nothing about the peole they saved or tried to save oen at great ris to their own lives. 4
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All those people knew was the llowing: these people have the right to an innite recognition, without liit, in cluding at the risk of y own life. a not saying that this idea ust be the sole line of thought on the subject of the just and the unjust. But do think the idea that would have to doinate our thinking is that the just, this tie in the sense of the quality or the idea of being st, is giving to each person that which you dont even know he o she is owed All you know is that he or she is a person an that, as such, he or she has the right to an absolute respect You ust think this r yourselves. o one will ever be able to coe up to you and say This is what absolute justice is f soeone could say that, perhaps we wouldnt even have to bothe being just or unjust. We would only have to apply, rathe indlessly, what would be a law. Montreuil, October 1 , 006
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Questons and Answers
Which is ore ust, the le or the riht
That's a very ood question f can ake a bit of a caricature of thins, woud say that the riht and the e are distinuished fro one another by two dirent vi sions of ustice For the riht, ustice is iven by nature or by the natura order of thins The supposedy natura way thins nction is ust There are, r exape, inequaities in nature soe are physicay stroner and others have ore oney, even if it is a itte dicult to attribute that to nature Accordin to such thinkin, it is ony natural that hey shoud reain stroner or wealthier and ustice is done when these supposedy natura dirences are respected That is why the riht is not vorably disposed to the state ettin too bi The state shouldn't ipose too any aws, shouldn't eislate too uch, since individuals have to be abe to anae on their own As for those on the le, ustice is not iven in a natura way, and so it has to be ade And for that, we have to search r it That, think, is how one coud direntiate these two sides o the viewpoint of ustice To be sure, we could be ore precise about the atter in fact, we woud have to be To do that, we would need to distinuish between two rihts and two es One riht wants the state to have a very stron presence so hat it can ipeent what is believed to be a natura law for exape, the ct of bein French, born of parents who were theselves born in France, who were theselves born of parents born in France, and so on This scenario invokes a sort of natural ]LN
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law, and so natural justie would be realized when those born in this situation or, to use one of their expressions, good Frenh people," enjoyed a privieged treatment in omparison to others. The right that is alled liberal" is something dirent. Similarly, there is a seond version of the le, one that is pratially nonexistent today but that used to think it knew of what means the mehanisms of the state and pub li power ought to avail themselves to establish a new jus tie through authoritarian hannels These two extreme attitudes, on the right and on the le, both boil down to the idea that justie an be shown. " To put it very simply, either justie is in nature or it is in a poltial onguration yet to be established. This brings us bak to the idea that justie annot be shown" But there is still a fundamental dierene between these two: r the le, justie is still to be done. It is rst neessary to gure out what it is. When I und out what this dialogue was alled, I thought you'd use the word eqaliy a lot more than you did In t you haven't used it muh, so I'd like to know what you think of equality and justie.
You're right, I've hardly used the word eqay. I did use it at a irly entral plae in the disussion, but it's true that in what llowed, I talked mostly about the direne that exists within equality. Your question also intersets with the previous one regarding the direne between the right and the le. Equality is the rst priniple of justie. There is justie when, at the very least, there is equality, when all individuals are onsidered equal. We JLN
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could say ha he rs principle of jusice is equaliy and ha he las principle of jusice is also equaliy. Tha is wha I wan d o show you We are in a democraic coun ry which does no mean ha equaliy is assured bu i does mean ha he principle of equaliy is recognized I seemed o me imporan o show ha alhough i's easy enough o know wha equaliy demands in erms of he basic condiions of li schooling or healh i is less easy o know wha equaliy means in he conex of people who are all diren and singular This is where hings ge di cul bu j usice demands ha we hink abou i We have o keep in mind hough ha we canno raise he quesion of he equaliy of people in heir singulariy unil we have hough abou he equaliy of people insofar as hey all have a cerain number of needs ha have o be me in an equable way. Everyone mus have housing sheler and enough o ea Everyone has he righ o educaion work healh and so on Aer hose needs are me anoher demand begins ha is no nonegaliarian bu ha mus ex end as r as he direne of each person one by one Hisorically bere jusice appeared in he sense ha we undersand i oday here had always been wha we migh call a j usice of equaliy" Wha ha means is ha if you did somehing wrong o someone hen hey had he righ o do he same hing o you Bu his has o do wih a equaliy of srengh no a legal or poliical equaliy [lga 1it de dit]
I have a quesion. A h e beginning of e world you said ha hings worked according o he law of he sronges o how did he ideas of equaliy of jusice and o injusice come abou?
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The beginning of he world i no exacly he ame hing a he beginning of humaniy. A he beginning of he world i he jungle he grea primordial oup ou of which we are almo ure abou hi he ronge emerged. Bu he ronge are no necearily he mo reilien. Dinoaur perhap diappeared becaue hey be came oo big oo rong or perhap becaue volcanic aciv iy wa more powerful han hey were. A concern he beginning of humaniy hough of coure we know nohing abou i. I i no by going o ee The e r Fire, even if i i a good lm ha we will really become informed abou he beginning of humaniy. On he conrary we have o hink ha he beginning of humaniy coincide wih he beginning of equaliy and ha he ene of juice i here raighaway indiociable from men even if heyre alo in conic wi one anoher and making war launching heir in bludgeon a one an oher or barring each oher om huning he gazelle on each oher erriory. I ill doen preven he word h maniy om meaning recognizing oher a equal o o el ve" even if oher hing are of coure going o cloud he iue ince ome people are going o be phyically ronger while oher are going o have more preige One hing clearly how ha he r men were a en gaged a we are wih he ju and he unju and ha i language. Ever ince here have been human being here ha been language. And could we no ay ha language eally i he mo ju hing in he world For language o arie r u o be able o alk o each oher here ha o be muual recogniion. Language ignie ha we underand each oher and o underand each oher here ha o be
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equality That' what I nd o exating ute] about your quetion Yo baially aked how we eer ame to peak of the jut and of the unjut That' a ery intereting way of thnking about it At the beginning of a book alled The Politi, Aritotle, a Greek philoopher om the hird entury BeE, write that man i a politial animal Hee it not a matter of politi in the ene of the dierene between the ight and the le Rather, Aritotle i onerned with politi in the ene that man i an animal who by nature lie in oiety Why doe he lie in oiety? Ari totle ay that man lie in oiety beaue he poee language with whih to diu the jut and the unjut So you'e jut gued out the rt hapter of Aritotle Pol tic. Now you an buy the book and ead the ret Within the realm of what i onidered unjut, an thee be exeption that are atually jut? For example, let ay I kill you If I kill you beaue I dont like you, that unjut, but if I kill you beaue you tried to kill me then that j ut
Firt o, youre mitaken if you dont like me ! Im only kidding What i implied by your quetion i pre iely the reaon why I abandoned the word love beaue it i dangerou and riky But all the ame, I think we ould hae ued anothe word that play an important role r youth thee day, the word repect. Only, we hae to pay attention to the way in whih the word i ued, for repect thee day uually mean repet r the tronger" So omeone might be repeted beaue he or h e i a buly When you ay if I dont like you," one aume, of oure, LN
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that it's a questin f persnal prerence, which is, aer all, perctly nrmal At the very least, yu can't be rced t like peple Aer all, that's what iendship means Everyne has his r her iends, his r her clsest buddies, which is cmpletely nrmal but it des shw us hw dif cult it is t think and practice the recgnitin f the the persn in terms f what I called lve a little while ag. ut t cme back t yur questin, if I try t kill yu, d yu have the right t kill me ut f selfdense ? This is an extremely delicate questin One has t knw whether it's necessary t respnd t rce with rce Of curse, t dend neself against an aggressin, it is ust t use rce, a degree f frce that is as equal as pssible t that f the aggressr ut even if yu physically dend yurself against an aggressin, that desn't mean that yu're nw in a psitin t udge the ne wh was aggressive tward yu Justice demands that yu dend yursef and if yu have abslutely n ther means available t yu but t kil the ther, ustice wil invlve yur ding that ut if yu d have ther means at yur dispsal with which t avert the aggressin altgether r at least t ver pwer the aggressr, ustice demands hat yu use thse means In ther wrds, ustice extends further than simpy ding the same thing in return It asks why the aggressr did what he r she did That is hw the great passage t law is pened up, t the idea f law as the scial functining f a rm f ustice. Fr instance, that's hw the passage was made in antiquity frm a law f retaliatin t a law that, rst and remst, prceeds by way f speech and by way f an assessment f what is really at stake, ne 55
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that ass itself how it should understand the other persons behavior. There has been a law in eistence r a very long time, the law of the talion an eye r an eye, a tooth r a tooth hs law rers to the legal arrangements of ancient Judaism that are und in the Bible. In this law of the talion, we already nd the idea of a law involving an equality: if the other person cuts o my hand, I have the right to cut o his or her hand. But what is oen ignored is that this law of the talion was established in order to prevent a situation arising whereby if someone were to cut off my hand, I would then cut off both hands, both et, and his or her head. It was already a rm of regulation, of moderation So I cant rmulate the question in eactly te same way as you did One cannot say that, within the realm of injustice, just eceptions eist If someone wants to harm you, this is in ect unjust. But there are two stages in responding justly: the rst is the elementary response that aims at selfprotection, and the second comes down to a consideration of the person, which is obviously very di cult, indeed, perhaps impossible in practice From out of this law of an eye r an eye, something very mous happens in the history of our European culture Even i you arent Christian, youll still recognize this line from Christ in the gospels it was said to you an eye r an eye, a tooth r a tooth, but I tell you, if someone stries you on the right chee, turn to him the other also " (Mat thew 538-39. Obviously its completely untenable, this story of turning the other cee. We could as ourselves 56
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what it means, but that would be the subject of another dialogue.
Are there just wars
That's also a very good question, but a dicult one. It is complex because war is a phenomenon that does not concern individual people but rather states or institutions. One could s ay that all w ar is unjust because of the harm it brings to people who didnt do anything wrong. To sim plify things, well say that those people are caught within the logic of the states waging war. In a certain sense, there are practically no wars between states anymore, since there are no longer states r whch one recognizes the right to wage war, either to dend their own territory or to con quer that belonging to others. In a certain way, even though we still use the word wr there are no longer wars today corresponding to that rmer relation between states. Also, even if it was considered j ust to wage war in the past, this always l, at least partly, on people other than those who entered into the war, on civilians. And there are wer and wer distinc tions between civilians and the military today. o what in the past could constitute a principle of justice between statesthe right to wage war against each other has disappeared today. Almost all the wars currently taking place in the world are j ustied by the idea of justice: it's said that it is unjust r a particular country to be governed by a particular person or that it is an injustice r ertain economic interests to be threatened by some or monopolized by others. For instance, certain states have gone ]LN
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to war in Iraq r supposedly demorati priniples They laim to dend justie, a justie higher than that of all states In othe plaes, it's te opposite rebel groups or revolutionaries ae ghting against an established power in the name of justie The ontemporary world is in a very peuliar situation: war is being waged all over the plae in the name of justie. So there are neither j ust wars nor un just wars anymore For that matter, tere is no longer war in te strit sense of te term . We are now in a situation in wih a sort of onfusion has been produed between an idea of general justie (everyone has th e right to") and an idea of genealized ombat, a elation of res nd in tis sense I tink one ould say that tere is no just war today This question is not so easily settled, tough I am struk that you would raise the issue, given how young you are. For older people like me, it is a question weve been asking ourselves regularly ove the past twenty years or so. But an it really be the ase tat there are no just wars?" Tis was a partiularly pessing question, fo ex ample, during te war in Kosovo Was tis war just or unjust? This question an only be raised within analyses that are no longer onduted in terms of states First, i the Kosovo war, it was preisely not a state that was being dealt wit but the Serbian provine of Kosovo. This thinking is distint om the old logi of states and onerns a general morality or an ideal of a great demorati justie. We an rst ask ourselves what onlusions are to be drawn om situations like te one in Kosovo Seond, and this question is more serious, we an also ask ourselves about tis grand idea of just and universal demoray 5
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Ho easily can it be distinguished om the economic, strategic, and political interests of certain countries What you said is very important, because today humanity has to ask itself ho to develop an idea of justice that is obviously no longer the j ustice of states that possess the right to age ar against one another So this is one of those moments hen j ustice demands of us that e retun to the la and that attempts be made to rmulate las, in this case, las r humanity There are several intenational tribunals that judge ar crimes, since there are such things as laws of ar, but these tribunals are not recognized by all countries It is as i� in France, you ere to say no, I rese to recog nize the courts in Montreuil It can't nction like that My question relates back to that of the young lady Do the accepted denitions of the jut and the unut have the same signicance in all languages, religions, and philosophies? Q
ou are asking too much of me, especially as con cerns languages When you speak of languages, religions, and philosophies, you are raising very dirent cases In a religion, there is one justice that comes bere all the oth ers, and that is the act of rendering hat is due to the god of the religion If the idea of religion has a meaning, i t is to give priority to the right la dit] of a god considered as a person who is superior to humanity and to hom it is just to give hi s due This ca n be done through prayers or adoration, through a particular ay of li or a particular ay of consecrating his li, and so on According to this denition, a religion cannot be j ust, but that doesn't mean
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that a religion is incapable of recognizing what is called the justice o men, nor does it mean that justice toward god must come in second place The point is that justice toward god must never contradict the j utice of men If it does contradict the justice of men, even if this j ustice is not perctly established and xed, we'd have to say that this religion, or what in this case was called religion, is not just I am asking this question r Simon, who is sitting beside me How can we recognize what is just and what is not just?
We cant recogze it easily But there are simple things that can be recognized as either fair or not ir ute u iute]: it is not fair that your neighbor in the cateria has a helping that is twice the size of yours It is also not fair that someone be naturally stronger than an other I am not really talking about handicaps here, but even that someone be sicker or have more sensitive lungs or ears than others These examples are easy to recognize But what is truly just r everyone at the same time as r each person individually? This, one cannot recognize, since it is not given in advance It must be searched r, invented, and found, each time anew More is always nec essary one can never tell oneself that things are sufciently just as they are One is never sufciently just To think in that way is already to begin to be just LN
I am thinking of the azis, and even today, of the ex treme right in France, both of which privilege one popula tion over another How can people stand to know that
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tyr acting n a truy unjust ay and to do it nontss? T probm is tat tos o act in suc a ay do not kno it Ty tink ty ar bing just t is important to broadn t issu and not to imit it to t cas o t ais, ic is t grat dangr o tis trrib istory t is spciay important not to pus tis pisod asid by saying tat it as just ts ray trrib pop No, vry prson or vry group o pop convincd tat or s knos at is j ust and unjust, convincd tat or s is doing j ustic, convincd tat or s dos not av to mak t rt to bcom mor j ustvry prson o tis typ is dangrous T bginning o justic, as av sn, is in kno ing tat on is nvr sucinty just Tis princip is t xact opposit o t on dscribd arir Onc again, Scarnggr or som guy in a payground o its somon in t ac is convincd is acting justy itr t otr guy dsrvd it or, i didnt dsrv it, it is just bcaus m strongr tan is Tis qustion coms up again in trms o knoing i it is just to tak rvng pysicay Witout going so r as to tak about racism, you a kno about t njymnt many o us can gt out o making somon sur o is simpy akr tan ar A o you av sn it on noug at scoo, rigt ? T akst cannot dnd im or rs and somon o i s strongr gts a cru pasur out o pstring suc a prson or gtting into a scrap it im or r But i yo say to a guy (r it usuay is a guy) o dos suc a ting at your doing is unjust," migt rspond Just,
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unjust I dont give dmn" Tht is one possibe e sponse In res onding lie tht, he is thining the just nd the unjust in terms of lw I don 't give dmnI dont hve to obey the lw" But he cn so respond by sying Unjust how so Im the one who decides wht jutice is " He who clims to enrce his own j ustice therefore hs his own ide of justice, nd I might dd tht this notion is not completey se It hs to do with the ide tht every person ha justice in him or hersef or, better stil, tht every person i site of justice on his or her own, site where justice must be done Perhps I did not insist on this enough When I sid tht justice is wys done in retion to others, I didn't men to suggest tht I hve nothing to contribute nd tht I must ony submit But, in the n l instnce, it does not l to me to now wht is j ust Justice is ectivey mde in retion to others I m nother in retion to you, just s you re nother in reltion to me To the extent tht I m only me, I m limited in my possibiities for thining, understnding, nd ppreciting wht is owed to the other, wht is owed to you I cnnot, on my own, decide wht is ust r you nd r everyone (The ignal r the end o the dialogue i given and the audiene applaud.)
Now, is it rey just to pplud The honor of this ppluse shouldn't rely be directed t meI hve only tled to you bout things tht lots of peope bere me hve thought bout nd discussed for centuries
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e call them Little Dialgues," and et the ae never little The idea f little dialogue seems prl chsen; the are, rather, dialoguefor little ones [pu les petits] But what des little one mean? n an case, this will have t be a great dialogue tda because we are dealing with a great subject O curse, all the subjects are great, but must cnss that prpsed this ne t Gilberte msel whereas she prpsed r sug gested all the thers t me Aer the last Little Dialgue" did n the just and the unjust, tld Gilberte that lve still had t be discussed in these Little Dialgues" She replied, G r ight ahead, then" At the time, didnt real ize hw ver dicult a subject it wuld be t talk abut, whether r adults r r children The subject is bviusl ver imprtant We have t talk abut it because we all have smething at stake in the wrd love and i n the images that g with it
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Up to what point, though, is it obvious that we have to talk bout it In a ertain way, we ould say that it is neessary to talk about love and that, above all else, love must be expressed Love is expressed and, in being ex pressed, it is always being reated. All of love resides i the t of saying I love you to someone I love youwe all say it and we've all said t. Even the youngest hildren here know what it's like to be enouraged to say I love you, I love you mommy more so than I love you daddy, even though both phrases are a bit onventional or sripted And then there is I love you, even the youngest among you have perhaps said I love you to other people of your own age, to others who are neither hums nor buddies or iends In a ertain sense I love you says it all everything is ontained in I love you When we say I love you, we say everything. We all know that we are saying something dierent om delarations like Im happy to be with you, to see your ousins, r example, or old iends We're happy, but we don't say I love you to them o, when we say I love you we are saying something really very spei. The question then beomes: What are we saying What does I lov e you mean I an tell you that nobody an give us the meaning of these words, nobody I ould show you thousands of pages and thousands of books arguing that nobody an say what these words mean, or that the sense of these words is always beyond what we an say about them, that their mean ing resides in the sole t of their being said When I say I love you to someone, the sense of love is there, but not neessarily in a omplete or immediate way I ould be 66
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mstaken, o deep down I mght not really agee wth what I'm sayng But when we're sayng t sncerely, we know that we ae expressng the most ntmate thng that can be sad Intate s the atn superlatve of nteror. A supelatve s a m that says somethng to ts greatest powe, and the atn nteror means more nsde than" So ntus means the nnemost of" The ntmate s what s nnermost n me, what s deepest n me, and so what s also most secret n me, most reserved and most properly mne, 1 nasmuch as ths can be mne wthout my knowng t myself an wthout my beng able to explan t When I say I love you, I am sayng the most ntmate thng, both r me and r the othe person, because I a touchng that peson at hs or her nnermost For ths rea son, the topc s very embarrassng and dcult to engage Is t even a subject one can engage That s not clear I' sure that some of you were embarrassed when you un out that ths would be a alogue about love There are drent knds of embarassment, though Perhaps you asked yourselves, But how can we talk about love" So you mght also be uneasy and curous to hear what I'l actually manage to say on the subject We have all had such complcated thoughts and elngs at the prospect of talkng about love Perhaps youre ready to laugh or make fun of the whole natter Oen whe young people talk about love to each other, they laugh about t When chldren see lovers kssng n publc, they laugh and make fun of them At other tmes, we mght look upon l overs wth nostalga f we ourselves o not have lovers We know that laughter can often be the expresson 6
o ebarassent We laugh beause we are eling soething port nt, soething intiate. We laugh in oder to dend ourselves o the attration o the sination that we are elng. Moreover, soe o you, or rather, perhaps soe o the grls present, thought we were going to talk about true love, about that big event that oes at the end o airytales and roane stories. Although suh stories are u less widespead today than they used to be, you still kn ow the rula two people ll in love, get arried, and then have lots o hildren This is not quite the iage o true love that we have today. Love is everywhere, even in Ateri. And yet all oi strip storiesexept roanti onesaddressed to hildren avoid putting their haraters into aorous situations. n Ateri, love is treated in a huoous way Even in Harry Pottrhow an one not talk about Harry Potter today? love is present However, as always, the hero ust be a little eoved ro love. The love story plays out between Herione and Ron, and other love stories irulate around the haraters. Love is all around us, and it intrigues us Love eletries us, and r very good reasons, sine it is so intiate and iportant As was trying to gure out a way to talk about it, thought o the rhye love you a little, a lot, passionately, adly, not at all. This little rhye has perhaps been orgotten today. Do you know it? (Epreion oaration in the o.) Yes, even so. You say the rhye while pluking the petals o a daisy. ou pluk the one by one, saying love you a little, a lot, passionately, adly, not at all, and you ontinue in that way, depending on the nuber o 6
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petals. Of ourse you a also say he o she loves me a little, a lot," ad so o. f its a oxeye daisy, there ae may moe petals, so people oe heat b plukig them i buhes. Obviously they do so i oder to lad o passioately" o madly." As was learig about this hyme, foud out that this game is to be played al l o its ow. f we dot heat, if we take the rst petal ad proeed aordig to the um be of petals, the game is a way of osultig oes tue The idea of rtue is iterestig i this otext, r a elemet of hae is always ivolved whe lovers meet We eessarily d those with whom e ll i love y hae. Certai people do meet oe aother i a ogaized way; moe ad moe, i t, oe hears about people meetig eah othe though datig servies ad the like. But at the ed of the day, there will always be a elemet of hae ivolved t is ot the hae of the meetig that is importat but above all the t that we aot meet the other perso y eessity pure ad simple o oe a say you have to meet someoe like this or that" i order to ll i love Ad this is very importat Lets leave the issue of hae there ad take up the sequee of this l ittle rhyme. t is woderlly ostruted. You wouldt th ik it, but the ostrutio is ver y e. ts all there I love you a little, a lot" You already kow this is ot love. f someoe asks you whether you love them ad you respod yes, love you a lot," youve already disappoited them. This meas that I love you" is absolute. We must say love you," period. We aot quatify it 69
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Liewise if I say I ove more than Y" Anne ore than Juie this means that I dont love either of them. I ove ou a itte a ot" means that I appreiate you as a person but this an appy equaly we to obets: I lie tanerines but I prer strawberries I lie ravioi but I r prer Frenh ies with ethup. I an aso say it of peo peI really lie Steve or I really lie Leiabut you now that this sti isnt ove. I ove you a itte a ot" means that I nd you attrative or that I ie you. It means that Im happy that I now you and that I et to do thins with you but the emphasis is entirely on me. I am ivin an estimate or an appraisal of you and its in rerene to that that I an say a itte a ot" or even more reay a ot." But when I say I ove you" I annot ive you a measurement I annot say if it is more or less. On the ontrary I ove you" is absoute that s detahed from everythin" in Latin detahed from every measurement and every omparison. This tes us somethin important: true ove beins beyond every possibiity of settin up quantities or derees or of main omparisons. True ove beins on the order of the absoute. When we an estabish quantities or mae omparisons by ontrast we are entirey alone in the air. When I say that I realy ove ies with ethup and that I realy ove Leila it is about me: I am statin my taste or my prerene. At this point Leila and ies with ethup have beome interhaneabe. So at moments ie these people are bein treated a ittle ie obets. In love we are two. From the moment we are two everyhin hanes. There is no more deree no more prerene. One person addresses the other and if the
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other person replies with I love you" then the two people have entere into a unique relation that cannot be com pare with anything else. It oesnt mae sense to say that John an Leila love each other more than Steve an Roberta o. If it oes mae sense the people in one of the couples ont really love each other or else theyre jus really goo friens. There are many egrees of frienship or nness bu t none of them has anything to o with two beings who have chosen each other in an absolute way. With love we are no longer in the realm of comparison or of I lie/enj oy him or her. " Of course we o tae pleasure in each other but that has to o with something else again Im going to have to siestep two issues here because if I ont theyll tae up too much time. The rst has to o with what it means to love onesel Loving oneself is no t the same a s egotism.2 The secon issue has to o with the love parents have r their chilren an chilren have r their parents. A long as we still have our parents or even if they have ie we are in a relation of love with them. But you certainly sense that is not the same thing as the other love weve been iscussing since we int choose our parents an sometimes we have the sense that loving them is an obliga tion one that we ont alway want. Sometimes we ont love our parents at all an that can also be true of parents as well. So this love is ifferent rom true love but it oes still have to o with 0ve.3 Now I come to the thir moment in the rhyme pas sionately." Passionatelywhat is passion? Passion means that we submit. Something happens to us tha is oppoe to action. Love happens to us. We ont submit to it lie
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we do to a punishment to an accident or to boredom. ubmitting can also mean that we receive or welcome it with pleasur . But we do receive it. I t comes om the other person from elsewhere. We receive love even when we give it. Thats what is important. When we love we are giving love to another person but we are giving something that we have received om elsewhere from the other person perhaps beyond the relation to oneself and beyond the others selfrelation. This comes from nowhere and everywhere and allows us to address another person by being captivated or taken by him or her. We are captivated by this person because of his or her absolute uniqueness and not because of persona qualities not because he or she is nny beautil intelli gent or clever not to speak of rich." If I say I love Louis because he has the very latest videogame console" then I dont love Louis. Even if I say I love Ocane because of he gorgeous blond hair I dont love Ocane. Of course hair and other qualities proper to the person do count but what I receive in love or what creates passion is what we call the uniqueness of the per son. Its him or her and thats all that matters. There is a word r this the beloved [llu]. Perhaps youve heard the expression the one my heart has chosen [ lu de coeur ]." For example in France we elect [] ministers regional counselors the president of the RepublicI dont understand why I am hearing laughter. We elect the presi dent of the Republic and he can choose [lire] his lover but the two uses of lire are obviously very dirent. The election of a minister or the president is done by a maj ority. But the lu in love involves a choice that is not made by a 2
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majorty. Choe here means that a erson s hosen, stn gushe or set aart rom all others. Ol eressons lke the one my heart has hosen" make a goo eal of sense. Ths exresson rers to who ever has been hosen by my heart an by my aaty to reeve, to el, an to allow a erson to ome to me as a erson, r what he or she s an neenently of every thng he or she has. Ths rene between what someone s an what someone has, between beng an havng s extremely m ortant here. We love a beng: reet r a oule of mn utes on someone you love, an you alreay know that you love that ths erson exsts an not what he or she has, whether hysal qualtes or muh eeer ones. All those thngs ount, but t s muh more mortant that ths er son exsts. Lets take another wor you know well, one that wll robably make you laugh, dearet [hr]. You often hear your arents sayng earest" to eah other. Ths wor s so omletely hakneye an overuse that eole mostly say t beause theyve eveloe a habt of ong so. t haens a lot that eole who all eah other earest" no longer hol eah other ear at all. Ths s a ase of hab an of language. The wor makes us laugh; t just seems so rulous am thnkng of hlren wo make fun of lovers, not ther arents, who arent lovers anymore, but twentyyearol lovers on th e ark benhes of the Luxem bourg who get on your nerves a lttle, so you make fun of them. You laugh to eah other about how theyre allng eah other earest" an about how rulous t souns.
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The verb to hold dear coes o the faily of dear in the sense o this watch is dear" or expensive [hre]. To hold dear or to cherish [hri] eans to give soeone a price You ight be surprised to n out that the word herih belongs to the sae ily as harity- both coe o the Latin word aru, dear" Charity does not ean dear" in the sense of giving oney to poor people For Christians, that eant giving soeone an absolute price Christians gave everyone an absolute price, but Christian love is another question altogether hen I say dearest," I a using the superlative, which is the strongest in a series and which you can hear when adults say, also a bit conventionally, y dear" In polite language, we say dear soandso" Dear" eans that I hold you in high estee, that I give you a price But if we can abstract it o all of its wear and tear, dearest [h] eans the one who I cherish absolutely, the ost, hi or her to who I give a unique and inco parable price, a price beyond all price You will be even ore surprised, as I was ysel� to discover that the word are coes o the sae ily In very old French, this word was haree. The caress is the gesture we ake toward tose who we cherish, those to who we accord the greatest price This indicates two things to us: rst, that it is a atter of giving a price or according a unique value to soeone, and second, that it is also a atter of aking gestures that correspond to this value hat gestures ight correspond to such a value? No gesture on the order of having can correspond to this value And rightly so Of course, we can or gis, and i t is 4
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understood that we give presents to those we love In ct, it will e Valentines Day soon, and the Internet and all the stores are giving us all kinds of ideas for gis to or those we love But we know that gis cannot correspond to any love, and that they can even mask an asence of love The gi can e a translation of the cherishing But it can also translate nothing at all, or it can simply translate the desire to show that I have made tremendous sacrices to e ale to or such a necklace, a diamond or whatever The gesture of love is a caress, not necessarily a sensual caress ut one in which I address the eing of the other, address his or her presence The caress is a touch that expresses a particular action We avoid touching people we don't know at all In the suway, we touch each other as little as possile Sometimes were rced to, ut this is only ecause it's so crowded And esides, if we do touch someone, it can e taken r a comeon or r the ody language of an approach The caress teaches us that what counts in love is the presence of the other, the touch of the other, and, in a certain sense, nothing (of the) other [rien dautre] What does this pure presence with nothing (of the) other mean ? It means that the only thing that counts is that the eing of the other e in me, inseparale om me In love, the other person does not turn into me, though He or she is not identical to me, ut still we two are inseparale We cannot live without each other, as they say, without r all th at ecoming one, y remaining precisely two There are risks involved in all this, great risks We can e mistaken, and we can confuse the image of the other person that we have in us, the other person such as we see 5
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him r her, with the real pern, wh i necearily ir ent m th image Every practice f lve cnit in a bac an rth between the real pern an the pwerful image I have f him r her ne f thi i imple, an it can eaily bac r e Yu al nw the ng by Rita Mit u, Strie f Lve En balyin General." Lve pen nt a very great ri, but thi ri i the meaure f the increible value we place n anther per n. We mae him r her thi valuable becaue we nee t , becaue we receive mething in return. Lve tell u that thing are never quite right with u when were alne Were nt mae t be alne, ut a we're al nt mae t be in large grup. Thi en't mean that everything i autmatically n e when were with anther pern. But when we are with him r her, we nw that mething ging n," a they ay We are mae t be in relatin with anther pern, ne with whm me thing' ging n"mething that never enable but that a real relation in the trng ene f the wr. Im n t aying that we ar e all , r alway, mae t pen ur entire live with ne an the ame pern. It' true, thugh, that lve e ay thi lve ever aer" We prmie t lve each ther rever, but then metime it all ver three ay later. But that' part f the ri f thi ablute cmmitment. + + +
Let' nw mve n t the lat tw part f the ryme, maly, nt at all." In ct, weve alreay entere int the iue f maly." There i a rt f mane in the ri, 6
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te engagement in te very at f erising f giving t te ter persn and f reeiving m te ter persn a value beynd all value. We depart frm all tat is reasn able in terms f relatins between peple: we are engaged wit ea ter mre tan we uld be in any ter rela tin. We pen up t ea ter mve tward ea ter and expse urselves t a great deal s it is very diult t knw at wat pint te ter persn migt be asking t mu. Am I rigt t feel tat e r se is sking t mu f me r is te prblem wit me nt knwing w t g far enug? Tis is an extremely deliate issue dan gerus and diult. Su a pwerl and unique relatin between tw peple is very diult Ea f tem is risk ing a lt beause tey must bt break m teir sense f selsatisfatin and m teir selntainment frm wat is alled narissism" My alm is endangered wen Im in lve fr lve desnt make yu alm ut wen a braing disquiet tip ver int a trmented ne it ant g n any lnger. At te extreme its even pssible r tw peple t destry ea ter Te dream f vers in all great lve stries i f dying tgeter like Rme and Juliet. Very ften ld uples w ave lived tgeter r teir entire lives expe riene te desire t die tgeter. It is very diult fr tese ld uples t imagine ne f tem surviving te ter and ntinuing alne in life. Te idea f dying tgeter sug gests tat deat may be te nly way f mpletely being tgeter wereas by ntrast tere is nting mre alive tan lve. ut tere is als a srt f madness wen lve asks t mu. Lve is trilling and it an make yu want t d
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anyting. But in the end it can also ask too much o the other person and o yoursel. It is a kind o madness, but all te sam , it is a madness tat sows its real worth, a worth beyond measure. Love demands a total reedom and a total devotion rom the other person. Lets ce it in a very real sense, the demand o love is a contradictory one. In te game o the daisy, we always hope to land on madly." Passionately" is already not too bad. Right ater madly," tough, you land on not at all," because it can all come to a alt or ll at r no reason, just as it began. But tat doesnt mean you have to give it all up aer te rst minor disagreement. I you do tat, it wasnt love. But i the disagreement is greater and goes on r a wile, it could be that it is bot necessary and proper to break things o The not at all" o the rhyme means that love, even te truest love, can always be lost. I t is never guaran teed. I a love were guaranteed, it would not be love. We do make vows, tough, as in I promise, I swea" It is always necessary to make vows in love. But as the great pilosopher acques Derrida, who died a w years ago, said, we know that promises would not exist without the possibility o not keeping them. The promise allows r te possibility o its not being kept. In other words, a promise is not a contract. There is no such thing as a contract o love, but there is a vow. In making a vow, I am commtting mysel� wich means tat I want to keep it but maye I wont and tat would not necessarily be a mistake. This raises another issue, the issue o Whose ult is it? " i it doesnt work out . . . Perhaps tere is never, or very rarey, only one person at ult, but
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only he esenil fgiliy, he errible giliy nd dif culy of love Sill, he big wod in relion o love hs go o be del ity. Once gin, his doesn' men h if love comes o n end or if one person is unihful o he oher, someone is necessily ul Bu h doesn' chnge he fc h he word of love is delity, which comes om he sme mily of wods s ondene [l con nce nd engageent [les nilles Jus s wer people ge mried hese dys hn hey used o, wer sill ge engged The an or he ane refers o he one who promises, who besows his or her condence o nce," his or her deliy, which comes close o th [i n he ps, o sy h you were com mied o someone," you'd sy h you hd given your ih o someone [donner a i quelquun " This isn' bou being commied o doing his or h bu, bove l l, bou being commiing o being wih he oher person nd he ohe person, o being in unique relion wih wh he oher person is nd wih he fc h he or she is4 Moneuil, Februry 2, 2008
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Quesions and Answers
Q[]:5 read somewhere that loving is essentally the same
as wanting to be loved and wanted to know if that's true. t's both true and not true Everything is so very difult in what you're asking Of ourse to love is to want to be loved t's a request. f say love you" to someone am asking him or her to love me too want the love of the other person to hoose me and to reognize me as unique. an live my delaration of love in suh a way that this request and this expetation get the upper hand But regardless whenever say love you" am also asking for that whih give also an't say that when love am giving everything without expeting anything in re turn either No we have to say that in love the gi and the request are indistinguishable om eah other.
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Q[] n one of your parenthetial remarks you talked
about loving yoursel and sometimes we say that you have to love yourself bere you an love someone else wouldn't say that you have to start by loving your self but it ertainly is important not to hate yourself. We have to be lear on what loving oneself means Many philosophial and spiritual disussions have revolved around the idea of selflove One rm of selove is a withdrawal into oneself as i one were giving oneself pre erene over others This is alled egotism and annot really be alled love" There is another rm of sellove in whih we relate to ourselves as if to another person n love we are two so we
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alo have to be two in ellove. One mut love in oneelf the poibility of loving the other [lautrui]. In thi cae, I am not giving myelf prerence and I am alo not with drawing into myelf. But I dont have a negative relation to myelf of hatred or elrgetlne, either I have con dence in myelf a one who i capable of loving another peron [ ] Wy i it o dicult to ay I love you r the rt
time? Not only te rt time, but youre right, it i a little more difcult the rt time. Saying I love you i dicult becaue we know how enormou thi declaration i. It ay it all, it even ay too much. Were afraid the other peron will reply ot me. What are we waiting r when we ay I love you ? JLN
I love you too Of coure ! A thinker named Roland Barthe wrote A Lovers Disourse Fgents in which there i a long note on poible repone to I love you, from Not me to Me too Of coure, we are waiting r the other peron to ay Me too, becaue the only ene of I love you i that the other peron love me to.6 I t i what I am aking r in giving my love. We know that we are declaring too much and that we run the rik of hearing Not me. So it normal to be afraid. The more aaid we a re, the more we put aying it and the more we enter into the truth JLN
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of how a lover els. But obviously it's imortant not to wait too lon g either. Q[]: Can we really seak of lov when it IS not recirocated Paradoxically yes. I really can love someone who is unresonsive to my love. It is ossible r me to love this erson truly r me to have discerned or touched some thing in them which they themselves ignore something to which they cannot or do not want to give access. y love is not lse because it really is directed toward the other erson. The resonse of the other erson might not be uttered or exressed but it nonetheless reveals a truth about them. This is a dicult oint and it would take a long time to analyze in detail. One might say that when we declare our love and the other erson isn't execting it this declaration of love will reveal to the other erson the ossibility that he or she is caable of loving and being loved. Love isn't something I know myself to have at my disosal ready to go. No love must be revealed to me. I declare my love because the other erson reveals my love to me. Even if nothing has been declared to me something about the other erson has come to touch me silently and without his or her knowing it. t that moment I say I love you" and I touch the very lace in him or her o which my love has come to me. The other erson might not know and might not resond. It oen haens that the other erson is taken aback or surrised and cannot come u with a resonse. For the other erson can only answer e too" if he or she was already reared to say I love
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you" I c just s esily throw the other perso ito tizzy by syig I love you" s I c led him or her to discover tht, deep dow, this ws wht he or she ws witig r [] Why does oe hve to sy I love you" r the other to ow it? Thts ver y good questio Sometimes we do s y it without exctly syig it we show it, we express it I sese, I love you" hs both the dvtge d the disd vtge of beig sid, of beig expressed i words, but i words tht sy much more th they re cpble of expliig If someoe sys I love you" to you d you sk r expltio, the perso will sy Im ot relly sure I do ow tht I d you very pretty d youre very ice Id relly lie to kiss you" If you replied yes, but wht else? the other perso will ot be ble to expli y further The behvior of someoe i love c sy lot, however, whether were wre of it or ot There is certi wy of beig ttetive to the other perso, of tig cre d of beig thoughtful towrd them, ot to spe of givig gis It is oe sid tht there is look of love, d sometimes we me of it For istce, we tl bout the eyes of someoe i lovewe used to sy googoo eyed" Whe youre i love, youre little ve ou llow yourself to be mzed by thigs, d you dot py much ttetio to people roud you Youre ecsttic i certi sese; you dot relly see ythig ut beyod the exmple of googoo eyes, the loo of perso i love relly c sy quite lot bout it JLN
Oter than that, we somtimes also say I love you" because we've had enough of the ct that the other person hasn't undertood. It could also be that the othe person has indeed understood, but that he or she is waiting r it to be said As long as it is n ot said, in a certain sense, it is not there, or it is there as a eling but not as a commit ment or an engagement. As long as we haven' t said I love you," we haven't said anything. If you say okay, so you're in love" to someone who's being extremely nice and attentive, he or she might reply no, not at all" so as to avoid a commitment I love you" is already a vow, a rmidable statement that we're aaid of When we say I love you," we're swearing to something whethe we want to o not [] Why does love sometimes make us doubt the delity of the othe You'e asking a question about ealousy Love makes us doubt the delity of the othe person because delity has nothing to rely on except avowed ithfulness, since that's all delity is So we're necessarily nervous, at least at the start We ask ourselves if the other person is truly responding to our expectations or if he o she really is committed in the same way as we are. We will never have any proof of it, or any guarantee. This anxiety is normal, it is constitutive of love. Love is agile and apprehensive b nature Jealousy is also a terrible and allconsuming eling that can develop in a vey dangerous way, since someone who is ealous can destroy a relationship if that ealousy ends up being ununded Why is it like that? Because in love we want the other to be completely r us This eling LN
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is exclusive Being and having are on a continuum, which means that they can never be completely separated: I want to be with the other person and I also want to possess them. Possession is a part of love lovers mutually possess each other If something in me should push this desire to possess a little too r, Ill end up wanting to possess everything about them I wont even want the other person to go out for ve minutes Some jealous people can go crazy If the other person goes out to buy a loaf of bread, they ask Where were you Who did you see" So there is suh a thing as a pathological state of jealousy Later on, youll be able to read an author like Proust who knew a lot about pathological jealousy This illness is the development o something entirely natural about love Without going as r as the great illnesses of jealousy, jealousy is nonetheless a danger to all of us, especially when we are young, since we are more insecure then, more aaid that the loved one will allow himself or herself to be seduced by others We cannot always be sure that were the most attractive one and yet, what I was trying to say is that love goes beyond seduction and also goes beyond pleasing" Q[] Do you think that love can be eternal ?
First of all, as a result of being so conditioned by my jobbecause I am a philosopherI would have to ask you to use the word eteal correctly, because it does not mean sempiternal" Eternity is not what the scholastics o the Middle Ages called sempiternity Sempiternity is what lasts rever Eternal means what is outside time" You all know the song by Dalida, The Story of a Love Eteral JLN
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and Banal." Bu in everyday language we always speak of eernal love, so Ill sop here wih my pedani lile remark. Of ourse a love an be eernal. Our idea and our image of love represen i as somehing eernal. A love an be eernal, ouside of ime: i begins and hen i no longer has anying o do wih duraion. A sweaing of love onains he idea ha love is everlasing, and his ould no e oherwise; we anno say I am going o love you r hree monhs." Thas wha is alled a holiday love air he kind ha lls magazines. The rashy, ype of magazine alks abou suh holi day love airs and gives us advie abou hem. There youll n d a moraliy, an ehis, and an aesheis aording o whih is normal o go on holiday and go ou wih a boy or a girl no even hree monhs bu r hree weeks or even r one week, wihou any ommimen whaso ever. This is no love bu seduion. I belongs in he realm of I love you a lile, a lo," even if i seems more suied o he olors of passionaely." For a love o las rever, i akes a lo of grae given by irumsanes and a lo of srengh. I also akes somehing (bu wha?) ha allows for new beginnings or r oninuaions, beause a love an survive rises and in d eliies. Las year, he philosopher and soiologis Andr Gorz died. Perhaps some aduls here heard abou he book he published a lile while bere he died. He died wih his wi; hey ommied suiide ogeher. Earlier, hey had deided o kill hemselves when hey beame oo sik or oo old, and hey did i. His book is a leer o his wi in whih he ells he sory of heir li ogeher. ou an ell 6
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that this love, which lasted an entire ltime, was very strong, since toward the end o f his li, when they're very old, he writes that he still loves her physically, that he loves her body and loves to caress her Their common political engagement, through which they ame to know each other, certainly played a large role n addition to their love r each other, they shared a cause, an ideal, and a battle Q[]: hat's the story with imaginary loves ? You mean when you imagine that you love someone? JL
Yes JL
omeone wh o exists, o r not ?
he could exist ither i n the imagination or in reality But wait, these are two very dierent cases For ex ample, you imagine that you're in love with Lara Cro (the boy m kes )you don't li ke her, this Cinderell a ?
JL
No, I'm not talking about ctional characters! o, you imagine that you're in love with someone you know ?
JL
Yes, that's it This rings us back to the question Can one love without being loved in rturn? " You enjoy imagining that
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you love oando, bu you don wan o ay or you an' ay Or ndeed, you know n advane ha you won' ge a ove anwer n reurn In your magnaon, do you ay I love you" or no o Okay So, I mgh be nkerng around a lle b n your head or your body here, bu one ould ay ha you're reang an mage o he oher peron and ha you enjoy magnng her preene, bu you'd never ell hem o Th very nereng and ome bak o wha I ad a momen ago In love, we bng abou a dvon om he oher To he exen ha we are arred oward he loved one by all or o quale and parulare, we reae an mage o hem ha we arry around n u. Th mage, even ha haraer belongng o ha peron, neearly dn om he real peron, an d a gap or on an are, beaue he real peron reveal hmel or herel o be more han ju he mage I have o hm or her or beaue I have dealzed her oo muh. A he ame me, we love a real peron Th all very delae. One oluon o avod uh on o be onen wh he mage, bu I hnk ha aer a whle you evenually wll realze ha ' only an mage Bu even when we do love omeone real, ' mporan o reognze ha we alo love an mage So, hng have o go n boh dreon, wh he real peron gong oward he mage and he mage gong bak oward he real peron Enjoy wha happen nex n your magnaon! ]LN
V Q[C]: Do you have to want to love
o, beause it's not eally a question of will I think it's vey ae that someone isn't pulle by the esie to love, an vey iult too. I f someone is not pulle in suh a way at least one in thei lives, this shows a eal iulty o a limit But I eally have to insist on what I sai ealie, that at st love omes to us, that it is sent to us om elsewhee The entie taition epesents love as a foe, o as a go shooting aows So it's ae that love oesn't ome, but, at the same time, it's not us to want it If we show no will o no onsious esie to love, that's ust ne; we simply have to wait an it usually oes ome.
JLN
Q[C]: How an one know if one eally loves the ight
peson That's exatly itone an't know! Though we o have a numbe of tos with whih to make a ugment about this, namely, the attibutes of the pesonfom his o he appeaane to his o he haate Then thee is the t that we on't meet ust anyboy We ae in a etain el of possible enountes, epening on how we live an on the extent of the openness given to us by ou paents, whih an eithe be quite boa o an be onne to a patiula soial milieu So we on't lak gouns fo hoosing Thee ae atually plenty of givens, many of whih we ae not awae o but what it is about the othe peson that attats us, what makes us esie the othe pesonall that esapes us The question as to why some one is moe attate to blones o to people who ae petite N
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or tin is extremely subtle and, in oint o t, unanswerable We all know that there is something in ertain es and in ertan harateristis that reates a kind of eo in us Tis is unanalyable, down to the ore Tat's why we annot say whether this erson is the rigt one, sine a lot of eole have brown hair or ave a artiular tye of intelligene, kindness, or harm It is for tat reason tat I soke of risk But it is reisely beause of this risk and tis hane that it is also so beautiful: one is turned toward te unknown, toward wat is so mysterious et there is also no right erson somewere out tere, beause tat would be disheartening If there were a doen ossble good ones" tat you rst had to nd and ten hoose between, love would beome a soiety game Tere's anoter ting to onsider: If a erson orresonds to something of my disositions, exetations, and desires and I delare my love to tat erson, and if tat erson also as a set of artiulars whih lead im or her to resond ositively to me, te very delaration of love, te t of loving, will transrm tis erson It will lae tem in relation to love itself and tis will ange them Love hanges te erson who is loved a great deal, ust as muh as it hanges the erson who loves. We all know that love hanges us When someones beavior strikes us as strange or euliar, we say that he or she must be in love This hange is one of the many sides of love tat we laug aboutwe laugh and say e (or se) is in love!"beause we are always irling around tis ore that is so mysterious and so owerl Something very imortant is beind all tis, and that is that love 90
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changes a person A Scottsh phlosoper fom te egh teenth century, Dav Hume, wrote somethng magn cent: e wrote that the beauty of a person s a consequence of the elng they have of beng esre. Ths ea s won erful. t s an antote to the beauty we get n magaznes It also upens the olsness or the semolshness about a toa nng beauty n a shetoa o about love beng bln It s nether of tose thngs, r love makes people beautful An r tat, we ont have to thnk about mo els n magaznes The beauty of a person s what nclnes them to ente nto relaton an to present themselves. A person s nassmlable to any sort of moel, canon, or mage. T hat s why the mage of an magnary love soul not stance tself too much om the real person . Q[]: When someone s n love wth several people, can one
say tat he or she s truly n love? Your queston s very trcky ont thnk so, so I woul say no. ont thnk you can be n love wth several people But t s possble that n the context of a very spe cc love relatonshp, another one can take place that has an entrely fferent qualty or an entrely rent tonal ty. Ths comes back to the queston s ths the rgt per son?" Ths queston s oen aske, an t s cult an panful to resolve, because t s true tat te sngular choce of one person oes happen r a lot of people For someone who s n love wth several people, there mght be no con ct f he or she s capable of apprecatng ts great er ence n tonalty t s as f sa that really love lstenng to Mles Davs but also love lstenng to Stockausen an
JLN
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Mozart, wthout there beng any conct created But thee s no conct n ths case because Mles Davs, Stockhausen, and Mozart ave no relaton to each other They are works rather than people When there are people nvolved, each of them asks me to be entrely wth hm or her The ques ton s whether I can be entrely, but severally and at the same tme I'll let you thnk about that Q[]: Why do some adults say that chld ren are not capable
of lovng? I do thnk that chldren love and are necessarly wthn love When a chld s born, he has to be regarded r who he s, as the unque and eplaceable beng that he s That s what t means to love a chld, and parents are there to do that A chld has an absolute need to be loved to be regarded as unque, n order to lve ot only do psychologsts and psychoanalysts know ths, but medcal doctors do too A chld who s well taken care of but to whom not one sgn of afecton s shown whom no one caresses and no one values, s at sk of developng very serous psychatrc dsoders and cetanly of becomng serously ll A chld needs love Whether the love of te parents s more o less successful s anothe poblem Its mportant for chldren to know how dcult t s for par ents to love ther chldren well It s very complcated to address the unque person who ths chld s, because we must also help hm or her to enter nto varous frameworks Parents also project mages onto ther chldren theyd be pleased f ther chldren turned out n one way or another, and chldren wll oen do the opposte Thats JLN
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completely normal though because children must afrm themselves So a child knows what love is since in return for the love that regards him or her as utterly unique that child also needs to address a mother and a father or people who occupy a unique position in his or her li So he or she is already in the love relationship but the innt cannot be involved in love t is said that a child seven years of age has reached the age of reason That's ightening because children believe that they must have become reasonable by that age ut this age also represents something else The child no longer needs to be cared r by the relation he or she has to the w adults who speak to his or her unique being He or she becomes a little bit more autonomous One could therefore say that the age of reason is the same as the age of love Some of the questions that have been posed here show that at this age children can begin to eperience love At the same time it is a stage There are other stages too ones that help us arrive at the age when we can well and truly get involved in love But we have to keep in mi nd that as Freud th e ther of psychoanalysis said peo ple never stop being born throughout their entire lives With my sityseven years 'm able to report that we do remain children r a very long time and that we are always reaching new stages at the threshold of which we can say to ourselves that we should truly be able to get involved Q[]: s a narcissistic person capable of loving another
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Another nacissistic person ? Im just kidding We'd have to dene what we mean by narcissism Nar cissism can ean the experience of accepting oneself and of being at ease with onesel of not being at wa with oneself or not eling despair with regard to onesel This is a good type of narcissism The bad kind consists in doing nothing but revolving around onesel or loving oneself in a way that is not about receiving love but about prefeing oneself over othes or about I love you a lot" The narcissistic person loves him self or herself like an object, ike a videogame console, an MP3 player, a Barbie doll, or a skateboad Someone who is narcissistic in this sense is preoccupied by a quantity of possessions, and this prevents him or her fom loving But love is very strong Oen its rst coup, or very r st blow, can shatter narcissism or at least rupture it When a relation of love is created, this type of narcissism comes undone JLN
(Gilberte Tsa takes a nal question fm a adult.)
I would like to make a couple of remarks The rst has to do with the word caress. Ive noticed that, in dierent regions of the world, when someone asks someone else a question, they touch or caress the other persons am as they do so And my second remark involves the word dear I have oen used the expesson youre worth a lot to me [tu comptes beaucoup pour moi] ," but I cant use it anymore because the word worth bothers me It suggests a market value
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The expression you're worth a lot to me" does ex press love but in a way that puts it in retreat I hadn't thought o this phrase but it's oen used to express love by concealing it a l ittle or to express it to a third person a s in he's worth a lot to me " Some years ago the Americans invented an expression to designate motly in ocial con texts the person with whom one shares one's lie without being married to him or her So as not to use words lie love or mite, which suggest inmy or indelity they invented the expression igncant othe, the other who is important to me" This returns us to the expression compte pou: the person is important he or she counts has a price or a value Let's gather these things together under the idea o value: there are use values and exchange values Money r example has an exchange value but it is also the zero degree o value because it is value as general equivalence Everything has the same vaue that o money: Whether something is worth ve billi on euros or one euro the euro measures the relation So there's a common measure Then there a value that is entirely dierent om these an absolute value used in rerence to what is valu able in itsel without any possibility o comparison People are o this order The value o one person is not lie that o any other Earlier I said that when a child is born one has to relate to him or he as a singularity or as an absolute value We don't question whether this id is really acceptable or not We laugh at the very thought but imagine that that is what the Grees did in Athens at the time o Plato The Grees o that era practiced the selection o newborns at birth as well as gender selection They oen JLN
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eliminated gils because they didn't need many girls in he city And if a child ere born dermed or came at the rong time it ould vanish All of this involves a completely dierent orld and a completel dirent cultue and e're not here to judge them hat's not the issue he point is that r us today none of this makes any sense whatsoever ove is nothing but the relation to the absolute value of a person the hole question and diculty of hich is that the absolute value of the peson is also thei absolute mystery hat is hy love is so dicult and hy it involves risks and dangers just as it also involves beauty strength and passion
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ilberte didnt suggest beauty" as the title this talk; she decided the matter r me She told me ou have ha ve to talk to t o them about about beaut beauty" y" Then r r a short while wh ile we tried to nd another title but we couldnt come up with one So we agreed not to give it another title for a very pround pround and a nd serious seri ous reason: if we want to talk about beauty we must talk about beauty n tse We annot use periphrases; that is we cannot say something approaching beauty as did r my rst talk on god n that dialogue we didnt say god" but in heaven and on earth" This time ould not even have said the beautiful and the ugly" ugly" since to speak of the ugly ugly one has to know kn ow what the beautiful is So what is at a t stake here is beauty beauty in itself and not some thing beautiful beautiful or o r a a beauty" beauty" ts t s common to call a beautil man or woman a beauty" When we say theres a beauty" we are referring to one beauty in particular that perhaps has something to do with beauty but we still 99
hvent hven t exctly tlked t lked bout beuty We We lso ls o use beuty beuty ['et t d'ue beaut be aut" " For in the expression it is i s of beuty ['e exmple, if I were in the Louvre nd sw the Moa Lisa, I'd sy tht this pinting is of beuty tht tkes your breth wy Its turn of phrse specic to the French estt du d ue e beaut, we men tht lnguge tht when we sy es such thing pticiptes in beuty o tht it hs to do with beuty But its still st ill not beuy A beuty is something beutil tht embodies, repesents, or shows something something of beuty beuty But it still doesn doesn 't show us wht beuty is To be ble to sy tht person is beutil or tht something is beutil, we must hve certin ide of beuty itself o, if you will, of bsolute beuty This is exctly wht I wnt to tlk to you bout: without knowing tht we we know k now it, we ll know k now something bout bsolute beuty In word, we ll know tht bsolute beuty is not beuty existing who knows where, ou of reh, which no one coul in, represen, or embody Rther, its something tht shows itself s one prticul beuty, nd then s nother, nd nother gin Absolute beuty mnif mn ifests ests itself itsel f in mny m ny beutiful beutiful things nd mny beutiful people, lthough we could never sy tht this thing, this pinting, this piece of music, or this person is beuty in itself At the sme time, we ll know tht we only spek of thing of beuty becuse we know wht beuty is In listening to me, you re perhps sying to yourself tht this is not true nd tht we don't know t ll wht beut beutyy is i s You re perhps thinking ht, h t, in ny cse, beuty is relly very reltive, tht ech person hs his o her own denition of beutyyou might nd somethin beutiful but nother person doesn't, or indeed you nd 00
something beautiful on one day but not on the nextand that what is beautiful in China is not beautiful in frica or in Europe But hat's not true We do know what beauty is I want to show you that you know it, that we all know it I am going to tell you straightaway why we know it, and then aer that we'll try to ll in the details You all know deep down that, if we speak of beauty, if we can speak of some thing like that, it clearly cannot be relative to the tastes of each person If it were relative, we could not even speak of beauty We would not even have the idea of beauty I shall indicate this to you in a moment with words other than beutifu, with the word pretty, r example We do not say the pretty"; pretty in itself or absolute pretty does not exist Pretty is relative; it depends on the person and on the moment But the beautiful is another issue entirely, a more serious one Beauty is extraordinarily serious It's not just about whats agreeable or attractive We all possess this vague and obscure knowledge r a start, we know that the siple fact of being able to talk about beauty shows the knowledge of something that simply cannot be relative to personal tastes, moods, or moments There is such a thing as beauty But at the same time we know that abso lute beauty is nowhere It is no more present in te n Li than it is in the Sphinx of the pyramids in Cairo or in an frican statue It is no more present in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony than it is in Ravel's Boero I think, then, that you also know what I am about to tell you If beauty is not just about tastes or personal judg ments, it is also not somewhere else, far o beyond every real or concrete beauty that could be shown For whom 0
would it be viible? Angel, uppoing there ae any, nd if there arent, then no one would be able to ee thi beauty If beauty exit, it ha to be enible or pereptible in one way or anothe. I think you ene tha abolute beauty i in every beauty or in eah of the thing that we ould all beautu. Beaue it i in thee thing, omething about them mut go beyond their material preene. You know vey well that when we ay a beauty, a beautiful girl or a beautiful boy, we think that omething radiate out from thi peron that goe beyond them Something like a all or a ign happen in thi peron, one that goe beyond hi or her attrative appearane When we peak of beauty, we are peaking of omething that goe beyond what i immediately given to u, by and thank to thi very thing. Beauty i not ubjetive it doe not depend upon individual judgment. But it i alo not objetive I annot tell you what it i in the ame way that I ould tell you exatly what time it i. Of oure, I an't guarantee you that it i the exat time beaue I don't have an atomi wath, but there are atomi wathe that an tell the exat time. I annot preent you with exat beauty, but I an ay that we all know how beauty addree u, with a ign or a all through all thoe thing we all beautiful. At the ame time, thoe thing we all beautiful are extemely varied and divee, and we do not alway ue the term in the ame way. For example, we an ay, It' a beautiful day today What i more, we ould devote an entie eion to aking ourelve why we all thi weathe beautiful We ay it i beautiful beaue it i pleaant or beaue we like the heat, whih i more omrtable than the old and rain. 02
But rain can also be vey beautiful It is anothe side of beauty tanding at the sea, e can say it is beautiful either when t is calm or hen it is rough We say beautiful" of many things in a very colloquial ay, sometimes ithout even really thinking about it Fo example, e say the Ac de Triomphe is beautifu" Look, some of you laughed I think a lot of tourists ho come to visit Paris, and children too, do nd the Arc de Triomphe beautiful ou also ouldnt say that the Arc de Triomphe is pretty; that ould be a little bizarre I am not going to get stuck on this example, r it ould take too long to analyze hy you dont really think of the Arc de Tiomphe as beautiful Perhaps it has force or poer, but thats something dierent The Eiffel Toer is beautiful Aha! No youre not laughing There is something common to all these examples When e say that something is beautiful, heth it be the Eiel Toer, a beautiful girl, a goodlooking boy, or a beautiful horse, e are alays saying that, at the very least, it pleases us Thats the rst thing What is it to please? To please is to attract When something pleases me, I am attracted The perception of something that e call beauti l gives birth to a desie in us I am going to play a rst piece of music by Monteverdi for you no, The Lament of Ariadne When you hear this music and this singer, it doesnt please you in the same ay that your usual music does, hether youre into rap or rock, but you do l something in the music that attracts you, that pulls you Toard hat are e being attracted? 0
Toward nothing, in a ertain ene, if not toward the hear ing of thi vo �e and of what we expeiene a a kind of plaintive moaning Ariadne ha been abandoned She i not jut in pain; he' uring an afition We are at tated by the very thing, the melody, the timbre of he voie, it purity, the deliay of it modulation We are attrated by what we ae hearing, but at the ame time, and though it, we ae attrated toward nothing we ould name o grap We ould do a muiologial o even a phyiologial analyi of thi voie, but that would teah u nothing about how it make omething open up in u that i on the oder of a deire that goe nowhere if not beyond or rther Through thi voie, omething attrat u and all u beyond the imple at of litening But thi be yond" happen in the litening; beaue it i beautiful, thi mui eonate in me and reonate with it ou alo know that it i not imply pleaant or agree able You know how to tell the dieene between what i pleaant or what we lik e to liten to and wat i more than pleaant We are touhing hee on the eential point of what ontitute beauty Thee i what i imply pleaant and then there i what pleae beyond it imply bein pleaant There i what i ageeable and what i more than ageeable, what an even be diagreeable or an go too far but an till onern beauty There i that whih i pretty, pleaant, tunning, graeful, aptivating, ueful, well done, upe, that whih pleae u igh t away The divid ing line between the domain of the beautil and the pretty i not at all lear, between a pleaure whih open up the deire r beauty and tat whih pleae in a imple and immediate way We an pereive the ame piee of 04
musi or the same image in a way that remains on te order of the pretty and then, at another moment, in a wa that is opened onto beauty I believe you all know that saying that is super" is not the same as saying that is beautil" Most of the time, we don't onse the two phrases In the one ase, we use a whole series of phrases in the rst person, suh as I like" or I adore," whereas in the other, we say that is beautiful." You might want to tell me that we also say that is stunning." Bu rst and remost, what is to be understood by this expression is " am stunned." So, you have a sense that I annot relate the beautil to my own j udgment. It is not about my pleasure or approval, so it is not about the agreeable. The beautiful awakens in us an attration, a desire that is stronger than simple pleasure, a desire that is not satis ed with the objet This desire goes rther than that I will now show you a painting by an Italian painter named Caravaggio, om the end of the Italian Renaissane This painting represents arissus, the boy who one day sees his image in a pool of water He nds that image so beauti l that he desires it, lls into the water aer it, and then drowns. On the edge of the bank where he drowns, a ower grows that we all narissus. " This story is oen interpreted as a terrile misfortune, sine arissus was in love with himsel I is important not to be in love w ith onesel not to ll into what psyho analysis alls narissism." So arissus was punished r being in love with himsel I think that this interpretation is lse, even if it does tell us something about the origins of myth. The story of arissus atually onveys some thing very dierent om what this interpretation suggests. 0
his by dsn't r s himsl H dsn't rcgniz himslf, and s h dsn't nw that h's ling at him sl H ss his c that h nds bauiful, this c f such bauty that h passinatly dsir it and will ultimatly ls himslf in it H ss a strangr S th myth f arcissus is nt abut slfbsssin, sinc, whn l at myslf in th mirrr, nw it's m, whras thats nt th cas with Narcissus At th mmnt whn arcissus ss himslf in th watr, his gaz is that f smn wh is sing bauty his is nt smn gazing at himslf in a narcissistic shin t is th gaz that is pnd nt bauty sing itsl� and, sing itsl it als ss this rlatin t bauty and lss itslf in that rlatin in rdr t rmrg in th rm f a bautiful wr h gaz is discrd t b capabl f bauty and als t b capabl f prciing bauty right up t th pint f lsing itslf in it n this painting, araaggi rprsnts th scn n a distinctly rtical plan; th rctin snds rything bac int a rtical and frntal dimnsin fr w wh ar ling at it S w ar mad t undrstand that ur wn gaz at th painting is f th sam rdr as Narcissus gaz at his wn imag Fr Caraaggi, th imag f Narcissus is fundamntally a rprsntatin f th art f painting in gnral My gaz, which cms tward th hrizntal plan f th painting, pits nt th rtical plan and jins up with th gaz f Narcissus ling at himsl Ery tim w l at a painting r smthing n th rdr f art, w ar in a rlatin t smthing that tas us bynd th simpl gaz, bynd th simpl ct f ling at an imag, f undrstanding it and f nding it mr 06
or less agreeable There ca eve be somethig i the image that is icult to grasp It is ot simply pleasat; it asks that we become attache to it a that we uersta it A yet the reerig of the colors a the lies of the picture here is ot sucietly welloe r us to eter ito this image i as prou a way as woul be ecessary Every time we are ealig with a beautiful image we are ealig with a image i which beauty pulls us further tha the image ito the epths of the image j ust as Narcis sus is pulle ito the epths of the water We might say the llowig whe I say that what is beautiful i a beauti ful image or a beautiful piece of music carries us further tha the image or the music themselves a that this fur ther is beauty I am sayig somethig that i phiosophical terms is calle the uiversal I am sayig that there is a uiversality of the beautiful that the beautil is uiversal a that it hols r everyoe Youre ow goig to tell me that the Caravaggio paitig we just looke at is ot uiversal at all because it oest mea much to some of you or to Aicas or to Chiese people who live i very ifferet cultures where eve the play of rms a colors are ot the same let aloe the stories tol But remember what I just sai Beauty is owhere Whe I say that its uiversal I ot mea that it is suspee somewhere i the sky where it woul be uiversal but ivisible This makes o sese because beauty must be visible If there is a uiversality of the beautiful this uiversality is ot give I t is appeale to [app l ], offere esire It is hel out to us If it were simply give to us at the very momet whe beauty was give there woul o loger be beauty because there woul o loger be 0
desire or the call [appel]. In the same wa, if I were to ell ou that the universal tim is threetwo, ou would lose all inter st in it To want to know what time it is is more interesting. Kant, the German philosopher om the end of the eighteenth centur who tried to explain judgments about beaut, sas that, unlike judgments about the agreeable, judgments about beaut have a universal aim If I sa this is beautiful," I am claiming that m judgment can have a universal value even if I know that it cant have that value in an immediate wa. I am aiming at universalit. But if I sa I like this, I am admitting that this judgment concerns me alone. When I sa this is beautiful," I am sug gesting to others, as to msel� that the relate to something that is not individual, subjective, or relative. Let's look at another painting, The Reading b douard Manet, a French painter from the end of the nineteenth centur. It depicts a scene that is ver dierent from that of Narcssus A oung man is reading to a oung girl. This bo is reading to this girl, and something seems to be going on. Perhaps he is reading to her in order to impress her, but is it onl about that? Wh was this painting done ? To place this profusion of whiteness bere our ees the dress of the oung girl, the white fabric that covers the seat and the curtains. What is going on in this painting? Something between the whiteness, the bright and transparent light look at the sleeves hinting at the as underneathand the darkness. Something is going on between this brilliant transparent white and this darkness, the black of the bos dress. Curiousl, we see a black square on the page of the book, which is perhaps a shadow but which also seems to 0
plunge the writing of the boo itself into drness. Something is going on here tht is wholly in the reltion etween the light nd the drness, the brillince of the visible nd the drness of the bool Perhps this is wy of sying tht the visible, the brillint, the white, the trnsprent re on the side of womn, of seduction, of beuty The pinting does not relly show us whether or not the mn is beutiful. He is in the drness, but he is lso on the side of reding, of the redble. The visible is gesturing towrd sense tht is more thn tht of the redbe. Perhps tht is why the pge is lmost obstruted by sort of blc rectngle. In pinting lie this one, from the very rst vewing we understnd tht wht mtters is not the story being told In certin wy it doesnt even relly tell story, or the bit of story it does tell serves s support for tht other thing tht we cn neither recount nor write, r something tht is given through the whiteness, the brillince, the trnsprency, nd, I would sy, for striving towrd the light, to go into it, to let oneself be ten or crried wy by it. This going into the light or this getting crried into something tht, through the rm, goes beyond it nd mes us go furtherll this mes us loo t the imge more thn once. In other words, its not n imge from a mgzine. Those re mde r pge turning: you see Crl Bruni, nd then you turn the pge. You see Nomi Cmpbell, nd then you turn the pge, nd so on You lso see beutiul photogrphs of lndscpes or the erth s it is seen from helicopter. These photogrphs re plesnt, but you still turn the pge. When you see pintings or photogrphs ten with the intention of creting wor 9
of art, you cannot turn the page. ou have to top at it, you have to return to it. The two painting I jut howed you, _ jut like the piece of muic I had you liten to are work that million of people have returned to. There they di cover another accent, another variation on the ame key. And in effect, it i alway about the ame deire, the ame call, and the ame triving toward beauty. When I ay toward beauty, perhap you undertand better now that thi i not a call toward omething that i elewhere The thing there, and it i there r u to ink into, jut a Narciu doe in the water, and in the whitene and tranparency of the dre in the Manet painting. Thi applie to every image. Let look at a prehitoric painting, that i, om the origin of what we call art. I dont remember which cave thi tag come from, but I imply wanted to point out to you very brie y that the role of thee painting ha been the ubject of much dicuion. Why were they painted? Wa it a magical practice to en ure a good hunt or a religiou practice? Even the look of the drawing and the color how that the peron who painted it wa already attentive to beauty. A oon a it i a quetion of the human, we nd art and thi call toward beauty. It i clear that, in thi painting, perhap even more important than the pleaure of repreenting the animal i the deire to touch beauty and to make it touch. Here i another, completely dierent image, of an ma zonian tatue. I dont know anything about thi tatue, but I aw it and decided to chooe it for thi talk becaue of how obviou it i that, even if thi tatue ha many dieret acred, totemic, or mythological function, the work of form can never be reduced to thee nction. Thi work 0
BEAUTY
sows someting oter tan its funtions r a umanity of a ompletely dierent ivilization tan our own, one tat as oter sapes and oter olors in its spirit But one again, troug all tis, it is about a relation to beauty at te same time as it is about oter tings as well One last image, a painting by a Fren painter wo died only a w monts ago, Simon Hanta Tis anvas represents noting It was made using a tenique tat e invented He lded te anvas and ten knotted it at te lds After tat, e poured paint onto it and ten unlded it In t e unlding, te areas were te paint was able to set appeared and tose were it did not take were le wite We ant be relating to a story anymore, or to a magial or religious funtion Tis painting sows exatly te opening of te anvas to te relations of te olor and te wite, to te lds, to te splatters to someting tat is almost noting Hanta loved to say tat tere was noting to see, noting to look r Tis noting is at te same time a pure opening or an unlding of our gaze, tanks to te anvas tat opens onto beauty Were a beautiful piee of art is onerned we migt say tat wat distinguises it from wat is pretty or pleasing is ow te rm of te work takes pleasure in itsel Te pleasure is not so mu r us but is in te ting itsel Te ting does not please itself in te same way tat it pleases us It does not indulge itsel i t as noting to take or to savor Tis pleasure tat te rm takes in itself is wat an open us up to tis d imension beyond all pleasure and beyond any instant gratiation Tat doesnt mean it ors no satistion, just tat it doesnt stop at tat point
Beauty can never make do with simply eing suitable for whatever, whether for one's own personal prerences or the prerences of an age or a society r partcular styles or conventions. The rms in a Caravaggio painting or those in Monteverdi's music do suit a certain se t of conventions, of styles or ways belonging to an era. In that sense, the painting of Hanta would have been impossible in the age of Caravaggio, and the painting of Manet would have been impossible at the time of the prehistoric stag Personal preferences or those of a society or fashion cannot, though, enter into the form of the work itsel Of course, where shion is concerned, there can be appeals and rerences to beauty, but the way we dress is primarily dictated by the rules and codes that a society sets r itsel Addicts that you are to fashion labels, you nonetheless know that beauty is not what is at stake, even i you say that your brand X running shoes are beautiful. I am not in a position to speak il of this prerence, but we all know that something other than prerence is at stake when we speak of beauty. Or if it is a preference, it is r something that is in us and that surpasses us This thing is called truth" I n beauty, it is a question of truth It is not a veriable truth, but the truth as that toward which we are called, pulled, in a desire that goes well beyond us. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, one sentence has summarized the thought of at least two great authors of antiquity, Plato and Plotinus, although it is not und explicitly stated in either of these two writers' oeuvres: Beauty is the radiance of the true." This means not only that the true shines, but that truth, more tha being truth, radiates or shines. 2
e must also admit that there is always something un settling in the beautiful. If beauty is not simply pleasing but pleases in the mode of a all more than of pleasure this is also beause it unsettles Lets quikly go over these images again. Looking at eah of them, I think you an make out the disquieting aspet of eah quite easiy; we annot rest ontent with being bere a pleasant image There s nothing reassuring about these images They de stabilie and unsettle us e ask ourselves what is to be und behind them or where that might take us. We know nothing about it, though, and so we ertainly ant onlude that weve und beauty and so now were satised I would like to nish by iting an important Fren poet from the beginning of the twentieth entury, Arthur Rimbaud, who begins his most important text, A Seson in Hell with the llowing One night I took Beauty in my armsand I thought her bitterand I insulted her" Beauty as a reeived onvention or as what is agreed upon by an entire era beame unbearable to him. But rty pages later, aer going through all the ritiisms of this world of rigid onventions, Rimbaud ends by saying Thats all past. These days I know how to greet Beauty." We only know how to greet beauty one we are freed from all that is onventional, whether that be a personal prerene or those ditated by the ustoms of a soiety Montreuil, January 10, 2009
Qesions and Answers
'd ike to now whether beauty can be ephemera.
That's a beautifu question. woud say that at the mateia ee, beauty can certainy be eeting: imagine a andscape, o a rainbow about to anish from the sky after a thunderstom But beauty is both eeting and eterna at the same time. The painter who attempts to capture this moent doesn't want just to eproduce it but to capture whateer made him or he fee the ca of beauty. This is what he or she puts on the canas Of course the canas isn't eerasting, since een if remains in existence for a ery ong time, it wi eentuay deteriorate Eterna doesn't mea n what asts for a ong time it means what is outside time 'd ike to recount an anecdote r you from JeanLuc Godad, the mmaker For cinema aso has to do with beauty; it is not just about moies ike Star War or arry Poter. The anecdote might be made upperhaps by Godard himsef?but it doesn't reay matter, it's sti wedone At any rate, he's driing with his cameraman aong a highway in Switzerandhe himsef is Swiss and he sees a remarkabe sky, so they top and start to m The poice arie and te them that they are not aowed to park on the emergency shouder, at which point Godard says to them: es know. But there is an emergency ook at this sky. This is a oey itte stoy about the ephemera and the eterna.
JLN
When we nd something or someone beauti, what do we ook at rst?
4
This question is strange because it reverses the order of things. If we nd someone o something beautifu, then we've already looked at them But I don't think that means we've looked at anything in particular I t also doesn't mean that we've taken in the whole, but the whole does gve o a quality that makes us el as if there is moe than meets the eye I'll use the example of a peson If I nd someone pretty, this means I've seen particula things that suit m taste. It could be the hair, r instance, or the dress. In everyday conversation, we sometimes have the sense that pretty and beautiful are words that mean difrent things For instance, someone says that soandso is pretty, and an other says shes not pretty but beautiful We all know what it means to go om petty to beautiful. beautiful person is someone who's not necessarily very pretty but who does have something beyond thei elation to a certain set of conventions. supermodel is an example of this kind of relation to conventions I annot give an example of a su permodel whom I would call beautiful It is not about the individual people: maybe they are beautiful outside thei role as supermodels Someones beauty also includes his o her thinking and relationship to us. beautil person is not simply attractive perhaps he more attractive someone is to us, the less likely it will be that he or she is able to show beauty. The more we experience what is beyond hi m or her and beyond uswhich merits the name of truth the more beautil will he or she appear. JLN
Can we nd beauty in eveything?
es I sound as if I'm taking a rm stance here, but actually I'm not entiely sure. Let's take one of the least
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5
beautiful thins in this room this bottle of mineral wate It is not really beautiful I can't nd anythin beautil i this object, and we cant include the label in the oder of beauty either, since it simply states thins the brand, r instance, o the contents composition Yet I could perr some sort of esture that would put it in elation to beauty, like the esture of an artist I'm not an artist, but I could pretend to be If I wee arrested by the transparency of the plastic o by its shine, if I were to cut up a picture of this bottle and wok it up, I could transrm it into a photoraph or into a paintin I could do an installation usin bottles lled with colored water I could draw beauty out of it I could o beyond this object and pass into an order that's no loner of the object, in the same way that the paintins I showed you aren't obj ects Of course a paintin is a canvas with paint on it, but what counts as a picture is not an object What do we call it if it is neither an object nor a subject in the sense that a person is said to be a subject? I would say that it's Art? Yes, but what's art? At is the human activity that deals only with beauty
JLN
When you say beauty," you are talkin about physical beauty, but can inner beauty also be called beauty"?
There is no such thin a s inne beauty per se Beauty necessarily has to be perceived It can be visible or audible or a combination of the two I could put what I just said
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6
BE
abou a beauil peron ino your erm. I have no reaon o alk abou he inner preine of a goodlooking peron In c, i doen' even occur o me o hink abou hi o her inerior. Sangely enough, when I do hink abou h inide of a goodlooking peron, I auomaically hin abou hi o her anaomyhe keleon and organ Thi become quie awful, almo epulive. If I were o alk abou a beauiful peron in hi way, wha I would mean i ha hi o her exernal appeaance expee omehing of he inerior. Were I o develop hi hough rher, I would broach omehing I didn' have ime o alk abou earlier, which i why Gilbere aked me o alk abou beauy. She aked me becaue of ceain commen ha were made duing my alk on love. If I could coninue on wih hi, I would ay ha, baically, our relaion o beauy i alway one of love, becaue a relaion of love goe beyond he imple pleaure of aracion or graicaion. We all know wha a pleaure i i o be wih ome people, epecially if hey are goodlooking, friendly, or wiy. Bu depie how plea urable i may be, i ill in' love. We immediaely know ha love goe rher han ha and ha i i alo more demanding and more dangerou. Thi remind me ha, in my alk on love, I quoed an Englih philoopher from he eigheenh cenury, Hume, who ay omehing wonderful. He ay ha a peron beauy ha nohing o do wih hi or h er aure bu i he conequence of hi or he r feeling deired In hi deire, which i direced oward he peron r wha he or he i, o wha i aboluely myeiou an irreplaceable abou him or he, I no longer know wha or whom I love. Tha i wha i i o love omeone, o devoe
oneself to someone who will always remain absolutely unknown. But th ough this ery moement and because he or she receies and feels this moement th person relates to him or herself beyond him or herself And thus the person is beautiful Some romantic tales address this relationship between loers such as Riquet with the Tu or Beauty and the Beast The Beast is hideous but when he starts being loed by the Beauty in spite of and beyond his uliness he turns into the marelous prince we all know
Do you think we can lie wthout beauty?
Lie yes we can always lie poorly. dont actually think that anyone lies without beauty but that doesnt mean that eeryone lies in relation to works of art be cause not eeryone has access to art. But do think that eeryone has a sense of what we are talking about solely due to the £ct of being a human being We all know that saying its beautiful is not the same as saying ts pretty een if we are not always paying attention ts enough to point out that in language there is this dirence between the words t would be interesting to see how the diision between beautl and pretty is made in other languages. To lie without beauty is to lieas so oen happens in our liesas a function of immediate needs or necessities. But eery once in a while we hear the call of beauty. t is completely silent but we do hear something. For the last een years or so large exhibitions ae been attracting huge numbers of isitors. Recently there were so many isitors r an exhibition at the Grand Pa laisone that didnt actually nd all that successful N
r hree nighs in a row A lo lo of people ha i sayed open r said ha i was a sor of degradaion of ar reduced o a r of consueris One ie hey go o see Mane, anoher ohe r ie hey go o see see Picasso Picas so or he pharaohs pharaoh s reasure, reasure, and a ll of i ogeher ogeher aouns aoun s o one larg la rgee ass as s of culural consuer goods This is cerainly rue, bu a he sae ie hese housan ds of people who go and ay wai r a really long ie jus o see soe ar sense in soe obscure way ha hey can live liv e wihou beau beauy y They do no really know wha wh a hey are doing; doing; hey have be been en old over and over again ha Mone, Czanne, Picasso, and Delacroix were very iporan ariss, and so hey go o see he Bu hered be los of good reasons r he o nd he whole hing quie boring and o go see an eneraining ovie insead I a no saying ha all he criiciss are false, bu if so any people are visiing such exhibiions, soehing us be going going on wih wi h his h is desire desi re r r beau beauy y Bu hese people who go o see hese exhibiions jus because heyve been old ha hey had o go here will hey h ey hen hen be in a posiion o recognize recognize beauy beauy ? Wha Wh a boh boh ers e is ha heyll pass by soehing aweinspiring in he sree and won even look a i
Tha doesn boher e We are oo easily aken in by our socieys consan se l criicis Wha you are ar e saying is rue, bu we can read i in all he agazines and so i doesn really ineres e I prer o ell yself ha, aong all hese housands of people, here are perhaps a w whod do wha you suspec hey wouldn Because of seeing a Czanne exhibiion, he way hey see igh
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9
chang, and n day thy might lk diffntly at smthing thy cam acrss in th stt This is a wagthat much ll gran yubut it is n prr t mak, prhaps simply nt t fl hplss abut vrything Prhaps its bttr nt t dspair vr vrything Q imn Gilberte T):
r thr any mr qustins m
childrn? Gilbrt, yu might pint ut that a childs qustin culd als b psd by an adult wh dsnt knw h r sh is psing a childs qustin
JN
d lik t knw what, r yu, is smthing thats nt bautil But br d that, hav a ind whd lik t say smthing Mstly d just lik t snd grtings ut t th whl Val d Fntnay and t all th ppl wh rcgniz m, San, Mhammd, Yanis, th whl pink stat," Q:
la cit rose.
ur grtings t th ct rose hav bn snt ut Thats actually vry intrsting, bcaus pink is suspndd pcisly btwn th prtty and th bautiful u askd what, r m, isnt bautiful wuld say that it is n f tw things smthing thats nt bautil is cmpltly withdrawn int th bjct and is purly functinal Such a thing is nt bautil, in th strict sns f th trm ts nt ugly, ithr Thrs an intrsting catgry abut which had thught t say a wrd r tw, n that culd b symblizd by jw j wlry lry r xtndd t t includ incl ud JN
20
all clthing. Jewelr which i en decribed a beautiful rder f f beaut beaut where where it i i alwa al wa ubrdinated t i n an rder mething ther than itel f. The beaut beaut f j ewelr ewel r i made ma de t accmpan th e preentatin f a bd bd r a piece pi ece f clth ing. Jewelr alne i nt f the ame nature a a painting. But nw 1d like t intrduce a third categr. Firt the categr f the functinal bject which int beautiful in the trict ene; then the categr f jewelr which i be tween beaut and being part f a nctinal enemble; and then the ugl. Ugline i much mre cmplicated r it can ca n al al pint pint tward the ame am e thing thing a beau beaut t de but but i n it dark and terrible apect. If beaut i unettling that i becau becauee it can ca n pen p en nt nt the th e terrib terrible le j ut a well we ll a nt nt the ublime. Mrever the wrd ubme can ha ve tw t w mean mean ing. I didnt talk abut that either becaue we didnt have enugh time. Tw ver imprtant imp rtant authr have emphaized emphaize d thi relatin f beaut t the terrible: ne i Dtevk and the ther i Rilke. Beaut i terrible; it i unettling becaue it cannt be limited t uitabilit r harmn. I can enter int diharmn and dinance; it can hatter hatter all al l preference all uitabilit and all agreement. The hitr f art clearl hw that we have cntantl advanced b tearing up r detring received cnventin and an d beautil rm. A centur aer Caraaggi Puin a great French painter aid that Caravag Carav aggi gi came int the wrld t detr painting. That what Puin thught f Caravaggi. Yu all knw what culd be aid abut Pica and Czanne but al abut Manet. Thi detructin f cnventin al wa wa begun begun anew ane w thrugh thrughut ut the hitr f art ar t tell u ne n e thing: the ene f beaut cannt be atied with the edi mentatin menta tin f rm in a harmn ha rmn that get get repeated repeate d until until it 2
produce a claicim. From he momen ha a rm i imply repeaed r i own ae i no loner ha anyhin o do wih beauy To awaen a ene of beauy, Rimbaud, who inuled beauy, ay ha derucion neceary In hi inul o beauy, he poibiliy of uline i ao opened up Since he nineeenh cenury, wriin have ap peared wih Aesthetic of Ugliness in he ile. I now of a lea one wor in German wih ha exac ile Wih repulive uline in he ron ene and no only in he func ional one, he dar ide i een of wha, in beauy, i een from i bih ide Perhap we can never really eparae he wo; r me, ha i wha ane The Reading repre en Tha i why uline can oen be o cinain. You aid a while ao ha beauy i univeral and ha each of u can reconize i, bu do you hin ha he reco niion of beauy can be learned hrouh inrucion ar un apprentissage] ?
Ye, of coure. I i no mply iven or eleviden, becaue oen in an individual developmen ueful or ncional form are iven prioriy An individual can very eaily row up wihou ever bein opened up o he univere of beauyin c, i i very frequenly he cae. I wa my cae unil very lae; I wa more han weny year old I new hin abou painin, bu r me i wa ill only a bi caaloue of imae ha beloned o humaniy culure of he We. I alo have imae of Chinee painin, bu he idea ha i wa a queion of beauy in painin and in muic had no real place in my univere. I a queion of one milieu and one preoccupaion. So a
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kind of instrution or apprentieship does exist, but one doesnt learn whats beautiful and what isnt. One learns that thee is suh a thing as art that there are artists, art forms, musi, and art history. One an show how eah of these works an be appoahed, diserned, and, above all, that eah of these works is inexhaustible. Thats what a true eduation in beauty must do: show that ertai re ations, those of art, ae inexhaustible, not beause they are riher than other kinds, but beause they ae animated by a sense of the beyond or the innite One an learn tha this exists and how it exists, and, through that learning proess, one an aede to what, properly speaking, s no learned This apprentieship opens us up to this dimen sion, whih perhaps we would never otherwise have reahed The ertainty that this sense of beauty is present in us as human beings is what guided me in talking to yo this evening, just as it also guided the great thinkers of beauty, ant and Plato. This sense of beauty is present in a hidden or suppressed way, but it doesnt take muh for someone, save perhaps those overwhelmed by misrtune and suing, to be able to reognize that he or she knows something about it Without this preliminary disposition, one ouldnt learn anything, and I want to n d this mini mal disposition in the word beautiful and in the t that we understand it to be dirent from pretty A little while ago you said that, r you, there is no suh thing as inner beauty, so how an you name it ? Q
No, its not that inner beauty doesnt exist, but tha the inner itself doesnt. I didnt say that inner beaty
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doesn't exst but that ths nner beauty has to be vsble on the outsde. o what I meant was that the nner doesn't exst; there s no nner. What we all the nner s that through whh the outsde s opened onto a beyond. But the opposton of the nteror to the exteror doesn't mean anythng. It s pure ntasy the representaton of a knd o phantom on the nsde that would be the equvalent of the nner person as opposed to the external That doesn't exst: on the nsde there s a skeleton and a stomah not an mmateral soul. What s the soul? The great phlosopher Arstotle tells us that the soul s the rm of the body. o f the body s beautful then the soul s beautful and ve versa sne t onerns the same thng. Imagne a really ugly or dsgraed person beng able to evne a beauty n hs or her gesture regard ntenton and also love say f he or she loves or s loved n exess of hs or her appear ane That s when we would have to say that beauty s not n appearane but s n what shows through appearane and qute possbly despte appearane. You talk about beauty as f you were talkng about god I thnk they're both omplete llusons. You only talked about the lluson of beauty. Q
I wll ertanly grant you that god s an lluson a ordng to a ertan representaton we make of these thngs I would pont out to you however that there s a very bg drene between god and beauty We represent god through the representaton of a person and from that moment onward thngs go qute badly r god. But beauty s nether a person nor a thng. In sum t s almost nothng at all. JLN
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Exchange connue. ) But in all of your really interesting
and detailed eplorations of beauty there is nonetheless an impossibility of nding an absolute or a truth. I nd that you talk about it in the same way as people talk about god Indeed perhaps I did talk about it as others might talk about god as many great mystics in the great religions have talked about god and beauty Thats right
JLN
Exchange contnues) I would have preferred it if you
had closed by saying that both this beauty and this god are illusions. But no its eactly the opposite Of course if you take any one of the paintings that I showed you in a sense it has to do with an entire illusion machine.
JLN
Exchange contnues) Youre the one who is proecting
an illusion when you look at it. ot at all It makes me see something other than the patches of color and the rms on the canvas and this doesnt fall within the register of illusion at all I see some thing else and you do too sine you dont really seem like an iconoclast who would destroy all works of art. JLN
Exchange contnues. ) I make them
Okay so you know very well that its not about illusion
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(Exchange coninue) I t is precisely because I make at
tat I am saying it involves an illusion. Hold on a minute, because I can see tat we would ave to ave more dialogues, and not just dialogues r cildren, since tis fellow is not very young anymore, even i e migt not be as old as I am. We ave to rid ourselves o tis idea of illusion, wic we always use wenever we want to say anyting watsoever. It serves our purposes, weter we're talking about a mirage or talking about god or talking about beauty, even wen tese tings are not at all te same ting. An illusion is someting tat were taken in by, wereas I ave spent my time ere today telling you tat I cannot sow beauty to you and tat, particularly troug works of art, beauty is wat is sown in not being sown. Tere is noting illusory in tat If you are convinced tat wat you do is illusory, ten I ope you nd anoter occupation. JLN
(Exchange continues ) Tat doesnt neessarily llow. JLN
Ten you must know it isnt all an illusion.
1d like to say someting I, wo am adicapped, would like to say tank you to te ildren r teir questions, because teyve truly astonised me. Tese cildren ave given my li diretion tis aernoon. Wen we say tat trut comes out of te mouts of babes, terein lies te beauty of li entire.
Tank you r saying so because tats wat we nd too, at eac one of tese dialogues.
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God 1. Th asronomr in qusion was Danil Kunh.
Justice 1 [any is rring o h Frnh poliial pay La Doi libr al hrinn, or h Libal Chisian Righ.-Trans]
Love 1 [ an also fr o a los frind or o on who s mos inima o m.-Trans.] If I had dvlopd his parnhsis I would hav said oughly h following: o lov onslf is no h sam as goism. I is nssary o lov onsl Indd, i's angrous no o lov onslf and wors sill o ha onsl u jus as wih h lov of anoh w hav o disnguish bwn loving a vori obj, pring onslf ovr all ohs, whih is goism and in whih I la o myslf as o a prizd possssion or o wha I hav," and loving onslf in h vry ha on xiss, ha on is" and in ha sns, on is lik any ohr, on has a uniqu pri," on ouns in a uniqu way, r ohs as r onslf. In h mr as, I lov wha is known and possssd, whas in h lar, 2
N S P S 7 1 - 8 1 oe he unknown. loe wha am, he one who is always ye o e dsoeed and will also always emain unknown o mewho is eepe so ha nohe may loe him Loe always elaes o he un known o o he mysey of someone. And someone is always a mys ey I ome bak o his issue furhe on, in esponse o one of he quesions.) 3. o deelop his idea, I would hae insised on he ha he loe hildren hae heir paens is based on a elaionship ha is eiely dissymmerial, sine parens are hee o poet and ae hei hildren wih a iew o leading hem oward auonomy and inde pendene. This is no a loe ha wans o emain wih he ohe peson; on he onay, i is one ha wishes o deah iself from im o he, a he igh momen and in he righ way. The loe of hilden for hei parens esponds o his poeion and o his aompanimen, bu i oo is raesed by he moemen of deahing I does no wan o be held bak I is like an inese image of oe, inso as a muual deah men is desired. Wihin loe in he geneal sense, i is a maer of aah menbu neeheless, his aahmen also desires he auonomy of he ohe, desies ha he or she be him or hesel� but wihou he dissymmey brough abou by poeion and guidane. I am adding somehing hee ha I didn' een menion while I was speaking as somehing ha I had o leae by he wayside, sine ime was iking away and I had o sop Aording o my noes, I would hae oninued o say ha his deliy o ommmen is no solely a maer of feelings o desie Feelings and desies hae a li of heir own. They an ome and go, dsappea and reappea, an be di eed owad ohes as well as oward him o her o whom one is ommied This an lead someimes o a breakup, whih is oen he leas erible ouome Bu i an also lead o a geaer lariy egarding where one's ommimen lies, o a geae eogniion boh of he oher person in his o her uniqueness and singulaiy and of how my engage men onsiues a pa of his singulaiy 5 I hough i migh be ineresing o indiae wheher he quesion was posed by a gil [] or a boy [] In plaes where here is no suh indiaion, i is beause an ehange oninued wih he same peson. 6 Ae eading he ransripion of his answer, I waned o oe mysel This is no he only sense of loe The sense of loe is also, 2
