Those lacking imagination take refuge in reality
if non-thought contaminates thought
it was the best time we ever had
Not our experiences
but the silent tenacity
we affront them with.
Is it possible to produce a concept
about Africa?
Solzhenitsyn's novel has a subtitle.
No need to Google it.
Solzhenitsyn found it all alone.
"Experiment in literary investigation".
What does it do?
I don't understand.
The thumb. What does it do?
What did it do before?
So it's Little Thumb.
That's one way of putting it.
And to mark the trail?
Pebbles.
Where is the ogre?
See this?
"Experiment in literary investigation".
Exam time.
The Ogre takes us by the hand.
All of us.
In 1933, a Russian, Zworykin,
invented television.
Does 1933 ring a bell?
Hitler was elected democratically.
I doubt that.
Everything Hitler said,
he accomplished.
Not the first time someone conquered by arms
manages to conquer his conqueror politically.
For example,
armies of the Revolution
were conquered.
But they carried throughout all Europe
the idea of a Republic.
Alas, in Potsdam...
the allies declared:
We will wage peace as we waged war.
What do we see now?
The State is given absolute power. 1945, Jacques Ellul
He saw it all coming.
Almost.
Atomic power.
GMOs...
Advertizing. The State takes all.
Nanotechnologies.
Terrorism. This is Hitler's second victory.
We've got used to the State doing everything
and whenever something goes wrong,
we blame the State. Unemployment.
We ask it to take the entire nation's life
as its responsibility.
Reacting implies
that we react against economic policy,
against the police,
against welfare.
We see the entire nation rise up against us.
In fact, Hitler did not invent a thing.
A long tradition
led up to this crisis.
Machiavelli, Richelieu,
Bismarck.
And the Terror, Alain?
In '93, during the Terror,
the Convention produced: the Civil Code,
the new calendar,
the decimal system,
Hitler's victory, children.
The manufacturing of steel,
government accounting,
the Music Conservatory.
Sir, is it possible to produce a concept
about Africa?
The law that denies its own violence, cheats.
The law that denies what turns it into a state apparatus, cheats.
The law which deems itself self-legitimatizing, cheats twice.
I think that in primitive societies, this was not the case.
And during war?
It is a war, but of society against State.
I don't care.
I am at your command.
The end lingers on, I must live through it.
And it isn't easy.
The mouth closes...
Time to go straight ahead now.
I made the image.
What is going on?
End of this world?
Advent of another world?
So what happens
in that which seems to have no clear name.
We've come to say goodbye.
Leaving for the Americas?
Got some cheap junk?
Just a little philo.
You'll tell them what philosophy is.
Philosophy is a being,
the heart of it
being the question of its being
insofar as this being posits a being other than itself.
You think that in Europe happiness is not a new idea?
I'm into Africa.
Good luck!
Hello again.
I'll call the police.
He's sick.
Just one question.
It's vacation. We start again in September.
Two questions.
Is society
willing to accept murder
as a means to fight unemployment?
Second question.
What is the difference...
between an idea and a metaphor?
Ask Athenians on the tram.
Interior experience is now forbidden
by society in general
and spectacle in particular.
You mentioned murder.
What they call images
are becoming the murder of the present.
The present is a strange beast.
I don't care.
Take truth.
Plato says that beauty
is the splendor of truth.
Now there's an idea.
A metaphor of truth...
Look.
A child playing dice.
I am at your command.
A girl or a woman?
You'll see.
I've never managed to make it through just as it changes.
When you first met him...
where was it?
In Kinshasa.
At a bend in the river.
That reminds me of something.
The title of...
a book.
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Never been a Nobel for painting.
Or music.
What bank did he work at?
Alas.
You must not stay here...
It's dangerous.
I am not afraid.
Today, everyone is afraid.
Apache Indians of the Chikawa tribe,
call the world: the forest.
This morning is a dream.
Each person must think that the other is the dreamer.
A woman can do no harm.
She can annoy you, she can kill you, no more.
You all disgust me with your happiness.
This life we must love at any cost...
I am here for something else.
I am here to tell you no.
And to die.
I have to go too.
Hurry up!
You can't call this equality.
Rodin's sculpture, The Thinker... you know it?
I don't know.
The image of equality.
A function, a position.
An instant belonging to everyone in time and space,
the only one,
the nuts and bolts of equality.
Because everyone's thoughts in this situation...
thought regains its place in poop.
You're young.
At the height of your beauty and strength.
I am going to die.
I do not want to leave you.
I do not want to take you back.
I want nothing.
I am down on my knees, defeated.
We speak about nothing.
You hurt me and offended me.
I'd told you so, as well.
We no longer love each other,
never loved each other.
In myths recounting the birth of the hero,
being submerged in water
is similar to representations of birth
manifest in dreams.
I can't hear a thing.
He says he's dying.
So let him die.
There has existed
for 20 or 30 years now
a universal declaration of animal rights.
It contains ten articles.
It was drafted 200 years after 1789.
No one could think
freely
if his eyes were locked
in another's gaze.
As soon as gazes lock,
there are no longer exactly two of us.
Staying alone becomes hard.
It is not animals who are blind.
Man, blinded by conscience,
is incapable of seeing the world.
What is outside, wrote Rilke,
can be known only via an animal's gaze.
And Darwin, citing Buffon,
maintains that the dog is the only living creature
that loves you more than it loves itself.
The shadow of God.
Is it not for a woman who loves her man?
Everyone can stop God from existing, but no one does.
I'm sorry.
Nothing was even broached at that point in the story.
The reason for their being together
seemed - although they claim the opposite -
to each of them devoid of any future.
They enter a murky realm.
Look!
Go on, get out!
He seems nice.
It'll do us good.
Beat it, fleabag, get out...
Have you been living here long?
Why "long"? "Do you live here" is enough.
If being face to face invents language
Right and left were inverted
but not the top and bottom.
Why?
When he entered the gas chamber,
a child asked
"Why" to his mother.
An SS officer shouted
No whys!
I remember studying the Laurent-Schwarz-Dirac curve.
Infinite in every point except for one which is zero.
Or the contrary.
The two greatest inventions,
infinity and zero.
No.
Sex
and death.
Only free beings can be strangers to each other.
They have a shared freedom,
but this is what separates them.
Four years ago, you stabbed me.
You've forgotten.
Do something so I can speak to you.
What must I do?
Persuade me that you hear me.
I will barely say a word. I am looking for poverty in language.
Where the hell are you going?
I'll show you.
He could not make us...
humble.
Who?
Or could not.
Or would not.
So he made us...
humiliated.
Who?
God.
It's here.
We're going to see Frankenstein.
We'll be back.
In your circus
of forests,
of hills,
of valleys
pale death
blended the dark battalions.
I am at your command.
Where are you going?
Where I must.
In Kinshasa,
a journalist told me a story
about Mao Tse-Tung.
He was asked about the influence of the '89 revolution.
He said it's too soon to know.
You know, in Russian, kamera means prison.
You know, Russian cigarettes are healthier than American ones.
Why is that?
Because they contain almost no tobacco.
Russia will never be part of Europe.
If Russians become Europeans, they'll never be Russian again.
I've never made it through. Not slowing down on green.
Use the formula from yesteryear.
Why are you here?
Because there are no grownups.
In Africa you were coming out of what?
The silence.
There are tons of sounds.
There is war.
There are animals.
The silence arrives, then...
another country.
They're at the door. Speaking to you.
With language, something's happening.
Something awkward about our relation to the world.
It acts against pure freedom.
I'm speaking,
subject.
I must not stay here.
I'm listening...
object.
You've given up everything.
Take it one step further.
Give up freedom itself
and everything will be returned to you.
We need to get an interpreter.
Why do you say that?
Soon,
everyone will need an interpreter.
To understand the words coming from their own mouths.
What does your husband do?
He organizes events.
He's just an individual.
Not my turn to answer.
You know better than me.
What did you mean
when you declared:
"I am at your command"?
None of that matters anymore.
What's at stake is infinitely more serious.
Not simple thoughts and simple glances.
Summer already
and you still haven't answered.
There was my voice.
I would like to call proletarian the king of things.
A matter of harmony, then.
About what?
To let the other love.
Do you still take pictures?
Showing a forest, easy.
But showing a room with a forest nearby...
So the years passed..
You all disgust me
with your happiness.
Yes,
I am here to say no.
This morning is a dream.
Each thinks the other is dreaming.
A woman can do no harm.
She can annoy.
She can kill.
No more.
When I was a kid, we played Indians.
Apaches were my favorite.
Their word for the world is: the forest.
Hurry, I don't want to wait.
I talk about equality and each time you talk about poop.
Because that's where we're all equal.
I know what you're looking at.
Yes, a shame, no more forest.
No more war, we said.
Pray to God that all will be forgiven.
Go away now.
Try to smile as you leave.
Avoid...
shattered memories.
The police are coming. You must leave.
Words.
I don't want to hear about them.
No nudity in nature.
Animals are not naked because they are naked.
Now that I have seen war,
I know that if it ended,
everyone would ask:
what do we do with the bodies?
Perhaps only for them is the war over.
A philosopher is worried by others' existence,
perceiving the revolutionary force of signs.
The water spoke to him
in a deep, serious voice.
So Roxy began to think.
It is trying to talk to me,
as it has always tried to speak to people over the ages.
Conversing with itself when there was no one to listen.
But trying,
always trying to communicate its news to others.
Some of them learned a certain truth from the river.
The river is still asleep in a dreamy fog.
We see it no better than it sees itself.
Here is already the river.
But there, no more can be seen.
All we see is the abyss.
A fog that stops us from seeing further.
At that spot on the canvas,
paint not what we see, for we see nothing,
nor what we cannot see,
for we must paint only what we see.
But paint that we don't see.
Claude Monet.
I hate characters.
Ever since birth,
we're mistaken for another.
We push him,
we pull him...
We force him to get in character.
To live or to tell.
Yes.
We say there's no choice.
Look in the mirror.
There are both of them.
You mean...
the four of them.
In fact
a fact does not translate what we've done,
but what we haven't done.
We will have children.
Not yet.
A dog, if you want.
Imagine you're still a little boy.
We looked at cloud shapes.
As a girl,
I saw dogs all over.
In the blue or the white?
We are together, both of them.
We will need children.
Not sure.
A dog, yes!
This is the story dogs tell.
While the fire burns in the hearth,
and the north wind blows,
the family, then,
sits around the fire.
Puppies listen but do not say a word.
And, when the story is over,
they ask many questions.
What is man?
What is a city?
What is war?
I can know
what someone else thinks,
but not what I think.
Do something
so I can speak.
I can know what someone else thinks,
but not what I think.
Do something
so that I can speak.
It is precisely because this gentleness
was necessary to give birth to pain
and comes back, moreover,
to soothe it at times...
that men can be sincere
with others
and even with themselves,
when they glory in
a woman's kindness toward them.
At the heart of their liaison circulates, constantly,
secretly,
unavowed to others,
or unwittingly revealed by questions, investigations,
a painful concern.
But this could not have arisen without the previous gentleness.
They always want to be on time.
Where does that come from?
They want to be first.
A German mathematician...
Another German!
Concerning prime numbers,
Riemann arrived at a landscape
in which each point becomes music.
A line of zeros along the sea.
One can imagine that Frankenstein was born here.
One can imagine.
In 1816, Lord Byron and Shelley, chased from England,
sought shelter by Lake Geneva
with Mary Shelley who began to write a horror tale.
Nothing tragic about this story.
Not the laughter of giants,
no indifferent detail
recounts their pathetic love.
You are in bed, Professor.
You are asleep...
except...
we are not your dream.
You don't know?
No, I don't know.
I don't believe you.
I'm coming down below.
Yes, in depth.
I think you have to...
start down below...
and then surface.
Two questions, a big one and a small one.
What's difficult is to fit flatness into depth.
Suffering.
The other world.
It's him.
Use a deep voice.
My word.
You what do here?
Me very upset!
Outside!
He seems depressed.
He's dreaming of the Marquesas Islands.
Like in the Jack London novel.
Exactly.
Marlborough has left for war!
Don't know when he'll be back!