Dites-nous, Patrick Lemoine, à quoi sert vraiment un psy ? (Hors collection) (French Edition)

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Bernard's saying is reported for the first time in John of Salisbury's Metalogicon, which was completed in and is rightfully regarded as one of the major documents of what scholars have come to call the Twelfth Century "Renaissance. We frequently know more, not because we have moved ahead by our own natural ability, but because we are supported by the mental strength of others, and possess riches that we have inherited from our forefathers.

Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to puny dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted 6 up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature. Bernard's simile is vivid and easy to visualize, which explains its immediate imaginative appeal; and its subtle ambiguity succeeds in reconciling some of the basic claims of the moderni namely, that they occupy a more advanced position in comparison to the ancients with the requirements of an age for which tradition was still the only reliable source of value the relation of modernity to antiquity is consequently characterized as analogous to that of dwarfs to giants.

It was certainly the ambiguity, by which one enjoyed the freedom to stress only one of the two meanings combined in the metaphor, that made Bernard's dictum into a widely circulating formula and, eventually, into 7 a rhetorical commonplace. A striking fact about this comparison is that it represents an equally significant stage both in the history of the idea of progress and in that of the idea of decadence.

Seen from this vantage point, progress and decadence appear indeed to be intimately linked: A few instances of later uses of the medieval analogy can illustrate its semantic flexibility. Late in the sixteenth century, when the self-confidence of the Renaissance was being replaced by the baroque consciousness of universal illusion and mutability, the old image was revived by Michel de Montaigne.

The contrasting figures of the giants and the dwarfs were eliminated, but the essential idea of succeeding generations symbolized by human bodies sitting on the shoulders of each other was kept and developed. The moderns, Montaigne suggests, may be more advanced than the ancients, but they should not on this count be honored, for they have done nothing heroic to get where they are; their high position on the scale of progress is a consequence of natural law rather than of personal endeavor and merit.

Montaigne's view of progress is not without a touch of melancholy -- a welcome reminder that recognition of progress does not automatically lead to optimistic exultation. Thus, we mount stairwise from step to step. So it comes about that he who has mounted highest has often more honour than he deserves, for on 8 the shoulders of the last but one he is only one barleycorn higher. Burton cites as his source a rather obscure Spanish author and mystic, Diego de Estella , but the whole passage, with its air of quaint erudition, can be taken as hardly more than a rhetorical exercise.

Both the praise of the predecessors and the self-demeaning implication of the dwarf as a symbol for the author himself have no real force: But even in this case the metaphor seems intended not so much to convey a philosophy of progress as to give expression to feelings of personal modesty, gratitude, and admiration for earlier thinkers and scientists. What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much in several ways…. If 10 I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. One of the most significant metamorphoses of the medieval analogy is to be found, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, in Pascal's Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum ?

Published posthumously, this early piece is perhaps Pascal's most Cartesian writing. Like Descartes, Pascal is a staunch defender of the moderns' freedom of research and criticism against the unwar- ranted authority of the ancients. Antiquity has become the object of a cult carried to the point "that oracles are made of all its thoughts and mysteries, even of its obscurities. There is no real rupture in the continuity of the human effort to know, and the contribution of the ancients has made it easier for the moderns to understand aspects of nature that in antiquity would have been impossible to grasp.

It is our duty, therefore, to acknowledge our indebtedness. It is in this manner that we may at the present day adopt different sentiments and new opinions, without despising the ancients and without ingratitude, since the first knowledge which they have given us served as a stepping-stone to our own, and since in these advantages we are indebted to them for our ascendency over them; because by being raised by their aid to a certain degree, the slightest effort causes us to mount still higher, and with less pain and less glory we find ourselves above them.

Thence it is that we are enabled to discover things which it was impossible for them to perceive. Our view is more extended, and although they knew as well as we all that they could observe in nature, they did not, 12 nevertheless, know it so well, and we see more than they. There is little doubt that Pascal had in mind the old simile when writing the passage. He probably found it still suggestive, despite the rather grotesque contrast between dwarfs and giants, which might have appeared to his taste -- educated by an epoch of demanding intellectual refinement -- as both too crude and too childishly fabulous.

But beyond such hypothetical considerations it is certain that the young Pascal, at the time when he wrote the Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum, did not think of his contemporaries as pygmies. Pascal uses a series of elements taken from the original metaphor, the most striking one being the reference to the higher position and consequently to the more extended view of the moderns, but giants and dwarfs are left out. If the medieval figure contained an antimodern bias, in Pascal's treatment it has totally vanished.

During the Middle Ages time was conceived along essentially theological lines, as tangible proof of the transient character of human life and as a permanent reminder of death and what lay beyond. This thinking was illustrated by the recurrence of such major themes and motifs as memento mori, fortuna labilis the instability of fate , the ultimate vanity of all things, and the destructiveness of time. One of the most significant topoi of the Middle Ages, the idea of a theatrum mundi, drew an analogy between this world and a stage, on which humans are actors who unwittingly play the roles assigned to them by the divine Providence.

Such conceptions were natural in an economically and culturally static society dominated by the ideal of stability and even quiescence -- a society wary of change, in which secular values were considered from an entirely theocentric view of human life. There were also practical reasons for the rather loose and blurred time consciousness of the medieval individual.

We must remind ourselves, for instance, that no accurate measurement of time was possible before the invention of the mechanical clock in the late thirteenth century. The theological concept of time did not disappear suddenly, but from then on it had to coexist in a state of growing tension with a new awareness of the preciousness of practical time -- the time of action, creation, discovery, and transformation.

To cite again Ricardo Quinones's study of The Renaissance Discovery of Time, "Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio share their society's sense of energy and rejuvenation, as well as its most practical concerns with time. In them we find aroused energy and love of variety. They themselves were something of pioneers and acutely conscious of living in a new time, a time of poetic revival. But they also could regard time as a precious commodity, an 15 object worthy of scrupulous attention. More interesting than this periodization per se are the value judgments passed on each of these three eras, expressed by the metaphors of light and darkness, day and night, wakefulness and sleep.

Classical antiquity came to be associated with resplendent light, the Middle Ages became the nocturnal and oblivious "Dark Ages," while modernity was conceived of as a time of emergence from darkness, a time of awakening and "renascence," heralding a luminous future. The Renaissance approach to history is illustrated in the fourteenth century by the father of humanism -- Petrarch. Mommsen has pointed out that Petrarch introduced the notion of the "Dark Ages" in the periodization of history.

Summing up the results of his research, Mommsen writes: For the whole idea of the Italian 'rinascita' is inescapably connected with the notion of the preceding era as an age of obscurity. The people living in that 'renascence' thought of it as a time of revolution. They wanted to break away from traditions and they were convinced that they had effected 16 such a break. His message, as expressed in Africa, the poem in Latin which he considered his highest achievement, was certainly one of optimism and heroic hope. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live after me, there will follow a better age.

This sleep of forgetfulness will not last for ever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our 17 descendants can come again in the former pure radiance. He has often been described in terms of his conflicting allegiances to the classical and the Christian value systems as a personality embodying the whole spiritual drama of an age of transition.

What has been perhaps less noticed is that Petrarch tended to extend his and his age's contradictions to the concept of world history. To Petrarch and then to the next generation of humanists, history no longer appeared as a continuum but rather as a succession of sharply distinct ages, black and white, dark and bright. History seemed to proceed by dramatic ruptures, alternating periods of enlightened grandeur with dark periods of decay and chaos. Here we are faced with an obvious paradox, namely, that the Renaissance's much discussed activist optimism and cult of energy emanate from a vision of world history that is essentially catastrophic.

To speak of the immediate past -- the past that naturally structures the present -- as "dark" and at the same time posit the certainty of a "luminous" future -- even if it be the revival of a previous Golden Age -- involves a revolutionary way of thinking, for which we would try in vain to find coherent precedents before the Renaissance. Is it necessary to stress that revolution is more than, and qualitatively distinct from, a simple expression of dissatisfaction or rebellion? Revolution is distinguished from any form of spontaneous or even conscious rebellion because it implies, besides the essential moment of negation or rejection, a specific consciousness of time and an alliance with it.

Here again etymology is revealing. Most historical revolutions have conceived of themselves as returns to a purer initial state, and any consistent theory of revolution implies a cyclical view of history -whether successive cycles are seen as alternating light, darkness or as forming a symbolic ascending spiral, in accordance with a more systematic doctrine of progress. Insofar as the Renaissance was self-conscious and saw itself as the beginning of a new cycle in history, it accomplished an ideologically revolutionary alliance with time. Its whole philosophy of time was based on the conviction that history had a specific direction, expressive not of a transcendental, predetermined pattern, but of the necessary interaction of immanent forces.

Man was therefore to participate consciously in the creation of the future: Here again Petrarch's case offers a good illustration. For him, the moderni were still men of the Dark Ages, but with an important difference: Petrarch himself, in spite of his conflicting allegiances, was stimulated by his belief in the future. This prevented him from ever becoming a passive admirer of the ancients' grandeur. On the contrary, his cult of antiquity -- far from being mere antiquarianism -was a form of activism.

He was convinced that the passionate study of antiquity could and should kindle a sense of emulation. It was because he wanted so much to revive the spirit of antiquity that he was conscious of the dangers of an exclusive and single-minded cult of the past for its own sake, and so outspoken in his opposition to those who despised anything modern, contra laudatores veterum semper presentia contemnentes.

The process of erosion was started by a momentous revision of the values and doctrines that formed the legacy of the Middle Ages. But the Renaissance itself was unable to go beyond replacing the authority of the church with the authority of antiquity. We may even say -insofar as the Middle Ages themselves had recognized the authority of Greek and Roman antiquity in nontheological matters -- that the Renaissance was in certain respects less free from medieval traditions than it actually believed.

Indirectly, though, the Renaissance created a set of rational and critical arguments for breaking away from not just one but all forms of intellectual authority; and its fight against certain medieval cultural patterns made it discover and perfect ideological weapons that could well be -- and in fact later would be -- used against those same ancients whom they were supposed to vindicate. The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in its aesthetic aspects was rooted in much of the philosophic and scientific discussion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which resulted in the liberation of reason not only from the tyranny of medieval Scholasticism but also from the equally restricting fetters imposed on it by the Renaissance idolatry of classical antiquity.

In one form or another, most of these authors and their followers blame antiquity -- or rather the blind veneration of antiquity -- for the prevailing sterility of thought and the general lack of adequate methods in the sciences. This may explain why some of the more advanced minds of the time, philosophers and scientists, reacted with such intensity against the cult of antiquity. This may also explain, at a more specialized level, the highly interesting terminological strategy adopted by the defenders of modernity. Francis Bacon is, most probably, the originator of a new and powerful simile illustrating his and his generation's view of the rapport between antiquity and the modern age.

Bacon constructs a paradox involving the inexperience of boyhood and the wisdom of old age. From the vantage point proposed by the philosopher there is little doubt that it is we, the moderns, who are the real ancients, the ancients having been, when they lived, young and "modern. There are several statements of this paradox in Bacon's writings.

In the Advancement of Learning: And to speak truly, Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which 18 we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backwards from ourselves. In the Preface to Instauratio Magna: And for its value and utility it must be plainly avowed that the wisdom which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys: Or in Novum Organum: As for antiquity, the opinion touching it which men entertain is quite a negligent one, and scarcely consonant with the word itself.

For the old age of the world is to be accounted the true antiquity; and this is the attribute of our own times, not of the earlier age of the world in which the ancients lived; and which, though in respect to us it was elder, yet in respect to the world it was younger. Bacon's reasoning appealed to the defenders of modernity, and one should not be surprised to discover that his comparison was reformulated and developed throughout the seventeenth century and then passed on to the eighteenth. In France, where the Querelle which had actually begun much earlier was to be formally started in the s by Perrault and Fontenelle, Descartes closely followed Bacon when he said "C'est nous qui sommes les anciens," not without implying that the praise given to the ancients should rightfully go to the real ancients -- the moderns.

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Other French authors, including Pascal in the already mentioned Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum , used the paradoxical figure before Fontenelle 21 introduced it in his Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes If Bacon's paradox was new, the implied parallelism between the life of mankind and that of a human individual had a long tradition. It has been suggested that "the earliest use of the simile in terms similar to those of Bacon is probably to be found in Saint Augustine's City of 22 God X, The "progress" that Saint Augustine speaks of is in fact an ascension from earth to heaven, a passage from time to eternity.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the title of one of Leonardo Bruni's dialogues synthesizes 24 a broader trend: De modernis quibusdam scriptoribus in comparatione ad antiquos. Such parallels were not unknown to the Middle Ages, but the concept of antiquity was then quite different from what it came to mean after the Renaissance.

Curtius calls our attention to this crucial distinction: When we speak of the 'Ancients', we mean the pagan writers. The Middle Ages think 25 differently. The Querelle proper started when some modern-minded French authors, led by Charles Perrault, thought fit to apply the scientific concept of progress to literature and art. It is significant that neither scientists nor philosophers suggested the conspicuously fallacious line of reasoning that gave the moderns the feeling that they were entitled to transfer their scientific superiority over antiquity into an artistic one.

Let me also note that those who sided with the moderns in the notorious row were comparatively minor figures, in both France and England. This is certainly why what has remained alive from the whole controversy in England, in terms of the interests of today's nonscholarly reader, is Swift's devastating irony against the forgotten Wottons and Bentleys of the time. The story of the Querelle has been told repeatedly since the appearance of the first comprehensive and still authoritative study, Hippolyte Rigault's Histoire de la Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes Apart from a host of erudite articles, we can say that almost all the relevant facts have been collected and set in perspective in a number of comprehensive studies, from Hubert Gillot 's La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes en France to Hans Robert Jauss's recent study "Aestetische Normen und geschichtlische 26 Reflexion in der 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes'" ; and, in English, Anne Elizabeth Burlingame's The Battle of the Books in Its Historical Setting and Richard Foster Jones 's Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the 'Battle of the Books' It will suffice here to recall a few more or less familiar facts that have direct bearing on the evolution of modernity as a concept, with the intention of giving a systematic rather than an historical account of the dispute and its results.

The moderns subjected antiquity and its defenders to a variety of criticisms, which may be divided into three broad categories. Clearly, we are concerned here with the arguments of the moderns that have some kind of relevance to aesthetics, and not with what they had to say about modernity's scientific and technological superiority that superiority, for obvious tactical reasons, was often brought up by most of the "modernists".

The argument of reason. French neoclassicism was certainly subservient to antiquity, but a close study of the aesthetics of the period shows that imitation of the ancients was rarely recommended dogmatically after -- indeed, it was criticized as a fallacy. The famous neoclassical rules had been introduced and developed throughout the seventeenth century as an attempt to rationalize the indiscriminate Renaissance cult of antiquity and, moreover, to found a perfectly rational theory of beauty.

The elaboration and formulation of the rules of beauty were the expression of the triumph of rationality over authority in poetics, and they definitely paved the way for the moderns' later claims of superiority. By nearly unanimous consent, the most general rule is that of pleasing, and the first norm of artistic gratification -- so the neoclassical argument goes -- is verisimilitude in harmony with the requirements of beauty.

All the other rules, from the most comprehensive to the most specific, are derived more geometrico from these principles, and they are to be used as guidelines for the production by natural genius of any work of genuine merit. Left by itself, poetic genius is doomed -- if not to fail completely, then to err and give much less gratification than it would have been able to provide if it had known and observed the rules.

The larger the number of rules, the moderns' champion seems to suggest, the more advanced the age and its representative artists. A new Virgil, born in the century of Louis le Grand, would write a better version of the Aeneid because -- granted his genius was the same -- he could benefit from the more numerous and sophisticated rules at his disposal.

So when I have made clear that Homer and Virgil made countless mistakes which the moderns no longer make, I think I have proved that the ancients did not have all our rules, since the natural effect of rules is to prevent one from making mistakes. So that if today heaven were disposed to bring forth a man who had a genius of the magnitude of Virgil's, it is certain that he would write a more beautiful poem than the Aeneid because he would have, in accordance with my supposition, as much genius as Virgil and at the same time a larger 27 amount of precepts to guide him.

If we take into account Perrault's view of the development of reason and of general progress, we should not be surprised to find that the oldest of Greek poets, Homer, is by far the most frequently attacked for his errors and scientific inaccuracies. For instance, how on earth could the author of the Odyssey say that Ulysses was recognized by his dog, which he had not seen for twenty years, when Pliny makes it quite clear that a dog cannot live for more than fifteen years?

In England, Swift was much better aware of the absurdity of such a "scientific" approach to the poetry of the ancients, and turned into ridicule the excesses of Perrault and Fontenelle: But, besides these Omissions in Homer, already mentioned, the curious Reader will also observe several Defects in that Author's Writings for which he is not altogether accountable.

For whereas every Branch of Knowledge has received such wonderful Acquirements since his Age, especially within the last three Years or there- abouts; it is almost impossible, he could be so perfect in Modern Discoveries as his Advocates pretend. We freely acknowledge Him to be the inventor of the Compass, of Gunpowder, and the Circulation of the Blood: Does he not also leave us wholly to seek in the Art of Political Wagering?

What can be more defective and unsatisfactory than his long Dissertation 29 upon Tea? The argument of taste. Taste, the seventeenth-century moderns believed, developed along with other aspects of civilization, becoming more demanding and refined. The concept of progress is explicitly applied to the area of civility, mores, and cultural conventions. Antiquity was therefore more primitive than modern times and, worse, it went so far as to tolerate the reflection in poetry of rude and barbaric customs, which cannot help offending the taste of the civilized reader.

On the contrary, the basic neoclassicism of the moderns was rather more intolerant than that of the ancients' admirers, whose aesthetic concepts were certainly not more relativistic, but more flexible and comprehensive. Perrault's vocal nonconformism was in fact little more than a disguise of deep conformism and consciousness of fashion. We should not forget that the Querelle was indeed highly fashionable, and the court of Louis XIV and the salons passionately participated in it, with a natural majority favoring the moderns the epithet "natural" is justified if we realize that the aesthetic traditionalism of the "anciens" had little to attract a wider public of mondains.

So the famous battle was no real battle, and the moderns were hardly heroes. Today's reader of Perrault cannot help being struck by the narrow theoretical orthodoxy of this author who had been so controversial in his time. Actually all the arguments brought forth by Perrault to demonstrate the superiority of the moderns over the ancients are purely neoclassical. Perrault was certainly criticized during the debate, and sometimes quite bitterly, but none of his adversaries could find fault with the principles themselves, in the name of which the ancients were being attacked.

Roughly speaking, Perrault was scolded for two main reasons, a moral one it was petty, ungrateful, and selfserving to denigrate the ancients in order to underscore one's own merits , and a technical one the defects attributed to the ancients were in fact attributable only to their unfaithful and ungifted translators, whom the moderns were referring to simply because they knew neither Greek nor Latin. In a debate that had so much to do with intellectual history, both factions show a complete lack of historical sense, and both agree that the values involved in their discussion are absolute and changeless.

The rationalist concept of progress is by no means incompatible with the belief in the universal and timeless character of values. During the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries even the most single-minded progressivist doctrinaires had no doubts about the absolute validity of their value system and value judgments. What makes Perrault and his followers no less neoclassic than their enemies, beyond the questions at issue, is their common belief in a transcendent and unique model of beauty. The merit of each particular artist is measured by how closely his works approximate this pure and incorruptible ideal.

Beauty, like all the other fundamental values, has nothing to do with time, but exists objectively and eternally. The progressivists think that the advancement of learning, the development of civilization, and the enlightening influence of reason contribute to a better, more effective understanding of those perennial and universal values, which were no less real in older times but only less clearly discerned.

So Perrault and the moderns did not think that antiquity's ideal of beauty could have been different from their own. What they prided themselves on was only their ability to be more faithful to an ideal that the ancients had pursued less successfully. This is an essential point in our discussion. In their claim of superiority over the ancients, the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moderns did not challenge any of the fundamental criteria of beauty recognized and promoted by their opponents. So we could say that Perrault and his party were fighting the ancients with aesthetic arguments borrowed from those who had imposed the cult of antiquity.

The moderns did not negate the ancients. We might label their approach "a criticism of imperfections," in the sense that they tried to point out where and how the ancients had failed to live up to the demands of timeless perfection. In typically neoclassical fashion, the concept of perfection itself was never questioned. During the seventeenth century and even later, the opposition between authority and reason was not automatically extended to religious matters, and one could well be in favor of rationalism and the doctrine of progress in all areas concerned with the study of nature, while readily accepting the principle of authority in theology.

Pascal's Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum offers once again a clear illustration.

Although determined by the growing prestige of reason as a critical faculty and by the revolutionary discoveries of science, the self-consciousness of modernity as a distinct and superior period in the history of mankind was not free from all association with religion. On the contrary, such associations were, during certain periods, numerous and very close, and it is only by bringing them into focus that we can become fully aware of one of the structural ambiguities of modernity's idea, an ambiguity that accounts for the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the romantic irrationalists could still, while rejecting the progressivism and philosophical optimism of the Enlightenment, be committed to a broadly conceived modern ideal.

Keeping in mind Pascal's distinction between rational truth whose gradual discovery in time reflects the law of progress and the supernatural truth of religion, we may remark that the moderns could claim a double advantage over the ancients: First, they were older than the ancients, intellectually more mature; and second, they were in possession of the revealed truth of Christ, which had been inaccessible to the ancients.

The only thing that the ancients still had on their side -- this as a result of the work of the Renaissance humanists -- was beauty. Speaking of the ambivalent appraisal of antiquity's heritage by the sternly religious Jansenists, Sainte-Beuve cites in his history of Port Royal an aphorism by Joubert , which suggestively sums up the attitude of the religious-minded classicists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Several questions, although not asked explicitly as early as the seventeenth century, were somehow implied in the critical battle that started in France and had as an object the legitimacy of the Christian epic.

Is beauty an exclusively heathen invention and con- cept? Or are there two fundamental types of beauty, one pagan, the other Christian? And if so, which type is superior? Epic poems, imitating by and large the classical models of the genre, but in which God, the hierarchies of angels, and Satan with his legions of devils had replaced the gods of Greek and Latin mythology, had been popular in France and other Western countries since the midsixteenth century. Tasso in his Discorsi del Poema Eroico, In vain have our mistaken authors tried To lay these ancient ornaments aside, Thinking our God, and prophets that he sent, Might act like those the poets did invent, To fright poor readers in each line with hell, And talk of Satan, Ashtaroth, and Bell.

The mysteries which Christians must believe 32 Disdain such shifting pageants to receive…. Besides praising his own poem in hyperbolic terms, Desmarets voiced ideas totally opposed to the narrow neoclassical stance represented by Boileau's circle. His point was that he had written a poem on a noble and true subject, the "true religion fighting and conquering the 33 false one. Is it an exaggeration to think that Desmarets and other minor religious poets of his time contributed to the enlargement of the idea of modernity, and perhaps even to a greater extent than some of those directly and notoriously involved in the Querelle?

The fact is that the religious definition of modernity, or, to put it differently, the recognition of the essential connection between Christianity and modernity, was to become one of the major themes of romanticism. But the religious argument was not used openly during the heyday of the Querelle and did not become a significant factor in the reshaping of the modern idea before the emergence of romanticism. What were the main results of the Querelle? The most important one was probably the enrichment of the term "modern" with a number of sharply polemical connotations.

Not in France or in England or in the other countries reached by the echoes of the controversy could the moderns have won more than a reputation for gallantry and, perhaps, for iconoclasm. No distinctly new values were promoted or suggested. In this way, the pattern of literary and artistic development through negation of the established models of taste was created. It was during the eighteenth century that the idea of beauty began to undergo the process through which it lost its aspects of transcendence and finally became a purely historical category.

The romantics were already thinking in terms of a relative and historically immanent beauty and felt that to make valid judgments of taste one was supposed to derive one's criteria from historical experience -- not from a "utopian," universal, and timeless concept of beauty. The opposition between ancient and modern played the role of a shaping influence in this process.

The Quarrel offered the pattern for a broader distinction between two autonomous world views and scales of value, both of them equally legitimate historically: Hurd speaks of classic and gothic as two perfectly autonomous worlds, neither of which can be considered superior to the other. Quite naturally, one who approaches the gothic with classical criteria will be unable to discover in it anything except irregularity and ugliness. But this, obviously, does not mean that the gothic has no rules or goals of its own by which its achievements should be judged.

But the Gothic architecture has its own rules, by which when it comes 34 to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian. Such ideas are consistent with Hurd's endorsement of the cult of imagination as opposed to the neoclassical doctrine of imitation , and with his belief that, above and beyond nature, the poet has "a supernatural world to range in. In a word, you will find that the manners 36 they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are more poetical for being Gothic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word "romantic," a synonym for "modern" in the broadest acceptation, designated all the aesthetically relevant aspects of Christian civilization, seen as a distinct period in world history.

According to that notion, romanticism was essentially an expression of the Genius of Christianity, to use the title of Chateaubriand's famous book, in which a new parallel be- tween the ancients and the moderns was drawn, and in which the superiority of the latter was seen as resulting from their practice of not only the truest but also the most poetical of all religions. The medieval legends, epics, and romances, the poetry of the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Tasso, Milton, etc. It was only later that the meaning of the term was narrowed down to designate primarily the literary and artistic schools that reacted against the neoclassical system of values during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

For the romantics in the limited historical sense of our contemporary notion the aspiration toward universality, the desire to make the work of art resemble as closely as possible the transcendent model of beauty, belonged to the classical past. The new type of beauty was based on the "characteristic," on the various possibilities offered by the synthesis of the "grotesque" and the "sublime," on the "interesting," and on other such related categories that had replaced the ideal of classical perfection. The pursuit of perfection came to be regarded as an attempt to escape history and the shortest way toward "academicism.

To be of one's own time, to try to respond to its problems became more than an aesthetic -- it became almost a moral obligation. Stendhal is probably the first major European writer to term himself a romantic and to understand by romanticism not a particular period longer or shorter , nor a specific style, but an awareness of contemporary life, of modernity in its immediate sense. His definition of romanticism is more than a piece of paradoxical commonsense; it is, one may say, by its implied synonymity between "romantic" and "modern," and by the sharp sense of temporality it conveys throughout, a kind of first draft of Baudelaire's theory of modernity, which I shall examine later.

Here is what the author of Racine et Shakespeare had to say about "romanticisme" as opposed to "classicisme": Romanticism is the art of presenting to the peoples literary works which, in view of the present-day state of their customs and beliefs, affords them the utmost possible pleasure. Classicism, on the contrary, presents them with the literature that used to give the utmost pleasure to their great-grandfathers….

To imitate Sophocles and Euripides today, and to pretend that these imitations will not cause the nineteenth-century Frenchman to yawn, is to 38 be classicist. Stendhal does not hesitate to say that Sophocles and Euripides were romantic in their day.

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So was Racine -- his particular kind of romanticism consisting in his faithfulness to the taste of the court of Louis XIV, a taste characterized mainly by the "extreme dignity" that was then fashionable, and that made "a Duke of , even when overwhelmed with paternal affection, never fail to call his son: Taste is the ability of 39 pleasing today.

Set in historical perspective, such statements are rich in polemical implications. By his overt praise of fashion, for instance, does not Stendhal make fun of the neoclassical view that the artist should try to approximate as closely as possible the universal and atemporal model of beauty? The paradox, of which Stendhal is an illustration, is that the modern-minded writer often finds that the present is unprepared to accept the very things that it most needs.

So, the relevance of the artist's intuitions is to be confirmed by the future. The relations between the early nineteenth-century romantic and his time turn out to be quite strained.

When referring to the contemporary situation, Stendhal speaks of the writer as a fighter rather than a pleaser: In contrast to the boldness of the romantic, the classicist is cautious to the point of cowardice. And the contemporary public protects him because it is terrorized by the great reputations of the past. This explains why the present does not dare ask for what it needs.

People are unwittingly victims of the despotic power of habit, and it is one of the writer's major tasks to 41 try to eliminate its inhibiting and almost paralyzing effects in matters of imagination. Stendhal is aware that to be consistently modern romantic, in his terminology one has to take the risk of shocking the public, at least insofar as its taste is influenced by official academicism and a host of deep-rooted prejudices, for which an inadequate understanding of tradition is responsible.

Its sphere is thus much restricted, but at the same time its identity becomes essentially fleeting, extremely difficult to grasp because it cannot be defined in terms of past traditions Christian or otherwise , and very provisional because it stakes its survival on the confirmation of the future. It is known that Stendhal himself, throughout a literary career that went almost unnoticed by his contemporaries, took comfort in the thought that the future would do him justice. There is much more to Stendhal's preoccupation with the future than the mere compensatory dream of someone suffering from lack of recognition.

His personality is structurally that of a self-willed and entirely self-conscious precursor, although he clearly does not approve the vague rhetoric of futurity in which other romantics indulged his known dislike of Victor Hugo's prophetic attitudes is significant. Stendhal was a "romantic" in his own sense of the word, and this is why, even in Racine et Shakespeare, written before his major works, he could sometimes be blatantly antiromantic, and consistent with his lifelong literary creed that was later termed "realist.

The most striking one is that, liberated from the constraints of tradition, the writer should strive to give his contemporaries a pleasure that they seem unprepared to enjoy and perhaps do not even deserve. Since then, the relations between the two modernities have been irreducibly hostile, but not without allowing and even stimulating a variety of mutual influences in their rage for each other's destruction.

With regard to the first, bourgeois idea of modernity, we may say that it has by and large continued the outstanding traditions of earlier periods in the history of the modern idea. The doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology, the concern with time a measurable time, a time that can be bought and sold and therefore has, like any other commodity, a calculable equivalent in money , the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, but also the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success -- all have been associated in various degrees with the battle for the modern and were kept alive and promoted as key values in the triumphant civilization established by the middle class.

By contrast, the other modernity, the one that was to bring into being the avant-gardes, was from its romantic beginnings inclined toward radical antibourgeois attitudes. It was disgusted with the middle-class scale of values and expressed its disgust through the most diverse means, ranging from rebellion, anarchy, and apocalypticism to aristocratic self-exile. So, more than its positive aspirations which often have very little in common , what defines cultural modernity is its outright rejection of bourgeois modernity, its consuming negative passion.

Before referring more specifically to the origins of the split between the two modernities it is 42 useful to focus on the term "modernity" itself. In view of Baudelaire's cardinal importance as a theorist of aesthetic modernity, it should be pointed out that the word, a recent neologism in mid-nineteenth-centuryFrance, had circulated in English at least since the seventeenth century. The OED records the first occurrence of "modernity" meaning "present times" in It also cites Horace Walpole, who in a letter of spoke of Chatterton's poems in terms of "the modernity of [their] modulation," which "nobody [that has an ear] can 43 get over.

Its actual sense, in Walpole's view, was one of sound and "modulation," and we can best comprehend it musically. To appreciate the oustandingly original and seminal quality of Baudelaire's concept of "modernity" it will be instructive to consider here the way Chateaubriand employed the term about two decades earlier. The triteness of "modernity" comes out quite unequivocally: The history of the alienation of the modern writer starts with the romantic movement. In an early phase, the object of hatred and ridicule is philistinism, a typical form of middle-class hypocrisy.

The best example is preromantic and romantic Germany, where the critique of philistine mentality with all its heavy and stupid pretensions, crass prosaism, and false, totally inadequate praise of intellectual values to disguise an obsessive preoccupation with material ones played an essential role in the overall picture of cultural life. The satirical portrait of the philistine is frequently encountered in German romantic prose -- we have only to recall E.

Hoffmann's tales of the supernatural, and the typically Hoffmannesque antithesis between the creative powers of imagination symbolized by, among others, the unforgettable Anselmus in Der Goldene Topf and the utterly platitudinous character of the bourgeois world, with its solemn and empty earnestness. As a result, the term "philistine," negative and insulting as it was, acquired a definite social meaning, first in Germany, then in all Western cultures.

The significance of this semantic shift may be better understood when we compare the philistine to the laughingstock of the preceding neoclassical period, namely, the pedant. The pedant is a purely intellectual type and, as such, his social background is immaterial to the satirist who wants to portray him. The philistine is, on the contrary, defined mainly by his class background, all his intellectual attitudes being nothing but disguises of practical interests and social concerns. The romantic critique of philistinism in Germany was taken over by young radical groups in the s and s, and worked out into a clear-cut opposition between two types: At one time he is hostile to it,…he rebels against it as Gotz, Prometheus, Faust….

At another time he is friendly to it, 'accommodates' to it…. Thus Goethe is at one time colossal, at another petty; sometimes a defiant, scornful genius full of contempt for the world, other times a cautious, contented, 46 narrow Philistine. In postrevolutionary France the opposite trend prevailed: The idea of art's autonomy was by no means a novelty in the s, when the battlecry of Art for Art's Sake became popular in France among circles of young Bohemian poets and painters.

The view of art as an autonomous activity had been defended half a century earlier by Kant, who, in his Critique of Judgment , had formulated his paradoxical concept of art's "purposiveness without a purpose" and thus affirmed art's fundamental disinterestedness. The central statement of Gautier in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin is characteristically negative, a definition of beauty in terms of its total uselessness: Art for Art's Sake is the first product of aesthetic modernity's rebellion against the modernity of the philistine.

The result would be a modern kind of beauty, different from the canonic beauty of antiquity. Obviously, this can be achieved only on the basis of an acceptance of modernity as it is. It goes without saying that we accept civilization as it is, with its railroads, steamboats, English scientific research, central heating, factory chimneys and all its technical equipment, 47 which have been considered impervious to the picturesque. Like Baudelaire -- whose concept of the "heroism of modern life" he seems to echo here -- Gautier is aware that the straight rejection of modern civilization as irredeemably ugly can be as much of a philistine attitude as the superficial praise of it.

The argument of change, on which the defense of contemporary taste is based, may also be Stendhalian, but Baudelaire's explicit identification of romanticism with modern art puts a new and radical emphasis on the idea of modernity and on the value of novelty.

À propos de Corine

To speak of romanticism is to speak of modern art -- that is, of intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration toward the infinite, expressed by all means 49 available to the arts. Romanticism is, in Baudelaire's view, not only the "most recent, the most contemporary form of the beautiful," but also -- and this point deserves to be stressed -- it is substantially different from everything that has been done in the past. The awareness of this dissimilarity is actually the starting point in the search for novelty, another cardinal concept of Baudelaire's poetics "what has been disdained or unknown to the artists of the past" should become a subject of active meditation for the modern artist.

The conclusion of the above-quoted passage is paradoxical and deeply revealing at the same time: To give a more specific insight into Baudelaire's concept of romanticism, let us examine an instance in which it is applied more concretely. The "Salon of " deals at length with modernity, both directly the chapter entitled "On the Heroism of Modern Life" and indirectly the definition of romanticism , and there are many scattered remarks on it in other critical writings of Baudelaire, but there is little doubt that his most complete and pregnant treatment of modernity is to be found in his article on Constantin Guys, The Painter of Modern Life In this essay, modernity's most striking feature is its tendency toward some sort of immediacy, its attempt to identify with a sensuous present grasped in its very transitoriness and opposed, by its spontaneous nature, to a past hardened in frozen traditions and suggestive of lifeless quiescence: Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable….

As for this transitory, fleeting element whose metamorphoses are so frequent, you have no right either to scorn it or to ignore it. In a word, if a particular modernity is to be worthy to become antiquity, it is necessary to extract from it the mysterious beauty that human life involuntarily gives it….

Woe unto him who seeks in antiquity anything other than pure art, logic, and general method. By plunging too deeply into the past, he loses sight of the present; he renounces the values and privileges provided by circumstances; for almost all our 51 originality comes from the stamp that time imprints upon our feelings. For Baudelaire "modernity" to a large extent has lost its usual descriptive function, that is, it can no longer serve as a criterion for cutting out from the historical process a segment that might be convincingly designated as the present and, in that capacity, be compared to the past either wholly or in certain specific respects.

Baudelaire's approach to modernity renders impossible a systematic comparison between the moderns and the ancients, and in this sense it may be said to bring to a close an intellectual dispute whose origins go back to the late Middle Ages and whose history seems to be almost one with the development of the modern idea itself. But why can modernity not be compared to anything in the past? Imagine if the government had built military bases near Iran, forcing the popular secular reformers to embark on a crash program to build nukes.

How many attacks would we have suffered? There is still the war in Sudan, where US troops have been engaged in a peacekeeping mission for the last three years at the cost of several thousand lives. President Kerry vows to stay until the nation is stable, and he is correct. As a wise man once said: Unless the price is too high, the burden too great, the hardship too hard, the friend acts disproportionately, and the foe fights back.

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In which case, we need a timetable. Ruz sans Luz, je pense que vous pouvez demander a President Chavez a retire son ambassadeur a rompre avec les etats unis. Bush overnight of ordering his assassination for calling the US leader the devil during his speech at the United Nations this week.

Sur notre site http: Maybe Chavez did himself, his larger alternative agenda and his country a disservice by treating the UN podium as the set of his weekly TV show at home. For sure, the speech was far from a model of diplomatic rhetoric. This bad soundbite of an attack certainly seems a distraction from more important issues the Democrats should be engaging and fighting for with just 44 days before election day. Maybe talk about why these are times when we need effective diplomacy and dialogue with countries like Venezuela—not name calling?

Some Democrats, like Senator Tom Harkin, got it right. Je lis toujours Chomsky avec plaisir et gratitude.

Un fasciste dangereux qui defend la torture. In April , following a general strike led by oil company management and collaborating labor union leaders in Venezuela, parts of the Venezuelan military launched a coup to remove democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez Frias from office. In response, literally millions of Venezuelans swarmed to Miraflores, surrounding the palace, protesting the coup. Faced with the widespread public opposition, frustrated by loyal military forces who supported President Chavez, and condemned by heads of state across Latin America, the coup attempt collapsed.

Chavez was returned to Miraflores, unharmed, where he resumed his duties as head of state2 Ellner and Rosen, This article addresses the question of possible AFL-CIO involvement in the coup attempt, trying to confirm or deny any possible involvement. To do this, the paper proceeds in the following directions: To this task, we now turn.

Before we can consider possible involvement of the AFL-CIO in the Venezuelan coup attempt, we must first consider any foreign policy it may have established: However, if it has such a foreign policy program, then the possibility of such involvement is more likely to be substantiated. Although not generally known by union members as it has been consciously hidden by its leaders, the AFL-CIO actually has a long-time foreign policy program that goes back to the days of the American Federation of Labor AFL during the teens under then-president, Samuel Gompers.

It has been unequivocally established that they have worked to overthrow democratically-elected governments, have collaborated with dictators against progressive labor movements, and have supported reactionary labor movements against progressive governments Scipes, In fact, according to labor journalist Lee Sustar,.

Venezuela—a key focus of U. Sustar, ; 3 see also Hirsch, I have suggested before that these are likely to be policy-making organizations for the NED itself Scipes, b. The Solidarity Center has been active in Venezuela since While that might have been true, it is not all the Solidarity Center was doing.

These meetings, six in all, took place around the country and culminated in a national meeting on March 5, On April 11th, a massive march and demonstration was held to support the union. The coup was denounced generally throughout the hemisphere Golinger, Folsom, issued a statement publicly praising the coup leaders for their coup Marquis, In response to this coup attempt, the people mobilized in the millions, the military split and the coup attempt failed.

Chavez was returned to Miraflores on April 14th, where he resumed his duties as President. Chavez, in challenging the government emphasis added Marquis, On May 2, , this author published a piece on Z Net, whereby he noted the incredible similarities between the coup in Chile on September 11, , and the April coup attempt in Venezuela. This author noted that he had no proof to his accusations, but that the patterns were strikingly similar, and his suspicions had been raised. As far as can be determined, no answers to these questions have ever been provided publicly.

In the April issue of Labor Notes, this author again returned to the debate, this time with evidence. Additionally, in a personal communication with this author on March 6, , Steve Ellner elaborated on events:. Yes, he is correct, but the CTV leaders condemned it after they had been betrayed by Carmona and his people. According to Ellner and Rosen, despite the CTV and Ortega being key players in the coup efforts, upon attaining the presidency during the coup, Carmona ignored the labor wing of the opposition, appointing a cabinet of business leaders, military men and conservative politicians Ellner and Rosen, The Solidarity Center reports surfaced by Bigwood and Golinger n.

Similarly to developments in Chile preceding the September 11, coup against the government of Salvador Allende see Hirsch, , n. This author was able to locate NED funding for Venezuela:. NED has been long active across Latin America. It has been active in Venezuela, the fifth largest oil producer in the world, since In her book, Eva Golinger provides extensive funding accounts from the NED to its various grantee agencies in the country.

Most of these accounts—not all—however, agree with my figures. In short, combining my own research with that of others, this author shows that the CTV leadership was involved in the coup, that Solidarity Center staff members were involved beyond the field of organized labor, and that all of these operations were funded from outside of the US labor movement. Interestingly, even with publication of extensive material by a number of authors, the AFL-CIO has stuck to its original position: The CTV executive refused to sign the infamous decree of the short-lived Carmona regime that dissolved the National Assembly.

Bigwood and Golinger, n. Thus, any understanding of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program in the post years must specifically include its activities in Venezuela, and their similarities to previous pre operations, most importantly in Chile. A Response to Kim Scipes. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Barry, Tom and Deb Preusch. Bigwood, Jeremy and Eva Golinger.

These are documents unearthed by FOIA requests and are posted on-line at http: Taking Care of Business: Cantor, Daniel and Juliet Schor.

Catalogue nouveautés lecture publique adultes

Labor, the World Economy, and Central America. Following the Gacek article. Ellner, Steve and Fred Rosen. Coup, Chaos, or Misunderstanding? Introduction on-line at http: Differing Response to the Washington Consensus.

New Labor Forum, Vol. Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela. A copy of the Final Resolution is on-line at http: A Clear and Present Danger. Jones, Bart and Letta Tayler. A Newsday Special Report. Published by the Orlando Sentinel, on-line at http: CIA and American Labor: Dissertation, Department of History, Rutgers University. Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America. Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, Quezon City, Metro Manila: On-line in English at http: Return of Labor Imperialism, or Mistaken Reaction?

Listing in newsletter directs readers to web site at http: Article introduced in newsletter, carried in whole on web site at http: A more complete, un-edited, version of this article is at http: On line at http: Final Report from the Convention. Yankee Unions Go Home!

Sweeney and US Foreign Policy. Workers of the World Undermined: Weinrub, Al and William Bollinger. Labor Network on Central America. Bush instigated the coup, it was unhappy with the regime of Hugo Chavez, and sent clear signals to the opposition in Venezuela that it would not be upset should a coup against Chavez take place. The New York Times reported on CIA documents that showed that the Bush Administration had detailed information about the coup plans days prior to the coup Forero, See also Eva Golinger In her book, Golinger provides extensive, in-depth documentation and analysis establishing this claim—see particularly the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief generated by the CIA dated April 6, printed on pp.

And all the while knowing that this was false, and that the military coup was part of a plan that they knew about in advance. For an in-depth report of on-going US activities against Venezuela, until January , see James, Quotes in this paper are from the January-March Quarterly Report, and are found at http: More importantly, she prints an unclassified cable, which she identifies as being from March the date on the memo is March 2, but from the contents, more likely should have been dated March 12 , from the US Embassy in Caracas to the Secretary of State, where this meeting is reported.

In this cable, the following is stated: In a following article in , responding to Lee Sustar , Gacek made basically the same claims as he did in his article. Sustar, in turn, responded to Gacek , and argued that Gacek had not, in reality, addressed the central claim of his article, while Gacek made himself to appear as though he was doing just that. See Hirsch, ; Scipes, ab, c. Chavez, who called President George W. The book, first published in , soon topped the best seller list of Amazon. On Wednesday, with Chomsky at No. The year-old Chomsky is famous as a linguist and as a frequent opponent of U.

The Venezuelan leader also denied recent news reports, which based on earlier comments concluded that Chavez believed Chomsky was dead. A review of his comments during the news conference in New York last week showed that Chavez said: Unfortunately, I never was able to meet him. I tried to meet this man, but he was already a little deteriorated at 90 years of age, John K.

A delectable chronicle from the New York Times relates a few picturesque and unforeseen incidents of our president in this capital of neo-imperialism and makes evident some of the cultural lacunae of the maximum leader of the global Bolivarian movement. Among other things the New York daily highlights that in the press conference following his vigorous speech to the United Nations, on Wednesday of this past week, President Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, expressed a regret, of not having met the icon of the U. Galbraith before his death. Et bien tant mieux! The balloting resumes Tuesday and could last days until one country prevails or the Latin American group decides to bring forth a compromise candidate.

Just this weekend, presidential elections were held in Ecuador that resulted in a run-off between two candidates — leftist economist Rafael Correa will face- off against Alvaro Noboa in a run-off next month. Correa is a close ally of Chavez, while Noboa is openly pro-Washington. Ambassador Francisco Arias Cardenas has complained that the US is actively trying to prevent Venezuela from winning the rotating seat on the U. Well a new book examines Chavez, his influence and his legacy. Ali also analyzes the leaders of two other countries — Cuba and Bolivia and looks at how together with Venezuela, they are sharply challenging American foreign policy.

Tariq Ali joins me in the firehouse studio. Tariq Ali joins me in the studio today. We thank you for joining us. And the fact that the United States takes this vote that seriously in a situation in Latin America indicates how much they fear Hugo Chavez, because otherwise this would have been a routine vote. Well, I fear that the Venezuelans will not make it. I think that the United States will probably get its way and that Guatemala, a country with the worst human rights record in Latin America probably, is going to be the representative of Latin America on the Security Council, when a majority of Latin American countries would prefer Venezuela.

The majority of Latin Americans are voting for Venezuela, but the United States wants Guatemala, because they will not tolerate a Venezuelan presence on the Security Council. Your last book was on Iraq. Can you talk about how Iraq relates to Latin America? Well, I just felt, Amy — I mean, we all write about Iraq. We talk about Iraq. The situation is incredibly depressing, as some of the images on your own program showed today. And here was a part of the world where the only violence was that being directed against popular movements by those who the United States backs, and Chavez and Evo Morales were winning democratic elections and actually giving the people what they had promised them in these campaigns.

So, calling it Pirates of the Caribbean was, of course, tongue-in-cheek, but the Axis of Hope is the strong part of this book, that it shows that you can wake the world up from a neoliberal sleep, in which it has sunk, and that the Latin American leaders have a social vision, which offers some hope to the world at the present time.

I mean, what we get from the Middle East is at the moment three occupations and constant battles and struggles and resistance and violence. I wanted to go to a clip of a film, going back to the attempted coup in Venezuela.

On April 11, , President Hugo Chavez was removed from power by a coalition of military officials and business leaders. This is a clip from the film. Very quickly, the word began to spread. Chavez had not been seen or heard of since he had been taken away two days earlier. That morning, as we drove around Caracas, the atmosphere was electric. Despite police repression, people had decided to march on the palace.

With so many people out on the streets, the palace guard who had remained loyal to Chavez decided to act. The plan was for the guard to take up key positions, surround the palace and to wait for a given signal. With all their positions secured, the signal was given. The presidential guard moved in. Several members of the newly installed government were taken prisoner, but in the confusion, Carmona and the generals had managed to slip away. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the film that was made in the palace during the attempted coup.

Tariq Ali, your response? Well, I was there a year later, Amy, when they were celebrating the victory and the defeat of the coup, and I saw the first viewing of this film in Caracas with 10, citizens of that city, and they were going absolutely wild. And, of course, what the film showed is that it was popular support for Chavez, both amongst the poorer sections of the community and amongst rank-and-file soldiers, which made the coup impossible for the United States and the Venezuelan oligarchy. And what people do not seem to understand, within the establishment in the United States and its state media hacks, is that you can have political leaders today in parts of the world who are extremely popular because they give the people what they promised to give them.

And I think this is what explains the popularity of Chavez. And, of course, using oil money to push through mega-spending on health, on education, on building homes for the poor, free universities for the poor, this is not permitted in this world. He does it, and at the same time he challenges U. You know, if he were increasingly authoritarian, how come that not a single private television station or newspaper, who denounce him day in and day out, have been touched? I mean, I cannot imagine, by the way, Amy, any Western country, this country or Britain, where you had the bulk of the media against you, which denounced you, which slandered you, and the governments would just sit back and take it.

Well, that was a historic speech. But in other parts of the world, they were shown, and you saw the bulk of the delegates applauding him. It was like a breath of fresh air. We are just too frightened. I mean, I think he went over the top a bit. But overall, the speech had a tremendous impact, and it made him a cult figure globally. And then, of course, it made Noam Chomsky a bestseller in this country, Amy, which is the other side of it. But, you know, this is a very interesting development, that a foreign head of state comes to the United Nations, denounces the American government, advises U.

The New York Times had to issue a correction, by the way, because they reported twice that afterwards Chavez said he wished he could have met Noam Chomsky, but unfortunately he was dead. Yes, that he wished he could have met Galbraith, but that he had not said that about Chomsky. He wished he could have met John Kenneth Galbraith. Yeah, but he certainly knows Chomsky is alive. I think Chomsky at the moment is probably on his way to Venezuela, as we speak.

There are very few politicians who do. Evo Morales, I have met once. I met him in Caracas. Incredibly honest, sincere, devoted politician. The first Native South American to be elected president of a republic. The oligarchs there are incredibly unhappy and [inaudible] with the army.

And the human capital that Cuba, this island of 12 million people, has produced in terms of doctors and teachers now flooding into Venezuela and Bolivia to help people there. So there are good things going on. Well, I think he is ill. And the big question dominating discussions behind the scenes is: My own view is that they will try and flood the island with money and buy it.

It would be a total disaster for Cuba if Miami really reentered Havana, because with it would come everything that existed before, and all the gains that the revolution has made, which even people hostile, like Colin Powell, admit that Castro has done a lot for the people of his country, that would go if it became a neoliberal island. And so, the Cuban leadership now needs to discuss how to stop that happening. Tariq Ali, thank you for joining us. His book is Pirates of the Caribbean: Mais une politique, ne serait-ce que vaguement, nationale indispose vite les Etats-Unis. Et les chiens de garde [6] occidentaux veillent.

Mais quels pays oublie-t-on? Comment la CIA influence-t-elle notre information quotidienne?

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