Can we still defend dead languages without being accused of conservatism and without idealizing ancient cultures? Continuing the debate revived in 2015 by the reform of the College, the Hellenist Pierre Judet de La Combe campaigns for the maintenance of a direct and critical relationship with the Ancients.
In continuation of The Future of Languages. Rethinking the Humanitiespreviously published with Heinz Wissman (Paris, Cerf, 2004), the Hellenist Pierre Judet de La Combe delivers a firm and nuanced plea in favor of Greek and Latin as school subjects in their own right. At the time of globish and globalized cannons, some will cry out for rearguard combat. They will be wrong. Using generous erudition, Judet de La Combe refreshes the terms of an old debate that the College reform, in the spring of 2015, relaunched.
The first interest of the work is to dispel several misunderstandings which have long parasitized the debate: “The ancient Greeks are not our ancestors”, states the author straight away, not without provocation. We understand that the emphasis is on the discreet but very heavy verb to be, operator of all identity fixations. If the Greeks are not our ancestors, it is because they… became them. Objects of an elective memory which established them as “adopted parents”, they fulfilled the office of a chosen authority.
The ancient Greeks, throughout our history, only came to our aid because we summoned them, by decision. (…) The shock of a past not transmitted, but solicited – and constructed, as they say – broke habits and made it possible to envisage a new, free culture or policy or science.
Nothing like it to remove the suspicion of a fetishistic relationship to Antiquity, as Salvatore Settis already invited us to do in The Future of Classics (Liana Levi, 2005). Anxious to rule out, as he writes elsewhere, all forms of “ecstasy which take place whenever we speak of (ancient) Greece” (“Warum Greece?”), Judet de La Combe considers ancient texts, not as the hard core of an essentialized origin, but as the chance offered for dynamic renewal.
Against false divisions
The first pages return to the reform of the College which, in spring 2015, reorganized the teaching of the humanities. The author explains that the integration of Greek and Latin courses into Practical Interdisciplinary Teaching (EAR) leads to the impoverishment of these materials, because it promotes a static approach to Antiquity. Under the guise of openness, the reform only produces superficial and fixed knowledge of the moving and complex reality of ancient worlds. Worse, the thematic scattering to which the EAR has nothing formative: it reduces Antiquity to “a collection of data, more or less exotic, (…) a mass of facts, opinions and certainties”. Against this delivery of a turnkey Antiquity, the author recommends a more experimental relationship with ancient heritage. These must not become the supports of “knowledge already known, predigested and in fact external, independent of the student”, but, conversely, the ground for critical and reflective experiences.
The work thwarts overly predictable assignments. For a long time, we have been asked to believe in a binary distribution of positions: the traditionalists stuck to the educational principles of their youth (and their ancestors) would be opposed by the progressives concerned with a democratization of knowledge and promoters, for this very reason, reforms aimed at dethroning the primacy of language in favor of a more transversal pedagogy. Judet de La Combe refutes this too good alternative. If he does not consider the major criticism addressed to the inflexible defenders of Greek and Latin to be “not unfounded” (the School has in fact failed to rethink its “elite model”), if he considers it “more than just and necessary” the encouragement given today to the spontaneity as well as the inventiveness of students, he does not draw from these shared observations the same conclusions as the “radical modernists”. It is indeed necessary to differentiate between available resources and the uses made of them: a culture, ancient or not, “is not in itself bourgeois. What is important is the function we give it, with the ideas we seek to draw from it in order to inculcate them.” An elementary but decisive nuance, which underpins the project of the work, which defends direct confrontation with ancient languages as a means of intellectual emancipation. We will have understood, Judet de La Combe sends back to back “a reflexive, Pavlovian left”, calling for a “hunt for privileges” and a cynical right pretending to be offended but which, no less than its enemy preferred, has “strongly contributed” to limiting the place of the humanities in school culture.
Dead languages still move
If we must continue to offer anyone who wishes the opportunity to study ancient languages, not despite their lack of relevance but indeed as dead languagesit is because such training easily becomes, provided we give ourselves the means, a school of critical freedom. Direct confrontation with texts produces effects such that we can see it as a “tool of resistance to various fundamentalisms” which lock the meaning of history and confiscate the keys to identity. This liberating use implies not sacrificing language to the dogma of effective communication. Against the commodification of meaning, School is this place where languages, escaping their instrumental reduction, must be able to be approached as “the common element where thoughts and their history are constructed”. Without being limited to their informative function, they benefit from being used as a mobile support where the meaning, far from being closed, is developed step by step. The grammatical flattening, required by the absence of any code external to the sources studied, even makes dead languages a democratic exercise ground par excellence.
This explains the importance given here to the work of translation. The word is understood in the strong sense, as opposed to the exercise of the version (traditionally oriented towards standard French) and it is illustrated with examples borrowed from work carried out in today’s colleges. Based on the necessary mastery of the original language, translation allows you to experience the flexibility of French. It puts students in a position to innovate by expanding, “thanks to a detour through another text, through its close grammatical analysis, their own skills as speakers and authors.” Wanting to oppose spontaneous creativity and analytical rigor term to term therefore makes little sense. Thus Judet de La Combe shares the reformers’ preference for “a true pedagogy of discovery”, but this is to better direct it towards the texts themselves, not towards “well-defined, storable and immediately communicable. As a patiently creative process, translation allows one to appropriate and even enrich the expressive possibilities of one’s own language, which clearly upsets the followers of a transparent language entirely dedicated to the delivery of unambiguous information.
To the philologist who suggests working on “short texts, not too difficult”, on “manipulatable, restricted objects”, we cannot decently retort that the bar is set too high, nor that we must remain realistic. Unless we admit that this reality is only the other name for the brutal renunciation of what makes the complex richness of meaning.
This complexity is due to the conflicting dimension of the signification processes: the content of words like “democracy” or “god” is not recorded once and for all in a stable corpus, but rather brought into play with each new occurrence. Because he emphasizes the dimension of meanings that is both plural and evolving, Judet de La Combe rightly defines the experience of ancient cultures as an “adventure”. To suggest in this way that the practice of texts has nothing to do with a visit to the museum is to glimpse a possible reason for its ministerial disavowal. It remains to be determined whether the School’s mission is to train tourists or independent minds. Such an “adventure”, of which the author delivers rich insights through stops at Homer, Virgil or even the tragedies, is not made to set certainties in stone. It is in vain that we would look there for the vacuum ingredients of happiness for all and universal peace: on the situation faced by women and slaves, what Antiquity says is worth less because of its answers, which are scandalous for us, only by the ways in which questions that still concern us were formed. As for the very notion of democracy, so often linked to the supposed Greek miracle, ancient political thought “resolves nothing, provides no solution”.
Nothing could be less disappointing, however: it is not a stock of solutions available to us, but, more usefullyargumentative configurations, problematizations whose plurality, by definition non-consensual, reopens files too hastily closed. This rediscovered plurality passes, whether we like it or not, through knowledge of the language: this alone allows us to “understand the genesis of the problems we encounter, their formation, the divergences they have given rise to”.
Dare to read?
Beyond the reforms debated in 2015, the author’s reflection stigmatizes the arrogance of certain elites. She points to “huge gaps in the training of these decision-makers” who, from one party to another, maintain a single cult of utility (in the poorest sense of the term) based on a “liberal conception of the world” seeing in it only a space in which to exchange goods and information. Regarding the decision-makers, a few lines of The Future of Languagesalready set the tone: “Like the interpreter of a text, (the decision-maker) will first force himself not to understand, before reconstructing the rules specific to the situation. If he does not do it, reality will remind him of his resistance” (ouvert. cit., p. 227). There followed a note on “the cruel misadventures” of the military intervention in Iraq. It was in 2004. We hadn’t seen anything yet. Put into perspective, these lines resonate strangely. All the more reason, twelve years later, to drive the point home:
Books, which require too much time, are replaced by round tables, expert opinions, reports and statistics. But the current failures are too striking, too repeated for a suspicion about the training of these managers and about this new mode of circulation of knowledge and decision-making not to come to mind.
The argument here resonates with other contemporary reflections. He finds for example, through other paths it is true, the questions of Yves Citton on the threats that a certain economy of knowledge poses to the “culture of interpretation” (see in particular The Future of Humanities. Knowledge economy or culture of interpretation? Paris, La Découverte, 2010). In this sense, daring to read the Greeks and Latins is first of all daring to read.
In a word, this work promotes an informed, curious and uninhibited reading, the only one capable of understanding what ancient texts “really do in the face of this canonization which saved them at the same time as it fixed them” (“ Warum Greece? The author defends the humanities in movement to which this plea, if read without blinkers or prejudice, will henceforth prohibit attaching the convenient but well-worn label of haughty conservatism. The academic future of the alumni will tell whether these arguments are audible today.