German translators, Jürgen Brankel, a philosopher from Hamburg. He told me that he was much more fascinated by Jean Hyppolite’s French translation than by Hegel’s original book! He took the view that, in German, the book was a typical piece of juvenilia, pretty shapeless, muddled, and that Hyppolite had turned it into a real monument that was completely new. According to Brankel, this ‘translation’ was in fact a book in its own right, and German philosophy would do well to learn from it. This ‘translation’ served as a perfect example of what excellent French philosophy is, and demonstrated that Germans should learn from that philosophy, and should by no means take back the book as though it was their property.
It seems, therefore, that passeur has to be understood in a very complex sense. Hyppolite apparently got the Phenomenology back to the Germans in the form of a book that was originally written in French! We have here a particularly extreme example of what Hegel calls ‘extraneation’, or the radical effect of mediation through alterity.
It is no doubt that which explains the very particular style of the translation. Let us move to the anecdotal level. When we were young, rumour had it that Hyppolite’s German was very poor, and that his translation was a philosophical operation in which the languages in question were the servants of the translator, and not the driving force behind the translation. Someone said this morning that Hyppolite helped to construct a French Hegel, and that in that sense he was the heir to Villiers de l’Isle Adam or Mallarmé rather than the University, even though the latter is an important agent in the history of philosophy. We have heard a striking eye-witness account today, and it defines my early relationship with Hyppolite. For I read and studied that translation for a long time without making any reference to the German text. Fortunately, I was told much later by Jürgen Brankel, that that was the right way to go about it, and that the important thing was to read Hegel only in French.
My second encounter with Jean Hyppolite was during the entrance examination to the Ecole normale supérieure. He examined me in philosophy. He had a slight lisp, and imitating the way he spoke was a common pastime for normaliens. He asked me: ‘Monsieur Badiou, what is a thing [chose]?’, which he pronounced ‘ssoze’. I gave him my answer. I am still trying to answer that question in big books: you never get over your exams. I quickly established a complicity with him because, in the course of the kind of rhetorical exercise in which we had been trained, I cited Parmenides’ poem in Beaufret’s translation. An isolated sentence in which Parmenides speaks of the moon, which I used to describe how far we are away from the Thing. ‘Claire dans la nuit, autour de la terre errante, lumière d’ailleurs’’ [‘Night-shining, wandering about the earth, another’s light’].1 My clever reference to a light from elsewhere made Hyppolite’s face light up. I was sure I was in a good position now. Even so, he asked me: ‘But what is the real difference between a ssoze and an obzet [objet/object]?’ I improvised an answer. And I have to say that, having worked in recent years, and with great difficulty, on the notion of an object, I still bear that warning in mind. I fear that, even today, I still confuse the two. At that time, having met Hyppolite the passeur, I encountered the organizer of the philosophical field, an organizer in the sense of someone who can recruit, who knows how to ask the right questions and who can forge alliances, even with people who are far removed from him. I had immediately seen the organizer function in the way he spoke to me.
I subsequently attended his seminar at ENS. It was on Fichte. This was in 1957. He wanted to get Fichte across in the same way that he had got Hegel across. But he sensed that it was not working as well. On several occasions, he said to me ‘They like Fichte less than they do Hegel’, including me in an objectivized collective. I remember a whole seminar that was devoted to a discussion of contemporary cosmologies, and Hyppolite, with his eternal cigarette holder – you could always see smoke rising over his head, whatever the circumstances – displayed extraordinary knowledge and virtuosity by explaining how the cycle of hydrogen and helium burned. During this inspired speech, with the blue smoke rising up in the great tradition of German philosophies of nature, you could literally see the entire cosmos bursting into flames. Despite all that, we did not like Fichte. Hyppolite quickly gave up, concluding that he had failed in his attempt to interest us in him. I will now use the word ‘inductor’: he was someone who has an inductive relationship with philosophical categories and others in the present tense. He was trying to extract from the present the possibilities opened up by a philosophy or a philosopher, and he would ratify his judgements and accept the results of his experiment. He was very much a man of the present, even and especially when he was using the history of philosophy as a way of inducting us into the past of the present.
One famous episode concerns the day Sartre came to the Ecole normale. There are a number of different versions of the story in circulation, and we have to let them circulate because, as Lévi-Strauss has taught us, that is how mythologies come into being. But I have the right to give you my own version: I was one of the three people who arranged for Sartre to come, the others being Pierre Verstraeten and Emmanuel Terray. We were with the ones who discussed what he was going to talk about with Sartre. Hyppolite gave us every encouragement. He recognized something of himself in an operation that consisted in bringing before the students of a dominant institution a typical figure from outside who had, of course, like everyone else, been through the Ecole normale supérieure, but who had had absolutely no academic destiny. Sartre taught philosophy in a lycée, and then became a freelance2 philosopher. This was where Hyppolite’s ‘mediator’ side came into its own.
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