Dominique Pagani

The endless variety of fields this teaching moves through, and of disciplines it draws on to approach them, keeps gathering a growing audience of members, companions and followers whose passionate wonder may seem surprising: not only because of the modest means of the small association trying to widen its reach, but above all because the systematically digressive form of this stubbornly oral teaching would seem more likely to baffle those it is meant for.

Detours? Digressions? Zigzags, a spiral, a labyrinth? Are we in philosophy, literature, geography, epistemology, poetics or musicology? Make no mistake: nothing is more consistent, continuous and coherent than the message Dominique Pagani seems set on delivering, whatever the pretext, and through whatever means, channels, media and formats one may wish.

Dominique Pagani was born in 1945… in Vietnam, that is, at a time when the world was beginning, however dimly, to discover the horror of the wounds inflicted on humanity by the Third Reich's ferocious crusade against “Judeo-Bolshevism”, and its atrocities, beyond all measure with anything the misfortunes of History had shown until then.

And yet, far from drawing the lesson of a “Never again!” — never again the “brown plague” — what one witnesses from that vintage year onwards is rather the hunt, bloodier than ever… for the red plague.

And instead of setting about, for the sake of the new generations, the absolute priority of “defusing” the enormous charge of resentment and counter-revolution the West had accumulated since the fall of the Ancien Régime (a deadly charge the Third Reich would only have to unleash), the powerful of this world — of our world — granted the Beast a second life by hiding and protecting it behind the mask of “totalitarianism”: a sweetener for Nazism and, most often, a crushing charge against collectivism alone — which will surprise only those who forget that the notion of the “totalitarian” was forged by the closest disciple of the most Nazi of philosophers.

It is clear that this concern for passing on an unacknowledged past — with the worst it holds, but also, and for ever, the best — is Dominique's professional constant, and that, freed from any duty of reserve on reaching retirement age, he became free to gather, for the new generations above all but not only for them, the essential elements of culture needed to make our historical present intelligible as a result, trying to restore the richness of its depth in time.