Ambivalence

Summary

Dominique Pagani consistently distinguishes ambivalence from ambiguity. Ambiguity is conscious: it belongs to the "two-faced" person or the dissembler who hides his thoughts. Ambivalence, a term he takes from the Freudian field, is a contradiction that operates without the subject even knowing it12. He also describes it as objective: it is the thing that contradicts itself, at once the highest and the basest34. He makes it the key word in the philosophical assessment of Romanticism, which is capable of the best and the worst5, and extends it to the "German problem"6. Regarding Hölderlin, he notes that some people, for ideological reasons, made ambiguity out of his ambivalence. He illustrates it with the image of a segment painted red and blue, whose midpoint is violet. On one occasion he links it to Kantian amphiboly. In music, he finds it in Mozart, where sensuality and melancholy mingle, and in characters who pretend to be moved and perhaps end up more in love7.

1. 1#8 Happiness and unhappiness in music11 Jan 2021 · 2:04:47
2. 2Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics20 May 2022 · 17:17
3. 3The religion of money29 Sept 2019 · 9:49
4. 4Hölderlin, poetry and politics19 Mar 2022 · 37:06
5. 5Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics20 May 2022 · 5:00
6. 6#10 The two Klemperers and Bruno Walter in Wagner18 Jan 2021 · 10:57
7. 7Polymorphously perverse Mozart1 Jun 2022 · 3:48

Summary produced automatically from 13 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.