Carnage

Worked through in 12 videos · 18 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani first reads carnage in the Odyssey. The poem opens with the sack of Troy and ends with the slaughter of the suitors, not with a happy ending. Ulysses, the first Western hero, is the instigator of these two symmetrical carnages. He insists that speaking this way is not hyperbole1. Ulysses' detour seeks to evade this compulsive return, yet each port of call ends in a local mini-carnage2 3. Hence the question he raises in 2017: can one free oneself from the fatality of carnage's return? He then transposes this pattern to modern history. Capitalism only emerges from its crises through carnage, from 1914, which liquidated the French peasantry, to the 50 million dead that followed the crisis of the 1930s4. He sets Greek carnage, concentrated in time, against modern carnage, a gradual wasting away, a "gentle carnage"5. He also links carnage to vengeance without public justice, to freedom conceived by Hegel as pure abstraction6, and, in Africa, to the resources of the soil rather than to ethnic groups.

Summary produced automatically from 18 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 12 · 14 Aug 2024Too late?

1:12:10The Odyssey begins with the sack of Troy and ends with the massacre of the suitors: Ulysses's detour eludes the compulsive return of carnage.

Cycle 12 · 11 Jul 2024After the vote: entering a zone of turbulence

18:42Ulysses, the first Western hero, spends his time repeating carnage, from the sack of Troy to the massacre of the suitors.

Cycle 11 · 17 Feb 2023Roots or migration? From analytical reverie to current events, from Hölderlin to the war

8:37Western destiny that Ulysses cannot escape: each stop ends in a local mini-carnage.

Cycle 10 · 7 Apr 2022#12 From Kafka to Proust, the dialectical passage from the intermezzo to the perpetuated edge

15:38Capital escapes its crises through carnage: the war of 1914, then the 50 million dead that followed the crisis of the 1930s.
26:05The sack of Troy and the massacre of the suitors are carnages: to speak this way is not a hyperbole.

Cycle 7 · 27 Mar 2020#1 Harnessed to confinitude

37:15After the malady of the century comes the century of malady, the century of carnage.
1:01:54One exits crises through unprecedented carnage; 1914 liquidates the French peasantry.

Series · 23 Mar 2020Introduction to the upcoming workshops

5:32The two Homeric carnages are symmetrical through their invariant: Ulysses, instigator of the sack of Troy and of the massacre of the suitors.
43:15The Greek carnage is concentrated in time; the modern carnage is a gradual decline, a carnage in slow motion.
1:10:56A real carnage, revolutions and wars, chronologically occupies the place between Enlightenment happiness and the following century's unhappiness.

Cycle 4 · 12 Apr 2018#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:05:46Ulysses is the man of carnage; the final digressions have a backdrop of violence: bibliophiles, the vase of Soissons, Abelard.

Cycle 4 · 24 Sept 2017#4.0 Presentation of the 2017-2018 workshop: Nerval's “Angélique”

11:33The Odyssey ends not in a happy ending but in the massacre of the suitors.
12:54Capitalism has never emerged from its crises except through carnage, such as the 50 million dead after the crisis of the 1930s.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus

55:32Initial carnage, final carnage: Ulysses's wandering is each time overtaken by the return of the carnage he thought he had eluded.
1:52:57The question of the year: can one be freed from the fatality of the return of carnage?

Cycle 2 · 10 Mar 2016#2.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:39:57Hegel's text helps to think the carnage that arises from freedom conceived as pure self and pure abstraction.

Series · 5 Jan 2015V for Vengeance

5:45Without public justice, vengeance produces permanent carnage.

Series · 28 Dec 2014N for Niger

4:31The carnage in the Central African Republic, Nigeria, and the Great Lakes region has as its stake the resources of the soil and subsoil, not ethnicity.