Writing

écriture

Worked through in 4 videos · 6 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani links writing to the beginning of history: with the scribes, prehistory comes to an end1 2. He stresses the original function of this writing. It does not serve first to tell the truth. It serves to please the pharaoh, and then to count. Pharaoh's scribe is a hagiographer, and in his view the human sciences still bear the mark of this origin3. While praising the ruler, these first writings nonetheless provide certainties. Without writing, oral memory reaches back only a few generations. This is why we know Cicero's Rome better than Charlemagne's empire4. He then singles out alphabetic writing, which gives a power of abstraction without which there would have been no Greek miracle5. In 2022, speaking of Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Baudelaire, he presents writing as the trace that keeps meditation from fading away. Yet even when written in black and white, language keeps a background of darkness and mystery6.

Summary produced automatically from 6 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 11 · 28 Sept 2022And what about the subject in all this? Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Baudelaire

1:01:38Meditating without a trace becomes evanescent; one writes black on white and a depth of darkness and mystery remains in language.

Talks · 24 Nov 2020Between sea and mountain, the standing stones of Valinco (the Corsican Neolithic)

4:01History begins with writing; the first writings are hagiography, eulogy of the pharaoh, but they give certainties.
28:30Without writing, oral memory goes back only a few generations; we know Cicero's Rome better than Charlemagne's empire.

Talks · 8 Jun 2017Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2017)

39:34The birth of writing is not made to tell the truth: Pharaoh's scribe is a hagiographer; the human sciences bear the mark of this origin.

Talks · 9 Mar 2017Is history a subject?

11:14The scribes' writing marks the end of prehistory; it serves first to please the pharaoh, then to count.
22:10Alphabetic writing gives a power of abstraction without which there would have been no Greek miracle.