Escapism

escapisme

Worked through in 4 videos · 6 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani sees escapism, the wish to escape, as a feature specific to modernity. Since the Enlightenment, he says, people have alternated between gaining access to knowledge and escaping: the Romantic reaction flees knowledge through wine, the poppy and eros1. This mania for escape dates from the moment when reality and truth became unbearable. He follows this theme from Romanticism to Baudelaire and Rimbaud2 3. He speaks of escapism as the moral fault of the nineteenth century. He has it run from Baudelaire to the music Nietzsche champions, a music that ignores good and evil4. In a session on Clouscard, he describes it as the symptom of an unhappy consciousness, that of a modernity that cannot bear modernity5. Finally, he notes that Baudelaire himself puts escape on trial: at the end of the journey, one finds again what one had fled6.

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

Cycle 11 · 18 May 2023Worldliness in Clouscard, or privileges for all

1:36:56Symptom of an unhappy consciousness, typical of a modernity that cannot bear modernity.
1:42:20Baudelaire puts it on trial: one finds again on arrival what one had fled.

Series · 28 Jan 2021#12 Nietzsche (right up) against Wagner

49:25The moral fault of the nineteenth century is escapism, the wish to escape, from Baudelaire to the Nietzschean music that knows nothing of good and evil.

Cycle 7 · 30 Mar 2020#2 Harnessed to confinitude

12:07The theme of escape, from romanticism to Baudelaire and Rimbaud, responds to something that has become unbearable with modernity.
35:06The mania for escape dates from the time when reality and truth became unbearable.

Series · 1 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 1/5

25:59Since the Enlightenment, we alternate between access to knowledge and escape from it: the Romantic reaction flees knowledge through wine, poppy, and eros.