Fantasy

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches fantasy as the subject's projection onto the external world. Taken at the surface, this world becomes a screen onto which the subject projects himself while believing he is dealing with objects. In the session on Adotevi and negritude, he identifies, at the root of anthropology, a Freudian investment in the purity of the native. In his view, nothing is more "fantasy-generating" than the narrative of origins1. The white man's fantasmatics thus attributes contradictory qualities to the African: the innocence of the child and bestial cruelty2. He also points to a fantasmatic element in discourses on nature, which belongs to the symbolic field: mother earth, Gaia, Cybele. In Rousseau, he traces a progression in the text that moves from reality towards fantasy, as far as the prenatal world. In 2021, he applies the notion to the present. The fantasy of ingestion, poisoning and injection, rooted mainly in the middle classes, explains in his view a constant preoccupation with the body that is more unconscious than rational3.

1. 1Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2017)8 Jun 2017 · 44:47
2. 2Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2017)8 Jun 2017 · 52:03
3. 3The world before, the world after (part 2)16 Jan 2021 · 18:04

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