Humanism

Summary

Dominique Pagani calls himself a humanist as a man of the left: for him, man is a value, which he places before God and before nature, and the task is to organise nature for the benefit of values that hold for man alone12. He locates the origin of humanism in Greece, where people stop glorifying the gods and glorify man instead. The answer to the riddle of the sphinx is man, and by killing the Sphinx, Oedipus puts humanism in the place of naturalism3. He places Marx in the line of Rousseau, Kant and Hegel in order to rule out a reading of Marx as an anti-humanist. In this he opposes Deleuze, Althusser and Foucault. Together with the universal and progress, man forms a "cursed triangle", attacked from 1966 onwards by postmodern thought4. He links anti-humanism to the old reactionary right, from which Nietzsche comes, and recalls that Nazi theorists already attacked Weimar humanism5. In his view, antispeciesism and a certain kind of environmentalism carry on this line, amounting to a quiet form of neo-Nazism6.

1. 1G for Gauche (the Left)21 Dec 2014 · 9:34
2. 2Pagani without detours21 Sept 2019 · 9:01
3. 3Hölderlin, poetry and politics19 Mar 2022 · 48:38
4. 4Worldliness in Clouscard: Aragon and the positivity of the negative29 Jun 2023 · 1:06:05
5. 5Michel Foucault2 May 2019 · 43:49
6. 6#3 Harnessed to confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 16:50

Summary produced automatically from 17 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.