Language

langage

Worked through in 42 videos · 62 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani distinguishes language, which unites humanity, from a language (langue), which belongs to a community, and from speech (parole), in which language comes into existence1. For him, language in general is an abstraction: it exists only through inherited languages. It is neither nature nor convention but a pact with tacit clauses. It is polysemous and lacks the univocity of mathematical discourse or of the machine2. Speaking does not mean passing on information as bees do: it means naming and addressing someone. Drawing on Hegel, he explains that the name tears the thing away from the sensory flux and raises it to the genus3. The common language, poetic and animistic, thinks in our place when we do not question its words4. He compares language to money, as both are instruments of exchange. He also analyses the perversion of words that goes along with domination, drawing on Victor Klemperer's study of the language of the Third Reich5.

Summary produced automatically from 63 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Series · 6 Jul 2026From Plato to Proust

17:27In Descartes, the words of ordinary language make us say "I see men" when we see only coats and hats.

Cycle 13 · 27 May 2025Flagrante Delights

1:12:17To speak is not to communicate as bees do, it is to name; man is the animal that speaks.

Talks · 23 Mar 2024Sahelian Africa and imperialism: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger

41:11According to Rousseau, language comes from passions more than from drives: one speaks when utilitarian immediacy ceases, unlike animal communication.

Cycle 12 · 18 Feb 2024Secularism, the truth of religion?

1:28:01Common language imposes a distribution of values one is not conscious of: the high is valorized, the low devalued.

Cycle 11 · 23 Nov 2022The aporias of anthropology

23:57It is up to us to decide what man is; Genesis, by having Adam name the creatures, shows the importance of language: homage to the logos.

Cycle 11 · 19 Oct 2022“Speech is the best and the worst of things” (Aesop)

4:39Language, as a communication system of humanity in general, does not exist: it is an abstraction. Everyone speaks a particular language, which is already more concrete.
10:29He does not put language on trial in favor of other modes of communication, but analyzes it, in the sense of the Marxian "Prozess."

Series · 20 Jul 2022Wagner: the truth of pure music

1:47Language is common to humanity, the tongue proper to a people, like a code; it exists only at the level of a singular, sonorous speech.

Series · 17 Nov 2021Left-washing: are the woke the most asleep?

1:05:30The Nazis acted on the auditory element of language; the impoverishment of language goes hand in hand with that of music, hence the idea of a true communist language.

Cycle 10 · 3 Nov 2021#10.4 From Lascaux to modern music, the permanence of the political stakes in aesthetics

1:41:39Philosopher, mathematician and poet each have a different relation to language; the mathematician replaces words with univocal signs.

Cycle 9.2 · 27 May 2021#9.22 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence” (part 2)

51:43Language does not depend on organs: the mynah bird speaks without thinking, deaf-mutes invent conventional signs.
1:17:37Language is material; the verbal stage progressively produced the anthropological instance as access to the universal.

Series · 22 May 2021A chapter of Marx written by Hegel

17:22Words make us go beyond thought; naming the wax or naming men presupposes judging, an activity of spirit.

Series · 21 May 2021Heidegger, or panzer-philosophy

9:11The language of the Third Reich perverts everyday words; "völkisch" refers to the people by blood, not to the popular.
17:31"Historicity," then "metaphysics," become words of the LTI.

Cycle 9.2 · 12 May 2021#9.21 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence”

1:01:09Man does not merely transmit information as bees do: the double articulation, physiological then conventional, gives access to the sign.
1:03:52The machine operates in univocity, like a bijective mapping; language can conceal, seduce, command, condemn.

Series · 7 Apr 2021#1 Mignon, or the song of silence

32:43Babbling, between cry and speech, has the channel but not yet the code of language; it is not yet a language.

Series · 31 Mar 2021“Red-browns”, “decolonial”: should we use the dominant language?

30:08When the words of the tribe are not questioned, they think in our place. Everyday language is poetic and animist, as in "the day rises."
1:07:35One does not use the adversary's words with impunity: "resilience" replaces "resistance," "decolonial" replaces "anticolonial."

Series · 9 Feb 2021#15 Plato, Rousseau, Hegel and music

48:17Sonic material is at the origin of speech and of the bond between subjects, which it constitutes instead of presupposing an already made human nature.
1:05:33Language is neither contract nor nature but connivance: learned by jumping in, it is polysemous.

Series · 18 Jan 2021#10 The two Klemperers and Bruno Walter in Wagner

1:02:49Nazi propaganda embeds itself in a new way of speaking, through lexical agglutination, studied by Victor Klemperer.

Series · 11 Jan 2021#8 Happiness and unhappiness in music

7:27Magical use of language: changing formulas, speaking Greek, producing tautologies to mask ignorance.

Cycle 9.1 · 17 Dec 2020#9 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

28:53The scientist uses a formalized discursivity; the philosopher uses everyday language, even if it means twisting it.
32:45Between nature and convention, language is a pact with tacit clauses, with a ground of darkness.

Cycle 9.1 · 10 Dec 2020#8 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

1:16:03Language is neither nature nor convention but pact, with secret clauses; it does not have the univocity of mathematical discourse.
1:23:32Everyday language is poetic: we spend our time making metaphors.

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

16:07Language knows more than those who use it: "paladines" names the sword of the statues.
19:36Language thinks us and comes to fill our metaphorical expectation.

Cycle 9.1 · 23 Oct 2020#2 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

46:57To say what I want, I must submit to a language that pre-exists me; speech transforms language.
1:11:20Language is a deposit that remembers for us, from a time before writing.

Talks · 6 Oct 2020Calves and Things (3): the dictatorship of the bobotariat

5:43Ordinary language is multivocal: democracy, progress, or values are taken in opposite senses.

Cycle 6 · 10 Nov 2019#6.1 Prelude: Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”

19:38The psychoanalyst's material is the patient's speech, language in act; institutionalized psychoanalysis has forgotten this.
29:36Curses and blessings around the cradle show that the unconscious is knotted in words even before one speaks.

Cycle 6 · 23 Oct 2019#6.1 The logic of the subject

49:26With Hegel, language is infiltrated into all the activities of the mind: we think and feel according to the logos.
56:35Language personifies, without our knowing it, what is something; it knows more about us than we know about it.

Talks · 29 Sept 2019The religion of money

7:58Like money, language circulates among us: these are two instruments of exchange, linked by Mallarmé.

Talks · 3 Aug 2019Money, work, freedom

13:30In language as in currency, there is inflation and historical sedimentation.
18:33There is a perversion of words and concepts that accompanies domination.

Cycle 5.2 · 26 May 2019#5.7 Nature or landscape?

27:34Langue, collective, is the middle term between the universality of langage and the singularity of parole; it distinguishes the natural from the artificial.
42:14Language is not powerless before mathematical rigor, it is simply not made for it: it serves to seduce, threaten, absolve, condemn.

Cycle 5.1 · 6 Dec 2018#5.2 bis Questions (Facebook Live)

52:30The name suppresses the empirical thing and becomes its true being; it is the first creative faculty of spirit.

Cycle 5.1 · 6 Dec 2018#5.2 ter Questions, following workshop #5.2 (Facebook Live)

1:03:20The name wrests the thing from temporal flux, suppresses the sensible and elevates it to the genus; it allows invariants to be communicated to one another.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.5 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

9:01Without words there is no thought; thought is the slave of language, according to Hölderlin.
1:49:46There is no idea without expression: no in without ex.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.7 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

34:39Language unites humanity, a tongue a community, speech an individual; in speech, language enters into existence.
1:26:30Logos means language, discourse, definition, but also relation and proportion.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.4 From Ulysses to Daedalus

33:45Language exists only through languages, which are an inheritance and not a heredity; the relation to the other determines the relation to the thing.

Talks · 9 Mar 2017Is history a subject?

1:05:20The language of bees is innate; human language is learned. Man is the animal that speaks, capable of the best as well as the worst.

Talks · 18 Jun 2016At the bistro (part 1)

10:58French is a disenclavement: it overcomes ethnic fragmentation, whereas local languages confine within a closed code.
15:00A language is not decreed: it forms through mixing, like French or a future Ivorian koinè.

Cycle 2 · 15 Feb 2016#2.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

40:51Language and money are the two forms of exchange; words introduce distinction and clarity into confusion, and their disruption is grave for an era.
47:42A tragedy in three acts: Adam names, Babel confuses languages, Pentecost avenges Babel.

Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 3/5

1:51:58The unity of the piece of wax is nowhere else than in us, in the word, the grammatical subject.
1:53:41The presence or absence of a word determines perception; there is a linguistic unconscious, we think according to language.

Talks · 8 Aug 2015Mythology and truth

16:52The mathematician invents a univocal language, myth speaks the language of the imaginary, and the philosopher speaks the common language, polysemic.

Talks · 23 Jun 2015L'île du Peuple: the debate

1:17:33The word is already an action; the tool and language appear together and both give presence to what is absent.

Series · 28 Dec 2014N for Niger

8:22Its social value lies in mastery of the language, learned from African schoolteachers for whom French was not the mother tongue.

Series · 27 Dec 2014M for Music

8:48Language and music unfold in time; their complicity appears in children's babbling, sounds modulated without the code.
10:28Music articulates the slightest nuance of mood, like discourse, but without concept.

Series · 19 Dec 2014E for Enfance (Childhood)

5:00The word is not a simple relation to the thing: I say "tree" to someone; language is not made for speaking to oneself alone.