Season 14 · 13 Apr 2026Language and thought: The case of LavoisierFreedom
Worked through in 82 videos · 146 passages.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani traces the modern concept of freedom back to Rousseau. Rousseau makes it the foundation of anthropology, as gravitation is the foundation of the natural sciences1. Freedom then replaces the good as the keystone: it is the possibility of doing good as well as evil. To be free is less to do what one wants than not to depend on the labour of another, and to obey the law one has prescribed for oneself2. He distinguishes it from the freedom of the Franks, that of the victor who enslaves. He also distinguishes it from the "freedom of the void", which flees every determination and in action becomes a fury of destruction3. Taking up Spinoza and Hegel, he defines it as the understanding of necessity: it exists only as liberation4. With Kant, it is a postulate of practical reason: philosophy presupposes it, without this proving that it exists5. In Hegel, it gives history its non-totalitarian meaning: one is free, then some, then all. Separated from equality, it remains an empty form.
- 1Mon éco-cabane dans la ZAD : autonomie ou aliénation ? • Q&A Philosophique • Dominique Pagani30 Apr 2021 · 9:13
- 2L comme Liberté26 Dec 2014 · 3:18
- 3#5.2 bis FaceBookLive / Questions (1)6 Dec 2018 · 44:23
- 4Ce soir, on repolitise. 2ème partie31 Mar 2018 · 1:27:27
- 5L’éternel retour… des camps de la mort ?13 Oct 2024 · 19:16
Summary produced automatically from 146 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.
Season 14 · 13 Apr 2026Language and thought: The case of Lavoisier
Season 14 · 28 Feb 2026Their "Europe" means war.- 9:32The freedom of the "free world," that of the Franks and of the free towns, is the freedom of throat-cutters: it is not that of the social contract.
Talks · 7 Feb 2025[INTERVIEW] DOMINIQUE PAGANI - Michel Clouscard and the betrayal of May 68
Season 13 · 6 Feb 2025On the anti-Sovietism of the Khmer Rouge-Greens- 28:10For the liberation theologians, God exists if one makes the kingdom of freedom grow here below against the empire of necessity.
Talks · 2 Dec 2024"Napoleon, or the reasons of cunning", with Dominique Pagani
Season 13 · 13 Oct 2024The eternal return… of the death camps?
Season 12 · 4 Jan 2024I am not who you think I am - The elusive identity- 40:43God wagers on freedom, which is not the good but the possibility of doing good as well as evil.
Season 12 · 17 Oct 2023Neither left nor right? Islamo-leftism?
Season 11 · 22 Jul 2023Worldliness in Clouscard - The world as "cunning of reason"
Season 11 · 9 Jul 2023Worldliness in Clouscard - The clash of worlds?
Season 11 · 18 May 2023Worldliness in Clouscard, or privileges for all- 20:10Hegel concentrates in it the meaning of history: one alone is free, then a few, then all, in right and in potential.
Season 11 · 3 Mar 2023War, neo-fascism: libertarian liberalism
Series · 12 Jul 2022Security: Is it conservatism or Revolution? - Dominique Pagani
Season 10 · 23 Jun 2022#15 Nietzsche: Philosophical or musical relevance? Answers to questions- 28:40Freedom becomes an empty and abstract form when it is not conjugated with social justice and equality.
Talks · 19 Mar 2022Dominique Pagani - Hölderlin, poetry and politics
Season 10 · 24 Feb 2022#10 UKRAINE: From the problem of "Edges" to the unleashing of war- 2:13:45Frei, free, frank designates the victor who imposes slavery on the vanquished; Svoboda is an antiphrasis that has nothing to do with democratic freedom.
Season 10 · 10 Feb 2022#9 PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION: Art, seen from here or from the other side?- 2:04:30Freedom is not the good: it is the possibility of doing good or evil, what the tempter promises Eve.
Season 10 · 23 Dec 202110#7 "Post-modern" eco-petty-Nazism - Plato's Gorgias
Season 10 · 6 Oct 202110#2 Dialectics of identity and difference- 1:20:48Rousseau founds anthropology on freedom. The free being creates a world out of nothing; what men have made, they can unmake.
Season 10 · 22 Sept 202110#1 The eternal irony of the community- 30:20Doing what I want is not doing what pleases me; freedom is won against the arbitrariness of mere pleasure.
Series · 30 Apr 2021My eco-cabin in the ZAD: autonomy or alienation? • Philosophical Q&A • Dominique Pagani
Season 9.2 · 14 Apr 20219 #19 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation • Part 2- 1:45:14The final crowd marks the passage, according to Engels, from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Season 9.2 · 3 Apr 20219 #18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation
Season 9.2 · 18 Feb 20219 #15 How can sciences of history be real?
Season 9.2 · 5 Feb 20219 #14 How can sciences of history be real?- 1:34:01Wherever science succeeds, freedom recedes. It is a postulate of practical reason without which philosophy would be useless.
Series · 24 Jan 2021Musicosophy 11. Modal and tonal music
Series · 3 Dec 2020Musicosophy 4. Sound ghettos- 42:38Dialectic of freedom and law: obeying the law one has prescribed for oneself, not the "free freedom" of revolt.
Series · 3 Dec 2020Musicosophy 1. Schubert and the master singers- 1:02:46Civil society is the moment when freedom can be won for each individual, but freedom is not the good.
Season 9.1 · 30 Nov 2020#6 Answers to questions
Season 9.1 · 6 Nov 2020#3 Benefits and harms of amnesia...- 19:48Siegfried's free act sows disorder in the order of destinies and makes them unpredictable.
Season 9.1 · 23 Oct 2020#2 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
Season 8 · 9 Jul 2020#13 • Return to the logics of the subject
Season 8 · 2 Jul 2020#12 • Return to the logics of the subject
Season 7 · 26 Apr 2020#6 • Harnessed to confinitude- 1:31:08With Rousseau, impulse of appetite alone is slavery, obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.
Season 7 · 30 Mar 2020#2 - Harnessed to Confinitude- 53:58The Orientals knew that one is free, the Greeks that some are, the moderns that all are, in potential.
Season 6 · 29 Mar 2020#6.6 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism- 37:19Negative freedom, the freedom of the void, flees all determination and feels itself exist only by destroying.
Season 6 · 19 Feb 2020#6.5 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism- 58:31It stands in for gravity in the order of values; Rousseau posits it as the foundation of anthropology.
Season 6 · 30 Jan 2020#6.4 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
Talks · 21 Sept 2019Pagani without detours
Talks · 3 Aug 2019Money, work, freedom
Season 5.2 · 29 Jul 2019#5.9 Kafka: An Imperial Message
Season 5.2 · 30 Jun 2019#5.8 Nature or Landscape?
Series · 2 May 2019Dominique Pagani ▷II Michel Foucault
Talks · 13 Feb 2019Hegel and the yellow vests (Part 1)
Season 5.1 · 13 Jan 2019#5.3 bis FaceBookLive / Questions- 35:59Philosophy has a proper domain where I have the freedom to do a thing or its opposite: values, the good-evil pair, distinct from the true-false pair.
Season 5.1 · 6 Dec 2018#5.2 bis FaceBookLive / Questions (1)
Talks · 2 Jul 2018Tribute to Domenico Losurdo- 1:19:02Modern subjective freedom, which appeared with Christianity, dissolves patriarchal states founded on immediate intuition.
Talks · 2 Jul 2018The Phenomenology of Spirit- 19:59Free will has objective conditions which form a system and which history progressively realizes.
- 44:07All of Hegel's philosophy is a philosophy of freedom; the Phenomenology describes the liberation of human existence.
- 1:27:23Freedom is a power that passes into existence through the mediation of equality and produces fraternity.
Talks · 12 Jun 2018In conversation: Dominique Pagani - Bernard Friot - 1 June 2018
Talks · 20 May 2018Marxist Café - Work and the right to work
Talks · 31 Mar 2018Tonight, we repoliticise. Part 2- 23:30History had a meaning as long as it sought the conditions of freedom, which form an ordered system.
- 54:10In Hegel, freedom gives history its only non-totalitarian meaning and remains inseparable from the assumption of death.
- 1:27:27Freedom is necessity understood; if it is not primary, it cannot be final; it exists only as liberation.
Talks · 12 Mar 2018Tonight, we repoliticise. Part 1
Season 4 · 12 Feb 2018#4.5 Angélique (by Nerval)
Season 4 · 15 Jan 2018#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)
Season 4 · 11 Dec 2017#4.3 Angélique (by Nerval)- 29:05The world of freedom produces a legislation that is the inverse of the Newtonian legislation of falling.
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.5 From Ulysses to Daedalus- 1:45:51The only modern modification of the Platonic scheme: replacing the good with freedom, which is also freedom to do evil.
Season 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.7 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.4 From Ulysses to Daedalus
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.2 From Ulysses to Daedalus- 14:40In Hegel, reason is a predicate of freedom; freedom is not the good and nothing guarantees its progress.
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus- 24:36To be modern, the idea of the good embodied by the sun must be replaced by the idea of freedom.
- 35:36Freedom moves in the opposite direction to gravitation: Rousseau is as powerful in liberation as Newton is in subjection.
- 1:41:04Freedom is the meaning of history, the opposite of the totalitarian: to bring about the greatest number of free individuals.
Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus- 1:19:03Naming is a decree: it is we who decide that this rock will be a table, according to our end; there is not first the object and then the word.
Talks · 9 Mar 2017Is History a subject?- 1:13:13History has a meaning, freedom; there is progress when one moves from a less free situation to a freer one.
- 1:22:44This meaning is not totalitarian: it tends toward as many free individuals as possible.
- 1:27:31Freedom requires material means, such as the bow or the horse collar, and not ideas alone.
Season 2 · 10 Mar 2016#2.4 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
Season 2 · 15 Feb 2016#2.2 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 5/5- 2:18:13Constraint is not the antonym of freedom: conquered order is the highest freedom; the freedom of the void becomes a fury of destruction.
Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 4/5- 26:28Freedom is not something already given, nor a quality: it is the path from determination to freedom, which is called liberation.
- 27:49Freedom is the substance, the gravity of the will, just as gravity is that of bodies.
- 2:33:49Making freedom the meaning of history gives a non-linear meaning, one that can fail: this failure is called barbarism.
Series · 1 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 2/5
Series · 1 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 1/5- 2:32:12Taken up from Spinoza: freedom is the intellection of necessity; one frees oneself by becoming conscious of what determines us.
Series · 29 Jan 2016What is to be done? 3/3- 15:06Natural liberty is bounded only by the individual's forces; civil liberty, limited by the general will, subjects one to laws that can be changed.
Season 1 · 28 Jan 2016#1.8 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?- 32:41Since Rousseau and Kant, freedom replaces the good as foundation: the possibility of doing good as much as its opposite.
- 1:20:00Freedom plays in the intersubjective world the role that gravitation plays in nature.
- 1:26:35I am free when I obey no already-given, neither natural nor supernatural; doing what pleases is not doing what one wills.
Season 1 · 11 Dec 2015#1.7 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?- 4:18A postulate of practical reason: one must suppose it possible for philosophy to be possible, without this proving that it exists.
- 35:36In modern thought, freedom replaces the sun, the idea of the good, as the keystone.
- 1:38:36The content of freedom is read in what humanity has achieved; for Hegel it is the very meaning of history.
Season 1 · 10 Dec 2015#1.6 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?- 1:04:26Freedom is the keystone that completes the philosophy of knowledge and opens the philosophy of action.
- 1:23:25For Rousseau, obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom; obeying and being free do not contradict each other.
- 1:44:56Doing what I want is not doing what pleases me: will and pleasure become disjoined.
Season 1 · 14 Sept 2015#1.3 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
Season 1 · 14 Sept 2015#1.2 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
Talks · 23 Jun 2015L'île du Peuple: the debate- 19:41Rousseau: natural liberty has for its bound only the strength of the individual; civil liberty goes much further, through education and the heritage of cultures.
- 27:45The fall goes downward, liberty upward: the natural order does not go in the same direction as the human order.
- 37:56Natural necessity admits no exception; one believes oneself freer in nature because one is fleeing a society of servitude and domination.
Series · 3 Jan 2015T for Triangle- 9:12In the human domain, the opposite is possible: I must not run the red light, but I can; this is the difference with the order of nature.
Series · 2 Jan 2015S for Savagery- 9:50Rousseau posits a principle of freedom that makes the human world intelligible, just as gravity makes nature intelligible in Newton.
Series · 26 Dec 2014L for Liberty
Series · 23 Dec 2014I for Island- 6:09Hegel sees the kinship between spirit and liberty; Rousseau is the philosopher who founds liberty.
Series · 26 Sept 2014#4 Neo-fascism and the ideology of desire; on the thought of M.Clouscard.- 2:07In Spinoza, freedom is the intellection of necessity; he defends human freedom against its illusory conceptions.
Series · 23 Sept 2014#3 The myth of the noble savage in Rousseau!
Series · 20 Sept 2014#2 Rousseau, a world that begins- 11:25To be free is less to do what one wants than not to depend on the labor of another.
- 26:55With Rousseau, freedom is the foundation of man, not a goal: a margin of maneuver with respect to natural determinism.
- 32:57Between the natural order and the human order, an unbridgeable gulf, which is freedom.