Mediation

Summary

Dominique Pagani links mediation first to Hegel, the philosopher of Vermittlung, "the action of passing through the middle," for whom it is mediations that give content to an abstract truth1. He thinks of it as the middle term of the syllogism, which he distinguishes from the centre, whose position is ambivalent2. The example he returns to most often is the tool, the middle term between the worker and the object, which he compares to the word between sender and addressee3. He places money and language in this same intermediate position. From this he draws an anthropology: memory, language and the tool mark the passage to the human order, and man does not merely make mediations, he is mediation, between the inertia of the stone and the omnipotence attributed to God4. He also finds figures of it in aesthetics: the second act as the mediating moment, Delacroix's painting, Nerval between Germany and France. For him, mediation remains deeper than the immediate5.

1. 1Hegel on the Beach 1/51 Feb 2016 · 11:52
2. 2M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (1987)23 Aug 2019 · 1:36:20
3. 3Worldliness in Clouscard: the world as “cunning of reason”22 Jul 2023 · 1:20:26
4. 4#5.2 ter Questions, following workshop #5.2 (Facebook Live)6 Dec 2018 · 41:41
5. 5#16 Return to the logics of the subject30 Jul 2020 · 57:08

Summary produced automatically from 56 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.