Mediation

médiation

Worked through in 36 videos · 55 passages.

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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.

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

Cycle 15 · 28 Aug 2026From Copernicus to Lenin: revolution!

31:36Discourse on the world became scientific only through the detour of mathematics, which is the furthest thing from what we see.

Cycle 12 · 4 Jun 2024The matrix of all illusion: the past lived as present

5:47The middle, the medium, mediation: the middle act is the most protected from the two extremes, in an almost geometrical sense, though it concerns duration.
2:32:46Rousseau imagines islands in the middle of the lake, like the middle of an opera, a protected place that refers back to the maternal.

Cycle 12 · 30 May 2024From fidelity to grace: from substance to subject

3:37The second act is the act of mediation, that of the middle.
1:02:09Between white and red, the Grail and the spear, the middle term is pink.

Cycle 11 · 22 Jul 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: the world as “cunning of reason”

1:20:26The instrument is the middle term between two extremes, the worker and the object, just as the middle term of a syllogism ensures a transitivity.

Talks · 27 Mar 2023Praxis and psyche

22:41The tool is a mediation between the subject who works and the object worked upon.
42:59Like the word between sender and receiver, the tool is a mediator.

Cycle 11 · 18 Mar 2023A springtime of the peoples?

51:06A slow quest for the real through a series of intermediaries and reasonings, the opposite of immediate apprehension.
1:59:13Mediate, discursive apprehension passes through language, words and concept.

Cycle 11 · 23 Nov 2022The aporias of anthropology

33:37In asking "what do you call...?", one leaves the immediate for the word, which is the intermediary for reaching things.
34:24The meaning of words depends on an agreement, a community of expression, not on individual whim.

Cycle 10 · 10 Jun 2022#14 Caves of yesterday and today: from Plato to modernity

6:31The mediation of the museum tears works from their context, but the gesture of offering carries them beyond their natural state.

Cycle 10 · 10 Feb 2022#9 Pictures at an Exhibition: art, seen from here or from the other side?

29:24The tragic conflict serves as the middle term of a syllogism: art and the state are two successive means of the same end, preserving community against atomism.
2:00:18The family and the state, taken separately, would be totalitarian without the mediation of civil society.

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

39:39The supreme ethical opposition is the middle term between aesthetics and politics, the moment of the middle.

Cycle 9.2 · 9 Jun 2021#9.23 “Ruled like music paper!” Bach, Nerval, Lévi-Strauss

1:35:52The middle way between logical thought and aesthetic perception; between the raw, the cooked, and the fermented. The concrete world always lies in the middle term.
2:02:35Everyday language is already a middle term between music and mathematical discourse.

Cycle 9.2 · 18 Feb 2021#9.15 How can sciences of history be real?

5:10Placing oneself at the midpoint allows one to say what follows and to recapitulate the beginning; the notion of midpoint is overdetermined: mezzo, intermezzo, Zwischenspiel, interplay.

Series · 7 Feb 2021#14 Mozart once more

32:53Central Europe and the Balkans are a mediation between West and East, extremely conflictual.

Series · 3 Dec 2020#1 Schubert and the master singers

1:58Beginning with the middle allows one to touch both an earlier period and a later one.
32:06The second act is the mediating moment par excellence, that of irreversible action.

Cycle 8 · 30 Jul 2020#16 Return to the logics of the subject

11:02The girl, mediation, is superior to the fruits that nature offered immediately.
57:08The middle term must never be underestimated in dialectic: mediation is deeper than the immediate.

Cycle 8 · 11 Jun 2020#10 Return to the logics of the subject

1:00:18One must pass through the individual's interiority to return to the collective having understood the meaning of the work.

Cycle 7 · 17 May 2020#8 Harnessed to confinitude

1:42:55The true self is the mediation between becoming other and being oneself: the movement from childhood to old age and death.

Series · 23 Aug 2019M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (1987)

36:09Philosophy is not a middle point but the apex of a triangle that sets the extremes back to back.
1:36:20Hegelian concept of the middle term, not to be confused with the center, whose position is ambivalent.

Talks · 3 Aug 2019Money, work, freedom

56:39Money is only a medium, a milieu between two extremes, like language between sender and receiver; it is neutral.

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

1:36Delacroix's painting is spatial and logical mediation, a middle term between two opposed extremes, the Arcadian landscape and the romantic landscape.

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

51:09Instead of the abstract immediate self, the mediation of memory, language and the tool implies negativity and suppression.
1:10:53Money and speech are two forms of mediation between men.

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

41:41Man does not only make mediations, he is mediation, a passage between the inertia of the stone and the omnipotence attributed to God.
1:10:37Mediation, language, tool, negation and death implicate one another, like similar triangles.

Cycle 5.1 · 21 Nov 2018#5.2 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought

4:28Hegel is the philosopher of Vermittlung: the act of making pass through the middle; scholarly transmission is one form of it.
51:35The passage to the anthropological order presupposes three mediations, increasingly rich: memory, language, the tool.
1:13:15Man does not perform mediations, he is mediation: passing beyond so as not to sink into the stability that brings back death.

Cycle 5.1 · 15 Oct 2018#5.0 Presentation of the 2018-2019 workshop

12:13Hegel mediates between Rousseau and Kant on one side, Marx and Lenin on the other.

Talks · 2 Jul 2018The Phenomenology of Spirit

58:21The Phenomenology is a mediating work: situated at the midpoint of Hegel's life, it is pedagogical, and the paperback edition popularizes it.

Talks · 20 May 2018Work and the right to work

10:19In Rousseau the worked object is a mediation between myself and the other self.
36:35In the syllogism of work, the tool is the middle term between the worker and the object.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.5 From Ulysses to Daedalus

47:17One does not reach the good in pure immediacy; intermediaries are needed, down to the sun's reflections in water.
1:28:32Descartes's steps: one can always find an intermediary to rise, a Promethean gesture.

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

1:10:22Nerval, for whom borders are spaces, delights in the in-between: he is a permanent mediation between Germany and France.

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

1:36:17The medium, the media, language and money: what lies between sender and receiver is the best and the worst.

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

19:15The girl is mediating: she offers the fruits and synthesizes in a higher form all their conditions in the gleam of her eye.
1:59:55The idea common to the senses is reached only mediately, through the sensibles.

Series · 1 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 1/5

11:52Hegelianism is a philosophy of mediation: it is mediations that give content to an abstract truth.
56:12The Phenomenology is a mediating work between the complexity of knowledge and the stage of opinion.

Series · 29 Jan 2016What is to be done? 1/3

43:44The Kantian schema, common to both extremes of an antinomy, allows for mediation.

Series · 29 Jan 2016What is to be done? 3/3

5:12The detour is mediation: instead of going straight ahead, one takes a roundabout path.
1:07:32One is never in immediate contact with nature; there is always a mediation, except in death.

Cycle 1 · 28 Jan 2016#1.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

17:47The medium is what is in the middle: the media, but also the tool, the hammer between the iron and the smith.

Series · 8 Dec 2015Michel Clouscard, the paths of praxis (2/2)

27:51As soon as one is alive, there are mediations, which are believed to be natural and which Clouscard develops.

Series · 6 Jan 2015W for Wolmar

2:35Wolmar mediates the triangle by accepting that Saint-Preux live with the couple.