Memory

Summary

Dominique Pagani rejects the view of memory as a tape recorder or as a recording that degrades over time: it is selective, it is someone's memory, and it retains what lasted, what was repeated, or what was brief but violent12. He links it to language, which mythology unites in Mnemosyne, since naming presupposes recognising3. With Proust and Plato, he holds that reality takes shape only in memory. He contrasts voluntary memory, which keeps only abstract expressions, with music, which restores the essence of lost happiness4. Memory is also ambivalent: anamnesis goes back as far as the prenatal night, but it runs up against the refusal of trauma, as in Nerval's dream5. In his sessions from 2020 onwards, he draws more and more on the social frameworks of memory defined by Halbwachs: what the media keep silent about ends up never having existed, and collective amnesia is the result of deliberate work67.

1. 1#9.18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation3 Apr 2021 · 37:11
2. 2Worldliness in Clouscard, or “the dominant ideology”26 Apr 2023 · 27:31
3. 3A chapter of Marx written by Hegel22 May 2021 · 13:03
4. 4#9 Romantic irony and the Vinteuil sonata15 Jan 2021 · 1:08:54
5. 5#8 Benefits and harms of amnesia…10 Dec 2020 · 1:10:43
6. 6War, neo-fascism: libertarian liberalism3 Mar 2023 · 43:46
7. 7On the anti-Sovietism of the Khmer Rouge-Greens6 Feb 2025 · 5:08

Summary produced automatically from 58 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.