Metaphor

Summary

Dominique Pagani makes metaphor the very essence of human language: there is never a literal sense, and language gives no warning when it moves from the literal to the figurative12. His recurring example is "the day rises": it is astronomical nonsense, but the phrase tells us something about the speaker, and we make poetry without knowing it, as Monsieur Jourdain made prose34. He contrasts this language with mathematics and with the highway code, where signs are in one-to-one correspondence with their definition. The mathematician flees metaphor, the poet is pure speech, and the philosopher shuttles between the two5. Philosophy is thus condemned to metaphor, which it must reflect upon. He stresses the logic of poetic sequence, in Hölderlin as in Hugo, for whom drowning figures social misery. He links metaphor to the universal and to Plato's analogy between the sun and the good. He also sees a political stake in it, since everyday metaphors carry wills and desires6.

1. 1M for Music27 Dec 2014 · 11:13
2. 2Clouscard and the problem of Socrates14 Oct 2022 · 1:48:02
3. 3#5.9 Kafka, “An Imperial Message”29 Jul 2019 · 56:05
4. 4“Red-browns”, “decolonial”: should we use the dominant language?31 Mar 2021 · 32:54
5. 5#5.9 Kafka, “An Imperial Message”29 Jul 2019 · 51:59
6. 6#5.9 Kafka, “An Imperial Message”29 Jul 2019 · 1:03:29

Summary produced automatically from 25 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.