Modernity

modernité

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Summary

Dominique Pagani distinguishes "our" modernity from the historians' Modern Times: Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy, but modernity is born of the double rupture of the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution1 2. He also thinks of it in logical terms and not only chronological ones. It then begins with Christianity, or even in Rome3 4. Its main attribute is the emergence of the individual in his singularity, cut off from substantial society. He draws from this a problem that remains unsolved: reconciling our political nature with the uniqueness of each person, which Rousseau holds together5 6. It also marks the end of the religious answers that came before the questions7. On the aesthetic level, he recognizes it by the mixing of genres, which overlaps with the mixing of classes. He distinguishes it from the avant-gardes, which age quickly. Romanticism is its first expression, and Rousseau, Baudelaire and Nerval are among its figures. He often returns to one formula: to be modern is to hate modernity. According to him, this is where it is most dangerous8 9.

Summary produced automatically from 86 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Series · 6 Jul 2026From Plato to Proust

48:06"Our modernity" is distinguished from other modernities; it is defined by the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution.

Series · 13 Jun 2025Our former savagery? An Illumination by Arthur Rimbaud

4:43"Our" modernity arises from two upheavals of the late eighteenth century: the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution. It differs from the historians' "modern times."

Season 13 · 27 May 2025Flagrante Delights

1:14:19Our modernity is born of the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution; we have not emerged from this upheaval.
1:15:42Before the Enlightenment, religious answers preceded questions; afterward, solutions can only be earthly.

Talks · 2 Dec 2024Napoleon, or the reasons of cunning

6:18Modernity is that which arises from the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution of the eighteenth century.

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

2:12:25It is not the psychology of chance individuals that interests him, but the modernity to which we belong.
2:36:46Rousseau's sentence, marked by maternal deprivation, continues in Chateaubriand, Flaubert and Proust.

Season 12 · 18 Feb 2024Secularism, the truth of religion?

40:03Modernity follows the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution; it expresses itself in capitalism and romanticism; the mark of the modern is to hate modernity.
44:44For the first time, man stands before his destiny without transcendent recourse: the answer no longer precedes the questions.

Season 11 · 3 Sept 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: desiring what? Through whom?

17:59"Our" modernity begins with the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution, in the era of the generation of 1770.
1:24:06The enjoyment of being sad is a contradiction that appears only with our modernity.

Season 11 · 9 Jul 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: the clash of worlds?

13:51Modernity begins when melancholy itself becomes suave, with Rousseau.
1:52:17The distinguishing trait of unhappy modernity is to be against modernity, and those who have benefited most from progress are against progress.

Talks · 29 May 2023From the debauchery of sense to the orgy of sentiment

6:42Our modernity is marked out by the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution, in the eighteenth century; Baudelaire's cracked self embodies it.

Series · 6 Jul 2022Tipsy Beethoven!

0:25Right after the Mozartian turning point, we enter modernity with Beethoven.

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

1:04:33The modern hero is characterized by splitting: the subject is no longer homogeneous like the character in the classics and the Greeks.

Series · 5 Mar 2022Panzer-philosophy against the cogito: neo-fascism or the ideology of nature (Heidegger, Descartes)

8:07Modernity hates modernity, and it is there that it is most dangerous.
46:43Renan's lament is that of the antimodern man, who regrets the era when answers preceded questions.

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

30:00He distinguishes modernity in general from our modernity, born of the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution.
44:39Romanticism is the first expression of modernity; it must not be confused with the avant-gardes.

Series · 23 May 2021From the lost voice to the path of modernity: from modal music to tonal music

6:02This is not about the Renaissance but about the modernity that follows the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution of the eighteenth century.
22:57Beginning of the individual's solitude with respect to all community.

Series · 25 Mar 2021#17 Interpretation

1:23:10Modernity is a crisis: asking oneself questions that religion avoided by making answers precede them.
1:24:31Ontological orphanhood: a world not made for us that must be made habitable collectively.

Series · 10 Mar 2021#16 Programme music, pure music

17:48The debate between pure music and program music is typical of modernity: it does not appear before the French Revolution and urbanization.
1:02:24Emergence of individuality, neurosis, malaise, and mixing of genres that overlays the mixing of classes.

Series · 7 Feb 2021#14 Mozart once more

49:51Modernity does not like modernity; whoever is part of the masses does not like the masses and seeks to distinguish themselves from them.

Season 9.2 · 7 Jan 2021#9.11 How can sciences of history be real?

1:23:24The modern hates modernity; the decentered universe opens a crisis of European consciousness in which man loses his place in the world.

Season 9.1 · 24 Dec 2020#10 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

5:51"One must be absolutely modern": not to escape, but to hold the ground won.
40:58The second pole is modernity, praxis, collective action, provided the means of production and exchange are reappropriated.

Series · 11 Dec 2020#5 Happiness versus the death drive in music

7:24A piece of music can have nothing transgressive in the modern sense without having aged a day.
23:41Its two reference points are the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, at the turn from the 18th to the 19th century.

Series · 3 Dec 2020#3 What is called modern music?

32:03Historical modernity dates from the second half of the eighteenth century: industrial revolution in England, political revolution in France.
41:27To be modern is to hate modernity: a wound that seeks to return to an era when it did not exist.
1:35:48Modernity is not reducible to this, but its first empirical reflex is to flee itself.

Season 9.1 · 19 Nov 2020#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

45:06Periodized by two great cracks: the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution.

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

28:49Modernity appears in Rome, the Urbs; the regret for the countryside in Virgil is already our ecologism.

Season 7 · 26 Apr 2020#6 Harnessed to confinitude

4:22To obey "Know thyself" is to ask what modernity is, of which romanticism is the first expression; nothing is more modern than the refusal of modernity.

Season 7 · 18 Apr 2020#5 Harnessed to confinitude

10:31The malady of the century, this malady that procures a good, defines modernity, of which Rousseau is the first instance.
26:02The three madmen illustrate what is typical of our modernity: the soul forever overstepping an outline.

Season 7 · 30 Mar 2020#2 Harnessed to confinitude

9:39It is born of the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution; an abyss separates it from the Ancien Régime.
49:53In the old world, everything is in its place; the property of modernity is to never be in place, to be in mobility.

Season 6 · 29 Mar 2020#6.6 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

1:24Our modernity arises with the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution, which dig an abyss between before and after.
58:24Modernity is an alternation of ecstasy and anguish.

Series · 23 Mar 2020Introduction to the upcoming workshops

11:22Baudelaire inaugurates modernity by dismissing both realists and romantics.
1:03:55All of modernity tries to reconcile individual fulfillment and collective life, which Rousseau holds together.

Season 6 · 19 Feb 2020#6.5 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

7:46The modernity that begins with the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution, the penultimate stage of substance-subject relations.
1:01:00Its lesson is absolute knowledge: the die is not cast, it is for man to decide.

Season 6 · 8 Jan 2020#6.3 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

1:07:36What characterizes modernity in its truth is consciousness and finitude.
1:38:49To be modern is to institute the split within the subject itself.

Season 6 · 10 Nov 2019#6.1 Prelude: Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”

38:20The Galilean break de-divinizes nature, which becomes inertia; man can then make a place for himself in it.
39:47The distinctive feature of modernity is too often to deny modernity: to be modern is to detest it.

Talks · 21 Sept 2019Pagani without detours

33:28To be thought in logical, not merely chronological, terms.
38:24Begins logically with Christianity; our modernity is born between the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution.

Season 5.2 · 25 Jan 2019#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?

1:09:11"Mouvement" is a hymn to the modernity of scientists and engineers, an ark in which the old world seems saved by science and technology.

Season 5.1 · 24 Oct 2018#5.1 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought

1:12:53Dissolution of the separation between the sexes as between classes; interpenetration of worlds that once ignored one another.

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

21:31He wants to reconcile hypermodernity, for which he campaigns like Rimbaud, and old savagery.

Season 4 · 14 Jun 2018#4.9 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:28:05Modernity hates modernity: to be modern is to flee toward the baroque or archaic cultures.
1:38:57It is born from the double crack of the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution.

Season 4 · 16 May 2018#4.8 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:33:44Born of the industrial revolution and the French Revolution; it is proper to it to hate itself.
1:45:58Our modern relation to art is museal, less gratifying but deeper.

Season 4 · 15 Mar 2018#4.6 Angélique (by Nerval)

36:32To be modern is to be a pagan Christian: one leg goes left, the other right; imbalance and greatness.
1:56:44To be modern is to leave substantial society for the society of subjects, with the French Revolution.

Season 4 · 4 Feb 2018#4.4B Objections to Dominique Pagani

0:56Nerval is exemplary of it, and of its impasses, since the end of history.
6:08Historical figure, Gestalt, situated between the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution, inseparable; it is recognized by the mixing of genres.
11:49Its main attribute is the emergence of the individual.

Season 4 · 18 Oct 2017#4.1 Angélique (by Nerval)

28:13Nerval arrives too early for modernity and too late for a romantic audience.
1:12:55Angélique is an anti-novel avant la lettre, with a very modern relationship between author and reader.

Season 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.5 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:46Malaise of the decoupling of the individual and society.
59:39The hallmark of modernity is the man without qualities, without a determined character.

Season 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.2 From Ulysses to Daedalus

9:51Distinct from the Early Modern period: it begins with the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution, after the Napoleonic transition.
1:02:47Ecology, the return of nature, is the oldest thing in modernity.

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

46:04It is born of two fractures, the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution; modernity does not love itself.

Season 2 · 10 Mar 2016#2.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

13:19The difficulty of modernity is to think a society composed of elements each of which is free, something no past society had to assume.
19:53Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy, but not modernity, which follows the English industrial revolution and the French political revolution.

Season 2 · 18 Feb 2016#2.3 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:08:44In Senancour, the season of happiness, the supreme value of the 18th century, is dreaded: modernity can be seen taking shape.
1:42:27Modernity breaks with the certainties the community used to bear; it expresses disquiet, Unruhe, which man can no longer escape.

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

30:20The fate of modern man is to be severed from his society of origin.
1:10:31A conceptual, not chronological, definition: modernity is when the individual emerges as such, in what is unique and singular about him.
1:20:01His unresolved problem: to subscribe to our fundamental political nature without sacrificing what is unique to each.

Season 1 · 10 Dec 2015#1.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

0:51Modernity appears at the end of the eighteenth century with the industrial revolution and the French Revolution; Kant provides its most rigorous assessment.
15:42The question "how is it that it works" had to wait for modernity, because before, the religious answer preceded the question.

Talks · 26 Apr 2015The music of history

1:44:42He opposes the avant-garde, which ages quickly, to modernity, which does not age, like Beethoven's last quartets.

Series · 1 Jan 2015R for Reverie

6:31The decisive advances of modern verbal creativity have been placed, since Rousseau, in the second state of reverie.
8:03Modernity cannot manage to escape the enigma of the relation between what we have in us of nature and of culture.

Series · 27 Dec 2014M for Music

13:02Aesthetic modernity has sought, since the end of the eighteenth century, the fusion of genres, linked to the telescoping of social classes.