Nature

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Summary

Dominique Pagani distinguishes nature from the environment: he says he defends the environment, the fruit of millennia of human labour, like the field or the chapel, and fights nature, the realm of necessity that shows itself in hunger1. He links the word to "being born": the natural is what one has by birth, and invoking nature amounts to justifying heredity and the status quo2. For him, nature knows neither good nor evil, only relations of force, which he also finds in Callicles3. He holds that the concept of nature is a human creation: one must have left nature to speak of it, and it must not be confused with matter. In Rousseau, he distinguishes the physical sense of nature from its polemical sense, a recourse against arbitrary power, of which the island is the metonymy4. He opposes the deification of nature in a certain kind of environmentalism and proposes that man become its shepherd.

Summary produced automatically from 92 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 15 · 8 Oct 2026Nature vs. freedom?

32:01The domain of the concepts of nature is that of physics, over which the understanding legislates theoretically.
48:44When one says "it's natural," one must look closely: incest is not unnatural, it is animals that practice it.

Cycle 13 · 25 Jul 2025Naturalist ideology: answers to questions

1:02:07The root refers to birth: without nature man would not exist, but if one considers only nature, he does not exist as man.

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

20:45We owe our existence to nature; it precedes man.
22:31Man begins to appear when nature begins to disappear; the Greeks escape nature into the city.

Cycle 13 · 17 Dec 2024The essence of evil: innocence of nature, horror of naturalism!

1:05:16Nature is perhaps a creation of human language; the notion adds nothing to matter, except a religious archaism.
1:08:21To say that something is not natural presupposes having emerged from nature.
1:14:41Nature is a value, an ought-to-be, which has meaning only for a being that has passed from the natural to the artificial.

Cycle 12 · 2 May 2024Neo-fascism and the ideology of desire: Clouscard, as relevant as ever

49:41Nature is history to which one has grown accustomed; likewise, nature is confused with landscape.

Talks · 23 Mar 2024Sahelian Africa and imperialism: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger

1:25:51There is no balance in nature; it is a politico-moral term. One protects the field and the chapel, which are labor and intelligence, not nature.
1:29:56A balance only makes sense in relation to what is vital for man; personifying nature as taking revenge belongs to animism.

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

2:11:40Distinguishing nature as the object of physics from nature in the polemical sense of the eighteenth century: what is free from feudal and ecclesiastical constraint.
2:18:27Nature is force and constraint, hunger; the animal does neither good nor evil, it does what it can.

Cycle 11 · 19 Oct 2022“Speech is the best and the worst of things” (Aesop)

20:24Second circle: the real without self-consciousness, where the idea disappears into mineral, vegetable, and animal matter.

Series · 22 Jun 2022From Bach to the Pygmies

10:27The noises of the equatorial forest belong to nature; they become art when the Pygmies order them into sounds.

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

16:07In nature there is neither good nor evil; the physicist there seeks only the true and the false.
27:41The root "nat" refers to birth: the natural is what one has by birth, what separates us most from one another.

Cycle 10 · 24 Feb 2022#10 Ukraine: from the problem of “edges” to the unleashing of war

2:18:31Demonizing man and deifying nature brings one close to the far right: nature refers back to the natal, to birth, to heredity.

Series · 6 Feb 2022The feminism of the privileged, puritanical censorship of femininity: Molière, Clouscard, Wagner

16:57There are males and females in nature, even among insects and plants; there, man has nothing to do with it.
32:52A table does not exist in nature: matter is given by nature, form is brought by man.

Cycle 10 · 23 Dec 2021#10.7 “Postmodern” eco-petty-Nazism: Plato's Gorgias

14:42Callicles invokes nature, that is, the relation of force, against contract and right; deification of nature and disparagement of man.
30:46The root "nat" refers to birth: nature is the baggage one is born with, heredity.

Cycle 10 · 6 Oct 2021#10.2 Dialectics of identity and difference

11:29Nature is the world of instinct: hunger is an instinct. Without hunger there would be no meal, but hunger does not explain how men eat.

Series · 18 Apr 2021#2 Lenin, or the wings of dreams

39:47There is no act in nature: the wind is as little active as the trees, it is itself an effect.

Series · 2 Feb 2021#13 Mozart restored

32:47He fights the regression that demonizes man and deifies nature.
1:06:16It is not a matter of fleeing the city for nature, but of fleeing true nature: death, illness, suffering, misery.

Talks · 16 Jan 2021The world before, the world after (part 2)

14:04He defends the environment against nature: a field is anything but natural. The environment is the fruit of millennia of human effort to push back raw nature.
34:56There remains in us a natural, animal part, the "old savagery," which should not be denied.

Series · 3 Dec 2020#2 From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval, on music

20:41The opposition between the natural and the cultural in music parallels that between phonetics, tied to the human throat, and phonology, specific to each language.
29:56Hunger is necessity; the meal is the way of satisfying it while escaping its determinism.

Cycle 9.1 · 30 Nov 2020#6 Answers to questions

16:16Human worries do not stem from any natural determination; nature makes neither the rich nor the prince, and what men have made, they can undo.

Talks · 5 Oct 2020Calves and Things (2): ecologism, the highest stage of capitalism?

17:20Nature must be distinguished from matter; to transform nature, it must first exist.
21:12Marx takes the natural element into account as a dialectical materialist.

Talks · 4 Oct 2020Calves and Things: the preface

13:14"Mother nature," Gaia: expressions that belong to the clinical realm, not to science.
30:14Man's environment is his social relation to nature. There is no nature in itself, only a humanized nature.

Cycle 8 · 17 Jul 2020#14 Return to the logics of the subject

22:47The cynic rejects nomos, the law of the city, in the name of physis, and lives in harmony with natural laws.

Series · 23 Mar 2020Introduction to the upcoming workshops

1:25:52In nature there is birth: to invoke nature is to say that everything is settled at birth; nature makes neither the rich nor the prince.
1:32:10Power has always relied on nature to justify the status quo, a function once held by religion.

Talks · 29 Sept 2019The religion of money

59:42We have spoken of nature ever since we left it. Nature is a creation of man, and fantasizing it leads to biological delirium.
1:10:46To say that nature is regulated and that it becomes deregulated belongs to providence: the religion of nature is a pantheism.

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

55:43Nature is also within us: a site of determination and constraint, not of freedom; ecologism confuses it with the external setting.
1:32:52Everything is material, but not all matter is natural: natural flowers and artificial ones.

Cycle 5.2 · 30 Jun 2019#5.8 Nature or landscape?

8:58This is the residue obtained by removing everything that bears the trace of man, that is, the universe. Reducing it to the planet is a reduction.
16:57Nature is a human creation: one must have left nature for the word to have meaning.

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

32:02The word nature is reserved for what bears no trace of human activity, present also beneath the landscape; nature is part of the process of production.
53:36One only specified that this is natural once inside artifice: the concept of nature, not reality itself, is a human creation.

Cycle 5.2 · 2 May 2019#5.6 Nature or landscape?

32:23Nature alone, as nature, is not enough to define landscape.
1:20:34Wild nature owes nothing to human arrangement; the rural landscape is a nature transformed into a field.

Cycle 5.2 · 4 Feb 2019#5.4 Nature or landscape?

17:20Physis, the object of physics, which has rather become a science of matter.
18:03He calls himself an adversary of what harms the environment and an adversary of nature: man must be its shepherd.

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

29:18He proposes reserving the word nature for what is outside us and untouched by the hand of man: desert, taiga, the Colorado canyon.
34:42Nature is what surrounds us once we abstract from what man has added, developed, built, or destroyed.
1:13:22Man is not opposed to nature by fire and iron: he remains animal in certain respects, he is "a plus."

Talks · 20 Jul 2018Education: can beauty be learned?

20:37With Hegel, nature is a copy of art; natural beauty dates only from the end of the eighteenth century.
24:18The industrial revolution had to push nature back and end its threat before it could begin to be found beautiful.

Talks · 2 Jul 2018The Phenomenology of Spirit

1:08:30There is nature only for a being who has emerged from it; to speak of the natural presupposes artifice. History precedes nature.

Talks · 31 Mar 2018Tonight, we repoliticise (part 2)

1:26:06For Marx, nature is positive; for Hegel, it is negative: dispersion, mutual exteriority, space and time.
1:34:51Nature is the first negation of man; the negation of nature by man is a negation of the negation that opens the anthropological field.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus

1:04:32The natural, in the language of representation, is what one has by birth. We are not born into nature but into an already complex world.

Talks · 9 Mar 2017Is history a subject?

24:52The wheat field and the chapel are not nature but human labor; defending the chapel pays tribute to man, not to the planet.

Talks · 2 Aug 2016Tribute to Jacques D'Hondt (3)

14:01According to Hegel, political crises develop during the pause of natural catastrophes; nature is returning today into history, and history must integrate it.

Series · 2 Aug 2016With Clouscard

31:35One speaks of nature only since man. Nature must not be confused with matter: the fall of bodies is a law of matter, whether natural or human.

Series · 1 Feb 2016Marx on the Beach 1/2

47:51Nature and "to be born" share the same root: what is natural is what I have by birth, before culture and history.
1:06:42Because of his generic prematurity, man is not viable by his natural endowment alone: social relation is his core.

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

24:18There is no action in nature, except metaphorically: the wind is itself the effect of causes, in an endless chain.
27:10Nature is the absolute otherness of each thing to itself; in it there is only otherness.

Cycle 1 · 14 Sept 2015#1.3 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

32:18Nature is not merely the environment; it manifests itself in hunger; it is the realm of necessity.
1:07:18It is neither good nor evil; in it there are only relations of power, no duty.

Cycle 1 · 14 Sept 2015#1.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

50:35Nature knows neither good nor evil; it knows only power, not duty.
52:36The concept of nature is a human creation: one had to leave nature in order to be able to speak of it.

Series · 9 Jan 2015Z for Zero

7:08By nature man is nothing and is not viable; he exists only by shaping a world in his own image.

Series · 8 Jan 2015Y for Yonville

12:12Nature does not suffer, and it is implacable with itself: the sun is a gigantic nuclear plant, and nature liquidated the dinosaurs.
13:56Man can become, not the exterminator, but the shepherd of nature, because he cares about the survival of other species.

Series · 7 Jan 2015X for Xanthippe

3:47Cooking, reproduction, eating: instances that recall our former savagery, to which woman is assigned.
8:54Nature terrifies the Greeks because it is infinity; one escapes it in the city.

Series · 2 Jan 2015S for Savagery

4:26Nature is not balanced and harmonious as we tell children: it is the relation of force.
9:07True nature, the object of physics, is opposed to the fantasized nature of the mother figure, the basis of a certain ecological discourse.

Series · 1 Jan 2015R for Reverie

8:03The eleventh promenade would be an attempt at synthesis of nature and culture in us, like Rimbaud's "ancient savagery" at the heart of industrial futurism.

Series · 23 Dec 2014I for Island

2:21The imagery of the return to nature, fed by anti-humanist discourse, is contradicted by the text of Robinson.
12:42In Nerval, nature tries to reclaim the ground that art disputed with it; the poet chooses art against nature.

Series · 21 Dec 2014G for Gauche (the Left)

9:34The question is whether a good environment means letting nature be or organizing it for the benefit of man.

Series · 20 Dec 2014F for Farniente

4:48Rousseau makes it the supreme value when it is the last resort against injustice, the same alternation as for farniente.

Series · 19 Dec 2014E for Enfance (Childhood)

15:17The island is a metonymy of nature: the recourse always available when civil society becomes servitude and domination; refuge and exile.

Series · 17 Dec 2014D for Desire

3:37First source of the content of human desire, hard to disentangle from history: hunger is not decided by me.

Series · 15 Dec 2014A for Antigone

7:33Neither family nor city is natural, the family presupposes institution, but nature plays a decisive role in the family bond.
9:06Natural law admits no exception, social law can be transgressed: one is not freer in nature.

Series · 23 Sept 2014#3 The myth of the noble savage in Rousseau

26:24The most treacherous term in Rousseau: the object of physics, the only objective sense, and the polemical sense of right against arbitrariness.
29:43Between bad and good society, a state through nature in the ordinary sense: landscape, solitude.

Series · 7 Jul 2012Radio Galère: Michel Clouscard (2)

34:03Distinguishing between the environment, which he defends, and nature, which he fights: hunger, submission to law, from which praxis seeks to free us.