Neopositivism

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani describes neopositivism as the dominant ideology since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one that came, in his view, from the English-speaking countries1. He specifies that the dominant ideology is not idealism but this neopositivism, which he regards as a regression that denies everything belonging to the subject2. He defines it as the application of the principles of the natural sciences to the human sciences, with everything else dismissed as outdated metaphysics3. Rationality is thereby limited to the sciences of objects, and "someones" are reduced to "somethings"4. He links it to the scientism of the nineteenth century and compares it to money, which likewise abstracts from the subject, from desire, from purpose and from meaning5. He sees in it the erasure of what Marxism and psychoanalysis had achieved in the knowledge of the subject. He nevertheless acknowledges that positivism was progress against religious sectarianism. Finally, he notes that petty-bourgeois ideology swings between relativism and neopositivism, whose common enemy is reason6.

1. 1La mondanité chez Clouscard : Aragon et la positivité du négatif29 Jun 2023 · 1:17:20
2. 2Dominique Pagani - Qui se cache sous les surfaces ? Esthétique et politique20 May 2022 · 1:29:21
3. 3L’éternel retour… des camps de la mort ?13 Oct 2024 · 21:08
4. 4La mondanité chez Clouscard : Aragon et la positivité du négatif29 Jun 2023 · 28:39
5. 5La répression du sujet dans la société civile bourgeoise9 Aug 2025 · 38:43
6. 6Les Veaux et les choses (3) : La dictature du bobotariat6 Oct 2020 · 12:07

Summary produced automatically from 10 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.