Praxis

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Summary

Dominique Pagani takes up praxis as Marx's generic term for all the works of liberation: the transformation of natural matter into historical matter, which pushes back the initial determinations, from the small Neolithic dam to agriculture1 2. For him, the real is a construction and not a given, and praxis also produces thought and the subject. He specifies that this is not enough to define values, and that the criterion of practice must not be made into a new religion3 4. He links it to Hegel, whose "spirit" corresponds to what the Clouscardo-Marxists call praxis, and he holds that it precedes language and makes it possible5. At the heart of his reading of Clouscard lies the reconciliation of praxis and the psyche, which is its highest product. He already sees this synthesis in Rousseau, in the Social Contract and the Nouvelle Héloïse6 7. He contrasts it with Sartre, for whom praxis remains individual and driven by need. He also extends it to landscape, music and beauty.

Summary produced automatically from 69 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 15 · 5 May 2026The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction

37:09Detaching oneself from the prisoners and climbing the slope is a practical act, a suffering in which certainties collapse.
50:05The return toward the prisoners moves from the theoretical to the practical, that is, to the political.

Talks · 7 Feb 2025Michel Clouscard and the betrayal of May 68

18:08Reconciling praxis, the whole economic and historical becoming, with psyche, its highest product.

Cycle 13 · 2 Sept 2024Clouscard: The metamorphoses of class struggle

25:04The synthesis of Rousseau and Clouscard unites praxis and psyche: Contrat social and La Nouvelle Héloïse, L'Être et le code and the Traité de l'amour fou.

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

2:13:19One may abandon the word but not the predicate: the transformation by man of natural matter into historical matter.
2:17:35The Tätigkeit presupposes a subject: in nature there is no action, only causes and effects.

Talks · 27 Mar 2023Praxis and psyche

2:53Rousseau achieves the synthesis of praxis, a Marxist concept, and of psyche; the Social Contract belongs to praxis.
21:56The psyche itself is a creation of praxis.

Series · 20 May 2022Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics

1:24:14Nature supplies the matter, history the form; praxis wrests from the outside what becomes our inside.

Series · 14 Jul 2021Everything is allowed, nothing is possible! Michel Clouscard, May 68 and the capitalism of seduction

26:19Reconciling praxis, an economic and historical becoming, and the psyche, its highest product.
52:52The parliament of the collective worker gives praxis a decisive place within the institution.

Series · 14 Jul 2021Everything's allowed, but nothing is possible! Michel Clouscard, May 68, French theory and capitalism

26:59Reconciling praxis, an economic and historical becoming, with the psyche, which is its highest product.
53:19The Parliament of the collective worker gives the world of praxis a decisive place within the institution.

Series · 22 May 2021A chapter of Marx written by Hegel

22:49The practical relation to the world, grounded by the tool, without which spirit would not have appeared.

Series · 25 Mar 2021#17 Interpretation

24:11One must remain realistic: an external constraint is given at the start and praxis must work with it.

Cycle 9.2 · 4 Mar 2021#9.16 How can sciences of history be real?

1:37:53History is that of praxis, but one must not turn the criterion of practice into a new religion.
1:43:05Marx rehabilitates theoretical activity; action is not agitation.

Cycle 9.2 · 14 Jan 2021#9.12 How can sciences of history be real?

1:28:29In Clouscard, a character risen from the earth to work on the cosmos embodies praxis, a mediation between the symbolic order and the concrete.
1:34:57Small and great, gnomes and gods: these oppositions are linked to the division of praxis.
1:36:02The logic of praxis opposes producing and consuming, Vulcan and Narcissus.

Cycle 9.1 · 10 Dec 2020#8 Benefits and harms of amnesia…

48:23The whole history of human praxis takes over from the lost paradise, from the house on stilts to central heating.
51:47"You shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow": praxis begins with the exit from paradise.

Cycle 9.1 · 3 Dec 2020#7 Answers to questions (continued)

40:22Human history is a double movement: interiorizing the exterior and externalizing the interior, like the architect who realizes the house he has in his head; one passes from being to act.

Cycle 9.1 · 30 Nov 2020#6 Answers to questions

11:42The millennia of human effort are the stages of the ascent of praxis, of which freedom is the result.

Cycle 9.1 · 26 Nov 2020#6 Presentation of the dominiquepagani.fr website

27:56The great moments in the history of praxis, from hunting-gathering and nomadism to settlement and agriculture, are shown in sub-Saharan Africa, where humanity first appeared.

Cycle 8 · 9 Jul 2020#13 Return to the logics of the subject

1:04:11The opposition between the two domains is not intellectual: it is praxis that has the answer, by realizing the end in the phenomenon.
1:36:48Lead opened up: the relation between art and praxis, which the Greek technē unites in a single word.

Cycle 8 · 2 Jul 2020#12 Return to the logics of the subject

56:31It is human action with its tools that extends the domain of freedom and limits that of mere natural causality.
1:12:42Man is only what he does: he recognizes himself in the external things he marks with the seal of his interiority.
1:41:46It is praxis that made language possible: language and tool give a presence to the absent.

Talks · 29 Sept 2019The religion of money

48:21The Greeks distinguish chrematistics, intellectual work that does not transform matter, from praxis, fabrication that transforms it.

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

43:59Man appears where nature disappears; the tool imposes a repeated form, the architect represents the work before producing it.
50:07Language presupposes praxis; that is why it is privileged for thinking the threshold of the human.

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

1:21:27The rural landscape presupposes that the natural element, marsh or forest, has been transformed by praxis into a field.

Cycle 5.1 · 6 Dec 2018#5.2 bis Questions (Facebook Live)

28:23Praxis gives form to matter according to an end: leather becomes a sandal, clay a pot.
1:17:41Man, not all-powerful, makes a detour through technē, the tool, praxis.

Cycle 5.1 · 6 Dec 2018#5.2 ter Questions, following workshop #5.2 (Facebook Live)

57:21If praxis served need, it would have been completed since prehistory; it serves the infinity of one who has become aware of his finitude.

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

39:25The only domain in which history can be observed scientifically; by mastering the outer world, it widens the inner world.

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

6:15The study of praxis must be indissociably linked to the consideration of the psyche; not having done so is an internal cause of the difficulties of revolutions.

Series · 5 Jul 2018Being and Code

7:23Clouscard's project: the self-engendering of praxis and psyche, the production process creating sensibility and a gnoseology.
1:46:46Chivalric virtue assumes its exclusion from praxis by taking refuge in subjectivity.

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

27:06In Sartre, praxis is individual and carried by need, whereas in Hegel it is carried by desire.
2:01:10Sartre conceives no passage from individual praxis to a collective praxis with new content.

Cycle 4 · 11 Dec 2017#4.3 Angélique (by Nerval)

25:28What Hegel calls spirit, the Clouscardian-Marxists call praxis; for a field to appear, a forest must disappear.
1:32:49Praxis is a relay of the mother: millennia of history carry the newborn.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus

1:42:52The practical relation of transforming reality by which man adapts his biotope to himself; labor that shapes matter, distinct from theoretical work.

Series · 2 Aug 2016With Clouscard

32:18Real appropriation of nature through labor and production, according to Clouscard following Marx.
1:20:34Musical time is human time created by history and praxis: musical meter relates to praxis.

Talks · 19 Jun 2016At the bistro (part 2)

22:21Man is a production: it is not enough to be born in order to be; the origin of man is posited according to the process of production.
30:08Praxis produces the psyche: this is the heart of Clouscard's thought.

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

9:13The whole history of production that has made us what we are, down to our ways of loving.
48:18Word that synthesizes labor and activity, and from which everything that is not natural derives.

Series · 29 Jan 2016What is to be done? 3/3

57:53One owes a debt to others when one enjoys a landscape: protecting the Romanesque chapel means protecting human labor against nature.
1:15:06The temporal depth of beauty is that of the history of praxis.

Cycle 1 · 28 Jan 2016#1.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:48:58Marx's generic term for the whole set of works of liberation, more global than economics.
1:53:58From the small Neolithic dam to the demographic strength of the Asian deltas, liberation is concrete.

Series · 8 Dec 2015Michel Clouscard, the paths of praxis (1/2)

26:19Lévi-Strauss and Heidegger, far from being opposed, are complicit in the restoration of one and the same denial of praxis.

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

11:59Praxis moves from "what must I do" to concrete "what is to be done," to which Clouscard adds "making oneself."
19:22Praxis is the measure of all things: reality is a construction and not a given external to it.
25:46It has a demiurgic and matrix-like aspect: it produces reality, thought and the subject, which is not enough to define values.

Series · 6 Jan 2015W for Wolmar

5:38Rousseau does not evade praxis: Clarens is a real world.
9:17Julie is bound to praxis, whereas Emma Bovary does not enter into her husband's.

Series · 1 Jan 2015R for Reverie

9:05Rousseau, faithful to ancient savagery, does not dismiss what this savagery gave through praxis.

Series · 25 Dec 2014K for Karl

9:28It is praxis that decides everything; nature is part of the process of production without being its essence.

Series · 22 Dec 2014H for Hegel

9:05It is the construction of reality recognized by idealism; it dismisses both nature and supernature, and to insist on it is to be materialist.

Series · 26 Sept 2014#4 Neo-fascism and the ideology of desire: on the thought of M. Clouscard

11:03A Marxist term that Clouscard wants to reconcile with psyche.
13:46There is a profound link between praxis and psyche, belonging to the Hegelian-Marxist current.

Series · 20 Sept 2014#2 Rousseau, a world that begins

47:22Every practical relation to the world that pushes back the initial determinations, from the fitting out of a cave onward; official history is divided according to the productive forces.

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

34:21Technique, praxis, is the way of freeing ourselves from nature for millennia; technique says nothing without the use the ruling class makes of it.