Progress

progrès

Worked through in 21 videos · 27 passages.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani says he believes in progress, then specifies that one should not believe in it but know it: progress consists in exploring what we have in common1. In the objective sense, it is the measurable continuity of modes of production, for example the time needed to make a table; value judgements only come afterwards2. The only consensual progress is technical: from charcoal to nuclear power, it uses less and less matter for more and more energy, and so it "has always been ecological"3. The prefix "pro" presupposes an end. Progress is not linear: it is a tendency, a resultant that passes through contradictions and restorations4 5. It has a direction, freedom, without being assured. He distinguishes this technical progress from social regression, which "societal" progress is supposed to compensate for. He relates humanism, the universal and progress to a "cursed triangle" fought by structuralism and postmodern thought6.

Summary produced automatically from 27 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Season 13 · 13 Oct 2024The eternal return… of the death camps?

22:22To the linear movement of progress, the eternal return opposes a circular movement that brings one back to the starting point.
55:17Ecclesiastes thinks time cyclically: nothing new under the sun, no good news.

Season 12 · 28 Feb 2024Clouscard by you - Answers to your questions

1:59:26One must not believe in progress but know it; progress consists in exploring what we have in common.

Season 11 · 9 Jul 2023Worldliness in Clouscard - The clash of worlds?

1:22:24Recovering the awkwardness of the Diallobé without giving up the progress that the mechanical world gives against chaos.
1:25:15Progress and technology are not the American world; discrediting them serves the far right.

Series · 31 Jan 2023Mallarmé, or class struggle on the lawn - Readings on the Spot

2:24The railway construction site brings progress, industry, and the worker into brutal confrontation with the aristocratic poet.

Talks · 19 Mar 2022Dominique Pagani - Hölderlin, poetry and politics

1:25:35Man, the universal and progress form the accursed triangle fought by postmodern counter-revolutionary thought.

Season 10 · 8 Dec 202110#6 War and Peace: "The death drives advance in silence..." (Freud)

1:26:06Progress has always been ecological: from charcoal to coal, to oil, to gas, then to nuclear power.

Series · 17 Nov 2021Left-washing: Are the woke the most asleep?

32:08Societal progress is supposed to console for the regression imposed on social progress.

Series · 24 Jan 2021Musicosophy 11. Modal and tonal music

20:29The progress of the scientific revolution is the passage from quality to quantity: color, weight, temperature become measurements that create a consensus.

Series · 18 Jan 2021Musicosophy 10. The two Klemperers and Bruno Walter in Wagner

1:20:02Humanism, the universal and progress form an accursed triangle, the concepts most fought against since the 1960s, notably by structuralism.

Talks · 16 Jan 2021The World Before, The World After - Part 2

26:31The prefix "pro" means "with a view to": judging a progress presupposes a prior purpose. Progress is not linear but a general tendency, a resultant.
28:55The only objective, measurable and consensual progress is technical progress, multiplied by the detour through science.

Series · 3 Dec 2020Musicosophy 1. Schubert and the master singers

51:55Voltaire believed that the progress of sciences and techniques was enough to civilize humanity: his failure against Rousseau.

Talks · 3 Aug 2019Money, work, freedom

36:13Refusing to kill love with gold is a recent, modern progress, which took millennia to achieve.

Series · 2 May 2019Dominique Pagani ▷II Michel Foucault

47:23In the objective sense, it is the measurable continuity of modes of production: the time needed to make a table; value judgments come afterward.

Talks · 6 Oct 2018Dominique Pagani "On Marx"

13:40Progress has always been ecological: from charcoal to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear power.
23:55The children of polished stone do not return to chipped stone: unlike biological heredity, there is progress.

Talks · 2 Jul 2018Tribute to Domenico Losurdo

1:50:46Men produce irreversible results; progress is never unilinear, it proceeds through contradictions and restorations.
1:57:55The meaning of history is freedom: progress has a direction but is not guaranteed, it depends on what is done with freedom.

Talks · 8 Jun 2017Negritude and negrologists / Adotevi by Pagani (2017)

49:10Ecologists see in it a nonsense leading to catastrophe; progress, man, and the universal are linked.

Talks · 18 Jun 2016At the bistro with Pagani: part 1

33:47He believes in progress; postmodern thought fights the triangle of man, the universal, and progress.
38:22One stops believing in progress when unemployment rises: the explanation is Marxian, not generational.

Series · 5 Jan 2015V for Vengeance

6:05The mere fact of a written law, common to all, is an enormous progress, even if it seems barbaric to us.

Series · 23 Dec 2014I for Island

7:18Rousseau never separates the past, progress, and technological future, which Rimbaud's poem brings together.

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

8:03From charcoal to nuclear power, technical progress uses less and less matter for more and more energy, whatever the intentions.

Series · 29 Jan 2012Everything is allowed but nothing is possible - Michel Clouscard - 2

9:50A participant distinguishes advances in the sciences and techniques from political and social regression, when relations of production remain unchanged.