Reflection

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from the optical sense of reflection: the incident ray and the reflected ray, which every subject presupposes. He sees in it a return upon oneself, "the eye of the soul" and not that of the body, which mathematicians write with a curved arrow, A = A1. For him philosophy is this projector turning back on itself, in the manner of set-theoretic reflexivity2. The eyes serve the outer world; to know oneself, one needs a mirror placed in front of oneself3. He links "speculative" to speculum, the mirror that returns the inverted self: reflection and speculation designate mediate knowledge, opposed to instinct and immediate intuition4. He also marks its limits: if there is nothing in front of the mirror, there is nothing in it, and at the extreme of the mediate the mind is deprived of substance. With Kleist, he notes that in the organic world grace shines all the more as reflection is weak: one must either not think or think infinitely, but not by halves56.

1. 1#3 Harnessed to confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 44:11
2. 2#9.11 How can sciences of history be real?7 Jan 2021 · 24:19
3. 3The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society9 Aug 2025 · 34:36
4. 4“I is another”, or contradictory identity12 Dec 2023 · 30:31
5. 5Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre”29 Sept 2023 · 32:01
6. 6Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre”29 Sept 2023 · 33:08

Summary produced automatically from 9 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.