Substance

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Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from etymology: substance is "what stands beneath," like the subject, and it remains while the attributes change. He follows the concept in Aristotle, where it is said of matter, of form and of the compound of the two1, in Spinoza, where it is cause of itself, and in Descartes with the example of the wax: unity comes only from the word and from consciousness2. He opposes substance, which is through itself, to relation, which is through another3. With Hegel, the substantial designates the immediate relation to the world that modernity has lost and knows it has lost. He connects it to Antiquity and to homogeneous communities. Modernity replaces substance with the subject. He criticizes the substantialist illusion that turns Ukraine, nations or "races" into eternal things. For him, nostalgia for substance underlies every reactionary ideology4. In 2024, he relates it to the Grail and to the maternal figure, which one must leave behind.

Summary produced automatically from 33 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Season 14 · 5 May 2026The foundations of the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction

1:01:07In Aristotle, substance is said in three senses: indeterminate matter, the form that determines it, the composite of the two.

Season 13 · 15 May 2025Imaginary identity

30:41In Aristotle, that which stands beneath and supports attributes; that which is essential and owes nothing to one's path or relation to others.
49:16White, Black, African or Western mentality are wrongly taken for substances, as if they were things.

Season 12 · 30 May 2024From fidelity to grace: from substance to subject

38:24The Grail is substance: substare, that which stands beneath, which gathers the blood and bears the newborn, a maternal element.
52:53What embodies substance is the maternal figure, the Mater dolorosa.
1:02:09Substance is immediacy, origin, the maternal fixation one must leave behind, otherwise it becomes deadly.

Season 12 · 1 Apr 2024The quest for the Grail, sanctimony or sacrilege?

1:11:08The Grail deprived of the spear is substance deprived of the concept: a modeling, not an interpretation.

Season 11 · 14 Oct 2022Clouscard and the problem of Socrates

1:38:22Substare, that which stands beneath the attributes, like the container; Hegel asks that the true be grasped not only as substance but also as subject.

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

1:34:12What is sufficient unto itself exists nowhere, except God: in Spinoza, substance is cause of itself.

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

48:51Dialectic forbids any substance from claiming to be eternal; Ukraine is not a substance but a relation.

Series · 31 Mar 2021“Red-browns”, “decolonial”: should we use the dominant language?

27:50The substantial, according to Hegel, is the subject who forgets its own activity and alienates it in the object.
33:55Desubstantializing our relation to the world is the millennia-long work that led from ignorance to science.

Series · 10 Mar 2021#16 Programme music, pure music

31:41National realities are not an eternal substance but derive their weight from historical determinations.

Series · 24 Jan 2021#11 Modal and tonal music

53:52Wax changes all its qualities; only the word sustains a substance, and unity falls to consciousness.
1:23:01There is a music of substance and a music of the subject.

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

27:16The nostalgia for substance founds every reactionary ideology and gives a common genus to its forms.
35:11Substantialism begins when one embellishes the past and refers to an already-given exempt from present problems.
1:05:19In Hegel, substance is the "compact solidity of being," the substantial, the opposite of the void in which modernity struggles.

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

48:51To define man by his property or by his genes is to substantialize him, to make a real thing correspond to a verbal essence.
1:07:21Substance is what exists by itself, relation is what exists through another: nothing is more opposed.

Season 6 · 19 Feb 2020#6.5 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

38:37Until modernity, the subject was alienated in substance; modernity replaces substance with the subject.
45:50Christianity desubstantializes the relation to the world by placing God beyond it.

Season 6 · 30 Jan 2020#6.4 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

1:24Substance and subject originally designate what lies underneath; substance is that which is affirmed of nothing and exists by itself.
4:45In Spinoza, that which needs no concept of another thing; it took two millennia to move from the subject by itself to the subject through another.

Season 6 · 8 Jan 2020#6.3 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

7:51What stands underneath and does not move while the attributes change; the same word as subject.
41:28In Aristotle, substance is first of all matter, what remains beneath every transformation.
1:04:20In Hegel, the substantial designates the immediate relation to the world that the modern spirit has lost and knows it has lost.

Season 2 · 18 Feb 2016#2.3 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

47:34The substantial world is an exceptionally homogeneous society, the community, which lives to the rhythm of the good bell and excludes any deviation.
1:41:46Modernity is the moment when one knows too much to live in the substantial world, naive and immediate.

Season 2 · 15 Feb 2016#2.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

30:41Antiquity is a substantial world: the individual holds no interest there, only the citizen counts.
1:24:06The more substantial a society, the more the collective protects against the threat of origins, but the more one must answer for oneself.

Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 3/5

2:20:14What stands beneath; the same etymology as subject. The substantialist illusion lends things the unity that comes from the subject, an alienating drift.

Talks · 23 Jun 2015L'île du Peuple: the debate

58:44Old logical relation between substance and its attributes: what remains of the wax when all its sensible qualities have changed?