Subject

sujet

Worked through in 43 videos · 84 passages.

Play the 40 passages in a row Make a board

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from the grammatical definition: the subject answers the question "who is it that?", not "what?". He notes that language often passes things off as persons, as in "the wind shakes the trees"1. For him, philosophy is a logic of the subject, not of objects, following the "know thyself"2. He traces a history of the subject. The subject is first a passive mirror for the empiricists, then becomes with Kant a prism, "a little factory" that transforms what it receives3. He criticises Kant's subject for being timeless; Marx then gives it its historical determinations. With Freud and Rimbaud's "I is another", the modern subject is split: consciousness is only the tip of the iceberg4. The subject pursues ends and is formed through the mediation of another. Taking up Hegel, he calls for grasping the true as subject and not only as substance. Finally, he denounces the "repression of the subject" in neopositivism and structuralism5.

Summary produced automatically from 84 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 15 · 28 Aug 2026From Copernicus to Lenin: revolution!

1:10:34Philosophy begins with "know thyself": knowledge is not reducible to external objects.
1:24:37Reason is a prism, a small factory that produces; the subject is active, has desires and pursues ends (Tätigkeit).

Series · 6 Jul 2026From Plato to Proust

21:53In the gaze, the narrator perceives a subject, with its desires and will, and not an object like a disc of mica.
39:56Each of the two subjects of the pair seeks to make sure there is someone behind the body.

Cycle 14 · 9 Aug 2025The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society

32:13Neopositivism enacts a repression, a denial of the subject, the opposite of the object; the spotlight does not illuminate itself.
54:50The repression of the subject has as its latest avatar structuralism: Kantianism without a transcendental subject, process without a subject, subversion of the subject.

Cycle 13 · 2 Dec 2024Evil, or the “unknowing” of the self

28:33"By what trouble do I see myself carried away from myself": a theory of the subject in Hippolytus.
57:53Contradiction within the subject: a force does not want him to return to the trauma.

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

53:26Beyond the nightmare of the two texts, there is always a subject for another subject: someone awaits the message.

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

52:53The pairing of the Grail and the spear translates into the path leading from substance to subject.
1:02:09The subject and the concept form the extreme opposite of substance; pink is their middle term.

Cycle 12 · 12 Dec 2023“I is another”, or contradictory identity

8:19What has been taken for a philosophy of the subject is merely a philosophy of consciousness, the emerged part of the iceberg that is the subject.
24:30A subject is someone who can say cogito and who has no being except through that.

Cycle 11 · 29 Jun 2023Worldliness in Clouscard: Aragon and the positivity of the negative

33:02A subject is not entirely determined by its here and now: it has an aim.
1:20:39The closer a science comes to the subject, the more resistance it meets: mathematics, physics, biology, human sciences, politics.

Cycle 11 · 18 Mar 2023A springtime of the peoples?

41:55"What is speaking?": we are not even sure that the subject of poetic speech is someone; it could be a mere grammatical subject.
48:17Eroticism depends on the anxiety of knowing whether one's partner is someone or a mechanism that loses its status as subject.

Cycle 11 · 23 Nov 2022The aporias of anthropology

26:49The word table designates a function, a desire, what ought to be and not what is: this requires a subject who speaks.

Cycle 11 · 13 Nov 2022Dialectics of hesitation and decision

48:19The object of philosophy is not like other objects: it is called a subject. Hence "know thyself."
51:58One is dialectical when contradiction is internal and opposes the subject to itself; one must distinguish somethings from someones.

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

21:28The hard sciences aim at knowledge of objects; philosophy aims at the subject.
1:40:38Subject comes from subjacere, that which lies beneath: it gives unity to qualities.
1:46:38Grammatically the subject answers "who is it that?", but the wind is not a subject: there is no first cause in nature.

Cycle 11 · 28 Sept 2022And what about the subject in all this? Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Baudelaire

19:17"Know thyself": philosophy passes from objects to the subject; the cognitive sciences treat subjects as objects.
1:27:11Philosophy tracks the truth of a someone, not of a something.
1:50:27The use of mathematics and tools belongs to responsible subjects, not to objects.

Cycle 10 · 23 Jun 2022#15 Nietzsche: philosophical or musical relevance? Answers to questions

7:25Philosophy is not a logic of objects but a logic of the subject, according to "know thyself."
1:55:18A rule of law without a subject makes no sense: the sovereign is the subject.

Cycle 10 · 10 Jun 2022#14 Caves of yesterday and today: from Plato to modernity

38:25Science evacuates what only a subject can feel; everyday language expresses a logic of the subject.

Series · 5 Mar 2022Panzer-philosophy against the cogito: neo-fascism or the ideology of nature (Heidegger, Descartes)

6:33Since Descartes, the being is represented as object by a subject; Heidegger sees in this an insurrection of man against being.

Cycle 9.2 · 30 Jun 2021#9.24 “Ruled like music paper!” Nerval, Baudelaire (part 2)

9:55A logic of someones and not of somethings, which millennia have not sufficed to make explicit.

Series · 20 May 2021Cynicism of the extreme centre or epistemic heroism? The dialectic of the middle

6:41For empiricism, the subject is a passive mirror; for Kant, it is a prism, a small plant that transforms white light into colors.
11:16The projector can illuminate everything except itself: the subject has an effect on the way we receive the object.

Cycle 9.2 · 28 Apr 2021#9.20 From signal to sign: Einstein

23:52Freud brings about an extension of the subject, whose consciousness is now only the emerged part, which is not to be confused with the object of the sciences.
40:45The subject does not want the subject to know itself, and the dominant subjects do everything so that we do not know ourselves.

Series · 18 Apr 2021#2 Lenin, or the wings of dreams

21:16The cycle is part of the return to the logic of the subject, against the logics of the object.
48:05Reducing the subject to consciousness is an illusion: one does not judge an individual by the idea they have of themselves.

Cycle 9.2 · 3 Apr 2021#9.18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation

38:51The subject begins with selection: "this I take, this I don't." It is a concrete being that is hungry, not a pure spirit; there is more and less.

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

20:27Neo-positivism eliminates the subject: it treats man himself as a thing and refuses to distinguish something from someone.
29:11The grammatical subject of "the wind shakes the trees" is a metaphor: the wind is no more active than the trees.

Series · 31 Mar 2021Wagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?

0:54A false objectivism looks at the object in order to keep silent about the subject; as at the foot of the train, the subject is the maddening acceleration of becoming when the gaze draws closer to itself.
1:07:35When the subject knows itself almost too well, it becomes unbearable, as for Racine after Phèdre.

Series · 25 Mar 2021#18 What is musical in music

57:02In Rousseau, it is no longer the senses that fix the world: the subject is fixed by the object, a complement of the object of the setting.

Cycle 9.2 · 17 Mar 2021#9.17 The geopolitical metaphor: Planck, Descartes, Clouscard

57:40In direct knowledge according to d'Alembert, the subject is crushed, passive, absorbed by the object.
1:12:18Abstracting from the subject is legitimate for the natural sciences, reductive as soon as one moves to the sciences of history.

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

5:51What faces the object, what answers the question "who is it?"; man becomes a subject through history.
1:24:30Only a "someone" can find something useful or useless: pursuing an end, being a subject and making a value judgment belong to the same field.

Series · 24 Jan 2021#11 Modal and tonal music

52:31Dialectical materialism cannot ignore the activity of the subject, which Marx takes up from German idealism.
1:53:43Thinking reality no longer only as substance but also as subject.

Series · 17 Dec 2020#7 The Greeks, myth and music

40:42The subject aims at the relation to another subject; man is a subject, unlike objects subject to natural determination.
42:06The collective subject is both collective and a subject: wolves and bees are collective but are not subjects.

Cycle 7 · 18 Apr 2020#5 Harnessed to confinitude

16:37The subject of modernity, of which romanticism is the first expression, floats in uncertainty.
21:58"I is an other" shows the subject's estrangement from itself, finding itself split.

Cycle 7 · 4 Apr 2020#3 Harnessed to confinitude

1:31:14The subject answers the question "who kills?": it is not the virus but the poverty of the public hospital.
1:33:23Classicism, the self is hateful; romanticism, to speak of myself is to speak of you; synthesis, Rimbaud: I is an other.

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

10:10Sub-jacere: what lies underneath, as in "here lies"; etymologically identical to substance.
27:24To apprehend the true as subject is to follow an oriented movement away from substance, not a return to it.

Cycle 6 · 3 Dec 2019#6.2 The logic of the subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism

16:23The subject answers the question "who is it?", but language often passes off whats as whos.
23:43The subject's proper trait is to pursue ends.
53:02Defined merely as what opposes any object, the subject remains abstract.

Cycle 6 · 10 Nov 2019#6.1 Prelude: Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”

20:39It is first a school notion: what answers the question "who is it?" But in "the wind shakes the trees," the subject is something.
42:26With Freud, the subject exceeds consciousness: consciousness and the unconscious dispute the place of the subject.

Cycle 6 · 23 Oct 2019#6.1 The logic of the subject

39:24The subject is like a spotlight that illuminates everything except itself; it sees itself only facing a mirror.
42:16Grammatical definition: the subject answers the question "who is it," not "what."
1:11:47In "I have changed," the I remains the same through change: the subject is eminently dialectical and does not belong to the natural sciences.

Cycle 5.2 · 29 Jul 2019#5.9 Kafka, “An Imperial Message”

4:58With the cogito, the subject puts everything through the sieve; it deepens with Kant then receives its historical determinations with Marx.
29:18Subject, finality, and action presuppose as first source a someone and not a something.

Cycle 5.1 · 31 Dec 2018#5.3 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought

1:48:25Grasping the true as subject and not only as substance; all speech signifies for someone.

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

1:00:37Modernity involves a split within the subject, unthinkable in Racine.
1:08:26The psychic unconscious: thoughts I do not think, wills I do not will.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.5 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

0:18The modern subject is one that divides itself.
54:34Negativity inscribes itself within the subject itself, typical of modernity.

Cycle 3 · 1 Aug 2017#3.2 From Ulysses to Daedalus

1:17:17An irreversible achievement of romanticism: it was hidden in objects, but it comes galloping back.
1:29:45With Baudelaire the subject becomes total, a modern subject, with the risk of imbalance and madness.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

39:19The modern subject is split between consciousness and unconscious: "I is an other."
48:13Consciousness is partial, and therefore biased. The same content is expressed through different psychologies, beyond the psychological field.

Cycle 2 · 10 Mar 2016#2.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

15:06The subject is not something already given nor a substance: it is someone who has become a subject through the mediation of another.
16:25With Descartes, true is what I myself validate, and this self is each one of us.
1:26:28The abstract subject, the bad subject, asserts itself only through the negation of the object.

Cycle 1 · 10 Dec 2015#1.5 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

1:23:34Pre-critical thought makes the subject a passive mirror; in Kant, it becomes a prism that transforms, a little factory.
1:48:25What matters is not whether one begins with experience or with reasoning, but the passive or active status of the subject of knowledge.

Cycle 1 · 10 Dec 2015#1.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

17:03In Kant the subject is no longer a passive mirror but a prism, a small factory that transforms what it receives.
42:45Between the subject and the object there is the subject itself, a whole activity unnoticed by consciousness.
1:38:14Kant's limit: these a priori come from a timeless subject, without history or genesis.