Universal

universel

Worked through in 37 videos · 51 passages.

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Summary

Dominique Pagani understands the universal as what holds everywhere, always and for everyone, on the model of "if A equals B, B equals A": logic and geometry establish it against those who see only opinions1. With Euclid and Kant, he holds it to be intersubjective: knowledge is universal only if it can be shared2. In Hegel, language stands in the element of the universal, what I say belying what I mean. Together with man and progress, it forms a "cursed triangle", discredited since the 1970s by culturalist relativism, which serves capitalism by dividing people into identities3 4. He links this rejection to Burke, to the counter-revolution and to Nazism5. He distinguishes the false universal, which it is legitimate to criticise, from the concept itself. With Adotevi, he defends a thought that wills the universal. Regarding Nerval, he speaks of a dialectic of the particular and the universal: the great writer starts from his own mother to reach "the mother"6.

Summary produced automatically from 51 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Cycle 13 · 29 Aug 2025State and state apparatus: the conflict between public and private

29:33Africans want what men want; the universal is being fought today by everyone's confinement in their culture or their genes.

Cycle 13 · 15 May 2025Imaginary identity

40:20In the student's message, the Quran addresses all men: tribes and nations so they may know one another, with no superiority of Arab over Black.

Cycle 13 · 20 Sept 2024Sickness, misfortune, evil

35:47Philosophy seeks univocal communication; the universal is denounced as reactionary by liberalism, which prefers to divide.

Cycle 10 · 27 Jan 2022#8 Philosophising under threat

1:31:44To dissolve fratricidal struggles, identities must be stripped of their status and the universal restored: exploiters against exploited.

Cycle 10 · 23 Dec 2021#10.7 “Postmodern” eco-petty-Nazism: Plato's Gorgias

1:42:18The cursed triangle of post-modernity: the universal, man, and progress proceed from the same concept; the animal is specialized, man has no determination but a universal one.

Cycle 10 · 8 Dec 2021#10.6 War and peace: “The death drives advance in silence…” (Freud)

1:04:40A Pygmy parent wants, like every parent, their child to be healthy: humanity comes together on fundamental points, and faces light up for the same reasons.

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

1:07:28The tribe is not an exclusive community but the whole of the human tribe.
1:13:46Universalism is the worst enemy of the racialized; it aims at the universal common to oneself and one's interlocutor.

Series · 6 Jun 2021#3 Nomad or sedentary? The case of Nerval

1:28:30Philosophy is in the element of universality: what matters is what goes beyond Nerval's particular case.
1:38:00Great authors tell our story by telling their own: each person's experience is the treasure of all, against the assignment of identities.

Cycle 9.2 · 27 May 2021#9.22 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence” (part 2)

38:44The notion of universal man, valid for all, was attacked by the counter-revolution and then by the Nazis.
45:37Reason is a universal instrument: the animal is determined by its biotope, man adapts the environment to his will.

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

1:34:12Burke says he never met man in general: everyone must stay in their identitarian bubble, "proletarians of all countries, tear each other apart."

Series · 24 Jan 2021#11 Modal and tonal music

55:35Relativism forbids the concept and the collective; it starts from a legitimate critique of the false universal but throws out the baby with the bathwater.

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

1:20:34One of the three points of the accursed triangle, attacked by cultural relativism.

Talks · 16 Jan 2021The world before, the world after (part 2)

45:45The accursed triangle, discredited since the 1970s, unites man, the universal and progress; it is opposed by the relativism of cultures.
51:38Against division by genders and identities, one must set oneself universal goals; privileging what is given at birth rather than what is due to history is troubling.

Cycle 8 · 30 May 2020#9 Return to the logics of the subject

54:57Our era is against man, against progress, and against the universal, like Burke who never met men.

Cycle 7 · 26 Apr 2020#6 Harnessed to confinitude

1:09:28The great writer expresses from his own experience what holds for everyone: the biographical mother refers to the structural mother.

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

1:09:39Nazism fought universalism together with Christianity and Marxism; the structuralist attack on universalism is a tributary of its reconstitution.

Series · 2 May 2019Michel Foucault

26:08The trial of universalism leads to a relativism that divides men into imaginary identities, to the benefit of capital.
41:10With Terence, human universality is thought long before the 19th century.

Cycle 4 · 16 May 2018#4.8 Angélique (by Nerval)

2:48The question is that of the particular and the universal: Nerval's quest is not for his mother, but for the mother.
45:03Nerval exhaustively unfolds the path we all have to travel.

Cycle 4 · 12 Apr 2018#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:26:45Nerval's mother is anecdotal; the maternal function, the fact of being carried, concerns us all.
1:36:31It is necessary to render a cult to whatever has carried us; it may be a man, like Saint Christopher.

Cycle 4 · 12 Feb 2018#4.5 Angélique (by Nerval)

1:04:46The text brings into play a dialectic of the particular and the universal: from the personal narrative to the collective concern of Rousseau's tomb.

Cycle 4 · 4 Feb 2018#4.4B Objections to Dominique Pagani

14:37Hippolyte rises to the universal by recognizing that he is like everyone else, at the price of losing himself.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

30:01Against culturalist relativism, he rehabilitates the solidary triangle of man, the universal and progress.

Cycle 2 · 1 Aug 2017#2.7 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

39:43Socrates stands for the universal and the city against the communities; a notion combated since May '68.
45:11Humanity, the universal and progress form the accursed triangle of dominant thought.

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

1:58:46Relativism serves capitalism, which has an interest in there being no universal; we all love the same thing, freedom.

Talks · 17 Jun 2017Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (1)

2:23The book has a universal character, useful even to those unfamiliar with Africa.
5:41If Greece is the country of philosophy, we are all Hellenes, and all negroes.

Talks · 17 Jun 2017Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2)

15:07There cannot be a civilization of the universal as long as one culture dominates another.
36:41Adotevi's thought is defined as a will toward the universal.

Talks · 8 Jun 2017Adotevi: Negritude and negrologists (2017)

30:03Today the universal is cursed by culturalist relativism; saying "they are men" reaffirms the universal.
48:50It is time to rehabilitate the universal, repudiated by dominant discourse.

Talks · 9 Mar 2017Is history a subject?

1:08:45He affirms humanity as a universal, which cannot be empirically observed.
1:18:39Burkina Faso: a national universal supersedes ethnic groups.

Talks · 18 Jun 2016At the bistro (part 1)

34:25Lévi-Strauss and Burke deny the universal and man; Aristotle knows only the existing individual.

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

1:21:36What, through the mediation of negation, is neither this nor that; language is in the element of the universal: what I say belies what I mean.

Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 4/5

1:34:40Euclid's postulates and Kantian objectivity show that the universal is intersubjective or is not.

Cycle 1 · 11 Dec 2015#1.7 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

34:38A knowledge is universal only if it can be shared; the dominant ideology substitutes relativism and culturalism for this.

Cycle 1 · 14 Sept 2015#1.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?

34:23Knowledge holds everywhere and always, like "if A equals B, B equals A". Today, cultural relativism wages a war against the universal.

Series · 3 Jan 2015T for Triangle

3:23"If A equals B, B equals A" holds for everyone: logic and geometry give a universal, against those who believe there are only opinions.
4:07A notion discredited today and accused of ethnocentrism, even though kinship relations also hold for Africans; it must be defended against the entrenched identities that wage war.

Series · 24 Dec 2014J for Jeunesse (Youth)

3:25The old age of the hero, the warrior, the sage is devoted to the universal and cares only for it.

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

0:28The bad abstract universal, the night in which all cows are black, is opposed to Clouscard's concrete dramaturgy.

Series · 29 Jan 2012Everything is allowed but nothing is possible: Michel Clouscard (2)

51:05Praising a complex music for everyone and giving a musical education to all.
53:47The Musée de l'Homme belonged to a republican universalism that respected all cultures. For a participant, primitive arts fall under a false, neocolonial exotic otherness.