Anaximandre

Summary

What Dominique Pagani takes from Anaximander is above all the apeiron, the indeterminate, which Anaximander places at the origin of everything1. He renders it as "the contourless" and contrasts it with the peras, the clearly determined limit2. He sees in it what the Greeks dread. In a session devoted to Lacan's text "Function and Field of Speech and Language," he presents this principle as locked in struggle with the peras and uses it as an image of the closure of the ego3. He also links the apeiron to a sensory experience, one that can be had at Cape Sounion4. Beyond this, he places Anaximander among the Presocratics whose problems are still debated5, among the predecessors whom Aristotle summarizes, and as a thinker known mainly through Diogenes Laertius6. His mentions are brief and always point back to this tension between the unlimited and the limit.

1. 1The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society9 Aug 2025 · 28:48
2. 2#3.3 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 1:14:40
3. 3#6.1 Prelude: Lacan, “Function and field of speech and language”10 Nov 2019 · 1:25:55
4. 4#3 Harnessed to confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 54:12
5. 5My eco-cabin in the ZAD: autonomy or alienation?30 Apr 2021 · 8:15
6. 6#10.7 “Postmodern” eco-petty-Nazism: Plato's Gorgias23 Dec 2021 · 51:00

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.