Dédale

Summary

Dominique Pagani makes Daedalus a figure of liberation. He presents him as the slave of Minos tasked with building the labyrinth, whose name has become a common noun for bewilderment. He escapes from it thanks to the wings he makes with his son Icarus. What he retains in him is the engineer, who uses cunning within reality in order to build rather than to destroy, and he links him to Prometheus as an emancipator1. In the 2017-2018 workshop devoted to Nerval's "Angélique," he organizes the course "from Ulysses to Daedalus": in contrast to the repetition that characterizes Ulysses, Daedalus's wings are an attempt to break out of the cycle2, and this opposition marks the culmination of the seminar3. He stresses that no version of the myth gives him a tragic end: Daedalus finds a middle way between servitude and hubris, thanks to his sense of measure45. He returns to this opposition with Ulysses as late as 2022 and 2023, also mentioning the engineer's genius as evoked by Hölderlin.

1. 1#2.5 Between crisis and war: philosophising?1 Aug 2017 · 22:18
2. 2#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)15 Jan 2018 · 1:38:28
3. 3#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Apr 2018 · 1:35:10
4. 4#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Apr 2018 · 1:48:43
5. 5Worldliness in Clouscard: the world as “cunning of reason”22 Jul 2023 · 1:11:24

Summary produced automatically from 16 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.