Ésope

Summary

What Dominique Pagani mainly takes from Aesop is a saying he quotes regularly from 2016 to 2025: language, or speech, is "the best and the worst of things." He comments on it the same way each time: language educates, transmits, communicates and consoles, but it also serves slander and lies123. In 2022 this sentence gives its title to a session, where he sees it as the expression of a contradiction4. He then compares it with Hegel's Science of Logic, which would also contain the best and the worst5. In 2025 he extends it from language to man himself6. He also presents Aesop as a fabulist about whom little is known, like Homer, and points out that La Fontaine took up many of his subjects and that Molière also drew on him78. Finally, he credits him with a fable about pleasure and pain as two bodies joined under a single head, which he mentions when discussing identity and difference9.

1. 1#2.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?15 Feb 2016 · 1:36:17
2. 2Left-washing: are the woke the most asleep?17 Nov 2021 · 54:12
3. 3Wagner: the truth of pure music20 Jul 2022 · 13:40
4. 4“Speech is the best and the worst of things” (Aesop)19 Oct 2022 · 3:40
5. 5“Speech is the best and the worst of things” (Aesop)19 Oct 2022 · 32:24
6. 6The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society9 Aug 2025 · 36:00
7. 7“Speech is the best and the worst of things” (Aesop)19 Oct 2022 · 8:04
8. 8#3.3 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 56:29
9. 9#10.2 Dialectics of identity and difference6 Oct 2021 · 1:03:39

Summary produced automatically from 11 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.