La Rochefoucauld

Summary

What Dominique Pagani mainly takes from La Rochefoucauld is one maxim, which he quotes several times between 2014 and 2023: some people would never have fallen in love had they not heard of love1. He presents it as the statement of a general rule about desire2. He then uses it in a range of contexts: music and Greek myth3, amnesia4, and a question-and-answer session5. In 2019, speaking about Michel Foucault, he treats it as the work of a moralist who studies manners and customs, and he argues that this maxim about learned love already contains the programme of structuralism6. Elsewhere he calls the Maxims "admirable" and notes that their author was an aristocrat7. He also links him with Nietzsche: he notes that Nietzsche admired this French moralist and treats La Rochefoucauld as a model of ease that Nietzsche does not reach8.

1. 1D for Desire17 Dec 2014 · 6:38
2. 2D for Desire17 Dec 2014 · 6:37
3. 3#7 The Greeks, myth and music17 Dec 2020 · 24:29
4. 4#9 Benefits and harms of amnesia…17 Dec 2020 · 1:36:56
5. 5Wagner and his interpreters, approaching Clouscard, Marx = Theseus?31 Mar 2021 · 1:06:35
6. 6Michel Foucault2 May 2019 · 9:10
7. 7#10.5 The figure of Antigone, such as into herself at last…24 Nov 2021 · 9:28
8. 8#4 Neo-fascism and the ideology of desire: on the thought of M. Clouscard26 Sept 2014 · 1:25

Summary produced automatically from 9 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.