Madame de La Fayette

Summary

Dominique Pagani discusses Madame de La Fayette almost entirely through The Princess of Clèves, which he takes as an example of a historically determined way of loving. He comes back to it from 2014 to 2026 with the same formula: this novel would be impossible in the age of Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man, which shows that love has a history and that love relationships do not stem from a fixed nature123. He also uses the novel against naturalistic explanations: one cannot move from chemical equations to the reason of a romantic love4, and one learns more about love from this book than from all of cognitivism5. He also stresses its social background: the novel's first encounter presupposes a code of aristocratic high society6, in an age when social worlds did not interpenetrate. Finally, he mentions the novel as a comparative literature topic for the agrégation7.

1. 1#4 Neo-fascism and the ideology of desire: on the thought of M. Clouscard26 Sept 2014 · 10:22
2. 2Our former savagery? An Illumination by Arthur Rimbaud13 Jun 2025 · 33:04
3. 3Language and thought: the case of Lavoisier13 Apr 2026 · 57:19
4. 4#1.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015 · 33:28
5. 5From Copernicus to Lenin: revolution!28 Aug 2026 · 1:11:55
6. 6With Clouscard2 Aug 2016 · 1:06:34
7. 7#9.21 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence”12 May 2021 · 46:56

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