philosopher avecdominique paganiPaths ofPraxis
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Proust

Marcel Proust · French novelist, critic and essayist (1871–1922) · 1871–1922

Appears in 97 videos · 163 passages, 58 of them in depth.

Play the 40 passages in a row

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani often returns to the band of girls at Balbec in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: Proust links their beauty to their social class, to sport and to comfort, which in his view makes him "more Marxist" than radical thought12. He also reads closely the young girl's gaze, which reflects a whole life, a produced world3. He places Proust in the line of Rousseau's poetic prose and of Nerval, whose Sylvie Proust admired. Above all, he focuses on memory: the madeleine, the goodnight kiss as a founding memory, and Vinteuil's little phrase, where the music itself speaks and makes death less bitter45. He often quotes "the only true paradises are the ones we have lost." Yet he criticises Proust for staying shut inside personal memory, whereas Nerval seeks the universal6. Finally, he refuses to have Proust dismissed as a bourgeois author.

  1. 1D comme Désir17 Dec 2014 · 9:28
  2. 2De Platon à Proust - Lectures à vifs6 Jul 2026 · 10:36
  3. 3Dominique Pagani - Qui se cache sous les surfaces ? Esthétique et politique20 May 2022 · 1:17:47
  4. 4#4 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...13 Nov 2020 · 57:43
  5. 5Musicosophie 9. Ironie romantique et sonate de Vinteuil15 Jan 2021 · 1:00:08
  6. 69 #23 "C'est réglé comme du papier à musique !" • Bach • Nerval • Lévi-Strauss9 Jun 2021 · 2:23:09

Summary produced automatically from 150 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Portrait: ProustWho is this?

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( PROOST; French:; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated into English as In Search of Lost Time, earlier Remembrance of Things Past), which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927 and totals around 1.25 million words. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. […]

Read the article on Wikipedia

Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0, excerpt · Portrait: Otto Wegener, Public domain

Season 10 · 7 Apr 2022#12 From Kafka to Proust, the dialectical passage from the intermezzo to the perpetuated edge
  1. 1:13:06Swann in LoveThe only part of the Recherche told in the third person; the indefinite article says that this love is everyone's, against the vanity of singularity.
  2. 1:19:03Swann in LoveThe little phrase resurrects the volatile essence of past happiness, beyond abstract extracts of the intellect: a more developed reminiscence than the madeleine.
  3. 1:28:46Swann in LoveThe little phrase, harmonious and fleeting, speaks the vanity of sufferings and elevates them to something superior to positive life.
  4. 1:43:57Swann in LoveSwann perpetuates the edge in a prolonged wait; the simple past marks the continuous surging forth of the event.
  5. 1:53:43Swann's WayThe scene of the goodnight kiss: the child's sobs have never ceased, and he only hears them at the end of his life.
Season 12 · 4 Jun 2024The matrix of all illusion: the past lived as present
  1. 1:22:13Within a Budding GroveThe title, which earned him the Goncourt prize, is inspired by the flower-maidens scene.
  2. 2:13:18In Search of Lost TimeHe acknowledges the importance of Sylvie; the narrator of the Recherche is marked by maternal fixation.
  3. 2:15:21Time RegainedA path from fidelity to grace, from the white sonata to the red septet.
  4. 2:16:42Swann's WayThe bedtime drama: the mother refuses the goodnight kiss, the father unexpectedly grants the night, and the sobs have never ceased.
  5. 2:37:05The culmination of the never-ending sentence, born in Rousseau.
Season 9.1 · 19 Nov 2020#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
  1. 6:10Swann's WayMemories are enveloped by a matrix memory, the sobs of the child waiting for his mother's goodnight kiss.
  2. 18:19Swann's WayReading of the steeple passage: memory reconquers from oblivion lands that dry up and are rebuilt.
  3. 26:17Swann's WayThe child who dreamed, like a memorialist lost in the crowd, keeps the most fleeting particulars alive.
  4. 32:48Swann's WayScent of hawthorn, a bursting bubble: the isolated memory floats like a flowering Delos, perhaps come from a dream.
Series · 6 Jul 2026From Plato to Proust - Readings on the Spot
  1. 10:36Within a Budding GroveHe describes the little band, linking their beauty to a social class and to sport: Proust is more Marxist than mechanistic Marxism.
  2. 13:45Within a Budding GroveHe finely analyzes what is material and what is not in Albertine's gaze.
  3. 27:21Swann's WayHe reads the first encounter with Gilberte: the gaze wants to capture the body and the soul.
Series · 3 Aug 2022SCHUBERT - THE DIVINE CAPTIVES • Pagani Parle Musique
  1. 1:06Swann's WayHe knew music better than the average writer, and his sentences are immense musical sequences, close to improvisation.
  2. 3:33Swann in LoveHe makes music itself speak: the little phrase brings back the whole past of Swann's love.
  3. 9:13Swann in LoveLucid, he did not believe in eternal life, yet he shows that music makes death less bitter.
  4. 15:34Vinteuil's phrase returns in his text as the theme returns in Schubert's trio.
Series · 2 Feb 2016Hegel on the Beach 5/5
  1. 36:18Within a Budding GroveThe girl's eyes are not a disc of mica: what shines in them are the shadows of her whole life.
  2. 40:33Within a Budding GroveThe homogeneity of the little band may owe to social class, a determining notion even in a supposedly worldly novelist.
  3. 55:02Within a Budding GroveThe narrator desires the girl's whole life: interiority is made of the external world.
  4. 2:27:09Written today, this passage would be accused of Marxism.
Season 9.1 · 6 Nov 2020#3 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
  1. 23:58In Search of Lost TimeIts opening on the uncertainty of the instant and of waking echoes the Norns; he knew Wagner well.
  2. 1:26:16In Search of Lost TimeAn excerpt is meant to illustrate what it means, for memory, to be overdetermined.
  3. 1:27:04Swann's WayThe scene of the evening kiss: the sobs that never ceased reveal a matrix memory beneath all others.
Series · 29 Jan 2016What is to be done? 3/3
  1. 7:33Heir to Rousseau's poetic prose.
  2. 11:21The madeleine, a secular ecstasy comparable to Rousseau's.
  3. 59:54The disappointment before the dreamed-of object shows that it aimed at something else.
  4. 1:01:33Within a Budding GroveRelates the collective beauty of the girls of Balbec to their class, to sport, and to economic ease.
  5. 1:14:24Shows that much praxis is needed to produce the beauty of bodies.
Series · 1 Feb 2016Marx on the Beach 1/2
  1. 10:02In Search of Lost TimeSon of a rentier, far from Marxism, yet he explains the beauty of the girls of Balbec by the sporting and comfortable habits of a class.
  2. 1:08:50Recalled to show that class relations are to be gathered from human expression.
Series · 1 Jan 2015R for Reverie
  1. 3:43He admired the passage in Sylvie on half-drowsiness.
  2. 7:01In Search of Lost TimeThe beginning of the Recherche describes over several pages an intermediate state between waking and sleep; Proust almost never names Rousseau.
Series · 17 Dec 2014D for Desire
  1. 9:28Within a Budding GroveMore Marxist than radical thought: he links the beauty of the young girls of Balbec to the new habits of sport and comfort of new social strata.
Series · 27 Dec 2014M for Music
  1. 5:24In Search of Lost TimeThe narrator's journey is set in parallel with that of Parsifal, with the fifth walk as the matrix scene.
  2. 13:56Her prose contains more poetry than many verses.

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