Rabelais

Summary

What Dominique Pagani mainly takes from Rabelais is the new education of Gargantua and Pantagruel, to which the author devotes hundreds of pages. He sees in it the move from medieval learning by rote to intelligence, criticism and discussion1, as well as the question of how to make a human being, within the humanism of the total man. In his view, Rabelais is the first, in the Renaissance, to give educational discourse a political aim: the pedagogical prepares the political2. He often quotes the phrase "laughter is proper to man" as an example of specific difference or as a criterion of separation3, and on one occasion he corrects its attribution4. He also takes from Rabelais the "substantific marrow", a metaphor for what does one good, set against guilt-making5. He also uses Rabelais to talk about language: the words of the trades are still found in his work, vocabulary grows poorer from Rabelais to Racine, and his French would now be incomprehensible to us. Finally, he places him in the chain of comic authors, between Homer and Swift, his imitator.

1. 1#5.1 bis Questions (Facebook Live)2 Nov 2018 · 15:55
2. 2"On a triangle of madness at the heart of modern consciousness"19 Dec 2014 · 6:43
3. 3#1.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015 · 1:28:23
4. 4“Speech is the best and the worst of things” (Aesop)19 Oct 2022 · 24:05
5. 5#15 Return to the logics of the subject23 Jul 2020 · 17:43

Summary produced automatically from 27 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.