Rimbaud

Summary

Dominique Pagani often returns to "Je est un autre" ("I is another"). He reads it as the formula of the split subject: the conscious self is only a small part of the subject, and the deliberate grammatical error heralds the unconscious1. He reads "Conte" closely: the prince whom nothing resists illustrates the Hegelian theory of abstract desire and the fury of destruction. The poem closes on "la musique savante manque à notre désir" ("learned music is lacking to our desire")2. For him, "Mouvement" is a hymn to industrial modernity, in which a young couple preserves "l'ancienne sauvagerie" (the "ancient savagery")3. He cites the Lettre du voyant, which judges all of poetry: Baudelaire is the first of the seers there, but his form is judged petty, and the Romantics are strangled by the "old form". From Une saison en enfer, he retains the passage from rebel to revolutionary: there is no escaping, one must "greet beauty", and the work ends with the march of peoples4.

1. 1#2.6 Between crisis and war: philosophising?1 Aug 2017 · 39:19
2. 2#2.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Mar 2016 · 1:19:44
3. 3#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?25 Jan 2019 · 1:07:27
4. 4Sickness, misfortune, evil20 Sept 2024 · 1:28:11

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