Zola

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani returns mainly to L'Assommoir, from which he retains one scene: the worker who has just been paid, instead of buying the bare necessities, goes to drink with his friends at the café. He reads it as a lesson in anthropology, in which the superfluous comes before the necessary and the code prevails over being12. The novel also gives him a pictorial representation of the proletarian, the hell of the factory that the middle strata escape. He holds, however, that this image must give way to the concept34. Speaking of Clouscard, the "Zola-style worker" stands for the pre-war poverty that no one wants to bring back5. He counts Zola among the great realist novelists, in whom realism is radicalised into naturalism. He presents him as the figure of the progressive, the man of the left to whom Marx preferred Balzac6. He also calls him a relentless positivist, a mechanistic rather than dialectical materialist, while specifying that his critique of philosophical naturalism does not target Zola's naturalism. Finally, he mentions Le Ventre de Paris in connection with Les Halles.

1. 1Avec Clouscard2 Aug 2016 · 36:07
2. 2#5 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...19 Nov 2020 · 1:17:13
3. 3Cynisme de l'extrême centre ou héroïsme épistémique ? La dialectique du milieu • Dominique Pagani20 May 2021 · 41:12
4. 4La mondanité chez Clouscard : Désirer quoi ? Par qui ??3 Sept 2023 · 2:01:26
5. 5TOUT EST PERMIS, RIEN N'EST POSSIBLE ! Michel Clouscard, Mai 68 et le capitalisme de la séduction14 Jul 2021 · 7:18
6. 6Préface au mémoire de Simon Verdun, « La critique du néokantisme chez Michel Clouscard », soutenue à l’ENS DE Paris, sanctionnée par une mention très bien.5 Jul 2018 · 1:43:43

Summary produced automatically from 19 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.