Zola

Summary

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. 1With Clouscard2 Aug 2016 · 36:07
2. 2#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia…19 Nov 2020 · 1:17:13
3. 3Cynicism of the extreme centre or epistemic heroism? The dialectic of the middle20 May 2021 · 41:12
4. 4Worldliness in Clouscard: desiring what? Through whom?3 Sept 2023 · 2:01:26
5. 5Everything is allowed, nothing is possible! Michel Clouscard, May 68 and the capitalism of seduction14 Jul 2021 · 7:18
6. 6Preface to Simon Verdun's master's dissertation, “The critique of neo-Kantianism in Michel Clouscard”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.