Love

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches love as something both natural and historical. The content of amorous desire comes from nature, but also from a history that places it in the symbolic field. To show this, he draws on Clouscard's Traité de l'amour fou, the myth of Tristan, La Rochefoucauld and Racine's Phèdre1. With Pascal, he asks whether we love someone or only qualities, and he points out that qualities also have a history, as with Swann and Odette2. In Rousseau he sees a new form of couple, carried by the middle strata, which rejects pleasure as a class privilege. Clarens and the festival after work are its image3. The couple in Rimbaud's "Mouvement" allows him to link the erotic to a fault, with Vigny and Hesiod, and to argue that this "ancient" love presupposes millennia of history4. In Proust, he reads love as a victory over death through music5, and then as the search for someone behind the body: in Plato, love is not "platonic"6.

1. 1D for Desire17 Dec 2014
2. 2Q for Quality31 Dec 2014
3. 3W for Wolmar6 Jan 2015
4. 4Our former savagery? An Illumination by Arthur Rimbaud13 Jun 2025
5. 5Schubert: the divine captives3 Aug 2022
6. 6From Plato to Proust6 Jul 2026

Introduction produced automatically from the 8 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.