Anthropology
14 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani approaches anthropology through a triad he draws from Rousseau: nature makes man, God makes man, man makes man1. With Hegel and Marx, he holds to this third position, which he presents as the synthesis that goes beyond naturalism and theology: man does not have a history, he is history2. He grounds the anthropological order in mediations (memory, language and the tool) and in the awareness of finitude rather than in death itself. From this he concludes that hominization begins with the superfluous: burials, cave paintings, meals3. He stresses the premature birth of the human child, distinguishes heredity from heritage and draws on feral children: man is not an origin but a process4. On the threshold between animal and man, he rejects the antinomy of the continuous and the discontinuous. He sees the two as the poles of a dialectic and places the break, which is logical rather than ontological, in the passage from signal to sign5. He also points to the self-interested origins of ethnology, down to Lévi-Strauss, and links naturalism to Nazi ideology and to ecologism.
- 1Que faire ? 1/329 Jan 2016
- 2#5.2 L’Odyssée du philosophe : La pensée révolutionnaire21 Nov 2018
- 3#5 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...19 Nov 2020
- 4IL NE SUFFIT PAS DE NAÎTRE HOMME, POUR ÊTRE HOMME • Q&A Philosophique • Dominique Pagani19 Jul 2021
- 5LES APORIES DE L’ANTHROPOLOGIE23 Nov 2022
Introduction produced automatically from the 14 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 14 videos
Season 13Naturalist ideology / Answers to questions - Dominique Pagani
25 Jul 2025What does money reveal about desire and self-knowledge, and why speak of a dialectic of matter rather than a dialectic of nature?
Season 13Flagrante Delights
27 May 2025What do perfumes, even the foul-smelling ones, teach us about sublimation, about modernity, and about man caught between the indeterminate and the determinate?
Season 11THE APORIAS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
23 Nov 2022Can we fix a threshold where one ceases to be animal and becomes man, or must man be thought as the very movement of this passage?
Questions and answersBEING BORN HUMAN IS NOT ENOUGH TO BE HUMAN • Philosophical Q&A • Dominique Pagani
19 Jul 2021In what way, in man, does code precede being?
Season 9.29 #22 Science and/or philosophy of "artificial intelligence" - Part 2
27 May 2021What distinguishes man from an "intelligent" machine, and how do debates on artificial intelligence take up problems already posed by Descartes?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 7. The Greeks, myth and music
17 Dec 2020Why do Greek art, myth, and music, tied to a past that is gone, still give us aesthetic pleasure?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 2. From Lévi-Strauss to Nerval on music
3 Dec 2020Is the divorce between scholarly music and popular music that Lévi-Strauss notes in contemporary music a new symptom, and how can one think the union of speech and music up to the music of the future?
Season 9.1#7 Answers to questions (continued)
3 Dec 2020How should one answer public questions on Nazism and esotericism, contemporary music, ontology in Marx, orbital resonance and a variant of Capital, and how to announce next semester's program?
Season 9.1#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
19 Nov 2020Why is human memory inseparable from forgetting, and how does the consciousness of death mean that 'the echo changes'?
On Michel ClouscardD. Pagani / M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (1987)
23 Aug 2019What does Michel Clouscard's response to Claude Morilhat (1987) reveal about the place of philosophy and about his concept of neo-Kantianism?
Season 5.1#5.3 The philosopher's Odyssey: Revolutionary thought
31 Dec 2018How can we think both the order of nature and the order of freedom at once, and what makes negativity the principle of revolutionary thought?
Season 5.1#5.2 The philosopher's Odyssey: Revolutionary thought
21 Nov 2018Why does Hegel, the philosopher of mediation, occupy a central place in revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin, and what relation does mediation have with death?
At the Tropiques bookshopNegritude and negrologists / Adotevi by Pagani (2017)
8 Jun 2017What does Stanislas Adotevi show in Négritude et négrologues, and why does his critique of the essentialism of negritude disturb even more today?
What Is to Be Done?What is to be done? 1/3
29 Jan 2016What is to be done, and why does the answer require a theoretical detour through Rousseau and his conception of happiness?