Summary
Dominique Pagani approaches anthropology through a triad he draws from Rousseau. Against naturalism (nature makes man) and theology (God makes man), he holds with Hegel and Marx that man makes man1. In his view, man has no immediate relation to nature: memory, language and the tool are mediations, and it is awareness of finitude that grounds the anthropological order. For him, hominization begins with the superfluous: burials, cave paintings, the codified meal2. He distinguishes heredity from heritage. Born premature into an already agreed code, the child becomes human only when recognized by another, as feral children show3. He locates the break in the passage from signal to sign, a logical rather than ontological break. Discussing the Jebel Irhoud skull, he treats animal and man as the poles of a dialectic, man being the movement itself4. Finally, he links naturalism to Nazi ideology and to environmentalism5. With Adotevi, he also points out that ethnology is not innocent.
- 1#5.2 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought21 Nov 2018
- 2#5 Benefits and harms of amnesia…19 Nov 2020
- 3Being born human is not enough to be human19 Jul 2021
- 4The aporias of anthropology23 Nov 2022
- 5Naturalist ideology: answers to questions25 Jul 2025
Introduction produced automatically from the 15 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 15 videos
Cycle 15Nature vs. freedom?
8 Oct 2026How does Kant distinguish the domain of nature from that of freedom, and in what sense do these two legislations contend for one and the same territory?
Cycle 13Naturalist ideology: answers to questions
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?
Cycle 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?
Cycle 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
19 Jul 2021In what way, in man, does code precede being?
Cycle 9.2#9.22 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?
Musicosophie#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?
Musicosophie#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?
Cycle 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?
Cycle 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 ClouscardM. 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?
Cycle 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?
Cycle 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 bookshopAdotevi: Negritude and negrologists (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?