Money

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani refuses to demonize money. He starts from the young Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, who quotes Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, and then argues that money is only a mediation and that everything depends on how it is distributed, that is, on social justice1. He compares money to language, two forms of exchange that bind people together, drawing on Mallarmé2. He also examines its ambivalence, at once base and sacred: the fetish, the golden calf, Freud's link between money and excrement. In Nerval, the refusal to buy love separates an old world from a modern world in which other values appear. Finally, he explains surplus value in Marx and criticizes usury3. From 2021 on, he draws on Hegel's First Philosophy of Spirit, where money is an "existing material concept" and "the possibility of all things of need"4. From this he draws a thesis: money keeps desire in the indeterminate and makes it possible to put off the "know thyself". He links it to neopositivism and to bourgeois civil society, which he sees as a repression of the subject56.

1. 1Argent, travail, liberté3 Aug 2019
2. 2#5.2 bis FaceBookLive / Questions (1)6 Dec 2018
3. 3La religion de l'Argent29 Sept 2019
4. 4Un chapitre de Marx écrit par Hegel • Q&A Philosophique • Dominique Pagani22 May 2021
5. 5L'idéologie naturaliste / Réponses aux questions - Dominique Pagani25 Jul 2025
6. 6La répression du sujet dans la société civile bourgeoise9 Aug 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 6 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.