Happiness
9 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani starts from Saint-Just's phrase, "happiness is a new idea in Europe," and defines happiness by what sets it apart from other notions. It differs from salvation through a positive relation to the world, here and now, and from pleasure or enjoyment through its duration12. In 2016, drawing on Rousseau, he makes it the middle term between the libertine's enjoyment and Robespierre's virtue, and the theme that unifies the Enlightenment. He reads the fifth walk of the Reveries, where the "precious far niente" arises from a forced exile and is not prescribed to others3. He sets this happiness against Nietzsche's praise of forgetting and against memory in Proust4. In the Musicosophie series, he traces the alternation between happy music and deathly music inherited from Tristan, from Mozart to Debussy, and criticizes the puritanism hostile to happiness. With Marx, he argues that enjoyment, a privilege of the dominant, becomes happiness when the productive forces allow it to be extended to the people5. In 2023, he links happiness to worldliness in Clouscard's sense and to history understood as extending to all the privileges once held by a few2.
- 1Musicosophie 5. Bonheur contre pulsion de mort en musique11 Dec 2020
- 2La mondanité chez Clouscard ou les privilèges pour tous18 May 2023
- 3Que faire ? 1/329 Jan 2016
- 4#1 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...8 Oct 2020
- 5Musicosophie 14. Mozart derechef7 Feb 2021
Introduction produced automatically from the 9 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 9 videos
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard, or privileges for all
18 May 2023Why does mondanité, in Clouscard, not reduce to "bling-bling", and what does the world become when the privileges of a few are extended to all?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard, or "The dominant ideology"
26 Apr 2023What does the world mean, and worldliness in Clouscard's sense, between the happiness of being in the world and the lie of the world that keeps the dominated under the ideology of the dominant?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 14. Mozart once more
7 Feb 2021Why does Mozart's music, situated in the shift from the Ancien Régime to the new world, express that happiness which is, according to Saint-Just, a new idea in Europe?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 13. Mozart restored
2 Feb 2021What does Mozart's music say about happiness, and how does this happiness express the historical turning point of the late eighteenth century?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 8. Happiness and unhappiness in music
11 Jan 2021Why does the history of music make happy and morbid musics alternate, and what is the happiness that they express?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 5. Happiness versus the death drive in music
11 Dec 2020How does modern music, since Beethoven, oscillate between the popular demand for happiness and the romantic fascination with the death drive?
Season 9.1#1 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
8 Oct 2020Is memory the condition of happiness and identity, or is forgetting its condition instead?
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?
What Is to Be Done?What is to be done? 3/3
29 Jan 2016How can one respond to the question "what is to be done?" through a theoretical detour, and how does Rousseau, between the praise of labor and the praise of idleness, found property, happiness, and the beauty of landscape on praxis?