Crisis

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from a thesis: philosophy is always the daughter of crisis. Socrates emerges in the crisis of the city, Descartes in the collapse of medieval values, the Enlightenment in the ruin of the feudal world. With Hegel, he locates the need to philosophize where oppositions have become rigid. He poses an alternative: does the Socratic question sow discord, or does it arise because the city is already in crisis? For him, crisis is read first of all in words, when the same words no longer mean the same things: "democracy" during the Vietnam War, "laxity" after the terrorist attacks. Each scientific revolution, from Galileo to Descartes, also throws philosophy into crisis. From 2016 onward, he takes up the economic crisis with Marx. The internal contradiction of capital, bound up with the extraction of surplus value, brings crisis back1. Since the 1970s, capitalism has been on an investment strike2. He compares the slaughter that ends the Odyssey with the fact that capitalism has only ever emerged from its crises through slaughter, and he asks whether there is another way out3.

1. 1Marx on the Beach 2/21 Feb 2016
2. 2#2.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?1 Aug 2017
3. 3#4.0 Presentation of the 2017-2018 workshop: Nerval's “Angélique”24 Sept 2017

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