Desire

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani first disputes the claim that a "theory of the affects" is something new. Since Plato, Descartes and Spinoza, philosophy has thought about desire, which comes before judgment and makes use of us rather than the other way round1. He argues that the content of human desire comes both from nature, as need, and from history, which places it in the symbolic field. He illustrates this with Clouscard, Tristan, La Rochefoucauld, Racine's Phèdre and Proust, and he criticises contemporary thought for a formalism stripped of that content2. Drawing on Hegel's Phenomenology, he defines self-consciousness as desire, which is destructive at first. Against Deleuze and Nietzsche, he reads Rimbaud's "Conte" as a figure of the freedom of the void3. He also examines the object of modern desire, marked by indeterminacy and infinity in Senancour, Baudelaire and Chateaubriand, and he asks who it is that desires4. Finally, with Clouscard, he distinguishes desire from the ideology of desire. That ideology reduces desire to the commercial trinkets of a capitalism that is permissive in social mores and repressive in social conditions5.

1. 1#6 Réponses aux questions30 Nov 2020
2. 2La PHILO avec PAGANI : D comme DÉSIR29 May 2023
3. 3Hegel Plage 2/51 Feb 2016
4. 4La mondanité chez Clouscard : Désirer quoi ? Par qui ??3 Sept 2023
5. 5Attention aux contresens !! Clouscard et l'idéologie du désir, en hommage au Précepteur14 Jan 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 8 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.