Slavery

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches slavery from three angles. In the tribute to Domenico Losurdo1, he reads the end of the master–slave dialectic, where the slave experiences anguish before death, the "absolute master." There, Losurdo argues that Hegel regards slavery as the absolute crime and that non-slavery has become an irreversible second nature, which Nietzsche opposes. He also likens the starving man, deprived of all rights, to the slave. In music2, he traces the birth of jazz to the "tragedy of the slave trade": the slave, coming from a pentatonic scale, sings the Lutheran chorale out of tune and makes major and minor heard at once. He recalls that Beethoven premiered the Kreutzer Sonata with the mixed-race violinist Bridgetower, and that music born of the most oppressed freed art music. In a session on identity3, he recalls that the Slavs owe their name to slaves. He also mentions slave raids and plays a message from a former Nigerien student who points to African accomplices in slavery, against any reading in terms of identity.

1. 1Hommage à Domenico Losurdo2 Jul 2018
2. 2Musicosophie 6. La Variation Jazz... de Beethoven15 Dec 2020
3. 3L'identité imaginaire15 May 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.