Summary
Dominique Pagani approaches ancient Greece first as the place where philosophy is born: it arises from the crisis of the Athenian city and, with Socrates, moves from monologue about things to dialogue about words. He often returns to the Gorgias. Callicles' thesis, which sets the force of nature against the law of the city, helps him read Rousseau; in 2021, he uses it to show that Nietzsche-inspired "post-modern" thought merely repeats it1. With Hegel, he sees the Euclidean-Platonic revolution, in which truth arises from an agreement between subjects, as a rationality bound up with democracy and as the Greek root of the West. He stresses Greek measure, embodied by the temple at Cape Sounion, as against the excess of Icarus or Oedipus and the infinite that the moderns seek2. Read with Hegel, Antigone does not set the individual against the state but the community of blood against the city3. Finally, in Hölderlin, Greece is the daylight of a collective in which "no one was alone", though it was reserved for a few4.
- 1#10.7 “Postmodern” eco-petty-Nazism: Plato's Gorgias23 Dec 2021
- 2Roots or migration? From analytical reverie to current events, from Hölderlin to the war17 Feb 2023
- 3#11 Return to the logics of the subject21 Jun 2020
- 4Hölderlin, poetry and politics19 Mar 2022
Introduction produced automatically from the 20 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 20 videos
Cycle 15Language and thought: the case of Lavoisier
13 Apr 2026What distinguishes philosophy from other fields of knowledge, and why is its relation to language essential to it?
Cycle 12Neither left nor right? Islamo-leftism?
17 Oct 2023What does the opposition between left and right mean today, and what does the term "Islamo-leftism" conceal?
Cycle 11Roots or migration? From analytical reverie to current events, from Hölderlin to the war
17 Feb 2023Between roots and migration, between the measure of the inhabited place and the pull of the infinite, how does man find his place, while war looms?
Le Gros Rouge Qui TâcheHölderlin, poetry and politics
19 Mar 2022How can we read Hölderlin, given his contradictory receptions, and what does his poetry matter to communist militants?
Cycle 10#10.7 “Postmodern” eco-petty-Nazism: Plato's Gorgias
23 Dec 2021Why does "post-modern" thought, which claims descent from Nietzsche, deify nature and despise equality merely repeat the thesis of Callicles in Plato's Gorgias?
Cycle 10#10.2 Dialectics of identity and difference
6 Oct 2021What relation, and what hierarchy, does Hegel establish between aesthetics and politics, based on the opposition between the family and the city embodied by Antigone?
Cycle 8#11 Return to the logics of the subject
21 Jun 2020How does Hegel's aesthetics, centered on the figure of Antigone and on classical art, allow us to think tragedy, finitude, and the avant-gardes of modernity?
Cycle 7#5 Harnessed to confinitude
18 Apr 2020If access to truth is irreversible, why does modern consciousness seek to flee it?
At the Tropiques bookshopPagani without detours
21 Sept 2019How can a book give linear form to Dominique Pagani's oral teaching, and what does this teaching say about the specificity of philosophy, of modernity, and of the question "what must I do"?
Cycle 5.2#5.5 Nature or landscape?
26 Mar 2019How does landscape reach its highest poetic value when the visible setting fades to become an interior landscape?
Cycle 5.1#5.2 ter Questions, following workshop #5.2 (Facebook Live)
6 Dec 2018What relation does the philosopher have with politics, and how do finality, negativity, mediation and death implicate one another in man?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityEducation: can beauty be learned?
20 Jul 2018Is beauty a matter of individual taste, or can it be learned through an education that brings us into contact with works of art?
Cycle 4#4.9 Angélique (by Nerval)
14 Jun 2018How is a rigorous, quasi-scientific reading of a literary text possible if an abyss separates the exact sciences from the field of human actions?
Cycle 3#3.4 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017What relation does philosophy hold, in its principle, with politics?
Cycle 3#3.2 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017How does modernity, since the French Revolution, repeat the alternation of classicism and romanticism, and is this repetition a return to the same or a spiral?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachHegel on the Beach 3/5
2 Feb 2016How does the phenomenology of spirit, by refusing to treat knowledge as a preliminary instrument, shift truth from the sensible object to the subject?
What Is to Be Done?What is to be done? 2/3
29 Jan 2016What does the passage from the state of nature to the civil state mean in Rousseau, and why does the Social Contract begin by rejecting force as a foundation of right?
Cycle 1#1.2 Between crisis and war: philosophising?
14 Sept 2015Why does philosophy always arise from crisis, and what distinguishes it from other forms of thought?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityMythology and truth
8 Aug 2015Why does myth, which philosophy sought to set aside in favor of rational discourse, always come back, and what truth does it express?
A Philosophical AlphabetX for Xanthippe
7 Jan 2015Why does Socrates choose Xanthippe, the shrew, and refuse Alcibiades, the most beautiful man in Athens?