Contemporary ideology
13 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani starts from the definition of ideology that Marx gives in the 1859 preface: an inverted truth, carried by mentalities that change more slowly than the productive forces1. With Clouscard, he describes the liberal-libertarian counter-revolution that came out of the Marshall Plan and May 68, permissive for the consumer and repressive for the producer. He rejects the phrase "consumer society," which hides the producers2. In his view, the dominant ideology fights man, the universal and progress all at once, and he places cultural relativism, structuralism and an environmentalism that deifies nature within it. He treats ecology as the aesthetic surface of liberal ideology3. He compares Nietzschean postmodern thought to Callicles' speech in Plato's Gorgias and sees this naturalism as one of the tributaries feeding the reconstitution of Nazism4. He also links today's returns to nature to the robinsonades that Marx criticised. In the recent sessions, he names neo-positivism as the dominant ideology: a cult of science that denies the subject, in the same way that money lets one put off self-knowledge5.
- 1#2.8 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?1 Aug 2017
- 2TOUT EST PERMIS, RIEN N'EST POSSIBLE ! Michel Clouscard, Mai 68 et le capitalisme de la séduction14 Jul 2021
- 3Les Veaux et les choses (3) : La dictature du bobotariat6 Oct 2020
- 410#7 L'éco-nazillonisme "post-moderne" - Le Gorgias de Platon23 Dec 2021
- 5La répression du sujet dans la société civile bourgeoise9 Aug 2025
Introduction produced automatically from the 13 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 13 videos
Season 13The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society
9 Aug 2025What do money, neopositivism, and bourgeois civil society have in common in the repression of the subject and self-knowledge?
Season 1010#7 "Post-modern" 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?
On Michel ClouscardEVERYTHING IS ALLOWED, NOTHING IS POSSIBLE! Michel Clouscard, May 68 and the capitalism of seduction
14 Jul 2021How does Michel Clouscard analyze the capitalism of seduction born of the Marshall Plan and revealed by May 68, summed up in the formula "everything is permitted, but nothing is possible"?
Questions and answersMy eco-cabin in the ZAD: autonomy or alienation? • Philosophical Q&A • Dominique Pagani
30 Apr 2021Is the autonomy claimed today by those who go off to live in nature a freedom or a way of freeing oneself from humanity?
Analytical Reveries#2 Lenin, or the wings of dreams
18 Apr 2021Under what condition can a revolutionary dream, and what does this dream teach us about the place of the subject and of finality in history?
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?
At the Tropiques bookshopCalves and Things (3): The dictatorship of the bobotariat
6 Oct 2020Is political ecology anything other than the aesthetic surface of dominant liberal ideology?
Season 6#6.1-1/2 - Prelude • D.Pagani / Lacan: Function and field of speech and language
10 Nov 2019How do the death drive and the compulsion to repeat, as read in Freud and Lacan, shed light on the logic of the subject and on the reconstitution of Nazism?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityDominique Pagani "On Marx"
6 Oct 2018What does Marx's sentence "in the social production of their existence, men enter into determined relations" mean, and how does it illuminate the world today?
Season 2#2.8 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
1 Aug 2017How can philosophy, after having answered with the sciences the question "what can I know?", move on to the knowledge of man and his historical present?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachMarx on the Beach 1/2
1 Feb 2016What does Marx mean when he affirms that men enter into relations of production independent of their will, and in what sense do these relations form "the unconscious of the unconscious"?
On Michel ClouscardDominique Pagani on Michel Clouscard - The paths of praxis 2/2
8 Dec 2015Why does Clouscard, in Les Chemins de la praxis, pass through Hegel and ontology to think social being, and what becomes of the notion of identity?
Season 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?