Youth

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches youth from two angles: Rousseau's philosophy and musical transmission. To a question from the audience asking whether youth, for Rousseau, is a passage or a permanent state, he answers that there is never any cult of youth in his work: the Reveries lament the effects of age without praising either old age or youth1. He links the cult of youth to the ruling classes by reading the passage of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit on femininity, "the eternal irony of the community", which exposes old age to the mockery of a youth without enthusiasm. In his view, for Rousseau, education from the earliest years is the key, with no possible return to ignorance, against Nietzsche's attempt. On the musical side, he describes a youth confined in a "sound ghetto" reduced to a binary metre and cut off from the classical and jazz heritage2. He considers the task of giving back to young people this heritage being taken from them to be more than political3.

1. 1J comme Jeunesse24 Dec 2014
2. 2B comme Bach16 Dec 2014
3. 3Pagani Parle Musique • Introduction au podcast23 May 2022

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