Language
32 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani approaches language through the philosopher's position. The philosopher stands between the mathematician, who forges a univocal language, and the poet, who speaks in images: he seeks rigour without leaving everyday language, and replaces "what is it?" with "what do you call…?"12. He holds that so-called natural language is not natural at all. Each word in it is bent by an idea and carries the unconscious and a background of darkness. Hence the "problem of Socrates" formulated by Clouscard: how to move from ordinary language to the concept3. He distinguishes the signal, a natural link, from the sign, a convention between subjects. He draws on Helen Keller, on Hegel, for whom language annihilates the thing, and on Descartes's criteria to distinguish man from machine4. He reads the biblical "tragic comedy" of language (Adam, Babel, Pentecost) alongside Baudelaire, Hölderlin and Mallarmé5. Regarding music, an infra-speech close to children's babble, he distinguishes speaking from saying6. A theme of the 2016 workshop, language returns in the 2022 cycle on hesitation, then with Lavoisier in 2026.
- 19 #20 Du SIGNAL au SIGNE • Einstein28 Apr 2021
- 2Langage et pensée : Le cas Lavoisier13 Apr 2026
- 3Clouscard et le problème de Socrate14 Oct 2022
- 49 #22 Science et/ou philosophie de l' "intelligence artificielle" - 2ème partie27 May 2021
- 5#2.2 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?15 Feb 2016
- 6WAGNER - LA VÉRITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE PURE • Pagani Parle Musique20 Jul 2022
Introduction produced automatically from the 32 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 32 videos
Season 14Language 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?
Season 11THE APORIAS OF ANTHROPOLOGY
23 Nov 2022Can we fix a threshold where one ceases to be animal and becomes man, or must man be thought as the very movement of this passage?
Season 11Dialectics of hesitation and decision
13 Nov 2022Why is hesitation, as opposed to decision, at the very origin of philosophy, and how does it touch on the problem of language?
Season 11"Speech is the best and the worst of things" (Aesop)
19 Oct 2022In what sense is speech "the best and the worst of things," and how does this contradiction reappear in Hegel's Greater Logic and in the relation between philosophy and history?
Season 11Clouscard and the problem of Socrates
14 Oct 2022How, starting from ordinary ideological language, do we arrive at the necessity of the concept?
Season 11And what about the subject in all this? Hölderlin, Mallarmé and Baudelaire
28 Sept 2022How can philosophy, which hesitates between the rigor of mathematics and the language of poetry, take the subject into account?
Pagani Parle MusiqueWAGNER - THE TRUTH OF PURE MUSIC • Pagani Parle Musique
20 Jul 2022What does music say when it says nothing, and how does instrumental music express what words dare not say?
Season 10#14 Caves of Yesterday and Today - From Plato to modernity
10 Jun 2022What remains invariant, beneath their apparent discontinuity, in Dominique Pagani's talks?
Season 9.29 #22 Science and/or philosophy of "artificial intelligence" - Part 2
27 May 2021What distinguishes man from an "intelligent" machine, and how do debates on artificial intelligence take up problems already posed by Descartes?
Season 9.29 #21 Science and/or philosophy of "Artificial Intelligence"
12 May 2021What should be understood by "artificial intelligence," and what separates a machine that simulates intelligence from a being who speaks, doubts, and sets itself ends?
Season 9.29 #20 From SIGNAL to SIGN • Einstein
28 Apr 2021How can one cross the abyss between the natural sciences and the historical sciences, and how is it that statements drawn from language alone apply to the world?
Questions and answers"Red-browns", "decolonial": Should we use the dominant language? • Philosophical Q&A • Pagani
31 Mar 2021Should we take up the notions of "red-brown" and "decolonial" produced by dominant ideology, and what is lost when the subject is eliminated in the human sciences?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 18. What is musical in music
25 Mar 2021What is musical in music?
Season 9.1#10 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
24 Dec 2020Should anamnesis be pushed as far as our oldest vulnerability, or should it be forgotten in order to open onto a genuine future?
Season 9.1#9 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
17 Dec 2020Can we show that a logic is at work in human affairs, and what role do memory, forgetting, and anamnesis play in Phèdre's tragic confession?
Season 9.1#2 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
23 Oct 2020Why can memory, which Greek myth conflates with language in the figure of Mnemosyne, not go without forgetting?
Season 6#6.2 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
3 Dec 2019In what way does a logic of the subject allow us to think and combat the current reconstitution of Nazism, whose common ground is naturalism?
On Michel ClouscardD. Pagani / M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (1987)
23 Aug 2019What does Michel Clouscard's response to Claude Morilhat (1987) reveal about the place of philosophy and about his concept of neo-Kantianism?
Season 5.2#5.7 Nature or Landscape?
26 May 2019How do revolutionary thought and the question "nature or landscape" fit together, and what distinguishes nature from landscape?
Season 5.2#5.4 Nature or Landscape?
4 Feb 2019Are nature and landscape the same thing, or is landscape merely a surface onto which the subject projects its fantasies?
Season 5.2#5.4 Introduction / Nature or Landscape?
25 Jan 2019Are nature and landscape interchangeable terms?
Season 5.1#5.2 bis FaceBookLive / Questions (1)
6 Dec 2018What place belongs to the concept of end (telos) in the novel of formation and in the Hegelian-Marxist conception of history, and how do negativity and death relate to freedom?
Season 5.1#5.2 ter FaceBookLive / Questions (2) following Workshop #5.2
6 Dec 2018What relation does the philosopher have with politics, and how do finality, negativity, mediation and death implicate one another in man?
Season 2#2.5 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
1 Aug 2017How does the modern subject divide itself, and how does literature express the unconscious before Freud theorizes it?
Season 2#2.3 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
18 Feb 2016Why does philosophy, daughter of crisis, start from words of ordinary language, and what does modern poetry say about the historical moment named by the word "Occident"?
Season 2#2.1 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
15 Feb 2016Is it philosophical critique that provokes the crisis of the city, or is it because the city is in crisis that philosophizing is needed more than ever?
Season 2#2.2 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
15 Feb 2016How does a sonnet by Baudelaire, La Cloche fêlée, allow us to link the problem of language and communication to the thought of our historical present, modernity?
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?
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?
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 AlphabetQ for Quality
31 Dec 2014What does a quality say, and what are we talking about when we qualify a thing?
A Philosophical AlphabetM for Music
27 Dec 2014What relation does music have with time, with language and, in Rousseau, with writing?