Mal du siècle

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani places the mal du siècle within a historical sequence: with the generation of 1770, the happiness of the Enlightenment gives way to an ill without any positive cause. He first links it to the replacement of the Platonic good by freedom, a "black sun" bearing negativity and interiorisation, and he follows its deepening from the Greek temple to the cathedral through Hegel's Aesthetics1. He then turns it into a question about the object of modern desire. Reading Senancour's Oberman, Chateaubriand's René and Baudelaire's "Anywhere out of the world", he describes an indeterminate, infinite desire, a contradiction within the subject and a "voluptuousness of melancholy"2. He comes back to the theme in connection with autumn. In his view, loving the bad season is a historical reversal, tied to self-consciousness as a finite being and to the fact that "man has done so much"3. He does not stop at melancholy: he sets against it praxis12, the collective victory of Rimbaud's "Adieu" and the "smile through tears"3.

1. 1#1.8 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?28 Jan 2016
2. 2La mondanité chez Clouscard : Désirer quoi ? Par qui ??3 Sept 2023
3. 3La maladie, le malheur, le mal20 Sept 2024

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