Summary
Dominique Pagani approaches memory from one thesis: it is not a recording but a selection. This selection is made by a subject inhabited by negativity, in whom an effort not to remember works against the effort of memory1. He distinguishes individual memory, which recovers what one once knew, from collective amnesia, which makes people forget what they never knew. His examples are the Western whitewashing of terrorism in Syria and torture in Algeria2. Drawing on Proust's scene of the goodnight kiss, he defines overdetermined memory: every memory rests on an original memory. He asks whether anamnesis should be pushed back to the vulnerability of the newborn or cut short, and he sees memory as a "false future"3. He sets fidelity against fixation, in which one believes alive what is in fact a corpse4. He uses Vinteuil's little phrase to describe involuntary memory as a victory over death5. In contrast, he calls globalized repetitive music "amnesiac and amnesia-inducing."
- 1#9.18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation3 Apr 2021
- 2#3 Benefits and harms of amnesia…6 Nov 2020
- 3#10 Benefits and harms of amnesia…24 Dec 2020
- 4The matrix of all illusion: the past lived as present4 Jun 2024
- 5Schubert: the divine captives3 Aug 2022
Introduction produced automatically from the 10 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 10 videos
Cycle 12The matrix of all illusion: the past lived as present
4 Jun 2024Why does the fixation on the mother, which the second act of Parsifal stages, make the past be lived as a present, and how does this illusion concern modernity?
Cycle 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 MusiqueSchubert: the divine captives
3 Aug 2022How does music enter into time only to leave it, bringing back the past to the point of touching a kind of eternity?
Cycle 10#10.6 War and peace: “The death drives advance in silence…” (Freud)
8 Dec 2021Why is the danger of war, from the Sahel to the Russian-Ukrainian border, wrapped in silence, and what does this silence reveal, in the sense that "the death drives progress in silence"?
Analytical Reveries#4 Nomad and sedentary: the case of Nerval
4 Oct 2021Does the apparent randomness of Nerval's wanderings in Promenades et souvenirs conceal a necessity, that of mourning the mother and returning to origins?
Cycle 9.2#9.18 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation
3 Apr 2021How does Wagner's Twilight of the Gods move from the circular time of fate, in which everything repeats, to the freedom of the world of men?
Musicosophie#9 Romantic irony and the Vinteuil sonata
15 Jan 2021How can a literary text convey what is heard in music, and what do Walt's dream in Jean-Paul and Vinteuil's little phrase in Proust reveal?
Cycle 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?
Cycle 9.1#3 Benefits and harms of amnesia…
6 Nov 2020How do anamnesis and amnesia, individual and collective, work upon memory, and what does it mean for memory to be overdetermined?
Other videosLa Fausse Note, a film by Aliocha
26 Feb 2019Why is globalized, repetitive and binary music, broadcast everywhere since the 1950s, a music of enslavement and amnesia?