Migration

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches migration as an anthropological dimension of the human species, which he sets in tension with roots. He recalls that hominids who came out of the forest migrated as far as China and the Dordogne. This movement does not exclude long periods of stasis, and one does not thereby get rid of one's roots1. He contrasts this movement with Plato, who, fascinated by Egyptian stability, fixes citizens in place. He connects the question to Hölderlin's "In lovely blue". The poem moves from the infinity of the blue to human measure, embodied by the temple at Cape Sounion, and ends with Oedipus: king of Thebes, he becomes a stranger wandering between the cities2. He adds Nerval, who, in Promenades et souvenirs, considers living in something that moves, as well as the Wandering Jew, brought up by a question from the audience. In 2025, he presents wandering as the normal state of man, whose hominization is not complete. Man shuttles between the indeterminate and the determinate, like the land surveyor in Kafka's The Castle or the animal in The Burrow3.

1. 1Guerre, néo-fascisme : le libéralisme-libertaire3 Mar 2023
2. 2Racines ou migration ? De la rêverie analytique à l'actualité, de Hölderlin à la guerre17 Feb 2023
3. 3Flagrandélices27 May 2025

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