Greek mythology
14 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani approaches Greek mythology as a "concrete universal", which he compares to the Manding epic. He rejects the idea of a Greek miracle by pointing out what Greece borrowed from the East1. He reads in it structures that he links to Freud: the Odyssey runs from the sack of Troy to the slaughter of the suitors and figures the repetition of carnage. Against it he sets Daedalus, the slave engineer who frees himself through the tool1. Reread through Racine's Phèdre, the Cretan cycle helps him think about the unconscious and Theseus's repeated amnesia. He sees the killing of the Minotaur as a collective and political primal scene2. The myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus comes back to define man by a lack, which fire and the tool turn into a strength3. Drawing on Hesiod and Diodorus Siculus, he makes Mnemosyne the figure that binds memory and language, arising from a pre-Olympian world of chaos and castration that he refuses to idealize4. Nor does he make the Olympian order a value in itself. With Aeschylus and Marx, the Titans become the slaves5.
- 1Freud1 Aug 2017
- 2Musicosophie 7. Les Grecs, le mythe et la musique17 Dec 2020
- 3La mondanité chez Clouscard : Aragon et la positivité du négatif29 Jun 2023
- 4#2 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...23 Oct 2020
- 5#4 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...13 Nov 2020
Introduction produced automatically from the 14 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 14 videos
Readings on the spotOUR FORMER SAVAGERY? - An impromptu reading of an Illumination by Arthur Rimbaud
13 Jun 2025What does the question "Est-ce ancienne sauvagerie qu'on pardonne ?" mean in Rimbaud's "Mouvement," posed before a young couple in the midst of a hymn to industrial modernity?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard - The world as "cunning of reason"
22 Jul 2023How can reason, which has essence but not existence, produce a world, and why must it resort to cunning for this?
Season 11Worldliness in Clouscard: Aragon and the positivity of the negative
29 Jun 2023How does the positivity of the negative, read in a poem by Aragon and in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, shed light on Clouscard's concept of worldliness and the critique of neopositivism?
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?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 7. The Greeks, myth and music
17 Dec 2020Why do Greek art, myth, and music, tied to a past that is gone, still give us aesthetic pleasure?
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#4 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
13 Nov 2020How does memory, which retains and names, confront the indeterminacy of origins, and how can one memory overdetermine others?
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#6.1-1/2 - Prelude • D.Pagani / Lacan: Function and field of speech and language
10 Nov 2019How do the death drive and the compulsion to repeat, as read in Freud and Lacan, shed light on the logic of the subject and on the reconstitution of Nazism?
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 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#2.7 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
1 Aug 2017What path did the workshop "Between Crisis and War: Philosophizing?" follow, from the definition of philosophy to the passage to the philosophy of action?
Season 3#3.1 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017Can man free himself from the fatality of the return of carnage, figured by Ulysses, through the labor that transforms reality, figured by Daedalus?
A Philosophical AlphabetZ for Zero
9 Jan 2015Why is there something rather than nothing, and what does zero mean for man?