Mythology
16 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani defines myth as the oral and collective poem of the people. Plato sets it aside in the name of a univocal truth modelled on Euclid's geometry, yet myth always comes back. For him, it is a language of images that expresses truths unbeknownst to those who carry it, like the dream in Freud, and whose Greek core is the dread of excess, from Icarus to Oedipus1. He links it to Marx: the economic is never lived as such; it is expressed in displaced form in myth, as in the struggle of the Titans and the gods or in Das Rheingold2. With Lévi-Strauss, he takes music as the model for the structural analysis of myths and makes Wagner the father of that analysis3. He also points to one and the same structure from Theseus to Tristan. Several figures serve him as tools: Prometheus for negativity, Vulcan against Narcissus for labour, and above all Ulysses and Daedalus, who set repetition against liberation, from Nerval to Götterdämmerung. In that opera, the cycle of Ragnarök becomes a spiral45.
- 1Mythologie et Vérité8 Aug 2015
- 2Marx Plage 1/21 Feb 2016
- 39 #23 "C'est réglé comme du papier à musique !" • Bach • Nerval • Lévi-Strauss9 Jun 2021
- 49 #19 Le Crépuscule des dieux ou de la répétition à la libération • Partie 214 Apr 2021
- 59 #24 "C'est réglé comme du papier à musique !" • Nerval • Baudelaire • 2ème partie30 Jun 2021
Introduction produced automatically from the 16 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 16 videos
Season 13The essence of evil - Innocence of nature, horror of naturalism!
17 Dec 2024What is evil, if one starts from Rousseau's distinction between the state of nature and the civil state?
Season 9.29 #24 "Ruled like music paper!" • Nerval • Baudelaire • Part 2
30 Jun 2021What grounds the determinability that the symbolic order brings out in Nerval's texts, and how does Nerval get out of the repetition of his fantasy?
Season 9.29 #23 "Ruled like music paper!" • Bach • Nerval • Lévi-Strauss
9 Jun 2021How can it be shown that the historical sciences have an object as rigorously determinable as that of the natural sciences?
Analytical Reveries#3 Nomad or sedentary? - The case of Nerval
6 Jun 2021Where would we want to remain: what does the quest for lodging, in Nerval's Promenades et Souvenirs, becoming a quest for a voice, reveal?
Season 9.29 #19 Twilight of the Gods, or from repetition to liberation • Part 2
14 Apr 2021How does the last act of Twilight of the Gods move from the cyclical repetition of myth to a woman's knowledge and the reign of man?
Play ▷II PauseDominique Pagani ▷II Michel Foucault
2 May 2019What is the value of Michel Foucault's project, in his 1966 interview, of an ethnology of our own knowledge that announces the end of philosophy and the death of man?
Play ▷II PauseDominique Pagani ▷II Pablo Servigne
12 Mar 2019What does the collapsologist discourse of Pablo Servigne conceal beneath its scientific appearance?
Season 5.1#5.3 The philosopher's Odyssey: Revolutionary thought
31 Dec 2018How can we think both the order of nature and the order of freedom at once, and what makes negativity the principle of revolutionary thought?
Other videosMarxist Café - Work and the right to work
20 May 2018What should be understood by work, and by the right to work, from La Bruyère to Marx, by way of Rousseau and Hegel?
Season 4#4.8 Angélique (by Nerval)
16 May 2018In what sense is Nerval's quest for the mother, far from being a personal matter, connected to the universal, and what does modernity repress in its relation to art?
Season 4#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)
12 Apr 2018What does the ending of Nerval's Angélique reveal, where the walk that moves away from Rousseau's tomb closes into a loop, and is this necessity of the text merely personal or universal?
Season 4#4.4 Angélique (by Nerval)
15 Jan 2018What does the comparison of Angélique and Aurélia reveal about the evaporation of the real into surface, about the notion of edge in Nerval, and about the possibility of a determinism of human affairs?
Season 4#4.0 Dominique Pagani, Presentation of the 2017-2018 workshop: Nerval's "Angélique"
24 Sept 2017Why devote the 2017-2018 workshop to a continuous reading of Nerval's Angélique in order to continue the path "from Ulysses to Daedalus, from repetition to liberation"?
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 BeachMarx on the Beach 1/2
1 Feb 2016What does Marx mean when he affirms that men enter into relations of production independent of their will, and in what sense do these relations form "the unconscious of the unconscious"?
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?