The West

Summary

Dominique Pagani refuses to treat the "West" (Occident) as a place. It is neither the West as a direction, nor Europe, nor the developed countries, but a concept whose proper meaning is decline: the land where the day dies. He links it to the preface of Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, where the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, and to the congealed sun of Baudelaire's Harmonie du soir, "a West never slain." He sees it as a moment of modernity and of logic rather than as a period or a region: the moment when one knows too much to live in the substantial world, the moment of disquiet and of the emergence of the individual1. He connects to it the rapid history of tonal music, which he links to the destiny of freedom, and notes that the word serves to avoid saying capitalism1. In the recent sessions, the emphasis becomes political. He first speaks of a declining West unaware of itself, in connection with the sanctions against Russia2. He then rejects the word itself, because it turns a relation into a substance; according to him, the two greatest slaughters came from it3.

1. 1#11 Modal and tonal music24 Jan 2021
2. 2#12 From Kafka to Proust, the dialectical passage from the intermezzo to the perpetuated edge7 Apr 2022
3. 3Imaginary identity15 May 2025

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.