Landscape

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches landscape through a distinction: nature is the object of a physics that goes beyond the surface, whereas landscape exists only for someone. He uses the thought experiment of a glass of water drawn from a sunset over the sea to show that landscape is a surface. It is a relation and not a substance, a reflection that points towards something else. He argues that landscape is produced by millennia of human labour, as the etymology of paese and paysan (peasant) reminds us. In his view, nature becomes a spectacle only when it recedes before technology, in the era of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution1. He often returns to Rousseau's fifth walk. There the imagination places the island at the centre of Lake Biel, following a maternal fantasy, and he contrasts this with Chateaubriand's fixed, visual shot. From the triptych of Poussin, Delacroix and Friedrich to Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Rilke, he traces how the visible scenery fades in favour of an inner landscape, restored through speech.

1. 1What is to be done? 3/329 Jan 2016

Introduction produced automatically from the 8 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.