Romantic poetry

Season 11

What is the object of human desire in our modernity, and who is its subject?

Season 11

How can we think the ambivalence of the world, between enjoyment and negativity, when two worlds collide, as in the colonial encounter between Africa and the school of the white men?

Season 11

Does poetic speech proceed from the immediate intuition of genius or from a rigor that proceeds by mediations?

Season 11

Between roots and migration, between the measure of the inhabited place and the pull of the infinite, how does man find his place, while war looms?

Season 11

How can philosophy, which hesitates between the rigor of mathematics and the language of poetry, take the subject into account?

Le Gros Rouge Qui Tâche

How can we read Hölderlin, given his contradictory receptions, and what does his poetry matter to communist militants?

Season 10

What does the notion of edge, border and march teach us about the war that breaks out in Ukraine?

Season 10

Why does Hegel make Antigone's tragedy the "supreme ethical opposition," to the point of granting it a value that escapes its own era?

Analytical Reveries

Does the apparent randomness of Nerval's wanderings in Promenades et souvenirs conceal a necessity, that of mourning the mother and returning to origins?

Season 9.2

What 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?

Analytical Reveries

Where 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 9.1

Why is human memory inseparable from forgetting, and how does the consciousness of death mean that 'the echo changes'?

Season 9.1

How does memory, which retains and names, confront the indeterminacy of origins, and how can one memory overdetermine others?

Season 8

What does Kant's reflective judgment teach us about the relation between the beautiful object and the subject's desire, and how far can art lead?

Season 8

What relationship does the aesthetic field have with the political field, between the poet as bard of the collective and the poet of art for art's sake?

Season 7

What is lying, and how is lying to oneself related to ideology, repression, and negativity?

Season 7

What does the polarity of white and red in the poetic imagination, from Chrétien de Troyes to Mallarmé and Nerval, say about our modernity?

Season 7

If access to truth is irreversible, why does modern consciousness seek to flee it?

Season 7

Why does modern man's access to absolute knowledge come with a refusal to know, and how does this conflict between revolution and counter-revolution structure modernity?

Introduction to the workshops

What does Angélique de Nerval, reread in light of the Odyssey and the structure of the double carnage, teach us about the passage from Enlightenment happiness to the mal du siècle and about today's illusions?

Season 5.2

How does landscape reach its highest poetic value when the visible setting fades to become an interior landscape?

Season 4

How is a rigorous, quasi-scientific reading of a literary text possible if an abyss separates the exact sciences from the field of human actions?

Season 4

In 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

What 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

Why does Angélique's journey, seemingly disjointed, converge on Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville, and what does Nerval leave the reader once he has led him there?

Season 4

Does Nerval's itinerary in Angélique owe anything to chance, and what is meant by chance?

Season 4

Why go through Nerval and the concept of modernity to think the historical present, dominated by capital?

Season 4

What 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

How can a literary text, that of a madman, achieve such rigor that it grounds a rationality in the human order, where Kant had separated nature and freedom by an unbridgeable abyss?

Season 4

Is Angélique a disjointed text, or does it obey, beneath its digressions, a logic that is that of the dream?

Season 4

Why read Nerval's Angélique, and how does this disjointed narrative, written in the middle of the century, lead from the mother's tomb to Rousseau's tomb?

Season 4

Why 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

How can philosophy, after having answered with the sciences the question "what can I know?", move on to the knowledge of man and his historical present?

Season 3

What relation does philosophy hold, in its principle, with politics?

Season 3

How can we assume the contradiction between the Greek and Christian heritages without falling back into the old counter-revolutionary thought that presents itself as new?

Other videos

How does Rousseau open the sequence that runs to Lenin, and what becomes of this legacy in Nerval, the romantics, Clouscard and Nietzsche?

Other videos

What do African Francophonie, the misreadings of Clouscard, and the fusion of genres reveal about the modernity born of the French Revolution?

What Is to Be Done?

What is to be done, and why does the answer require a theoretical detour through Rousseau and his conception of happiness?

Season 1

Why does the philosophy of knowledge lead to the question "what must I do?", and what content should be given to freedom?

A Philosophical Alphabet

Should one be against, with, or "against with": how can opposition be thought without falling into one-sidedness?