French Revolution
58 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani traces modernity back to two "ruptures": the English industrial revolution and the French Revolution1. He links to them the mixing of genres, which answers to the collision of classes. He reads history since 1789 as a conflict between revolution and counter-revolution, down to the "third restoration" opened by the fall of the Soviet Union2. With Clouscard, he makes Rousseau the initiator of a philosophy of the French Revolution, extended as far as Hegel and Marx. With Jacques D'Hondt and Domenico Losurdo, he presents Hegel as the philosopher of that revolution, against the charge of totalitarianism3. In Nerval's Angélique, he follows a route that leads to Rousseau's tomb, where the collective interest prevails over the personal story. He also hears the Revolution in music: in Beethoven's break and in happiness, "a new idea in Europe" according to Saint-Just, which he finds again in Mozart4. In recent sessions, he makes hostility to the French Revolution one of the defining features of fascism5.
- 1#6.6 • La Logique du Sujet face à la reconstitution du nazisme29 Mar 2020
- 2#15 • Retour aux logiques du sujet23 Jul 2020
- 3Hommage à Jacques D'Hondt (2)2 Aug 2016
- 4Musicosophie 13. Mozart restitué2 Feb 2021
- 5Le retour du fascisme4 Feb 2026
Introduction produced automatically from the 58 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 58 videos
Jeunesse du MondeMALI: Dominique PAGANI REACTS to Emmanuel MACRON's remarks at the Africa Forward summit
16 May 2026What does Emmanuel Macron's discourse on French failure in Mali conceal, and where do the rebellion and the crisis in the Sahel come from?
Season 14Their "Europe" means war.
28 Feb 2026What is meant by fascism today, and why is war its worst expression?
Season 14The return of fascism
4 Feb 2026What is rightly called fascism, and how can we recognize its return today?
Season 13Naturalist ideology / Answers to questions - Dominique Pagani
25 Jul 2025What does money reveal about desire and self-knowledge, and why speak of a dialectic of matter rather than a dialectic of nature?
dominique bintou"Napoleon, or the reasons of cunning", with Dominique Pagani
2 Dec 2024Why is Napoleon of interest to philosophy, and what does Hegel's concept of the cunning of reason show about him?
Season 13Clouscard: The metamorphoses of class struggle
2 Sept 2024How does Clouscard's thought, read from Les Métamorphoses de la lutte des classes and its relation to Rousseau, account for the present situation?
Season 12Birth and carnage - The Massacre of the Innocents
22 Dec 2023What is dialectic, if it hinges on the internal contradiction of a subject between opposed and mutually necessary moments?
Readings on the spotKleist "On the Marionette Theatre" - Pagani - Readings on the Spot
29 Sept 2023Why, according to Kleist, does grace appear only in the marionette or in god, and never in the man who reflects?
Readings on the spotAragon "The Paris Peasant Sings" - Readings on the Spot
5 Aug 2023What does Aragon's "Le Paysan de Paris chante" say about working-class Paris and demonstrations, and how does this poem from the Resistance connect with current events?
Le Gros Rouge Qui TâcheDominique Pagani - Hölderlin, poetry and politics
19 Mar 2022How can we read Hölderlin, given his contradictory receptions, and what does his poetry matter to communist militants?
Questions and answersLeft-washing: Are the woke the most asleep?
17 Nov 2021Why does the societal left that calls itself "woke" play into the hands of the right, and how can a language common to the human tribe be recovered?
Season 1010#4 From Lascaux to modern music, the permanence of the political stakes in aesthetics
3 Nov 2021Why does aesthetics remain tied to a political stake in Hegel, and why does the tragedy of Antigone still hold for the modern world?
Questions and answersCynicism of the extreme centre or epistemic heroism? The dialectic of the middle • Dominique Pagani
20 May 2021What is the relation between the consciousness of consciousness and the victory of bourgeois materialist cynicism, and what does the category of the milieu reveal?
Questions and answersMy eco-cabin in the ZAD: autonomy or alienation? • Philosophical Q&A • Dominique Pagani
30 Apr 2021Is the autonomy claimed today by those who go off to live in nature a freedom or a way of freeing oneself from humanity?
Season 9.29 #14 How can sciences of history be real?
5 Feb 2021How can sciences of history be real, if the determinism of the natural sciences seems to exclude freedom?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 13. Mozart restored
2 Feb 2021What does Mozart's music say about happiness, and how does this happiness express the historical turning point of the late eighteenth century?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityThe World Before, The World After - Part 1
16 Jan 2021What separates a "world before" from a "world after", and is the health crisis a revolution or the acceleration of trends already at work?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 9. Romantic irony and the Vinteuil sonata
15 Jan 2021How can a literary text convey what is heard in music, and what do Walt's dream in Jean-Paul and Vinteuil's little phrase in Proust reveal?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 8. Happiness and unhappiness in music
11 Jan 2021Why does the history of music make happy and morbid musics alternate, and what is the happiness that they express?
MusicosophieMusicosophy 5. Happiness versus the death drive in music
11 Dec 2020How does modern music, since Beethoven, oscillate between the popular demand for happiness and the romantic fascination with the death drive?
Season 9.1#8 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
10 Dec 2020Why does the nostalgia for a lost substance found every reactionary ideology, and what does the ambivalence of memory and language reveal?
Season 8#15 • Return to the logics of the subject
23 Jul 2020What does the confinement of the era reveal, and what form of solidarity, camaraderie or community, allows us to face it?
Season 8#9 • Return to the logics of the subject
30 May 2020Does a privation of truth exist, a lie to oneself, that is not culpable, provided it is accompanied by social justice?
Season 7#4 • Harnessed to confinitude
11 Apr 2020When is romanticism, the first expression of modernity, progressive, and when does it become reactionary in the face of access to absolute knowledge?
Season 7#2 - Harnessed to Confinitude
30 Mar 2020Why 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?
Season 6#6.6 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
29 Mar 2020Why does the access to absolute knowledge in modernity symmetrically engender the temptation of an absolute non-knowledge, which leads as far as Nazism?
Introduction to the workshopsInterview with Dominique Pagani: Introduction to the upcoming workshops
23 Mar 2020What 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 6#6.5 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
19 Feb 2020How does the modern stage of the relation between substance and subject, where absolute knowledge becomes possible, shed light both on the logic of the subject and on the reconstitution of Nazism?
At the Tropiques bookshopPagani without detours
21 Sept 2019How can a book give linear form to Dominique Pagani's oral teaching, and what does this teaching say about the specificity of philosophy, of modernity, and of the question "what must I do"?
On Michel ClouscardD. Pagani / M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (1987)
23 Aug 2019What does Michel Clouscard's response to Claude Morilhat (1987) reveal about the place of philosophy and about his concept of neo-Kantianism?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityMoney, work, freedom
3 Aug 2019Is money only the power that perverts all values, or a medium whose problem lies in its distribution?
Season 5.2#5.8 Nature or Landscape?
30 Jun 2019What distinguishes nature from landscape, and how does the beauty of landscape relate to freedom and property?
Season 5.2#5.7 Nature or Landscape?
26 May 2019How do revolutionary thought and the question "nature or landscape" fit together, and what distinguishes nature from landscape?
At the Tropiques bookshopHegel and the yellow vests (Part 1)
13 Feb 2019Does the yellow vests movement mark, in light of Hegel and Marx, the return of the social against the societal, and what then becomes of the thesis of the end of history?
Season 5.2#5.4 Introduction / Nature or Landscape?
25 Jan 2019Are nature and landscape interchangeable terms?
Season 5.1#5.2 The philosopher's Odyssey: Revolutionary thought
21 Nov 2018Why does Hegel, the philosopher of mediation, occupy a central place in revolutionary thought from Rousseau to Lenin, and what relation does mediation have with death?
Season 5.1#5.1 The philosopher's Odyssey: Revolutionary thought
24 Oct 2018How does Rousseau open a sequence of revolutionary thought that leads to Lenin, and what dialectical thread runs through it?
At the Tropiques bookshopTribute to Domenico Losurdo
2 Jul 2018Why is Hegel's logic, long treated as a "dead dog," a logic of revolutionary political discourse that allows a critique of contemporary apoliticism?
At the Tropiques bookshopThe Phenomenology of Spirit
2 Jul 2018Why must we reread today Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as a philosophy of the true, opposed to the philosophy of sense?
At the Tropiques bookshopTonight, we repoliticise. Part 2
31 Mar 2018Why must we "repoliticize the political," and what does the debate between Hegel, Marx and Sartre on totality and totalization say?
Season 4#4.6 Angélique (by Nerval)
15 Mar 2018Why 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?
At the Tropiques bookshopTonight, we repoliticise. Part 1
12 Mar 2018Why must the political today be repoliticized, against the reduction of objectivity to intersubjectivity?
Season 4#4.5 Angélique (by Nerval)
12 Feb 2018Does Nerval's itinerary in Angélique owe anything to chance, and what is meant by chance?
Season 4#4.4B Objections to Dominique Pagani
4 Feb 2018Why go through Nerval and the concept of modernity to think the historical present, dominated by capital?
Season 4#4.3 Angélique (by Nerval)
11 Dec 2017How 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 3#3.3 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017How 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?
Season 3#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus
1 Aug 2017How does one pass from the theoretical order (what can I know?) to the practical order (what must I do?), and why is Rousseau, "Newton of morality," the decisive figure for this?
At the Tropiques bookshopTribute to Jacques D'Hondt (3)
2 Aug 2016Must we accept the two persistent ideas that make Hegel a totalitarian thinker and condemn dialectic, and what can Hegel contribute to thinking about the present world?
At the Tropiques bookshopTribute to Jacques D'Hondt (2)
2 Aug 2016How did Jacques D'Hondt's work undo the image of a conservative Hegel, philosopher of the Restoration, to make him instead the philosopher of living history and of the French Revolution?
Other videosAt the bistro with Pagani: part 1
18 Jun 2016What do African Francophonie, the misreadings of Clouscard, and the fusion of genres reveal about the modernity born of the French Revolution?
Hegel & Marx on the BeachHegel on the Beach 1/5
1 Feb 2016How should we read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in light of the historical upheaval and the Romantic crisis from which it emerged?
Season 1#1.6 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
10 Dec 2015What does Kant change by making the subject the legislator of knowledge, and why does this emancipation of the subject lead to the question of freedom?
Saint-Dizier Popular UniversityThe Music of History
26 Apr 2015What does music teach us about the history of peoples, once we have defined what is properly musical in music?
A Philosophical AlphabetP for People
30 Dec 2014What is a people, and how does one distinguish the popular from the populist, from pop music, and from « people » culture?
A Philosophical AlphabetI for Island
23 Dec 2014What does the figure of the island mean, from Robinson to the île des Peupliers, where Rousseau's tomb is located at Ermenonville?
Interviews for L’Affranchi#1 Presentation; the EU; Clouscard; Rousseau.
20 Sept 2014Who is Dominique Pagani, and how does he judge the railway workers' strike and the European Union?
Interviews for L’Affranchi#2 Rousseau, a world that begins
20 Sept 2014Why can one say, with Goethe, that with Rousseau a world begins?
On Michel ClouscardRadio Galère - Michel Clouscard - 1
6 Jul 2012What does Michel Clouscard's thought contribute to understanding the capitalism that emerged from May 68?