German Romanticism
19 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani places German Romanticism in the "interlude" that opened between the storming of the Bastille and the Restoration. He reads it through a contradiction: on one side the rational legacy of the Enlightenment, on the other escapism, which ends in a hecatomb of poets who died, went mad or took their own lives1. He draws on Hegel, who criticises Romantic hypochondria as a flight from the political world and who, in Pagani's view, both abolishes and preserves Romanticism in an Aufhebung2. In the demand to restore "lost substantiality" through emotion rather than through the concept, he sees the mainspring of reactionary nostalgia, which he illustrates with Arnim's The Heirs of the Entail3. He nevertheless holds Romanticism to be ambivalent: he assigns the aesthetic point to the Germans, who had no state, and the political point to the French, and in this connection he reads Novalis's Hymns to the Night4. He also discusses the dream in Jean Paul, the pure negativity of the Nightwatches of Bonaventura, and Kleist's puppet theatre, where grace belongs only to the puppet or to the god5.
- 1Hegel Plage 1/51 Feb 2016
- 2Hommage à Domenico Losurdo2 Jul 2018
- 3#8 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...10 Dec 2020
- 4Dominique Pagani - Qui se cache sous les surfaces ? Esthétique et politique20 May 2022
- 5Kleist « Sur le théâtre de marionnettes » - Pagani - Lectures sur le vif29 Sept 2023
Introduction produced automatically from the 19 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 19 videos
Readings on the spotFrom Plato to Proust - Readings on the Spot
6 Jul 2026What does amorous desire seek through the body and the gaze: someone or something?
Season 14The return of fascism
4 Feb 2026What is rightly called fascism, and how can we recognize its return today?
Season 12I am not who you think I am - The elusive identity
4 Jan 2024How can the notions of identity, indeterminacy and negativity, which lie at the heart of internal determination, be made concrete?
Season 12"I is another", or contradictory identity
12 Dec 2023How can we think the contradiction within the subject, the negativity immanent to the self, and why do we repress it?
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?
Questions and answersDominique Pagani - Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics
20 May 2022Why is romanticism ambivalent between aesthetics and politics, and in what sense are surface, reflection and landscape more profound than the depths?
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?
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?
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 9.1#1 Benefits and harms of amnesia...
8 Oct 2020Is memory the condition of happiness and identity, or is forgetting its condition instead?
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?
Season 6#6.3 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
8 Jan 2020How does the relationship between substance and subject, which converge in Antiquity and diverge in modern times, shed light on the reactionary attempt, up to Nazism, to restore "the compact solidity of being"?
Season 5.2#5.6 Nature or Landscape?
2 May 2019How is the exterior, the landscape, interiorized by speech and music, and how does landscape differ from nature?
Season 5.1#5.2 ter FaceBookLive / Questions (2) following Workshop #5.2
6 Dec 2018What relation does the philosopher have with politics, and how do finality, negativity, mediation and death implicate one another in man?
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?
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 2#2.4 Between crisis and war: Philosophising?
10 Mar 2016What is missing from the Cartesian subject in order to think the modern subject, and why do both the abstract self and the exclusive community end in destruction?
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?