Structuralism
10 videos, newest first.
What Dominique Pagani says
Dominique Pagani approaches structuralism through Michel Clouscard's critique of it. For Clouscard it is a neo-Kantianism, a "Kantianism without a transcendental subject", in a phrase Lévi-Strauss accepts, and this neo-Kantianism is the common feature of counter-revolutionary thought12. He places it in history: the movement is born of the parricide of Sartre and pushes Marxism back in the university; Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, a science of societies without history, evacuates history34. Above all, he points to an evacuation of the subject, from Lévi-Strauss to Althusser's "process without a subject" and Lacan's "subversion of the subject". He links it to naturalism, which is also what it has in common with Nazism56. He further criticises structuralism for a formalism that privileges the synchronic, denies time and juxtaposes differences like species without a genesis. In Foucault, he sees a rehabilitation of the discontinuous that breaks humanity up. Yet he also puts it to positive use: in 2021 he takes the overture of The Raw and the Cooked as a model for establishing that human productions are determinable. He sees in it a Hegelian mediation unknown to its author4.
- 1Dominique Pagani ▷II Michel Foucault2 May 2019
- 2D. Pagani / Réponse de M. Clouscard à C. Morilhat (1987)23 Aug 2019
- 3Préface au mémoire de Simon Verdun, « La critique du néokantisme chez Michel Clouscard », soutenue à l’ENS DE Paris, sanctionnée par une mention très bien.5 Jul 2018
- 49 #23 "C'est réglé comme du papier à musique !" • Bach • Nerval • Lévi-Strauss9 Jun 2021
- 5Popper (Karl)3 Dec 2019
- 6La répression du sujet dans la société civile bourgeoise9 Aug 2025
Introduction produced automatically from the 10 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.
The 10 videos
Season 13The repression of the subject in bourgeois civil society
9 Aug 2025What do money, neopositivism, and bourgeois civil society have in common in the repression of the subject and self-knowledge?
Season 12Clouscard by you - Answers to your questions
28 Feb 2024What does the critique of the distinction according to Bourdieu by Henri Lefebvre, and more broadly the work of Clouscard, teach us about how to think differences, relativism and determinism?
Season 9.29 #23 "Ruled like music paper!" • Bach • Nerval • Lévi-Strauss
9 Jun 2021How can it be shown that the historical sciences have an object as rigorously determinable as that of the natural sciences?
At the Tropiques bookshopCalves and Things (2): Ecologism, the highest stage of capitalism?
5 Oct 2020Why is ecologism a class ideology of capitalism, and what does the reference to Foucault's Les Mots et les choses in the title of the book Les Veaux et les choses mean?
Season 7#1 - Harnessed to Confinitude
27 Mar 2020What is common between the will to stop time in Baudelaire, Debussy and Lévi-Strauss, and the repetition of crises of capital that the events of March 2020 reveal?
Season 6#6.2 • The Logic of the Subject in the face of the reconstitution of Nazism
3 Dec 2019In what way does a logic of the subject allow us to think and combat the current reconstitution of Nazism, whose common ground is naturalism?
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?
Play ▷II PauseDominique Pagani ▷II Michel Foucault
2 May 2019What is the value of Michel Foucault's project, in his 1966 interview, of an ethnology of our own knowledge that announces the end of philosophy and the death of man?
On Michel ClouscardBeing and Code
5 Jul 2018What does the concept of neo-kantianism mean in Michel Clouscard's L'Être et le Code, and why does this book, which restores the precapitalist history of France, remain relevant today?
On Michel ClouscardDominique Pagani on Michel Clouscard - The paths of praxis 1/2
8 Dec 2015How should we read Michel Clouscard's Les Chemins de la praxis, and why does this book oppose Heidegger, philosopher of the counter-revolution, to Plato, philosopher of the revolution?