Classical theater

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani approaches classical theatre mainly through Racine, and first of all through Phèdre, which he reads as a tragedy of confession. For ancient ethics, speaking or keeping silent matters more than acting1. In Hippolytus's confession, he sees the split subject: speech says more than consciousness. He links this passage to Pascal and Kafka1 and sees in it the herald of the modern hero2. In his reading, what Phaedra loves in Theseus is the young hero who freed the Greeks. With Clouscard, this takes him from the Freudian unconscious to the class unconscious. He ties the perfection of Racine's language to the social homogeneity of the court1. He also contrasts the hateful self of the classics, who stage universal characters, with the Romantic self, and shows this with two lines spoken by Nero in Britannicus2. He looks closely at the word "bord" (edge, shore) in Phèdre and takes it up again in 2022 to think about the Ukrainian border3. In Molière, he reads Les Femmes savantes as a critique of a social milieu, not of women4.

1. 1#2.6 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?1 Aug 2017
2. 2#14 Cavernes d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui - De Platon à la modernité10 Jun 2022
3. 3#10 UKRAINE : Du problème des "Bords" au déchaînement de la guerre24 Feb 2022
4. 4Le féminisme des privilégiés, censure puritaine de la féminité - Molière, Clouscard, Wagner6 Feb 2022

Introduction produced automatically from the 4 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.