Classical theater

Summary

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 Between crisis and war: philosophising?1 Aug 2017
2. 2#14 Caves of yesterday and today: from Plato to modernity10 Jun 2022
3. 3#10 Ukraine: from the problem of “edges” to the unleashing of war24 Feb 2022
4. 4The feminism of the privileged, puritanical censorship of femininity: Molière, Clouscard, Wagner6 Feb 2022

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