English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The association, the livestreams, and the call for membership 0:00 Hello everyone, my name is Pierre-Alain, I'm the treasurer of the association alongside Dominique Pagani, and I'll take a brief moment before Dominique's presentation to tell you that we're going to start this 2021-2022 season of philosophy workshops with livestreams on YouTube and Facebook every two weeks. So it will be on Wednesday evenings at 8:30 pm, as it was last year, and the first one will be in two days, that is September 22nd, Wednesday September 22nd at 8:30 pm. And between each livestream, we'll continue to post shorter videos online, answers to questions, analytical reveries, but also technical fact-sheets on the history of thought, which Dominique will introduce to you.
0:42 We've done quite a bit of filming with Dominique, and I still have quite a lot of work to do to get these videos online, but it's coming. And as treasurer of the association, I'd also like to invite you to join the association and to help make it known. It's only the association's funds that allow us to have the technical means to put these videos online and to maintain and reference the website. So, even with our volunteer work, of course, there are costs we need to cover in order to spread Dominique's thought as widely as possible.
1:18 So, the yearly membership is still 20 euros, and it's 5 euros for anyone who can't afford the full rate. You also get access to a dedicated area created on the site, dominiquepagani.fr, where we share texts and books with you. And as a member, you can of course also join us for our general meetings and decide with us on actions to take to share Dominique's teaching even more widely. So you can join directly online at dominiquepagani.fr, and the link is also below this video.
Return from vacation and announcement of the book reading 1:54 Thank you all for your support, and I'll now hand over to Dominique, who will present this upcoming workshop season. Thank you all. Well, hello dear friends, it's a real pleasure to see you again and to say hello, after such a long separation. I won't hide that I needed it. Our productivity — I say "our" because I'm very happy that in the comments you kept posting, including during my long month-long silence over the holidays, which I'll come back to, you never stopped praising the improvement in technical quality.
2:45 In short, sending your satisfaction to the technical team, which made me very happy. So it's a bit on behalf of the whole team that we're glad to be back with you. I won't hide that I spent another month in Pierre-Alain's company. I say this behind his back — after all, it's private, but there's nothing very juicy in any of it. And even though it was quite wonderful to be in the company of Pierre-Alain and of Alioucha, who wasn't long in joining us, our friend the director of La Fausse Note, which he had filmed together with Pierre-Alain.
3:32 And I needed emptiness, void, vacuum — that's where the word "vacances" [holidays] comes from, isn't it? And not in order to do nothing, because I won't hide that I missed you almost every day, almost as a reflex, but in order to recharge the batteries a bit. In short, I'd go so far as to say it was almost for your sake that I took a month off, but you wouldn't believe me, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong either. So, straight away, so as not to waste too much time, this is just an introduction to present to you the program of the cycle of talks we're going to undertake together, I hope.
4:15 And Pierre-Alain insisted on renewing the call for your memberships and for you to bring in new members. So I hope we'll be more and more numerous in tracking down the concept together, and situating ourselves between crisis and war, call it whatever you like. But for this year, more precisely, the program will be a collective reading, a reading done together, of my little booklet, my publication with Delga, entitled "Femininity and Community in Hegel." I admit it's been a long time since people have been asking me to comment on this text, and for a long time I dragged my feet about doing it, since it seems a bit inappropriate to have to comment on one's own work.
Why start the reading over from scratch 5:19 But, firstly, there is a precedent. Those who have been following us for a while now, and even more so those who have been following us from the beginning, know this well, since for a long period, Philippe Moreau, our former head technician, before he took on new duties that had him traveling between Paris and Lyon, and Hugo Chies, one of the founding fathers of our association, and in any case a little brother to me, in African terms, were extremely kind enough to come every Saturday morning, giving up part of their weekend, from 9am, precisely to carry out a collective reading — but that time there were three of us — of that work.
6:14 So, I refer you already to the results that produced — we had stopped at the first part; there's an introduction and three parts in my book, and we had stopped just at the first part, the material being quite abundant. So why don't I simply pick up where what had already been done, and done so well, left off? For that, I refer you to the videos in question, which you'll find on the site set up by Pierre-Alain, under the heading "Femininity and Community," so, outside of the YouTube channel, of course.
7:04 I'm not simply going to pick up where that first part we did together left off, but I'm going to start the reading over from scratch, first because of newcomers, but above all because something wasn't working in the previous format — not because of Philippe and Hugo, who had carried out this almost weekly task in an irreproachable way, beyond anything I could have hoped for, for me and for us — but I'm not happy with the way I proceeded, because I was speaking to people close to me who didn't really challenge me, who asked for clarifications rather than raising counter-arguments, and so I wasn't taking the same risk with them, since we were broadly on the same page as to content; I wasn't taking the risk an author takes when throwing a bottle into the sea, a book without knowing who
8:15 is going to read it, or when, or in what frame of mind. And so I would like to start over here, so that this shared reading addresses the widest possible audience, and not only my dearest and most loyal friends and comrades. But it's also because, since then and up to today, and more than ever given current circumstances, the issue raised right in the title has become increasingly topical, under the fire of an ever-growing current relevance.
A philosophical approach, neither societal nor merely social 8:54 toward... We are constantly bombarded with TV panel shows where the "societal" approach invades almost every debate, to the detriment of — it's become an almost classic opposition — to the detriment of the social, the historical, the political, etc. And this will only be denied by those who reduce the political to the societal, because that's rather the point of their whole operation, and...
9:31 But when I speak of femininity and community, I'm proposing an approach that will be neither societal, nor merely social, nor merely societal, but will be, for once, properly philosophical. It can happen. There, I wanted to make that clear. So, on the program this year, the reading of "Femininity and Community in Hegel," "The relation of aesthetics to politics within the system."
10:06 But if I'm taking it up again, it's also because the best-intentioned reviews that people were kind enough to write of this work, here and there — I'll mention just one in particular, because I felt some emotion at having received a review in a paper founded by Louis Aragon, in Les Lettres françaises no less, and I'm very grateful to the editorial team and to whoever wrote the review for devoting half a page to me, with very fine photos of Hölderlin, by the way, very well chosen, in Les Lettres françaises — which, in chorus with other reviews, even very favorable ones, all highlighted this same criticism: that the book is sometimes too allusive, and in short, that one would like to know a bit more; there are things, notions, or passages, or allusions that call for being made explicit,
11:17 developed further, especially when talking about Hegel, after all. Hegel, for those who know him well, never misses a chance to remind us that what matters is not the immediate, abstract, general statement, but the development. In the time of his illustrious predecessor Leibniz, one would have said "in the detail" — the detail, that so Leibnizian notion, isn't it? It's in the detail that the global is best felt, isn't it? Hence this shared reading, which is going to take us at least a semester, if not the whole school year.
The short formats: questions, reveries, technical sheets 11:56 So. I don't want to dwell on it, because that would spoil the subject. And I'll take the opportunity to remind you that this collective reading will alternate with the so-called "short" formats — some of which run to an hour, well, I still have progress to make, not in shortening them, but in any case they are shorter formats than my near-2-hour, 2.5-hour monthly or biweekly sessions.
12:39 There were, as a reminder, three sub-categories within the short formats. There were the analytical reveries — I'm thinking of Mignon, I'm thinking of our analytical reveries following in Nerval's footsteps, the reading of "Promenades et souvenirs," etc. — but also the answers to questions. I'm delighted by the interest you take in these answers to questions, and in the developments to which my own answers lead, and in the debate that arises within the comments on our YouTube channel.
13:20 and also what I'd like to call technical fact-sheets, that is, somewhat in the spirit of our old — old in the school sense — of our old revision notebooks, or of our vocabulary notebooks from when we were learning English, or a philosophical vocabulary notebook: technical fact-sheets that consist of making, without excessive waffle, with a lot of quotation marks, and above all this time without detours, clarifications on recurring problems that keep resurfacing throughout the history of thought, philosophy in particular.
14:07 I don't know, I'm really saying this at random, you just have to open the box and they spring out in no particular order: determinism and freedom, dogmatism and skepticism, idealism and realism, realism and nominalism — which is yet another thing, isn't it — justice and violence, knowledge and action; you see, the more I mention, the more come to mind.
14:39 So let's stop there. But for these recurring problems, there are indeed fact-sheets to be made, again like vocabulary notebooks, where I'll propose precise definitions — not in order to give a definitive view on the matter, since a definition should not give a definitive view, whatever the etymology might suggest — but rather so that we can agree on the meaning we're going to give to these words when we talk about them among ourselves, it being understood that each of you can propose another meaning.
15:14 So. If I add up these three short-format themes — the analytical reveries, I'll put them out of order — the answers to questions, out of courtesy I'll start with those, rather the answers to questions, the analytical reveries, and the technical fact-sheets — they will alternate with the big piece that's going to occupy us this year, that is, the collective reading with you of "Femininity and Community," published by Éditions Delga, with a beautiful Turner painting on the cover, the relation of aesthetics to politics in Hegelianism.
16:00 Yes, it involves subjects we've already covered, but all the better, it will serve as revision, and it also involves many things we've only touched on in passing, or in bits and pieces, or getting a bit lost in my digressions, and this time we'll take the time to dwell on the detail and develop it. So, thank you in advance. And thank you again for your loyalty, especially those of you who kept writing to us even while lost in remote valleys — you know, there are places where you can't get a signal, in the interior of Corsica, I didn't really try to...
16:44 I admit I didn't ask Pierre-Alain, who was at the wheel, to drive four hours just to reconnect to the internet. So, but I'm all the more touched that many of you kept posting comments that I find very interesting, and which I won't fail to answer in the coming days and in the upcoming sessions ahead of us. Thank you, I hope I've been clear; if not, in any case, clarifications won't be long in coming, since as early as next Wednesday, Wednesday the 22nd, at 8:30 pm, I'll see you for our first collective session back.
17:24 Thank you for your loyalty, and have a very good evening as autumn begins.
