Carnage

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani first reads carnage in the Odyssey. The poem opens with the sack of Troy and ends with the slaughter of the suitors, not with a happy ending. Ulysses, the first Western hero, is the instigator of these two symmetrical carnages. He insists that speaking this way is not hyperbole1. Ulysses' detour seeks to evade this compulsive return, yet each port of call ends in a local mini-carnage23. Hence the question he raises in 2017: can one free oneself from the fatality of carnage's return4? He then transposes this pattern to modern history. Capitalism only emerges from its crises through carnage, from 1914, which liquidated the French peasantry, to the 50 million dead that followed the crisis of the 1930s5. He sets Greek carnage, concentrated in time, against modern carnage, a gradual wasting away, a "gentle carnage"6. He also links carnage to vengeance without public justice, to freedom conceived by Hegel as pure abstraction7, and, in Africa, to the resources of the soil rather than to ethnic groups.

1. 1#12 De Kafka à Proust, le passage dialectique de l’intermezzo au bord perpétué7 Apr 2022 · 26:05
2. 2Racines ou migration ? De la rêverie analytique à l'actualité, de Hölderlin à la guerre17 Feb 2023 · 8:37
3. 3TROP TARD ?14 Aug 2024 · 1:12:10
4. 4Freud1 Aug 2017 · 1:52:57
5. 5#12 De Kafka à Proust, le passage dialectique de l’intermezzo au bord perpétué7 Apr 2022 · 15:38
6. 6L'interview de Dominique Pagani : Introduction aux futurs ateliers23 Mar 2020 · 43:15
7. 7#2.4 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?10 Mar 2016 · 1:39:57

Summary produced automatically from 18 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.