Desire

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani treats desire as a constant object of philosophy. He holds it to be primary, even for knowledge: we judge things good because we desire them1. He contrasts it with need, which is determinate and finite, like thirst. Human desire, by contrast, is infinite because it is indeterminate, and its content mixes nature and history2. Being modern, in his view, means recognizing this absence of measure, unlike the Greeks, who held to measure; Rousseau and Faust illustrate it. Following Hegel, he holds that consciousness is desire and that desire destroys its object, which nevertheless keeps reappearing3. In aesthetics, he maintains against Kant that every pleasure presupposes a satisfied desire, often an unconscious one: the beautiful object knows more about me than I do4. For him, production serves desire rather than need, and therefore has no end point. With Clouscard, he criticizes Deleuze's presentation of desire as creative, which goes along with libidinal consumption5.

1. 1La PHILO avec PAGANI : D comme DÉSIR29 May 2023 · 2:36
2. 2La mondanité chez Clouscard - Le choc des mondes ?9 Jul 2023 · 54:17
3. 3Hegel Plage 2/51 Feb 2016 · 26:39
4. 4#12 • Retour aux logiques du sujet2 Jul 2020 · 1:18:25
5. 5#4 Neofascisme et idéologie du désir; sur la pensée de M.Clouscard.26 Sept 2014 · 52:03

Summary produced automatically from 85 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.