Individual

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani takes from Hegel a definition of the individual: particularity reflected into itself and thereby raised to the universal1. He draws two distinctions from it. The individual is not to be confused with the particular, which may be no more than a specimen, and it is opposed neither to the universal nor to society2. Far from being immediate, it is the result of a journey. He compares it to the course of a river, made of its shape, its foreign contributions and its impurity3. Historically, he sees the individual as a modern notion: in the Greek city it is only an "ineffective shadow", whereas modernity begins with its emergence, from Rousseau's Confessions to Romanticism4. This separation from the community of origin is a step forward, but it comes with anxieties and a descent into hell. In Marxian terms, the individual reflects on its class determinations. He calls himself "communist for the individual": poverty prevents individuals from emerging, and the individual, the opposite of individualism, is the finest flowering of the collective5.

1. 1Hegel Plage 4/52 Feb 2016 · 17:27
2. 210#7 L'éco-nazillonisme "post-moderne" - Le Gorgias de Platon23 Dec 2021 · 1:37:32
3. 3#4.6 Angélique (de Nerval)15 Mar 2018 · 1:47:51
4. 4#11 • Retour aux logiques du sujet21 Jun 2020 · 31:50
5. 5#4.4B Objections à Dominique Pagani4 Feb 2018 · 12:08

Summary produced automatically from 28 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.