Negativity

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani links negativity first of all to Hegel, whom he presents as "the philosopher of negativity." He reads it as suppression: a field is a forest that has been suppressed, the fruit is the negation of the flower, and the flame exists only because the fuel disappears12. Man asserts himself by negating what nature gives him, and this is how nature becomes history. For him, the heart of speculative thought is the infinite as negativity relating to itself, the source of all activity and all consciousness, which he contrasts with the bad infinite of "n plus one"3. This negativity lies within the subject: the "night" one sees in a person's gaze, the anguish before death, the split within the self. He associates Descartes, Mephistopheles and Freudian negation with this theme. He does, however, single out a negative freedom that feels it exists only by destroying, as with the Terror or the Khmer Rouge4. The negative has to turn against itself in order to produce the positive, which is all the more solid for having gone through the ordeal56.

1. 1Café Marxiste - Travail et droit au travail20 May 2018 · 1:18:53
2. 2"Je est un autre" ou l'identité contradictoire12 Dec 2023 · 48:49
3. 3"Je est un autre" ou l'identité contradictoire12 Dec 2023 · 57:03
4. 4De l'anti-soviétisme des khmers rouges-vert6 Feb 2025 · 58:00
5. 5Ce soir, on repolitise. 2ème partie31 Mar 2018 · 1:08:24
6. 6De la fidélité à la grâce - De la substance au Sujet30 May 2024 · 43:39

Summary produced automatically from 55 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.