Death drive

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani links the death drive to the late Freud, and he regards it as a discovery more fundamental than the pleasure principle1. He understands it as life's tendency to return, by roundabout paths, to an earlier state, the inorganic: death understood as extinction, not as carnage2. In it, desire ultimately aims at its own release, a return to inert matter that he calls a radical materialism3. He also describes it as a boundary too closed to the outside, which lets the inside waste away, and he connects it with amnesia. He often takes up the formula that the death drives "progress in silence": if the drive is fulfilled, it does away with all the other drives4. In 2022 he applies this formula to the threat of war, which grows in what goes unspoken5. In music, he sees Wotan and Tristan as figures of this drive, and he asks whether instrumental music, as a way of keeping silent, does not play its game6.

1. 1WAGNER - LA VÉRITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE PURE • Pagani Parle Musique20 Jul 2022 · 0:21
2. 2#6.1-1/2 - Prélude • D.Pagani / Lacan : Fonction et champs de la parole et du langage10 Nov 2019 · 58:53
3. 3Musicosophie 5. Bonheur contre pulsion de mort en musique11 Dec 2020 · 59:21
4. 410#6 Guerre et Paix : "Les pulsions de mort progressent en silence..." (Freud)8 Dec 2021 · 15:26
5. 5#11 UKRAINE : La mathématique unit les hommes, la politique les divise (Aristote)24 Mar 2022 · 2:46
6. 6WAGNER - LA VÉRITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE PURE • Pagani Parle Musique20 Jul 2022 · 12:52

Summary produced automatically from 12 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.