Totality

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani defines totality as a synthesis of unity and plurality, or a plurality brought back to unity, following the table of categories, where it is the subject who brings it back to unity1. He contrasts it with a heap of pebbles, which is a mere plurality: a plant or a work of art is altered if one of its parts is removed, because each part can only be conceived in relation to the whole23. Empirical reality, which overflows everything, is never a totality. With Hegel, he distinguishes organic totality, which unfolds in time, from the spatial and fixed totality of a house4. He rehabilitates the notion against that of totalitarianism: the people is a totality in motion, never closed, and in this sense a guarantee of democracy5. He also distinguishes totality from totalization: Sartre prefers the latter, whereas for Marx totality exists as the human species6. In literature, he contrasts the classical self, which gains its unity by giving up expressing itself as a whole, with the Romantic self, which seeks to express itself in its totality.

1. 1#4.4 Angélique (de Nerval)15 Jan 2018 · 43:32
2. 2L'île du Peuple : le débat23 Jun 2015 · 1:49
3. 3#1.6 Entre crise et guerre : Philosopher ?10 Dec 2015 · 46:32
4. 4Ce soir, on repolitise. 2ème partie31 Mar 2018 · 1:38:14
5. 5Dominique Pagani sur Michel Clouscard - Les chemins de la praxis 1/28 Dec 2015 · 21:24
6. 6Ce soir, on repolitise. 1ère partie12 Mar 2018 · 59:29

Summary produced automatically from 14 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.